Hi All, I am an SEO newb, but I have read a lot of articles and believe I am doing the right SEO things... but my competitor who started his blog at the same time is killing me! I have been writing articles, squidoo & social media, blog comments, some directories and I have more incoming links, and from a larger diversity than my competitor. The only thing that I could see being the problem is that I have fewer 'pages' on my site, and his is in blog format, and mine is html/css. I have a higher ranking on Open Site Explorer, and Yahoo's site explorer. What am I doing wrong?
You just mentioned the problem. You have fewer pages. The more pages you have the more keywords you can rank, and the more unique content you have the more trust you will have from Google. Further, it will be a good idea to upgrade to Wordpress.
Also it is not only about the amount of links you have but also the quality of those links that help boost your rank.
This might not be useful for him though depending on how he runs his site, and the type of content on offer. Wordpress is good for constant updates, he may only have a few pages because he NEEDS only a few pages.
Test one keyword and see if it will improve by adding more forum posts, come up with a list of article directories and post unique article to each, and also good affordable paid directories....i know its painful but works.
Thanks for all of your replies! My site is a quiz site, and I don't have a lot of 'unique' content as my content is mostly based on polls. Would adding lots more polls (each one creates a new webpage) help boost my rank? Also, if I start a blog on the site on a subpage, and update it, would that also boost my search engine results?
If you create more pollsmake sure you have a substantial amount of unique content on the page. Just creating more thin pages will little unique content will not help you. A blog could be a good source of unique content for you.