I am ranked 28 for a pretty popular search term which is searched on overture about 35,000 times per month. This is for Yahoo. I would like to know what I can do in order to get into the top 10 for Yahoo. It is a forum, so the home page doesn't have a whole lot of content. What to do?
You can also have an SEO report done on your website that will help point out parts of your website that could be improved to increas search engine rankings, such as meta tags, page title etc etc...
A content rich home page might be beneficial for the search engines, but it will be less effective in conversions to users I think. pretend forums.digitalpoint.com was the homepage for digitalpoint. It is that equivalent, except a different topic of course. And I have just submitted to 200 website directories, manually. Hopefully that will help
Don't overlook the power of internal links within your site. I had two important keyword phrases for which I was scoring poorly in Google. They draw about 1,000 searches daily (combined), according to Wordtracker and Overture. I wanted to get some of that traffic. So I created internal links on each page of my site TO the page where those two terms are featured. The "anchor text" of those links — that is, the actual text in those links — was the keyword phrases I was targeting for better rankings. Results? Now #3 and #6 on Google for terms being searched 1,000 times daily. Internal links, from one page to another within your site, can have powerful results in the search engines. Be sure to use the KW phrases you are emphasizing as the actual text contained in these internal links.
Internal links are also a great way of adding structure to your site. If you have 100 pages then linking to every page from every other page will result in a flat structure. You shold link to the 10 most important pages from every page on the site and then from these important pages you can link deep into the relevant sections.
Summarizing all the good pieces of advice that you have received from our fellow members, I would suggest you do the following: 1) List the top 10 competitors you have on yahoo (The 1st SERP) 2) Take a look at their meta-tags / content / keyword density 3) Do not forget to check their inbound links and also the anchor text for it use BRAD CALLEN'S - SEO ELITE if you need to. 4) After comparing your pages with the top10 you can do some on page optimization and also do link swapping with relevant websites which your competitor has linked to .. but do not forget to use the keyword as the anchor text 5) Wait for the yahoo bot to re-index and update your website and back-links
What about the internal links? You forgot those in your summary. 10 points will be deducted from Hufflepuff for that.
I thought you had the internal links covered pretty well .. but ok I will do the explanation: Herez the remaining point- While doing internal linking make sure that you link your webpages in A-->B B-->C C-->D in descending order of importance. While doing internal linking use the KEYWORD you want to optimize as the anchor text for the link. Gazelle does it now cover all the SEO basics Hope I get a +10 from you on this
I would add that using internal sitewide links to 10 - 20 of the most important or main category pages is good for inceasing rankings. Make sure that your main keywords are in the anchor text of those links. I can't give your 10 points back for that. That would be like giving credit for homework when you hand it in the day after it was corrected in class.