The site is www.communitynewspapers.com. We post 10 or so articles each business day and have been up and running since aug 1st. Since then we've gotten 50k pageviews and 20k visitors. 1/3 of our traffic comes from search and that equates to an average of 300 search visitors per business day. Were trying to rank high for the keywords of the communities we cover but really havent made any progress. Were number one for the term community newspapers (33,000 global searches) but thats only pulled in 344 visits for the life of the site. Were not ranked on the first page for any of the communities we cover even though there is almost no competition for any of them according to the keyword tool. And we've published on average 40 posts per community since the start of the site. Our rankings have barely budged since i started tracking them mid aug. Im not really sure what questions to ask but Im really open to any advice you guys can throw my way.
Have the specific keyword(s) you're targeting in the title. Example: "Miami Community Newspaper" or "Florida Community Newspaper". You need it to be an exact match. Then add some permanent content at the top of the page with those keywords you're targeting. Then get backlinks with the keywords as the anchor text. That's a good start.
Interesting. Thanks for the input. Lets say we change the meta keywords and start backlinking with those anchor keywords to target 'Miamis Community Newspaper' and we make it to number one. But then we realize 'Florida News' is better. Can we target Florida News without loosing our ranking for Miamis Community Newspaper?
If you build quality links for those and you'll include the keyword in the title probably it will stay.
Yes you need to optimise each page for your individual keywords. This will include Titles, Keyword density etc. When you have finally optimised that particular page of your site to target say "florida" traffic. Then build links based around that keyword to that particular page. There are more advanced strategies but i wont touch on them.
Start with keyword research. Find out which keyword is the most searched for. Then you won't find out later which one is better. Also for ranking, take a look at your competition for each keyword. If it's Wikipedia, Google, and whatever the main Miami newspaper is it might be hard to rank for. Check out the PR of the top rankings for each keyword to see if you can compete.
Your <TITLE> tag is wrong. Right now it says, "Local Newspaper, Articles, Stories and Events around Miami Florida". If you want to rank for "Miami's Community Newspaper", then that's the text that should be in your TITLE tag. The same is true for each page. For your Doral Community Newspaper page, use the TITLE "Doral Community Newspaper". As for your queston about changing the META KEYWORDS tag, you can do that, but META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION doesn't do much for your rankings. If anything the META DESCRIPTION will help make your SERP listing look more interesting, but not necessarily make it rank better.
And even if you had all element 100% optimized. It does not mean that you can rank better thabn others - It depands on the SEO efforts taken care by your competitors and the money they place on link building activities as well.
Thanks for the input everyone. I think i have a better idea on what to do. Much love to steve johnson, punchaboveyourweight, and linkwatcher for pointing out the title tag. I've been looking at it this whole time and it never occurred to me.
Man Im having one hell of a time figuring this out. Im in the appearance editor and I see the meta keywords but I'm only seeing one meta description line. It changes the title for the whole site. If thats the case, how can I change the title line depending on the category like Steve Johnson suggests? Or even with linkwatcher's suggestion. How can I optimize each page if they run on the same wordpress template? As far as backlinks we rubbed some elbows and found another news site (PR7) that were going to team up with. We will get plenty of backlinks with the right anchor text soon enough. Sorry for the noobish questions. I've got two degrees in business but this stuff is totally new to me and I've got zero php skills. I got in touch with some seo companies but I always felt like they would end up spamming comment boards with total crap linking back to our site. It happens on our boards all the time. Then they talked about article submissions (about.com for example) and all this extra stuff that I wasn't looking for. Almost always they wanted to do this whole package of services. Most of the time they didn't even notice the competition for most of the keywords was near zero. Out of the 5 I spoke with, not a single one brought up the title tag. So ya, its frustrating. I just wanted someone to look over the site, make suggestions, and I'd be happy to pay for their time to implement them but each time they were asking like 500 to 1500 a month for link building even though we have that covered.