I'm trying to do some SEO for my site but I'm just not getting why some things are happening and would like too find out why. I know there are some amazing SEO folks here so maybe you can shed some light on my problem. My site (http://tinyurl.com/36j6wh) is about 8 years old. It has about 36k backlinks on google alone. I have about 9000 pages of content all specific to the site and all 100% unique. I have very good speed/load times and a nearly xhtml compliant site, site maps, and a message board with about 500k posts. Now how is it for specific keywords revelent too my site there are sites with a single nearly irrelevant pages are getting better page listings then my site? Can anyone shed some light on this problem or give me some ideas of what I am doing wrong or change this?
How have you targeted those specific keywords? Are you using them as anchor text? Page Titles? - that'll be how the other sites are doing better than you, I expect - particularly using them as anchor text in their backlinks (p.s. - don't use tinyurl on dp - any kind of masking of links is not allowed)
I think though there are many backlinks pointing towards your site, it seems like targeting a particular keyword is lacking as magda was pointed out. You will have to target a particular keyword and do some basic on-page SEO for that keyword such as using relevant header tags and also using that keyword as your anchor text when ever you are building backlinks.
You always want to use the correct tags and keywords to in the header, anything relates to your website. Its really important that you do that . Or else your not gonna get the traffic you need to your that's relevant to the content on your website.
Yes it is not just a matter of get a ton of links and you can rank for any phrase. You still needs backlinks that target those specific phrases. As your website builds up more quality backlinks, it does get easier to rank for new keywords. Google isn't the best at determining a page's actual relevancy. It relies on algorithms that are not perfect. It is still fairly easy to exploit those algorithms and get irrelevant pages ranked well.