My site is http://ecribbage.com and focuses on playing free cribbage online. I'm doing ok right now, getting about 5000 unique visitors a month, Alexa is about 650,000 and google pagerank is 3. But my search rank on google search engine is very low for a search for "cribbage". I come up as like #86 in google, and #9 in Bing. I think getting to top10 in google would be a huge leap forward, any recommendations on how to close this gap between google and Bing? I see most people saying "do SEO", but I'm looking for specific examples on how people were able to achieve jumping to top 10 and closing the gap. what types of SEO are most effective, should I just hire someone to do all the SEO, etc.. Best Regards!
You have quite a bit of backlinks (2000+) and your meta tags look good. The only thing I can recommend to you would be adding an articles section (blog) where you post tips, strategies and other cribbage information with unique, keyword-rich content. And keep building strong High PR backlinks. Good luck to you
Your in a pretty competitive market but it looks like you are doing pretty good so far. If you have done all that you know how and are struggling then I might think about getting someone with a little more skills and see if that helps.
hi..im not a seo experts but i can advice you aysdigital are right you probably lacking in content and maybe you need to make more backlinks find a dofollow blogs and make a comment, dont try to comment on wordpress since latest version are now have a automatic nofollow for comment external links... try blogger,blogspot,wordpress.com,typepad and ofcourse comment only on the related for your site
You need to rethink your on-page optimization. For starters, your home page has the BEST chance of all pages on your site for ranking for a head term like "cribbage". Then the deeper you drill into your site, the more long tail the targeted keyword phrases should be. I haven't taken the time to do keyword research for your niche, but I am "assuming" you IF you could rank for "cribbage" then that would be the holy grail. And the fact that you're already at 86 is a good sign that it IS possible even though your niche might be fairly competitive. Assuming cribbage is going to be your money keyword, if I owned that site I know of several "quick fixes" I would make to the home page: 1) I would change the <title> to simply <title>Cribbage</Cribbage>. Currently it's "Play the best Cribbage games online". Not only is the keyword density of the word "cribbage" within the <title> element only 16.67%... "cribbage" is the 4th word in your <title>'s targeted phrase. You should note that the closer the word is to the begining of the <title> the more importance it carries... and keyword density within major elements like <title>, <h1>, <h2>, link text, etc. influences the keywords importance in the eyes of the search engine. So by having <title> set to "Cribbage" you have 100% keyword density for your targeted keyword phrase and it's the 1st (and ONLY keyword phrase). 2) Your <h1> is current "New: Why play at eCribbage.com?" which after being normalized (punctuation replaced w/ spaces) Google sees as "new why play at ecribbage com". Again, even IF Google counts eCribbage as a match on cribbage your keyword density for "cribbage" within the <h1> element is 16.67%... not too important... and this time it is the 5th keyword in the element. I would change the <h1> to something like "Play Cribbage Online!". By doing so you've doubled the keyword density and made it the 2nd word in the phrase... You've also added 2 very important modifiers to the targeted keyword phrase ("Play" and "online") that people are likely to also search on frequently. 3) I would add some <h2>s to your page... a) in the left sidebar I would make your "All Games" header an <h2> and change it to "All Cribbage Games". This gets you an <h2> with cribbage in it. You can style that <h2> using CSS so that it looks EXACTLY like it does today. I would NOT make the "Advertisements" header in the left sidebar an <h2>. Instead I would simply make it a <div> that is styled exactly like the <h2> above for "All Cribbage Games". b) I would change the "Recent News" and "Goodies" headers farther down BOTH to <h2> elements. You can style them so that they look EXACTLY like they do today. I would change "Recent News" to "Cribbage News" or a less desireable "Recent Cribbage News". The point is to get "Cribbage" into the <h2>. I would change "Goodies" to "Cribbage Goodies". Be sure that when you add "news" and "goodies" to your site that you use the word cribbage in each entry at least once. Your "Goodies" seem to mostly use "eCribbage". I would limit its usage (drop the e) where possibly in favor of "cribbage". 4) Make sure all images and image links have an alt attribute with "cribbage" in the alt text. 5) I might consider even changing your HOME link in your top navigation to "Cribbage" or "Cribbage Home". Most people know that the left most link in a top navigation or the top link in a left navigation is always the HOME link. Then I would work on building backlinks from other sites with "cribbage" as the link text MOST of the time... Then make a much smaller percentage of your backlinks with link text containing 2 word phrases w/ "cribbage" as the first word like "cribbage games", "cribbage online", etc... then backlinks with link text containing 2 word phrases w/ "cribbage" as the 2nd word like "play cribbage", "buy cribbage", etc.... Then make an even smaller percentage of your backlinks with link text containing 3 word phrases w/ "cribbage" first... then 3 word phrases w/ "cribbage" as the 2nd word... then 3 word phrases w/ "cribbage" as the 3rd word... And so on... You should see the pattern.
Great Stuff!! I will try this stuff right away.. So - i'll try canonical's stuff and also create a new subpage rich with content about cribbage or something? Which backlinks are you talking about, the ones scattered around the internet? So get them all to change from eCribbage to just Cribbage? What about changing the title to: Cribbage - Best Free Online Crib or Cribbage - Best Free Games Online instead of just Cribbage ? if it's just Cribbage, won't it get lost in all the other search results that have just "Cribbage" as their title? Thanks for all your help.
I noticed that you got some backlinks from wikipedia too. But, you have not done any permanent redirect yet http://ecribbage.com have 116 backlinks http://www.ecribbage.com have 2020 backlinks Do a permanent 301 redirect from http://ecribbage.com to http://www.ecribbage.com and get full value of your backlinks. You can start simply set it to your preferred domain at google.com/webmaster. The Keyword "cribbage" have more than 2 million search results with 7k+ average monthly searches. I can say it is slightly competitive keyword. Ranked #84 is not bad at all with 2k backlinks. Keep building links especially dofollow links and anchored keyword with "cribbage" from unique domain and unique c-class IP. Make sure the page have low number of external/outbound links to get better value for your backlinks. No doubt that backlinks can bring you to top of search results but do it moderately not to raise the spam alert flag. I would say create 10-20 new dofollow anchored links from unique domain per day is a workable solution to your problem.
Atniz is correct. I meant to mention the canonicalization problems that exist on your site last night, but was heading off to bed and ran out of time. As Atnize mentioned you have URL canonicalization issues. You DEFINITELY want to fix this. As you can see your home page is NOT getting credit for a lot of its inbound links. I can access your home page using 4 different URLs (maybe more): http://ecribbage.com http://ecribbage.com/index.php http://www.ecribbage.com http://www.ecribbage.com/index.php The search engines see these as multiple web pages since search engines index URLs, not pages. Because the same content is being rendered for and indexed at all 4 URLs, this creates duplicate content on 3 of the 4 URLs. And as Atniz pointed out, this leads to split page rank because your inbound links get spread over multiple URLs depending on how other sites link to you. You need to pick one of the URLs as your home page canonical URL (I would agree w/ Atniz that http://www.ecribbage.com/ is the most likely candidate to be your home page canonical URL) and 301 redirect all other home page URLs to the canonical URL.