Guys, I run http://www.comparebroker.com. I have built pretty good reputation I think based on the fact that pagerank is 4. However traffic is still pretty low. I used to have a SEO company work on my website and I think they did more damage than help us. I know we have got a bunch of experts out here, if someone can look at my site and see what I am doing wrong, that would be awesome. Thanks, -Punit
Sending you a PM as perhaps I can help PM me, who did your previous SEO to please? PS make no rash decisions on hiring a SEO!!!
I would first be sure that your on page SEO is up to par for the keyphrases you are targeting. Then concentrate on off page SEO techniques like building quality links on related blogs, forums, bookmarks, directories etc.
I can suggest you to use! more H1 Tags with variation of H2 tags within different pages! More importantly also generate some possessive sort of content enriched with active keywords that can target more traffic through SEO prospectives
Let me say that your site looks pretty professional aesthetically. So you're off to a nice start aesthetically speaking. But I can list lots of things you could change on your home page to help your site... Here are a few: 1) Fire your graphic designer... The "Finding the Cheapest Online" image at the top of the home page has ALL of the text embedded in the image so the search engines see none of that text. Also, rather than paying about $1.50 for the image of the 2 guys and 1 girl on the right side of the page, it looks like they stole the image from istockphoto.com ROFLMAO... It still has their watermark on it. When you pay for the image, you get a version without the watermark. That should have been rendered as a solid blue background image that fades into the istockphoto. Then the text should have been CSS'd over top of the image so the engines can see the text in the image. 2) Your <title> element of the home page is not too good. You want to target your most general, hardest to rank for, head terms with your home page. It's currently set to: which is not really focused. Also it's 105 characters in length... There should really be no need to ever exceed 65 characters which is about the maximum number of characters from <title> that Googel will show in the SERPs. Keyword density IS important in individual HTML elements that are ranking factors like <title>, <h1>, <h2>, etc. In your current home page <title> you have the following densities: compare: 7.1% online: 21.4% stock: 14.3% stocks: 7.1% brokers: 14.3% discount: 7.1% brokerage: 7.1% firms: 7.1% trading: 7.1% trade: 7.1% With a site name like "comparebroker" I would think that you would want "compare" and "broker" (better yet "brokers" since you can't compare just ONE thing) in EVERY one of the home page's targeted phrases. I would probably go with a much more focused title like: I rarely exceed 3 targeted keyword phrases in the <title> of my pages, and other than the home page they typically target 1 unless (like i this case) they are almost identical). If you'll notice in my <title> I have the following densities: compare: 37.5% brokers: 37.5% stock: 12.5% online: 12.5% The most important words (compare and brokers) are the most dense... And I've ordered the phrases from MOST important, then the one with secondary importance... then the one that is of tertiary importance. 3) I would optimize your meta description. Your meta description is 261 characters long which is too long: I would recommend never exceeding 145-150 characters as those are the max typically shown by Yahoo! and Google, respectively, when its selected as the snippet of text to display in the SERPs. Google will show meta descriptions longer than 150 if your page shows in the SERPs when a user searches for a keyword phrase of 4+ keywords (i.e. very longtail keyword phrase). The meta description doesn't help you rank, but optimizing the meta description tag can increase the number of times it appears as the Google snippet AND increase click-thru-rates of your URL. 4) The <h1> on your home page is "Online Stock Broker Special Deals"... But this should match the keyword phrase(s) being targeted in the <title> (as should most of the content on this page). If you include an <h1> on your home page then I would make it have a value like: or depending on the "theme" or purpose of the site. BOTH include ALL keywords from the <title>, so regardless of whether the user finds your home page URL by searching for "compare brokers", "compare stock brokers", or "compare brokers online"... ALL of the keywords in the search phrase also appear in the <h1>. 5) A lot of the URLs on your site have issues... Some are dynamic URLs riddled with querystring parameters (like comparebroker.com/index.php?mod=product&pg=tradeing&trade_id=1) instead of keyword rich URLs. Others are using underscores (like comparebroker.com/no_maintenance_fee.php) which ruins any hope of the search engines finding keywords in those URLs as well. If you don't believe me, do this test: Search Google for search_engine_optimization. Note the number of results and ESPECIALLY note which words are highlighted/bolded in the titles, snippets, URLs in the SERPs returned. Now search for search engine optimization. Note the number of results is MUCH higher... also note that both search engine optimization and search-engine-optimization is highlighted/bolded in the titles, snippets, and URLs returned. You'll never see search_engine_optimization highlighted for a search for search engine optimization because it's seen as NOT a match. 6) By including "Read" in your link text of your hyperlinks like "Read OptionsHouse Reviews" you are actually hurting that page's ability to rank for "OptionsHouse Reviews". Just hyperlink the "OptionsHouse Reviews" portion of the sentence. The list goes on... But those would be some of the first changes I would consider.