Hello everyone - I hate to sound like a whiner, but I have a website that's over a year old, and is VERY relevant to its topic. I get decent low-level traffic, and in fact I'm #1 in Yahoo and MSN for 'comic book covers' (a small niche, to be sure, but still). Yet I can't rank in Google in the top ten pages! WTF? The site is at http://www.comic-covers.com. I know I don't have a ton of backlinks, but the link: command shows only a fraction of the true number of them, and always has. The site is optimized out the wazoo, it has practically 13,000 internal pages, all perfectly relevant, no blackhat or other funny business. But there are foreign sites, merchant sites, ebay auctions, and blog posts that rank much better than I do in Google. Why? BTW, apologies if this belongs in another forum.
Well google is the hardest to deal with.. But that aside, it can only search text, so try adding alt tags to your images. And also you should submit to some free directories to build your backlinks... The more google finds your site out there the more it will be willing to move you up in the SERP's... Otherwise goodwork with the rest of your optimization...
Well, I've submitted to several directories. And I've got alt text in nearly all the inner thumbnail gallery pages. Thanks for the replies.
Then you just have to wait it out... Google search results seem to be rather bouncy as of late (I think i've heard they're rotating random algorythms through random datacenters). So even if your site is the most relevant it may take awhile for them to pick up on it... But keep building content and backlinks and eventually they should come around to you... Also is it unique content or copied? And you should really external your css sheet to make things easier to change
Quick update: Believe it or not, the PR of the site went up to 4 over the weekend. I haven't checked its SE position yet. Nevertheless, thanks for the advice.