So what am I missing here?

The URL is:

http://ritzville-museums.org​

The name of the site (a pro bono one) is:

The History Museums of Ritzville, Washington State​

The keyword phrase is Washington state history museums.

The site is pretty new--a few weeks. It is already listed in dmoz, as a regional. It has a PR of 3. It shows almost no backlinks, but in fact has a few.

My basic concern is why a site with a PR of 3, admittedly not a mover and shaker, but, in its little world, more than naught, is not within the top 850 sites for its keywork phrase.

OK, top 10, top 20, let's not laugh; top 100, why not? Top 850??!?

Back when you still could, I did a Google for on-page only (the -xqzyl stuff) and it came up third for its keyword phrase.

Thoughts? Comments?

 

A search for: Washington state history museums, returns over a million results.

Quite competitive, but not extremely, i'm almost certain its the google sandboxing effect, and a couple of weeks isn't long enough to come out of it.

You'd need more than a few backlinks to get a site in the top 20 out of a million results.

 

the number of search results doesn't really make something competitive or not. the number of backlinks (a good measure of how serious the competition is about SEOing) is much more accurate.

the top site for that term has 217 links, the lowest one has, uh, one.

as far as what your problem is, I think it might just be pretty simple- you need to wait. a lot of new sites are really, really low at first. I'm experiencing things with one of mine at the moment, even for something that's so non-competitive that my on-page techniques should be more than enough.

if you want to rank for "Washington state history museums" it wouldn't hurt to actually use that exact phrase though- especially in the beginning of your title tag.

 

I would certainly look at increasing the number of inbound links. Google's just reporting 11 pages linking to your site at the moment, and the majority of those are inward links in the site itself. Scanning through the first two or three pages of results, it seemed full of government or state sponsored sites, which may be tough to compete against. All I can advise is to submit to as many quality directories as possible, and I'm sure you'll see your site in the top 100 or so fairly soon.

 

Government and state sites are more thanlikely hums and authorities. Your going to have to get some links from those, or some equally authorititve sites if you want to make inroads quickly.

 

Right. We are working on links, and will soon be an "associate member"organization of the #1 listed, the 800-pound gorilla in this playpen, the Washington State History Museum, so their link will help, and we have other submissions out.

But most of the comments, while useful and appreciated, are somewhat generic, and still leave me wondering this: with a PR of 3, decent or better on-page optimization, and some useful backlinks (not all show in the lists yet), should we not even now be at or higher than #850?? I mean, 850!

(I checked manually with the McDar tool, and #850 is as far down as it goes.)

 

Hi OC,

I have a couple of sites that are popping in and out in the Serps for one particular phrase, and that phrase only. I mean gone from the radar 9999 then back in at 15, then back out. The sites are #1 for about 50-70 other phrases, some of them are fairly competitive (18miliion pages returned, #1 site with 6,000 backlinks in anchor).

I can't figure why, and eventually it will sort itself out. My guess is that your suffereing from the same thing.