I own what I think is perhaps the largest community on the internet dedicated exclusively to the Nintendo DS gaming system, dsmeet.com. It's got a fair Alexa ranking, but it's new as of last December and I suspect that the sandbox effect may be plaguing it. I want to get this website ranked in at least the top 30, if not top 10 for the term "Nintendo DS". I've got some previous SEO experience from the "Nigritude Ultramarine" competition, but obviously a lot has changed in the ranking algorithms since then, and I haven't been paying attention. First off, do you think it is even possible for a website such as mine to reach the top ten? Many fan created websites rank within the top ten of the SERPs for "Zelda" and "Mario". Aside from the official website and a few top gaming websites, many of the pages ranked highly for "Nintendo DS" appear insignificant. So far I've managed to climb to page six of the SERPs, but I can't get any higher than this. What tips would you give me? What is more important these days? On-site SEO, or getting keyword backlinks from other websites? Which should I concentrate on most?
These are the things you will need to work on: 1) ON-Page SEO (optimize your content, meta tags etc) Do a comparison with the top ten competitors website 2) Get the internal linking correct. A-->B B-->C C-->D. 3) Try to outnumber your competitors in the back-links from relevant websites. Try Blogs, forums too.. 4) If you still cant get it to the top .... PM and Hire me
Given that there are nearly 3 million web pages all competing for the keyphrase "Nintendo DS", it looks like you've got your work cut out for you. Is there anything that makes your site different from all the rest? If there is, emphasize that.
A quick overview of what google knows about your site: 261 links 56 pages 671 mentions Is this about what you expected? If your site has more than 56 pages then you need to submit a google sitemap ASAP. You also need to concentrate on building some relevant links and lots of them, try this search to find partners. Maybe submit some reviews of the DS to article sites etc. Start a directory submision service (see the Buy, Sell, Trade section).
You have gotten off to a good start, my recommendation is build it up. You must have a lot of users, which means income, which can be invested in the website. If you want top rankings, its going to come down to on-page SEO and page rank, full stop. Everything on your page should be about Nintendo DS, and your page rank needs to get higher and higher. So...my main recommendation is, trade links with sites o similar PR, and buy links on high PR gaming sites. Once your pagerank goes higher, sell links and buy higher PR links, and exchange with higher PR sites. Its a slow process, takes months if not years, but if you want to be top for a competitive term I think its the best thing to do.
This is all very good advice, thanks! In response to mad4, the search results greatly vary with and without the www-prefix. For example: * I get 56 pages with the www-prefix versus 47,400 pages without * I get 660 mentions with the www-prefix versus 58,000 mentions without Is having the www-prefix hurting my rankings at all? Should I set up a .htaccess to take out the www-prefix? Or should I leave it alone? dsm56, do you think I could begin making money to buy links on higher PR websites now by selling text links of my own? Would you recommend this community as a place to do so, or should I talk directly with website owners? From what I've heard so far, it seems like links with the target anchor text are the key. I'll be concentrating on getting those then. Thanks for all your help, everyone!
Google has real problems with this so you need to set up htaccess to remove the www domain straight away.