I have a website that is indexed by all the major search engines, but none of my keywords (other than a direct typing of my website name in various fashions) show up in any of the search engines. I've had the keywords for about 6 months now, and the site has been up for 10 months. The site just went from a PR1 to a PR3, so google knows about it....but I can't find any of my keywords placing in any of the search engines. Anyone have any suggestions? I have a dozen or so quality backlinks with good anchor text, and over a thousand non-quality backlinks with good anchor text. My site is www.obesitydiscussion.com
there are may be two reasons 1) your site I very new and may be under SandBox google filter 2) very little number of sites have backlinks to yours
If I was in the sandbox I wouldn't show up in the SERPs at all or have page rank, or could I? A lof of sites have backlinks to my site, but only a couple dozen on quality sites with good anchor text
well, I was able to find some of my keywords, but they're so far back in the search engines I don't think anyone will find em
For starters your code is rather confusing and messy. You use a combination of divs and tables. The amount of garbage a search bot has to go through before it gets to any prominant or related text is rather huge!!! I'm also rather confused as to why you are displaying the xhtml and css valid icons as your site is far from being valid!!! The other major issue is that you have no h1 or p tags any where on the site. These are very, very important in relation to SEO!
Ranking for keywords is about a whole lot more than being indexed and having backlinks... Backlinks are great for PR, but are not particularly relevant with regard to SEPRs. You need to optimise your onpage content for the keywords you want to rank for. Place them in your <Hx> tags, use them throughout your content (but make sure it still reads well) etc etc. Read up on the basics of optimising...
Just to clarify though - don't just use <Hx> tags. Use the <h1> tags for the top headings which are most important, followed by a line of <h2> if need be and then use <p> tags. Don't use <h1> tags for every single section of text... this is bad!
You can go all the way up to <H6> (which is why I used the x) if you need to, but make sure it reads well. Heading tags are given more weight that <p> tags. Only use <H1> tags once. If you have more than one main heading, it should be it's own subject on it's own page... The other <Hx> tags can be used more than once, within reason.
Its important to have the headings in h1 tags because within theory (if you have written your content correctly) your headings should contain some if not all of your keywords. H1 tags are also given more importance by the search engines than p tags etc.
It is one of the most important on-page optimisation tools you have. You can use CSS to style your H1 tags so they work with your site (but don't style them to look like regular text).
thanks for the tips guys. I'm very newbish at this and had a former partner do the coding on the site. I'm not trying to better understand how to improve what he did.