Hi guys, I'm still working on my first site. www.politicalrundown.com It's a site dealing mostly with United States politics. As of right now I have like 3,000 backlinks on Yahoo, 77 for google, and a couple hundred for MSN ect. My problem seems to be SEO, I'm sort of a noob at it but want to get better. I don't rank in the top 10 pages for any of my keywords for google, yahoo, msn, or any other search engine. Let's say I want to get better with keywords "politics, government, congress and voting records" Pretty soon I will have 400 pages of members of congress's biographies and voting records. If I put something into each one of the pages that says something along the lines of "memberOfCongressHere is actively involved in politics and the united states government by being a member of congress" If I put something like that on 400 of my pages just changing the names of the congress members will that boost my ranking for some of those keywords? I have heard that content is king for SEO. Sorry if this seems unclear, im having a hard time getting my point across. Many thanks for help, Preston
The number of pages doesn't actually mean that it would boost SE Ranking or PR. I suggest you focus more on: 1. Good and Keyword Optimized content for the first 5 pages of the site. 2. Get as many Related site to link back to the main or index page of your site. 3. Get high PR sites as IBL.
Target a keyword phrase from 2 to 3 word. And also optimized your site content. In creating your site content try to mixed you keyword on the content.
Actually you can do more than 2 or 3 keywords per page. It depends on the content of page. In this case, I believe "US politics" can get you around 10-15 keywords with in the page. The break down will be: 5 major Keywords 10 minor keywords You just have to know mix the content together.
Thanks for the help guys. I understand now to target specific phrases or keywords. But how do I do this, by stating those keywords on many pages of my site? or just the first 5?
In my experience, you'll want to target each page differently, though doing that with 400+ pages will be a challenge. i.e. page 1 - congressional voting records page 2 - us congress page 3 - congressional voting history page 434 - charles rangle voting history Then, you'll want to link to each of these pages using that page's keyword as anchor text. Inbound links using this anchor text will work wonders. I don't know about targeting multiple keywords for a single page. I'm still figuring out how to optimize one page for both comparing and comparison of the keyword. Good luck.
Start with the Overture Keyword Selector: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Enter words as you mentioned like politics, government, congress and voting records into it. That will give you suggestions of other keyword phrases. What you need to do is aim each page at a different keyword phrase - but the secret is to go for a phrase that isn't too popular (becasue it will be harder to rank highly) and isn't too unpopular (because nobody searches for it) Hope that helps. Good luck!
Googles Webmaster Tools shows you what terms people have actually typed in to find your site, and it shows what position your in with that.
Thanks for all the tips everybody. Another thing, if I go to google and type site:www.politicalrundown.com I get a lot of links that shouldn't be indexed by google. I have a robots.txt which is being read by google, but it seems as like my main content isn't being indexed at all, while the cr*p that shouln't be indexed is getting all the attention. How would I go about fixing this?
I see what you mean, and that is indeed nasty. My advice is just to wait for Google to sort things out in your site. Your Robot.txt seems good. It may just take some time for Google to sort it right. Patience is virtue, especially in the world of SEO and SEM.
I agree, google taks some time to update, they still have some pages from a site I bought months ago that arent even on the site anymore.....