How is this guy beating me?

[diogenes]

I thought I was really starting to understand SEO, especially after finding this site. But I must be missing something. BAsed upon linkscape I am  head and shoulders above www.georgiauncontesteddivorce.com  a competitor site to my site www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc.com.  But his site outranks mine for the keyword uncontested divorce lawyer. Well he beats me with 10 facebook shares versus 4 but on every other domain metric and page metric I am much higher. My site is only about a year old, but I can't imagine that this is what is going on. Anybody got any ideas?

Thx

Paul

[irvingw]

I suggest you download the SEOMoz Toolbar and look at the link data. The competitor site far surpasses you in all the important factors like Moz Rank and Domain Authority. You can use Open Site Explorer and see exactly who's linking to your competitor and try to obtain these links as well.

[dittoeffect]

Two big things stand out to me upon my comparison. the georgia site has far less backlinks and lower page rank than yours. You will find that the links they do have are extremely relevant in post links from other sites. On top of this they are also listed in DMoz. Their pages have great On Page SEO design and very good interlinked pages. Their site is 8 years old and likely has been well established as an authority.

Your site has a higher page rank which although that is a good thing is not an overpowering factor in ranking for a single keyword. Looking at your blog I noticed that you have made good use of interlinking with yourself for the terms you would like though the content is a little thin. What stands out most to me is that your links come from directories which have very little value compared to a relevant contextual link from the post of a site about divorces and lawyers.

I noticed you have a backlink from this page http://www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com/ the anchor text here is "uncontested divorce blog" rather than "uncontested divorce". Really it seems like you should instead be focusing on more local terms such as "uncontested divorce new york city" for example as your site seems to be location specific. unless of course you do offer to cover cases outside new york then just going for "uncontested divorce" is fine.

Another note to add is that facebook shares don't influence the SERPs directly if at all.

The SEOMoz factors are a guideline to understanding the authority of a site and not a definite predictor of results in google since such factors are quite complicated.

to summarize:

1. age comparison.

2. relevant high value links as opposed to easy to get links.

3. appropriate anchor text for desired keyword.

bonus tips:

1. a few of your blog pages had broken image links

2. your images in your blogs have a good alt text but they link to the image source. try linking them to your about page or even the same post it is on as an image link with alt text is about the same as a text link with anchor text though you would be linking to a post you care about instead of an image location.

[diogenes]

Thanks for the answers  I might have confused vitalscom about which site is mine. mine is www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc, which has much better SEOMOZ stats. Ditto effect pointed out some good points, but if Open Site Explorer is valid, the strength of the links should be indicated by the ranking factors. You seem to be saying that despite the linking factors, because my links are directory links they are not as strong. This may explain the results, but if so it puts the validity of the tool into question. Age I had thought of as well as anchor text.

Paul

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Paul,

OSE is no-where near as complex as Google's algorithms and can only rank links in a relatively simplistic manner. Although it's a very good tool for getting an idea of what's going on, there are so many other contributing factors that Google will use that just can't be included in OSE.

For example, the directory links may be ranked highly in OSE because it's algorithm looks at all the links going into the directory and determines that it's probably quite a good source. Google however may have penalised the same directory (something OSE can't determine) and so any links from that directory may in-fact be worthless.

When using OSE, I tend to use my gut instinct as well as the stats to tell whether a link is worth anything or not. If a link looks particularly spammy then it probably looks the same in Google's eyes.

Also - it's worth remembering that OSE's index is much smaller than Google's, therefore although most of the decent links will be in there you may not be able to see some awesome links that your competitor has, simply because they're not in the OSE index yet.