SEO Landing Page Fail

[csmithal]

We have a PPC landing page template that I've used to aggregate blog post collections thematically.

http://www.ietravel.com/machu-picchu-travel

http://www.ietravel.com/kenya-and-tanzania-safari

The hope was that they would start ranking. After 5 months, it has yet to happen.Thought it was a good idea at the time because these pages have a nice prominent call-to-action area.

It now occurs to me that the pages are probably under-performing because they are not incorporated into the main site navigation.

Do you think that if I move these under their appropriate categories in the main site I'll see some lift? (Of course, I will add 301 redirects as well.)

Thanks

[kchandler]

Are these pages currently indexed in Google yet? Try doing a site search on the specific URL (site:www.domain.com/page). If the URL shows up, then you don't have an indexation issue.

The next step is checking your keyword targeting. So a few questions:

• What keywords where you hoping to rank for?
• What is the average traffic for these, and the difficulty?
• How often and where do these keywords show up on your page?

Let me know the outcome of the site search and the answers to the questions above and then we can go from there!

• Kyle

[csmithal]

Hi Kyle,

Yes, these pages are indexed - I submitted them manually through Webmaster Tools. I am trying to rank for the words in the url's:

kenya and tanzania safari (49% difficulty; 1,000 local; 5,400 global)

machu picchu travel (50% difficulty; 8,100 local sv; 135K global, wtf?)

Both pages have an A grade in the Term Grader.

Thanks!

[kchandler]

It took a look at the page (machu picchu travel), agreed that your on-page is looking good and your domain authority is pretty solid as well to rank at that difficulty. However you only seem to have a total of 6 links going to this page, all internal links.

Continue working on building those internal links with the descriptive anchor text but more importantly try and get some external links to these pages. As you begin to get more external links you will build up your page's authority and in turn a higher rank.

I noticed that you had a few links form your blog, are those pages ranking at all?

[csmithal]

Sorry for the lapse in my reply - Tgiving intervened.

Yes, a few of my blog-post pages are ranking (for long-tail terms).

Good advice on trying to build external links to these pages. Realistically, it's unlikely that I'm going to be able to get anything other than directory or social bookmarking links (in the short tun), so would you recommend going that route?

[kchandler]

That would be a great start. There was a recent WBF that gave some great ideas to build links with email marketing campaigns that is definitely worth a read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-emails-to-build-links-whiteboard-friday

Also, try and get some links from your high authority pages across your domain pointing to these. That will definitely help pass some link juice along.

Good luck - Kyle