I go crazy!

[JulianW]

Hi everybody,

a short summary at the start:

I have my page (www.nlp-deutschland.de) since a long time positioned good, but not perfect in google. The best ressource is a forum wich brings me about 50.000 content-pages, unique and nice. My most important keyword is "NLP". I never needet to look for backlinks. There where only two pages above me: nlp.de, which is the direct key, and wikipedia.

Since about one year my page is suffering on google. Mostly it is because of competitors. I personaly think, they buy a lot of backlinks. I startet Seomoz PRO three months ago and I see, that they have about 5 times as much backlinks from other domains / c-blocks as I have. Round about, I got 100 and they got 500.

However, in the link analytics I also see that some pages with fewer backlinks are ranked higher. And I get so many different hints about SEO, that I don´t know anymore which one to follow. I am sure about what I am doing with backlinks, but I am not sure about onpage.

Here an example:
All my internal links are relative. As my key is also includet in the domain itself, it get´s no repetition in the url. One of my competitors, which has not the key in his url, just created a subfolder "/nlp/" to all of his pages and has absolute links in his navigation. This brings him the key to every single link in his navigation, while I have no key in the navigation, because it´s in the URL itself and the navigation is relative.

I was told that it would make a lot of sense to change the navigation to absolute links, just to get my key into every url of the navigation. Others say, this is bullshit.

Another question is double meta-description and meta-tags. With 50.000 content-pages it would be a huge lot of work to get them all done different (by hand). But it is shown as an ERROR in the SeoMoz-Reports. Are they so much important?

However, I just realize I have no clue about onpage-optimization. So what would you suggest are the most important factors onpage?

All the best, Julian!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Julian

It is frustrating if your competitors are buying links and you are trying to earn them but Google's current focus is on removing the value and in some cases penalizing those sites that take things to far.

With regards to on-page optimisation, your homepage seems fine for the NLP phrase but your title tag could be made a little more natural to win more clicks and maybe a little more descriptive.

Currently you have:

NLP in Köln | München | Frankfurt | Berlin | Hamburg | NLP

Well, maybe I would lose the NLP from the end straight away and possibly go for something a little more natural like

NLP - Neuro-linguistic programming | nlp-deutschland.de

Get your brand on there and don't spam those city names into the page title as the homepage is probably trying to do too much.

If you want to advertise NLP at these locations, then have individual pages for each location going after those individual terms far more effectively. For example, the page for Köln could be titled:

NLP Köln - Neuro-Linguistic Programming | nlp-deutschland.de

Someone then searching for 'NLP Köln' would then have a very specific and accurate landing page that was inline with their exact search query and you would start to have a broader keyword strategy than just laser concentrating on 'NLP'.

So, some advice, quickly summed up.

1. Stop thinking about search engines, think about people and how they are searching and what they would be more likely to click on.

2. Target a wider range of keywords so you are not reliant on just one main and very general term (NLP).

3. Create new pages and optimise them for your keywords and test the optimisation with the keyword optimiser tool if this is not a strong area: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization

4. Think about content you can use to generate links - this seems like a complex subject so maybe an infograhic or some other piece of premium content could be used to generate links and interest. Once you create a premium piece of content like this it can be a linkable asset but also re-purposed for lead generation, to encourage social / viral sharing of your site giving your brand more visibility etc. This will build the kind of links that your competitors can't buy and improve your lot for these big terms and will help you generate more business in the process

5. Consider some link building activities via guest blogging or some such - again, this is a complex topic so I can only imagine that the opportunities for content on site and

6. Identify any gaps in the search results for user queries and create authoritative content to fill those gaps - hard answers make for easy links! Then, again, use this content to visit places where such questions are being asked and point people in the right direction. It may not be SEO as such but this will generate more exposure by having all rivers running to a single point (your site).

That, should be enough to keep you busy for a while.

Hope it helps!
Marcus