Why is a low ranking site outperforming a higher one?

[ken-lewis]

Hi,

I've got a question here that is more about learning than about rectifying this specific situation, as it is a low traffic (low dollar) situation.  I would appreciate your help.

Thanks,

Ken

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The targeted long-tail is:  carrollton ga internet marketing

The targeted site is: http://www.kennethlewis.com/

Yet, when I run the keyword search I get this other site of mine, which is older, but has much worse metrics.  http://www.breemawellness.com/  On this site, all I did was put a in-text link on it and added the keywords to my title tags.

Open Site Explorer shows these metrics:

KennethLewis.com 34, 23, 18, 98

vs. BreemaWellness 27, 15, 7, 10.

Both are on the same server.

Note:

-Until two months ago the KennethLewis.com was only partially about Internet Marketing- mildly so, actually- and it was a 2-3 page iWeb not-optimized site.  But BreemaWellness has never been about Internet Marketing, and those words were just added two months ago for the first time.

-KennethLewis.com gets regular content changes, to the blog.  BreemaWellness.com almost never gets touched.

Thoughts?

[Gyi]

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your query. Based on a very cursory review, http://www.kennethlewis.com/ isn't optimized for any georgia or carrollton terms. On the other hand, http://www.breemawellness.com/ contains several optimizations for those terms (i.e. title tag, internal links, etc).

Like I said, perhaps I am misunderstanding at what you're driving...

[Tompt]

It's a bit tricky to give you anything firm, because in very broad terms these things are down to the volume of links pointing at a site, and both the sites in question are low on links (if you were to get a few reasonable external links pointing at KennethLewis.com I think you'd see a rapid change). But going on the data we have I think this is a mix of site structure, content and page title.

Breema has reasonable content relevant to the query you've mentioned on the front page. It's in plain text there is really no messing around, it's nice and simple. On the other hand the page on KennethLewis is somewhat buried behind a slider containing none of your quoted keywords (and it's the last slide as well).

Moving on to the titles Search engines will read in the region of 70 characters of your title, anything more than that and you are likely to be losing the later words in it. In the case of the page Google is ranking the word "marketing" gets cut off halfway. Breema on the other hand has Georgia mentioned twice and Internet Marketing all covered within those 70 characters and this is going to have an impact.

If you were to create even a few text links to that page from other pages on the site using your quoted keywords I think you would see an improvement, it would be even better if you got the text on your slider sorted, right now it's all about cars, hunger and statistics rather than internet marketing.

Links are the key, get a few reasonable external links with the right anchor text and you'll see some results.

Hope that helps.

[ken-lewis]

"cars, hunger, and statistics" LOL

Yes, it is true that I used the index page as a sales place for potential clients, and significantly overlooked SEO.  Hypocritical, I must say of myself.

Thanks guys for pointing out the obvious.  It is funny how much easier it is for me to see other site's issues then my own.

Any other thoughts, anyone?

[Tompt]

Yes, maybe I was a little blunt there, sorry about that, it wasn't how I intended it.

Nothing wrong with a sales page as the front page if your clients are mostly direct and you expect that to remain the case.

With that said if they have gone to the trouble of typing in your URL, they are expressing quite a lot of interest already, so it's unlikely that they'll begrudge clicking through to a sales page if you make it an obvious and desirable option.

[ken-lewis]

I obviously haven't optimized KennethLewis.com for the given term, but the term is all over the site on multiple pages.   As for the Breema site, it is mentioned just on the homepage of a site that otherwise has no relevance to the keywords.

I thought Google would know better, and wouldn't give much weight to the addition to the homepage of a different topic (Breema in this case).  I put it on there clearly for SEO purposes, and find it strange that Google is taking the bait so easily.

**What happened to all I've read about Google looking site-wide for relevance, and not just on one page? ** How can an Internet Marketing website appear lower in an Internet Marketing search than one with a radically different topic and three usages of the keyword on one page?

In my eyes this reveals that it is not content/relevance that is important, but rather one's ability to play the SEO game, which is exactly what Google says it wants to avoid.  Right?

Just trying to wrap my head around this.

[Tompt]

Links are what you want in SEO, they are probably the strongest ranking factor (at least for the time being), but the easiest way to get those is to visible create content that people want to create links around. This is the reason that content is so important.

If you are doing all your linkbuilding manually, by yourself, you have a long road ahead of you.

Google has indexed your page, so it's been crawled but it only has the one link pointing at it and as I said that's not providing any particular context.

I don't think that anyone is going to disagree with the concept that knowing more about SEO is an advantage, but it's not a game winner.

Your situation will all be solved by sorting out that slider and getting some more links with the right anchor text pointing at KennethLewis, specifically at the page we're discussing.