What can i do to move my site up the search engines

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi. my site www.in2town.co.uk  is currently number five in google for the search word lifestyle magazine, sometimes it moves to four but for over a year it has not got past four. before we had to do the site from scratch due to a major problem upgrading, we were number one in the search engines and our traffic was around 30% higher than it is now.

For the keyword lifestyle news, we are on the fifth page of google and would really like to improve this.

I would like to know what i need to do on our home page to try and improve our rankings for these two words. the most important word for us is lifestyle news.

any help in my goal to improve our rankings would be great.

We have improved our design which we are still working on, and we have upgraded to a bigger dedicated server to improve the speed.

[IainReloadMedia]

Hey Diane,

Good question. It looks like you've been working hard on the site as you're getting an A using the SEOMOZ on page factors tool...
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization

There are a few small tweaks you could do, running the tool above will show you these. Nothing major.

You mentioned before the upgrade you ranked no.1. I'd start by making sure all links pointing to your previous site are being handled correctly on the new one. For example are there any links to none existent pages which need to be 301'd to the home page?

You also need to diversify your backlink anchor text, as the largest amount of anchor text is "Lifestyle magazine". Pre Penguin this would of worked, but now your brand should be the most frequent anchor text used.

Hope that helps

Iain - Reload Media

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for this, i have read about the brand but never really understood it as some people say it works and other people say it does not work.

My brand is in2town which would not bring me traffic, the keywords that would bring me traffic is lifestyle news, online magazine, lifestyle magazine etc

i have about 2000 old links pointing to different sections in my site, these have been put in my htaccess file, i have about another 2000 that are not pointing anywhere.

I lost around 4,000 links because of the problem upgrading, long story but it is on the forum of what happened.

should i be pointing the other links that are doing nothing to my home page or put them in the correct sections. if i point them all the the home page then the home page will have around 2000 links with so many different anchor text as a lot of the old links are story articles.

many thanks for the advice