Hello all, I hope someone may be able to advise me on the problem im having with SEO. Heres the info.

I run a website based on the Super Mario Bros series of games and I use the most recent version of Joomla as my content management system.

The site has been up since April 14th this year, and I know it takes a long times for sites to settle into the search engines etc properly as seven years ago I ran a different Mario site using PHPNuke, this ended up third on results for my targetted main keywords of "super mario" on google.

I am having an absoloute nightmare however getting any visibility for the same keywords now. The website is at www.classic-mario.net - can you see anything on there that might be scaring off the search engines, particularly google?

Or is the five months the site has been around simply not long enough to get anywhere?

I've got H1 tags (joomla does them auto I think) on all my 1200+ pages, meta tags and descriptions on each individual page, lots of backlinks and building more all the time, some of which from very popular sites, a sitemap registered with google webmaster tools which says I have 114 pages in their index etc.

Our Alexa rank has gone from 25mil to 700k in this time but the traffic generated from search engines on the whole is still 5% or less

Can anyone please help.

Best regards

Luke

Or is the five months the site has been around simply not long enough to get anywhere?

Correct!

You more than probably have read or heard about the Google Sandbox, haven't you? In certain cases if the niches are very hot even the one year old websites might be regarded as newcomers to the online world, especially if the niches are already dominated by older domains and websites. Constant work would be the key as you would need to remain patient for some time.

5 months is not enough to rank a site especially if you are targeting also for a high competitive keywords.

You work will give your results. Keep on working with the good work. Perform article submissions and blog post in different sites daily. you can use free blog sites available on internet. And keep on working with other off page SEO activities as well.