The site in my signature, Impartial Investor has been running for about 6 months now but has virtually no traffic from google!

I was upgraded from 0 to 4 in the last google update and some of my other pages are 2 and three but I have only got about 15 hits from google since I started it.

Is it because my key words (about investing and finance) are too competitive? Or is it because I have not optimised sufficiently on specific key words? Or is it something else?

Any advice would be appreciated greatly.

MattD

Many factors will determine your traffic:
1) The competition - Your competitor have much higher PR than yours
2) Keywords used - Is that the keywords that searchers will look for?
3) Back links, quantity and quality links
and others.

Hey guys, I just realised MattD's website: impartial-investor.co.uk is not found in Google at all.

Can anyone tell me why?

Originally Posted by nkthen

Hey guys, I just realised MattD's website: impartial-investor.co.uk is not found in Google at all.

Can anyone tell me why?

If you search using the terms impartial and investor I come up as top for google.co.uk

I tried putting in "impartial-investor.co.uk" in the search engine and got nothing as well, which is strange.

If you put "site:impartial-investor.co.uk" you will get all the pages indexed by google for my site.

Please don't scare me like that!

MattD

well it's there but in dire straits.

Looks to be a duplicate content penalty/filter because of the session IDs

addition,

Also the site has been indexed under both www and the non-www version.

You need to choose one and 301 redirect the other to rectify this.

Chrishhirst,

I was aware of the second issue but I did, not know how to correct it, thankyou. As for the session ID'S they are a worrying problem bacause I would need to stop using the content management site that I use at the moment!

Is there anything I can put in the robot.txt file to stop them indexing sessions? (Yes I know this is optimistic.)

MattD

Not in the robots.txt, but in most CM Systems you can turn off sessions in the URI for spiders

Thanks again Chrishirst, I will look into it at the xoops website (thats my CMS,) and around the net, hopefully that should help. I didn't think about my session ID's producing duplicate content.

MattD

I would agree with the above plus I would take a look at your title tags, that is a big thing with Google, make sure it contains your keywords. Check out some of our promotion articles at http://www.auxic.com/fa.htm that can be helpfull on what search engines are looking for. More incoming links with your keywords in the link text will be helpfull also. Add a suggested link for people to use on your links page. This can help with your incoming links.

Although you have PR4, like someone else noted, you will have competitors. How are the quality of your links? do you have good content?

Just a note on competition, even if you have PR7 you may not even be listed in top 10 for the keywords you have.

Few reasons:
1) Your competitor has more quality backlinks than you
2) Your competitor has more themed backlinks and keywords are in the link
3) Your competitor's page is more optimized for search engines
4) Your competitor's page upates its content more regularly than you

If you have more than 10 competitors who are better than you in the above reasons, a PR7 will not even see you at the top.

The keywords that you're targeting may be too broad or too narrow. If they're too broad, you'd have too many competitors and your site may not rank very high. If they're too narrow, your site may rank high, but the only problem is, no one would search on your keywords.

PR is way over-rated. I have a PR0 site that is getting around 200 visitors a day and a PR4 that is getting around 70.

PR is important, but it is only one of a number of factors that determine your search engine ranking. I took a quick look at impartial-investor.co.uk, and most of the keywords in the meta tags seem quite good (though there are some very general ones like "articles", "shares", and "news"). You should narrow it down to a few specific keywords on each page, and strategically include them in the content in whatever way you can.

I also noticed that some of the links on your homepage don't go anywhere (the pages don't work, and the visitor is redirected to the homepage). You should fix that right away.

For a basic SEO checklist, take a look at http://www.wealthstream.info/search_...timization.htm, and use some of the suggestions listed there.

You will need to pick more relevant keywords to get more hits! Not many people type those words and you will probably have a ton of competition!