I've been posting here about a site I designed called http://www.vantidy.co.uk

The site has relivant content for our main keyword search of "van racking" and has a moderate but growing collection of back links.

When searched in Google for "van racking" the first site that comes up is a company called sort*mo.co.uk (blanked out cos I dont want this forum to help their listings!!)

they only have the search phrase listed 3 times on the home page compared to around 30 times for mine.

Also there is no links page at all on the site.

How is this doing so well in the rankings?

Originally Posted by rolda hayes

How is this doing so well in the rankings?

By the Power Vested in Inbound Links.

Also the other site is 6 years older than yours, which might give it an edge.

The major reason I can see is because you're making the same mistake a bunch of us make (including me about 7-8 years ago): you went too far with the SEO and forgot about the end user.

Link exchanges? Don't work.
Putting a phrase 30 times on the home page? Doesn't work. (Generally speaking, a phrase should be mentioned 3-4 times at most per 100-200 words to make the copy easier to read).
Using the H1 tag to dump a few extra keywords on the top of your page for competitive edge? Doesn't work.

Simply put, you need to learn that good SEO stems from good basic design.

Use h tags for actual text headings. If you want to fit the phrase "van racking" in, come up with some marketing slogan for it.
Don't worry so much about whether your key phrase is in there 5 times or 6. It really won't make much difference anyway.
Try not to make your site look quite as busy and cluttered as it does. The colour scheme may need to be changed to meet your target audience's needs as well, but that's something only they can judge.

In other words, don't worry so much about the SEO and let it happen naturally. You've got an okay site other than that from the looks of it...might need some tweaking here and there, but all sites do.

Thanks for the advice adam,
Think I'll have a play with the contnet a bit. I always hated over using keywords but thought that was the way to do it

Originally Posted by rolda hayes

they only have the search phrase listed 3 times on the home page compared to around 30 times for mine.

Er, sounds pretty equal to me. The phrase appears on both home pages. I really doubt it goes any further than that ( keyword density and stuff ). If writing a word more times gave you an advantage, we'd all be doing our sites in ASP or PHP with some code that looks like this:

for(int i = 0; 1 < 1000 * 1000; i++)
Response.Write("My Favorite Keyword ");

That would be far too easy to manipulate, and the sites that scored the best, would likely be the worst ones for search engines to send people to.

Just as a reminder