How to get good SERP for category level pages?
I am getting a decent SERP (first result of 2nd page) for my home page relative to the keywords that I want it to be associate with ?however ?my other top level category pages and other subpages have horrible SERP.
I have dialed in the Titles, Descriptions, Keywords and Content for the category and sub pages, but I still cant seem to get a good position when the relative keywords are used. The only page on the site that has a decent SERP is my homepage, the rest of the pages will never get found with someone typing in a keyword in a search engine to find them, because they are buried so deep.
Am I missing something obvious that is causing these pages, which I think are nicely designed for SEO, to not get a good SERP? We have submitted our sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Most pages are indexed, but the SERP is horrible ?it must be something obvious, any help would be much appreciated! Hi Kraza,
You need to take a look at the amount of search competition you are competing with on the keywords for each of your category pages... If your category keyword page has only say 1,000 results in google, and you have optimised the page and site correctly, it will be alot easier to rank than against a competition of say 10 million for the same keyword.
Submitting sitemaps and optimising meta tags and on page factors isn't always enough - as you have found.
Firstly, I would check to see whether the page(s) in question are actually indexed in google, if they are not, that could be the problem, and this could be down to no unique content on each page, little or no relevancy to added, or the page(s) simply aren't being picked up yet by the search engines (for large websites it can take time).
If you really want to be competitive and rank your internal pages, you will need to push some links towards them. This can be done in several ways, article marketing and social bookmarking to name a few.
My suggestion would be to write an article relevant for each category page and get it submitted to several article directories. There are people in this forum who advertise article submission and writing, so might be a good idea to check them out.
Having a good article distributed to some of the better article directories with your link in will boost the page(s) you are wanting to rank, and should see some results within a few weeks to a month, although don't expect miracles - don't forget your competitors are probably doing the same and you need to stay ahead of the game. Which article directories would you recommend and can you submit the same article to more than one directory or will google frown upon this? I have found that google are only indexing about half my pages at present so i need to do something to help index them quicker. You can submit your article to more than 1 directory, however some directories like unique content (ezinearticles) and also google may/may not index and count all the links due to the content being the same elsewhere, i've noticed this personally - within a few days to a week some articles will drop from the index.
You can use tools to spin the article to provide unique versions, or re-write each article manually, although try to keep them as unique as possible, and still be readable and of decent quality.
There are thousands of article directories, popular ones being ezinearticles, articledashboard, articlealley, goarticles...
If your new to article marketing, it might be worth paying someone with the knowledge and expertise to get your article distributed and accepted into as many decent directories as possible, whilst retaining the quality of the article as most people will spin the article also for you.
You can sign up to article distribution services, use someone on the forums or purchase some tools yourself to do this, but at the same time you will need to learn how to use them and make use of them regulary to get your monies worth.
The other option is social bookmarking, popular sites such as digg, reddit, delicious should help get your pages indexed, as these sites are crawled continuously due to the massive user base and constant updates, although some are nofollow and therefore pass little link value to your site.
I may start a thread offering article distribution for a small fee if anyone is interested, you would have to provide the article though, but i could spin it for you. Thanks Mark for the detailed responses, much appreciated.
I am not sure exactly what Social Bookmarking means, can you help me understand this better? I do know of Digg, just not sure what social bookmarking means.
Also, should I focus on links back to specific internal pages and not my home page?
What about starting my own blog page - a separate website - and linking back to mysite in various categories of the blog? Social bookmarking is exactly like digg, but there are thousands or other sites which aren't as high quality but you can submit your page to them (some label it as 'submit news'). Your put in your information and your page gets submitted to each site for review by the admin and then gets approved. If you search google (or I am sure this forum, I am new to this one so haven't had a chance to get round to browsing the site), you will find people who have posted lists of social bookmark sites, but here are a few to get you going:
http://www.spurl.net/
http://www.mysitevote.com
http://www.reddit.com
http://www.folkd.com
http://www.dzone.com
http://mylinkvault.com/
http://oyax.com/
http://tugatop.com/
http://cadillactight.net/
http://memfrag.com/mf.app
http://bukmark.net/
http://bookmarking-site.com
http://www.a1-webmarks.com/
http://www.business-planet.net/
http://www.webmaster911.com
http://www.bookmark4you.com
I haven't checked those recently but should all still be live and working. I usually save the URL for my bookmark into an excel sheet to create either an RSS feed to submit or use a pinging service like pingdevice.com to help get them indexed. You don't have to do this, but it can increase the time google finds your link.
You should also create informative pages at Squidoo and link from within the content. For example, if one of your pages was about blue widgets, write a lens on squidoo about blue widgets, ideas, designs, information, guides etc, then link from the text to the blue widget page on your site, and also perhaps a link to your sites homepage using the right anchor text. You can create as many pages on squidoo and do this, but make sure the pages are informative. You can also do this with hubpages although they have a system where your hub and author profile is scored, and any links are nofollow unless your page and author score is increased to a certain level. You will need to check their site for the exact info, but I think your page score needs to be 75 and your author score in the region of 55.
With any linking strategy you should really look to get your site and it's main pages ranked, so linking to internal pages is definitely recommended... For example, your main page may be about a particular service you offer, or a product, and therefore the page should be optimised for those keywords. Hitting links to this page will make it rank better with the right keyword, as opposed trying to make your homepage rank for this etc.
Creating your own blog will be useful and should provide some benefit, but don't forget it will be new in the eyes of google, and itself will have no backlinks, might not be indexed and have no authority, so the weight of the links you send from it won't be high... If you were to do this method, I will create mini sites or blogs with unique content, update them periodically, and link 2 or 3 times to your sites pages per article. At the same time, try and get your blog some links in to increase the link juice being passed to you. I would also link every now and then to a non competitor (such as a hubpage article related to your nice, a dmoz page where you are listed/related to your niche, a wikipedia page related to your niche etc) so it doesn't always look like you are only linking to your site. I do want to know about this more as, may be the good SERP can achieve through working on different pages by well optimizing those pages. Mark - thanks again.
Another question, is it really necessary to add a "/links" page to my site? for reciprocal linking? It seems that when I wam submitting my link to other directories, they would obviously prefer and claim it takes less time for me to get my link approved, if I put their link on my site.
What are your thoughts on this? I would rather stay away from creating a links page on my site. Is it risky to add a link page in the mind of Google? Is it needed? If your lookingto enter link exchanges then it is worth you adding a page or section of your website specifically for this. My only suggestion would to make it so there are no more than 20-25 links per page.
Typically, exchanging links with related sites to your niche will provide the most benefit. I'd personally avoid exchanging links with general web directories, i've never done it and I really would not be keen on linking to a site which is unrelated (or some directories ask you to link to another third party website, one I saw recently was a link to a phone card site).
You don't have to exchange links to boost your search engine positioning, although getting the right amount of links back to your site from related sites are generally viewed to be worth more than a link from a
I am getting a decent SERP (first result of 2nd page) for my home page relative to the keywords that I want it to be associate with ?however ?my other top level category pages and other subpages have horrible SERP.
I have dialed in the Titles, Descriptions, Keywords and Content for the category and sub pages, but I still cant seem to get a good position when the relative keywords are used. The only page on the site that has a decent SERP is my homepage, the rest of the pages will never get found with someone typing in a keyword in a search engine to find them, because they are buried so deep.
Am I missing something obvious that is causing these pages, which I think are nicely designed for SEO, to not get a good SERP? We have submitted our sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Most pages are indexed, but the SERP is horrible ?it must be something obvious, any help would be much appreciated! Hi Kraza,
You need to take a look at the amount of search competition you are competing with on the keywords for each of your category pages... If your category keyword page has only say 1,000 results in google, and you have optimised the page and site correctly, it will be alot easier to rank than against a competition of say 10 million for the same keyword.
Submitting sitemaps and optimising meta tags and on page factors isn't always enough - as you have found.
Firstly, I would check to see whether the page(s) in question are actually indexed in google, if they are not, that could be the problem, and this could be down to no unique content on each page, little or no relevancy to added, or the page(s) simply aren't being picked up yet by the search engines (for large websites it can take time).
If you really want to be competitive and rank your internal pages, you will need to push some links towards them. This can be done in several ways, article marketing and social bookmarking to name a few.
My suggestion would be to write an article relevant for each category page and get it submitted to several article directories. There are people in this forum who advertise article submission and writing, so might be a good idea to check them out.
Having a good article distributed to some of the better article directories with your link in will boost the page(s) you are wanting to rank, and should see some results within a few weeks to a month, although don't expect miracles - don't forget your competitors are probably doing the same and you need to stay ahead of the game. Which article directories would you recommend and can you submit the same article to more than one directory or will google frown upon this? I have found that google are only indexing about half my pages at present so i need to do something to help index them quicker. You can submit your article to more than 1 directory, however some directories like unique content (ezinearticles) and also google may/may not index and count all the links due to the content being the same elsewhere, i've noticed this personally - within a few days to a week some articles will drop from the index.
You can use tools to spin the article to provide unique versions, or re-write each article manually, although try to keep them as unique as possible, and still be readable and of decent quality.
There are thousands of article directories, popular ones being ezinearticles, articledashboard, articlealley, goarticles...
If your new to article marketing, it might be worth paying someone with the knowledge and expertise to get your article distributed and accepted into as many decent directories as possible, whilst retaining the quality of the article as most people will spin the article also for you.
You can sign up to article distribution services, use someone on the forums or purchase some tools yourself to do this, but at the same time you will need to learn how to use them and make use of them regulary to get your monies worth.
The other option is social bookmarking, popular sites such as digg, reddit, delicious should help get your pages indexed, as these sites are crawled continuously due to the massive user base and constant updates, although some are nofollow and therefore pass little link value to your site.
I may start a thread offering article distribution for a small fee if anyone is interested, you would have to provide the article though, but i could spin it for you. Thanks Mark for the detailed responses, much appreciated.
I am not sure exactly what Social Bookmarking means, can you help me understand this better? I do know of Digg, just not sure what social bookmarking means.
Also, should I focus on links back to specific internal pages and not my home page?
What about starting my own blog page - a separate website - and linking back to mysite in various categories of the blog? Social bookmarking is exactly like digg, but there are thousands or other sites which aren't as high quality but you can submit your page to them (some label it as 'submit news'). Your put in your information and your page gets submitted to each site for review by the admin and then gets approved. If you search google (or I am sure this forum, I am new to this one so haven't had a chance to get round to browsing the site), you will find people who have posted lists of social bookmark sites, but here are a few to get you going:
http://www.spurl.net/
http://www.mysitevote.com
http://www.reddit.com
http://www.folkd.com
http://www.dzone.com
http://mylinkvault.com/
http://oyax.com/
http://tugatop.com/
http://cadillactight.net/
http://memfrag.com/mf.app
http://bukmark.net/
http://bookmarking-site.com
http://www.a1-webmarks.com/
http://www.business-planet.net/
http://www.webmaster911.com
http://www.bookmark4you.com
I haven't checked those recently but should all still be live and working. I usually save the URL for my bookmark into an excel sheet to create either an RSS feed to submit or use a pinging service like pingdevice.com to help get them indexed. You don't have to do this, but it can increase the time google finds your link.
You should also create informative pages at Squidoo and link from within the content. For example, if one of your pages was about blue widgets, write a lens on squidoo about blue widgets, ideas, designs, information, guides etc, then link from the text to the blue widget page on your site, and also perhaps a link to your sites homepage using the right anchor text. You can create as many pages on squidoo and do this, but make sure the pages are informative. You can also do this with hubpages although they have a system where your hub and author profile is scored, and any links are nofollow unless your page and author score is increased to a certain level. You will need to check their site for the exact info, but I think your page score needs to be 75 and your author score in the region of 55.
With any linking strategy you should really look to get your site and it's main pages ranked, so linking to internal pages is definitely recommended... For example, your main page may be about a particular service you offer, or a product, and therefore the page should be optimised for those keywords. Hitting links to this page will make it rank better with the right keyword, as opposed trying to make your homepage rank for this etc.
Creating your own blog will be useful and should provide some benefit, but don't forget it will be new in the eyes of google, and itself will have no backlinks, might not be indexed and have no authority, so the weight of the links you send from it won't be high... If you were to do this method, I will create mini sites or blogs with unique content, update them periodically, and link 2 or 3 times to your sites pages per article. At the same time, try and get your blog some links in to increase the link juice being passed to you. I would also link every now and then to a non competitor (such as a hubpage article related to your nice, a dmoz page where you are listed/related to your niche, a wikipedia page related to your niche etc) so it doesn't always look like you are only linking to your site. I do want to know about this more as, may be the good SERP can achieve through working on different pages by well optimizing those pages. Mark - thanks again.
Another question, is it really necessary to add a "/links" page to my site? for reciprocal linking? It seems that when I wam submitting my link to other directories, they would obviously prefer and claim it takes less time for me to get my link approved, if I put their link on my site.
What are your thoughts on this? I would rather stay away from creating a links page on my site. Is it risky to add a link page in the mind of Google? Is it needed? If your lookingto enter link exchanges then it is worth you adding a page or section of your website specifically for this. My only suggestion would to make it so there are no more than 20-25 links per page.
Typically, exchanging links with related sites to your niche will provide the most benefit. I'd personally avoid exchanging links with general web directories, i've never done it and I really would not be keen on linking to a site which is unrelated (or some directories ask you to link to another third party website, one I saw recently was a link to a phone card site).
You don't have to exchange links to boost your search engine positioning, although getting the right amount of links back to your site from related sites are generally viewed to be worth more than a link from a