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Fairly new to search engine optimisation and am trying to figure out why one of our sites is ranking above another site for a particular search phrase (second site really should be coming top as search phrase is the clients company name but its coming 4th and a page on our companies site is coming 1st!).
Going to be looking at various different aspects of both sites to see why this is happening could someone tell if there should be something else I should be looking at other than:
Keyword Density, Inbound Links, outbound links? Page Titles, domain names, poor coding, Page Rank , meta tags
Or will any of the above actually be having little or no effect on SE ranking?
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Cheers
Initial thoughts are it could be to do with keyword density as we mention the clients name 5 or 6 times in a page with very little other content?
The site is doing ok in other search terms it just the client wants to know why they are not coming top when people search for the company name.
Optimization Basics [webmasterworld.com]
Plus inbound links and anchor text; and also check some of the threads linked to.
Aside from Page Rank which is exclusive to Google, most things apply to any search engine. There's a difference in the weighting of different factors and also periodic changes in alogrithms as time goes on.
trying to figure out why one of our sites is ranking above another site for a particular search phrase (second site really should be coming top as search phrase is the clients company name but its coming 4th and a page on our companies site is coming 1st!).
It could possibly be because of the other company's name being in the anchor text of a link to their site on your site's page.
That's the kind of little details you have to look at. What helps a lot is to look at Google's cache of pages with highlighting turned on to get an idea of where the search terms are used and how often - and whether words are being used individually or in phrases in some cases.
