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The page has been optimized over and over (although I admit I need to change a title here and there). At first, I didn't use <h1>'s, but now I put them in the proper place, with the proper KWs, and restructured them with CSS to look the way I like. Page titles were changed to reflect the information or specific article. KWs range from heavily searched industry specific but generalized terms, to the smallest 4 word niche. I've been spidered heavily by the big 3 (Goog, MSN, and Yahoo), and pretty much all of my pages are in the indexes. I also get spidered frequently (And update content). I have about 30 solid inbound links from sites with PR4+ (some of these sites have me linked on 50-100, or even 1,000 pages), and another 20 links from directory sites. I should also mention I'm in DMOZ in a solid catagory with other HUGE sites, but there are less than 20 sites in this catagory (it's 5 or 6 deep).
I've gotten many emails telling me how useful the site is, how easy it is to navigate, how good the information is, but I can't get organic traffic. I've been getting traffic from my links, type ins, and links from my signature in other forums. Currently I'm at about 25-30 uniques a day.
Is it time for some proffessional SEO or link building? (or both?) Should I try to start with the basics again? Read through the library and try to reoptimize from scratch? It's been a solid 6 months, so I'm getting frustrated, thanks for your help :)
I predict that one day soon the clouds will part and you will bathe in the warm glow of some deserved Google trafic. Don't do anything silly in the meantime.
Considering how competitive your market is(assuming it's what I think it is :)) I would say keep working on more inbound links. PR4 is probably too low for your field.
How do you stack against your competition, i.e. type in the keywords on G and what do they have that you may not?
...and your lack of traffic from msn and Yahoo is due to those search-engines being not much good.
I would disagree with that statement, For reference, I've seen the sandbox from Google first hand. On a site that is about three months old, I've gotten 147 referrals from Google this month. MSN has sent 3654 and Yahoo has sent 4802 on the month. What's worse is that GBot ate the site up about 2 weeks after it's launch. Yet, still not performing in the SERPs (despite showing a pr5 with more than 300 inbound links not from the same domains).
Coming from someone who was riding Google for about three years -- I think we're witnessing the downfall day by day. And strangely, I love it.
Regardless of all that though, comments like that (and my reply) stray off topic and do not help fidibidabah at all.
fidibidabah, if possible, could you describe the path you've taken so far in gathering inbound links and performing your SE submissions to date?
From there, perhaps we can diagnose your situation a bit better. Apologies on the rant too.
ShootinBlanks
I optimised for a phrase based on some Overture suggestions. For some reason the phrase disappeared from Overture's suggestions the following month - clearly it was no longer being searched for.
No point in optimising for non-existent phrases...*erk*
