I need some suggestions/advice improving dismal search performance

[Demaestro]

I have posted about the site I am dealing with before. It is our company's website.

My previous post about the site was about how it had a wiki for years that is top results for searches on default passwords for some network devices, the wiki out performs the manufacturers of these devices. Big names like "shamshung" and "smony". Anyway this wiki is a geek blog pet project of the techs here and not related to the managed it and software business. The only traffic the site got for years was for the wiki. About 9 months ago I separated out the wiki to a subdomain in an effort to give the main business side of the site a change to gain it's own keywords and not be swallowed by the wiki's keyword dominance.

Fast forward the wiki continues to enjoy top rankings and great traffic. The main site seems stuck/penalized/dead, WMT shows almost none of the keywords in the site, the site sites at page 10+ for terms using local qualifiers behind sites that are so irrelevant to the search topic it is unbelievable the site ranks behind them.

So here is where my head it at, and what I am seeing.

WMT shows no incoming links but many of our clients' websites link our site... however they are all on the same server/IP range? Is that a problem?

WMT shows no of the keywords for things that are the main topic of both the home page and interior pages. For example, "Managed IT services", the main page has H3 tagged section discussing it. The main menu has links with link text reading "Managed IT services" the page is /managed-it-services/ The H1 is "Managed IT Services" etc... But WMT tools doesn't show managed or services in the list of keywords it detects? Are we penalized?

We literally get no keyword data from Google for the main site, except the business name and mistyping os the domain. Same with queries... Why?!?!

I am questioning everything I know. Should I give money to one of the million people that email us daily about SEO services? I used to be able to pull a site to the top or near it for local business results... what did I miss? I am seriously lost at this point.

[Kratos]

About incoming links from same server/IPs, if these are actual sites with real content and a real white hat purpose and not spam networks, then there's nothing to worry. If G hasn't picked it up after a long time then it can be the way the links are structured that isn't seen by Google. Also G may not always show all links and it may take even more than a year to show a link, even if it's a good link in a page that is indexed. The link report in WMT can be really buggy.

Ranking well in Google comes down to links and on page structure. It's that simple, and it's beautifully simple too.

Do you have the type of links that give you butterflies in the stomach when you notice that you got them and even every time you visit the page where your link is?
Do you have content that has so many FB likes that you feel like buying Facebook stock shares?
Is your site navigated in a way that allows for PageRank to flow to where you want it to flow?
Do you have unneeded internal (and external) links?
Is your site slower than 2 seconds to load (although this is a minor ranking factor but hey 'we optimization now')?
Are you keyword stuffing your headings? By the way, use of headings is overrated these days, and only good for semantics and long tails and only if you play your cards right too and don't keyword stuff the hell out of them like most people do.

Way too much stuff going on. I haven't seen your site but my guess is that you're not under a filter (not a penalty, as a penalty is manual). You just lack off page and on page SEO.

[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:23 pm (utc) on Apr 9, 2015]

[netmeg]

Don't give any money to anyone contacting you about SEO. The ones who know what they're doing don't need to troll for business. They have waiting lists.

[tangor]

Do the terms you want rank well for other sites? If not, then it is possible some dictionary words or phrases are not as well indexed (ignored).

[Demaestro]

Hi all sorry, thanks for the replies.

The incoming links we have are for our client's sites. They are legit sites, not relating to our industry at all, they all vary in categories, but they are real sites. As for sites in our category, there are almost no links except to the wiki. For that there are tons.

To answer some questions.....

We have almost 0 social media presence. I think the site is really well structured and follows a logic content order. The site loads quickly, except for one large slider image, but it still comes in under 2 seconds.

I feel like we are stuffing keywords a bit, but not unnaturally, and I assume by headings you mean <h%> tags. <h1> always have the keywords in them 2 and 3 sometimes do but they always define and match up with the content that follows.

Terms do rank well for other sites, and to be honest some of the sites are better than ours, but a lot of them are far worse. Some of the sites ranking ahead of us are so far and away from what I would call relevant to the search terms, the fact that our site doesn't at least rank ahead of those ones hurts my feelers and ego lol.

Is there a way to tell if you are in some sort of penalty? The fact that the wiki does so well on a subdomain makes me think not, but I can't explain why it doesn't even detect those keywords in WMT at all. Not even one instance when there are clearly many.