Stumped on how to rank well

Don't understand this at all

[Boesman]

I have a travel site that has a pr of 4. I have been in business for 2 years and spend quite a bit with adwords. My competitor has multiple sites with different domains but with almost similar content. He launches a site and two months later he has the # 1 spot. The first page of search results are all his sites. My site is on the 10th page. (searching in South Africa only)

I have a few questions.

1. There are MANY sites that have a higher listing than I but they have a lower page rank. What is the point of Page Rank if it doesn't affect your position in search results?

2. I think I have followed the book but failed miserably. I need to know what to do and to understand why my competition is doing what I am not.

3. How is it possible for a site that has almost no relevance to get a higher ranking. One site has maybe one page and I have a travel site with more than 1,000 pages but my ranking sucks?

<Sorry, no specific domain names.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 2:07 pm (utc) on Jan. 2, 2007]

[egurr]

How does your site compare (or more specifically the target page) with that of the top ten sites? Do you have same number (within ten percent) of words, keyword density, title density, etc.?
Also, do all of the top ten sites have the keyword in the domain name?
Lots of factors to consider.

[youfoundjake]

I also have a question about this.
If my main keyword phrase is "widgets" and I have all my incoming links to my home page, Is it a good idea to have some incoming links to example.com/types.htm when the search term is "types of widgets"?
I know that it would help spread PR through out the site, but will linking to types.htm help me rank higher for "widgets" on the homepage as well?

[tedster]

It might -- lots of factors are in play here. Internal linking in your site will "circulate" the PR back to your home page even from internal pages. I'm assuming that you have a "Home" link on the internal and it points to the domain root itself, not to index.htm or some such file name.

[youfoundjake]

I have a 301 redirect from www.example.com/index.htm to www.example.com as well as from example.com to www.example.com. The internal linking all points to index.htm as of this moment.
I'm still up in the air about internal linking, should I have all the links with the FQDN or just what ever page it is off the root?
As far as have external links pointing to my site, besides it helping spread PR, does it also lend "trust" to the site since more then just the homepage is being linked to and if so, will the site appear higher in the SERPS as a result?

[piatkow]

My experience is that a lot of visitors seem unwilling to actually attempt to navigate a site so by encouraging deep linking I get more of them to visit relevant pages. On my site it doesn't seem to have affected search engine placement on key searches and results are more relevant to the enquiry.

[Oliver Henniges]

It is always problematic to aim at tweaking ranking by pulling knobs on minor factors. Details of your internal pagerank-distribution - as Tedster suggested - may be the icing on the cake, but considering how you described your situation, I'd suggest some more basic issues at work. So without knowing specific details of your website, let me just point to a few things:

0) Make sure your pages are parseable and syntactically well-formed. Use the w3c-validator wherever possible, and check for broken links.

1) The travelling industry is a highly competitive area. How do you monitor your ranking: Just one keyword or several phrases from the long tail? It doesen't really say very much if you are #1 for a search on "travelling to south africa". Try "afrika" if you want to invite my compatriots, and constantly monitor your logfiles and/or google trends if you want to get a glimpse what your visitors are actually looking for.

2) Make sure that no two URLs on your domain show the same content. Make sure that your 1000 pages have unique page-titles in the meta tags, which match the search-phrases you want to get #1 for. Choose a page title with anything from two to seven words. Make sure these words are repeated in the description- and keyword- metatags, and are repeated with an acceptable density in the body text. It also might help if the internal link-anchors match the page's titles, but the most important thing is that your visitors will find the desired information on exactly that page. The paranoids among us believe, that google is monitoring how long your visitors spend reading that page and where they click from there;)

3) running 1000 pages would mean that each should at least be indexed with a PR2 if your main-site has a PR4. Is this the case? If not, check your internal link-structure. Make sure each page could be found max. two graphs away from your main page; add a two-leveled sitemap if necessary, and submit a sitemap.xml-file through your webmaster-central account.

4) Backlinks are always helpful.

I hardly ever SEF more than this; didn't even really bother about my anchor texts 100%. So far I have survived all algo-changes and am really satisfied with the overall results. My area is not as competitive as the travelling industry, but the longer your tail the less competition you have. Whether you call yourself "market-leader" primarily depends on the narrowness of your niche, thus your own definition.