SEO For Category pages

[lobas]

Hello,

I'm having a few problems with my site and I think the root of the problem lies with the on-page seo because the site has some good authority backlinks.

As you can see below "Keyword 1" is the main keyword and "blah blah" is the same for each page they are almost category pages.


Keyword 1 blah blah

Keyword 2 blah blah

Keyword 3 blah blah

Keyword 4 blah blah

Keyword 5 blah blah

I have included the Keyword within the title tage, meta description <H1>, <h2> in the body text, and useful content

But the pages are still ranking in at the top 200, we are doing nothing different than our competitors the site is 7 months old and im stuck for ideas now :(

[bwnbwn]

Might be a bit over optimized. I would scale back on the keyword stuffing and make the tiles more natural as well as the h1 and h2 tags. Mix them up but repeating the smae keywords in all the tags is not a good idea.

Don't play follow the leader be the leader.

Site is 7 months young and the other sites are? This is old ranking style and isn't advised even if some are doing it.

[goodroi]

have you reversed engineered the sites that are ranking above you? how many backlinks they have? have many unique referring domains are linking? how many pages of unique content they have? what their social presence is like?

then ask yourself how many of your pages contain several paragraphs of unique content? how many unique domains are linking to you? how often you are being mentioned on twitter, facebook and other social channels?

you might also want to use a paid link research tool to identify 301 redirects going to your competition.

[lobas]

Well the compeitors have links with the exact keywords going to the individual pages, 80% of these are paid links, which i dont plan on doing.

[freejung]

What is your internal linking structure like? Which pages are linked from the homepage? Which pages from individual category pages?

[lobas]

I have the same left hand side bar for basically every page with the keyword as the anchor text

[Robert Charlton]

From your description, I'm not getting a good picture of what's going on. My problem is with the syntax of your first sentence here, and I simply can't parse out what you're saying. Apparently, some others are understanding. Would you clarify...

As you can see below "Keyword 1" is the main keyword and "blah blah" is the same for each page they are almost category pages.


Keyword 1 blah blah

Keyword 2 blah blah

Keyword 3 blah blah

etc...

[lobas]

Manchester blah blah
Liverpool blah blah
London blah blah

[freejung]

Hm... I was sort of looking for more information than that, but I think I may be stuck on the fact that you're calling them "category" pages. What I was thinking is that maybe the link structure of the site is not set up to make them _look_ like categories (information silos), so that Google is not picking up on their importance.

Let's start with this: how many pages are there in your site, and how many internal links are on your homepage? And out of the total pages on your site, how many of them are these "category" pages we're talking about?

I'm not sure this will help explain why your competitors are outranking you by such a wide margin, I'm just fishing for something I might be able to give you advice about ;-).

With regards to your original question, it's impossible to say with so little information, but I would guess you're looking at a fairly competitive niche where you will probably have to just build up quite a bit more in order to rank -- more content, more links, more social presence etc.

[freejung]

This is one of those questions that would be easier to answer quickly if we could post URLs. lobas sticky-mailed me the URL, and I took a look at it.

The problem is simply one of link juice. The information architecture is fine, the keyword optimization is a bit heavy but should be fine. The competition has over 100X more link juice. No amount of on-site optimization is going to compete with that. Get more juice.