Hello and website taking a long time (6+ months) to appear on Google

[Stingraynut]

Hello SEO Chat members, this is my first post here, but I've had a lot of help from all sorts of forums over the years, from the Corvette Forum, RC Planes Forums, to Indian Curry Forums!! and of course many forums concerned with website building - Joomla, Wordpress and so on.

I've began building websites in 1997, moved into Wordpress in 2007 and now only build Wordpress as a CMS.

Currently I have about 12 business websites ranking on page one of Google for their relevant search terms, and a couple of sites bouncing up and down like yoyo's. ie One day not in top 100 next day position 47

I have a 6 month old site that is proving extremely hard to rank anywhere on Google. Everything SEO is correct except for no links and SEO Quakes says that the title and description are too long, but all the other SEO boxes are ticked.
For 6 months it hasn't appeared in the first 100 results. From past experience I expected to see it about page 6 after 2 or 3 months and work its way down to page 3 or better, for the search term 'car service cairns'.
Suddenly today, for the first time, it has come from being 'not in top 100', to position 18, so hopefully it's finding it proper place in the rankings, or will it bounce back into the stratosphere tomorrow :-) ?
The site is ADVANCED AUTOMOTIVE FOR CAR SERVICE & REPAIR CAIRNS, WARRANTY SERVICE, INJECTOR SERVICE, CAR BATTERIES. If any SEO Guru's here cares to have a look at it, I'd welcome any advice.
I have read the sticky Google Crawling and Indexation 101

My best SEO result was to get a brand new website on page one in 4 days Personal Guided Tours of Noumea and New Caledonia I guess it does help if there's not much competition, but that was still very quick!!

I choose this forum after looking at a few SEO forums and hope I can help sometimes as well as ask for help

Rob

[KernelPanic]

well, you rank #1 for ADVANCED AUTOMOTIVE FOR CAR SERVICE & REPAIR CAIRNS, WARRANTY SERVICE, INJECTOR SERVICE, CAR BATTERIES. lol

You said: "Everything SEO is correct except for no links" No links = no ranks. Ranks are the direct result of links and in a competitive environment no site will rank without them.

[joshz]

What REAL SEO efforts have you applied to your site?

Your onpage SEO is weak.
You have little to no links.

What have you done to earn the right to rank?

[Stingraynut]

joshz and everyone, thanks for your replies.
This was a low budget site, there wasn't any cash to do full SEO. Looking at the competition in this area, I expected the site to appear around page 6. To not appear in the first 10 pages was very surprising. The search term 'car service cairns' dropped 82 places yesterday and the site is now not in the top 100 again. I'm wondering what causes that, when nothing has been changed. I can't believe 82 competing websites for that search term all made changes to their sites over our long weekend.
SEO that has been done -
Keyword rich URL. Keywords in Title and description. Good keyword density in content - I judge the best keyword density from other sites ranking #1 and #2
H1 H2 H3 headings, Alt text on images,
Robots Txt, XML Sitemap Doc type XHTML Transitional encoding UTF-8 Google analytics Feed and site is gzip.
This is a wordpress website and I have sites ranking well in 10 page competition with the same level of SEO
eg Cairns Personal Ceremonies for your special wedding, marriage, naming or affirmation ceremony. "marriage celebrant cairns" #2

I have looked at the top ranking sites for 'car service cairns'
#1 Ultra Tune Cairns - Ultra Tune Auto Service Centres, Car Service, Servicing, Vehicle Handbook Servicing
#2 Cairns Car Service Centres, Auto Mechanics Cairns QLD
#3 Car Service Cairns Trinity Auto Group
They all have basic errors like no sitemap or robots txt, missing alt text, one has two H1's etc


I'm not complaining that the site isn't ranking in the top few pages, I'm wondering why it has been out of the top 100 for most of the 7 months it has existed.

Judging by my other sites, there is something wrong. I'm hoping someone here might spot something I've missed
Rob