I'm lost (Big Time)

I really need some advise.

Our site has been live and running almost a year. But when I type the keyword 'MAURITIUS" into google, we dont come up even in the first 1000.

PLEASE someone see what have we done so horribly wrong.

We have a PR of 2 now but still nothing for Mauritius

Our site is all the w's islandinfo.mu

I know its not the best site but to not be in 1000... God only knows how far back it is....

Is your site well optimized for that keyword? Have you check the keywords if it has high traffic? Do you use the keyword as anchor text?

It's a very generic keyword and tough to rank. You just cant pick up a country name which is a hot tourist destination, which is searched a lot, and then feel disappointed when not found in the SERP's for that keyword.

May be you dont have enough usage of the keyword "Mauritius" in your back links to pump you up in the SERP's.

You'll really need some kick-*** links to hold a rank on such keywords which are way too generic.



Did'nt see your site till now but that does not mean you are doing anything necessarily wrong.



No relation in PR and SERP's.....

Hello sidshady!

I know the reason why. The "mauritius" keyword is very famous! There are a lots of Google Adsense with the content of Mauritius, so the competition is very cruel between the webmasters for the good position with this keyword. You can check the value of advertiser competition for "Mauritius" keyword by the Google keyword selector: http+s://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

First of all, jalaj4you is right: the keyword is just too competitive.

Second, I'd be surprised if you rank in the top 500 for that keyword anytime soon. Most of the content on your website is duplicate (borrowed from news websites).

Third, you have about 200 backlinks, mostly from unrelated websites and directories.

No big surprise here, really.

There are 136,000,000 results for the search term Mauritius. To be in the top 1000 your page would need to be better optimized than 99.999265% of other pages that also have the keyword Mauritus. To do this you need to not only do on page optimization and a ton of link building but having something original to say on Mauritius would be a great first step as well.

Thanks for all the posts...

and all those comments... I was hoping that maybe a few people could just tell me exactly what you would change.

Ie on the first page, or in the sight seeing section etc.

Im gonna read the forums a lot more to see how people are doing what... but I look at my site everyday, and to be honest my mind is just blank out of ideas.

And the worst thing is Im not the web guy, I have to find this out and try and tell my web guy what to do

I know there is alot of competition for Mauritius. but when I look at some of the sites that even come up on page 100 of google, I just think, there is no way they should be ahead of ours.

also whats the best place to see where my back links are. every seo site, just gives me different results.

if any of you had to change or add something to islandinfo.mu what would it be?

with so many people here, im sure our site will benefit.

Thanks

You can check all links to your site using 'links: YourURL' in google search.

Just with a quick glance at your site first thing that pops out is WAY to many 'alt' attributes. Many of them contain no text at all. Also your main keyword does not appear in at least one of the first three alt attributes and when it does appear it does so too often. Consider getting rid of some of them and only placing your main keyword in for first couple. An old basic but something I always keep in mind.

No don't use google's link:yoururl.com command - it only shows random amounts of your links and only updates a few times a year.

Only rely on Google if you have your website verified in Google Webmaster Tools.

Use Yahoo's Site Explorer --> Just type linkdomain:yoururl.com in yahoo's search box or go directly to the explorer and just type in your URL at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

check for keyword density for the word Mauritius
it must be 3-4%

Really.... What exactly will happen if its 5% or more.

Woth less advice from where you people getting stuff like that??

And i thought it has to be precisely between 6.789 % - 8.632 % to rank #1 for a highly competitive keyword. How stupid of me!!

Those are numbers i 'd throw around and play with when i was a spammer. That's nuts! Playing with percentages regarding KWD is just plain 2004.

Make your site for the user, not to manipulate Google,; and i can tell you no properly written quality content would contain your KW 1 out of every 25 words!

"Make your site for the user" is the best advice I could also give you. I've achieved top placement (don't even ask me how as I'm not sure how I did it). I try not to worry about placement and concentrate on changing the content on my pages just about every other day. I think maybe this has helped me.

Also, I would not worry about PR rank. The rank on two of my sites are very low (1-2), and I don't even have backlinks on one of them, yet the sites rank high for my desired keywords.

Have you tried changing your Title and description keywords and monitoring the results on a week-to-week basis?