Links ranking higher than domain

Hi there, I am a newbie to seo and have been browsing this forum for a few weeks picking up tips on how to get my site up the google ranking.

Anyway I am now on page 11 for webdesign spain and page 15 for webdesign costa del sol, which after a couple of weeks and not that much optimisation, I am quite pleased about.

I was checking today and noticed that 2 links to sites that I have built are ranking above mine

my site is dakardesign.com and in my portfolio there are links to mumsinspain.com and collifordlakepark.com both of which I created.

I have put the keywords in the alt for the images of the sites I have built and they are ranking above my site.

What am I doing wrong. How do I get the links to pump up my ranking instead of the site that the links link to

Cheers in advance
Barry

Are you talking about the same keyword here?

I don't see how those otehr sites would rank for the same keyword? Am I missing something?

You will often find that if an authoritive site puts some content on you will find that it ranks higher than you site. In fact, you may find that this very thread ranks higher than your site simply because of the authority of this domain.

This could be the reason but Im not 100% sure what you are asking.

hi,

my site, dakardesign.com has a link to say collifordlakepark.com and the link is an image and the alt for the image is "webdesign spain".

when I google "webdesign spain", collifordlakepark ranks above my site by a few pages

Hmmm

I notice that Collifordlakepark has a lot more links to it than your site.

By linking to it with your keyword it allows the power of its own links to capitalise ont his relevance.

As you have less links to your site you do not have the link weight to support the relevance.

This is effectively what I was getting at with my above post. If you put the keyword in this thread a couple of times and in the title of your post it would probably rank higher than your site.

The issue is clouded a little bit when Geographical issues come into play but they are both .coms and Im assuming you are searching both from the same place so that elliminates that.

Get lots more link juice, then you will rank much better.

ok cool thanks

can i ask you if linktrader is any good, I have read that link farms are a no no, but linktrader just puts people together who want links

I have a load of people who want to trade links but dont want to ruin my ranking over it

Cheers again

There is still a lot of conjecture about link trading.

Personally I advise against it. I don't do link exchances unless they are highly relevant.

The key with linking is it must appear natural. If 95% of your link shave the same anchor text and are reciprocal link exchanges it doesn't look very natural - the search engines are wise to this.

Plus sites that do this are usually on the hairy edge of being bad link partners so linking to them could well get you in trouble.

ok thanks for all your help

need to find a way of getting links

This is the most common SEO problem!

Good content is a way to get links naturally.

Social bookmarking is quite good for some news wortyh articles.

There is a ton of other things you can do to - read up on link baits.