Optimising for Google - do you have to sell your soul??

Help me please….I have a website which I’ve put a lot of work into. Its non commercial and is about British cinema, films and actors…



www.britishcinemagreats.com



It has been developed over the last 4 months - 2 months I didn’t even know what SEO was – it sounded like some disease you might pick up in a hospital. Thanks to some great help here I have really progressed..



It has:

• About 150 pages of text
• 400 images
• alt tags, meta tags, dog tags
• a sitemap from the main index page
• it has been spidered by google
• I use traffic blazer to analyse it

Now thanks to the help of the experts here when you type in ‘British cinema’ it returns at 37!! (that’s good by the way) but other keyword searches like ‘British film’ ‘British actors’ don’t even return in the top 500.



But wait there’s more search for ‘Anthony Quayle’ and he’s at 53 but most other actors again are not in the top 500!!



I have the following back links, which I’ve checked and they are all there and have been for about 3months.



Sir Alec Guinness - A man of many parts PR5

Olivier PR5

Cinema Britain PR6

The Branagh Compendium PR5

Neroland PR5

The Peter Cushing Association PR5

The man with the hypnotic eye PR3

Planet Hopkins PR5

Ralph Fiennes Page PR5

Ralph Fiennes Interactive Web PR4

Anthony Hopkins Fantopia PR3

Lynns Classic Movies PR3

Sean Connery Online PR3

A tribute to Roddy McDowell PR4



Yet my page rank is only PR4 and on BackLink Checker http://www.thinkbling.com/prlinks/



It shows only 4 back links, low ones! Now my heavyweight intellectuals and techies could someone answer three questions for me.

1. Why the low Page Rank?
2. Why don’t all the back links show up?
3. Why is there such disparity in the search term results i.e. British cinema and British film?

Somebody out there help me….

Congrats on your site!

Low page rank as PR has not been updated by Google for months.

Google does not show all backlinks, just a random selection.

Google can take months to find, recognise and remember links to your site. I'm sure there are links to your site that you've not yet seen the benefit of

You are sooooo on the right track. Try not to think about where you are ranking day to day and concentrate instead on doing what you've been doing. Get more links to your site with your keyphrases. With a site like yours it would benefit you to get links to your internal pages too, as in a link to this page http://www.britishcinemagreats.com/...eric_coates.htm with 'Eric Coates' or 'Dambusters' as the text linking in.

Stick with it, you are doing the right things and it will pay off. It's just difficult being patient with Google, particularly for relatively new sites.

Jane

PR 4 is good for such a new site really. As Jane says, no PR update for two month. Even so, PR4 is not to be sneezed at.

Keep plugging away, you'll get there.

cheers for the encouragment guys. You're stars....I feel like I'm swimming against a tide. Any ideas why there is such disparity in my search result terms. Just doesn't make much sense.


Peter

Backlink anchor text mabey??

Cool..I'm not sure what that it!!

PJ