Our site is driving me to an early grave

Ok, I have been working on this problem forever. I have read this forum for the past 2-3 months trying to learn new things, and trust me I have and I thank you all for that.

Now, I have a question for everyone. We are a web hosting company and as you probably know, "web hosting" is almost impossible to get a high ranking. I have helped other people with much less competitive keywords on other sites and had really good luck, I just can’t seem to get our own page ranked high and it’s driving me crazy. If you type 'web hosting' (no quotes) in google, number 3 is adgrafix.com or hosting.com....same company. There is very little text on the page, the title is poor, and it has no meta tags. They do have a PR7.
I know this is one example but others seem to pop up often the top 50 results.

I have redone our site about 10 times over the past 1 ½ years, changing the tags from a few words to too many words and everything between, redid the html so the body shows up before the side navigation. We have a PR6 which doesn’t seem too bad, and a good listing in dmoz. I have done everything I can think of without much luck. I would love some help with this problem. I know 'web hosting' is almost impossible to rank high on but it seems anything with the word web in it is just about as hard. We do OK on ‘asp hosting’ and ‘FrontPage hosting’, most likely because it is not that well searched.

I’m not asking how to be #1, right now I would settle for the top 100 I just really don’t understand why a lot of other sites rank so much higher with less content. Our site is http://www.cybersharks.net

It seems like there are some that don’t play very fair and still have high rankings. Examples:
- http://www.cihost.com for one, go to google and search for the domain. Click on the link and book mark the page. Click on your book mark and it is a different page with the same address.
- http://www.sonicpipe.com/ check all the irrelevant crap at the bottom.
I will stay away from any SPAM; it just makes me mad to see others getting away with it and us trying to play by the rules suffer.

I think I have done my homework but don’t know where I’m screwing up.

Once I learn how to do this I will be glad to jump in and help the next people that come along.

Thanks in advance for your advice an sorry about babbling too much

Archie

first off, the ones that you mentioned as your competition are long established LARGE corporate hosting companies with large marketing machines. CIhost has been around since dirt was invented.

Second, get links back to you, and that may help a little.

Why not target a locality, or state first in search engines... then go global. Hell, I am a web designer and I rank #29 for web site design. I get traffic from search engines, and I get business also. Want to talk about a competitive search term, and since EVERYONE can design a web site, I think that is damn good. I targeted my state first, and I was #1, now I am fluctuating #1-#4. But more importantly, I keep improving my overall global rank. I have been at this though since 1999, and I was accepted by Yahoo in early 2000.

One key? I have not changed too very much the actual textual content on my site in over 2 years now. And I still keep improving. Try not changing the text on your page.

Try using CSS-P to bring your content above the rest of the code on the page. Use external javascripts for all scripts on the pages, give each page a unique title, specific to the page you are on. Use external style sheet instead of the inline stuff. and get more actual CONTENT on the page, you need 250 words there, more content with your primary keywords repeated 3 times. You do not have sufficient content to kick a SE eyes open. and it is hidden in too many TDs and styles and other junk.

You should be able to read plainly the text when you look at the code on the page.

OK try a few of those and then let it rest for a few months.. good rankings take time.

zen

Do you get a lot of business out of the traffic you get from the search engines?

Do you get a lot of request for quotes?

My company primarily makes Web applications and we are moving away from Web design. So I will have to re-market my site.


Im just curious, if you want to give that information out.

Thanks.

yes I get 50% of my business from search engine requests. and they are not the mom and pop crap sites. Most I can't even put my link on since they have me under a NDA for total. and I had to sell the copyright to the designs to them as well... but I do make a decent living doing design and development.

zen

Here are a few things that might help:

1. your title is too long and it doesnt start with your main keyword -- Web Hosting . You should have this keyword appear once at the very beginning of the title and do not repeat it later in the title.

2. update your alt tags so that they have "web hosting" first.

3. Change the page heading to "Web Hosting From CyberSharks.Net"

4. you might want to rework the copy to include the keyword web hosting in more places.

5. get more link backs!

I think getting a top 10 listing for web hosting on google is doable. its going to take some time and effort though.

good luck!

Lowell

Lowell & Zen,

Thanks so much for the advice. Our programer said he could help with the ideas from Zen and I will make the changes from Lowell. This is a real learning curve for highly competative key words and will be fun doing it with everyones help. Thanks again. Hell I may be posting advice in the next month or 2

Archie

that would be great!

zen