Am I doing something obviously wrong as per SEO?

The main page of my site (in sig) ranks as follows for a certain 3-work phrase that you should be able to deduce from my sig.

yahoo		#260	of 1,880,000 
msn search	#218	of 289,759
msn beta search	#1	of 2,182,057 
google		not in the first 1000  of 5,880,000 

Code (markup):

This is exactly the opposite of what I would like to see
Is there anything more as far as SEO goes that you can see that I should be doing on the site for G to start taking it into account? Is there anything I am doing wrong that you can see? I just want to get it right and then I will be more able to wait patiently

All the SEO I have done is:
meta tags (keywords & desc)
keywords in h1 tags on main page

And I have been trying to get links to the site. I haven't found it very easy

 

If you are 1 in MSN Beta there is hope for you in Google, since Beta is trying to reproduce the G algo.

Just get more backlinks, with your prefered anchor text.

How old is yor website??

 

Yes, I realize that IBLs are the way to go, it's just not as easy as it sounds
>How old is yor website??
ABout 4 months old.
Any other comments/help?

 

I have never seen google do that, strange, I know alexa will do this but google? I know sometimes google takes awhile.

 

You are in the 40s for allinanchor. My guess is that means you have to either improve your on-page SEO or there are some dampening effects on the quality of your links.

What percentage of your links are from the Coop?

 

Build lots of sites with lots of pages and run them on the coop.

Start a directory.
There are great "ODP import tools" that you can use too.

 

>Build lots of sites with lots of pages and run them on the coop.
I totally agree with this one- gotta keep working on it
>Start a directory.
Hmmm, maybe something very specific, a niche type of deal, I'm not too keen on adding *another* directory to the web...

Thanks for the ideas...

So, just to confirm. There is really nothing more I can do as far as on page SEO? One thing I have been mulling over is how to ad some h1 and h2 tags. Its not to easy to make them fit into the design... they take a lot of space. Do you know of any way to lose the extra line break that gets displayed after a heading?

 

if you are #40 allinanchor for the term in question, then links are what you need to work on (with that anchor text). If the site is only 4 months old, I am going to assume that google put you in the index at that point (for argument's sake). All of the links you have gathered over the past 4 months have probably not "matured" yet and you are probably not getting their full weight....just a guess here. But, as Crew and SEBasic said....build more links.

<edit>I just peeped your html. I would use H2 and H3 tags with 2 or 3 variants of the keyphrase in question and have supporting paragraphs beneath (Yahoo optimization)...

<h1>
<p>
<h2>
<p>
<h3>
<p>

etc...

Oh yeah, this takes time too

 

You might want to consider changing the anchor text that links back to your home page on all your subpages to your keyword (rather than your site name).

You could use bold or italics around your keywords in your content. (doesn't help much, but it does help).

Other than that I don't know. I know everyone says PageRank isn't as important anymore, but yours isn't even close to the PR6 of the top entries.

 

Thanks for the ideas guys. If there are any more ideas I'll take 'em too. Thanks just the same. Now I'm going to focus on the links.

 

msn is still changing a lot so ranking #1 now might not be like that next month

 

You can use css and define the text size of you header sections. They don't have to be big!

 

Yes, you should use css especialy if you are going to have many pages to your site.

 

Good idea, (which I have now implemented) look at the www.tomisimo.org main page. But with css is there any way to get rid of the extra space that is automatically put below headings?

 

h1 { margin-bottom: 5px; }

just an example. This is a great site for css reference

 

Great. I was trying to use line-height to reduce that. I'll see if the margin helps.

 

As far as I can see you haven't submited your site to many directories, yet?
You're already listed in DMOZ, congratulations for this.

You have a content oriented site. And it would be easy to get listed in many and quality directories. This would provide a lot of one way IBLs. PR and anchor text will benefit you google ranking.

To avoid sandboxing. I suggest you run this on regular basis, instead massive campaings. It's not for sure. But I gues it's better.

One more suggestion. Add a transcription to the words. Of course if it is posible.
I'm going to Spain for the holidays. And i don't know a word in Spanish. A word transcription will help me a lot. In fact many other users too.

Regards

 

Thanks for your comments air. I have been *slowly* applying for different directories (doing it by hand) I have quite a few more IBLs than what shows up in G. Hopefully soon more will show up.

About transcriptions of the words. This is actually something I'm working on right now and hopefully soon I will have transcriptions for both Spanish and English, based on the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) For now, if you just get the pronunciation of the vowels right, you will be understood:
pronounce
a as in ahhhhh or the ou in bought
e as in hay (the a) but it is not as long
i as in eeeeee or as in peek
o as in comb
u like the oo in school
If you get these vowel sounds right, you will still have a horrible pronunciation, but you should be understood. Have fun in Spain

 

Well applying by hand is the best tactics, I think. You can choose where to where not to.