: SEO - Website comparison - Why is this site so good? I always get asked questions by friends why my site doesn't search very well in Google, even though mine is better quality. How can I

@Murphy175

At least one site was showing 50+ W3 errors...as John said this isn't the only measure of success, but I personally believe that meeting standards are vitally important as a professional web developer.

A quick scan of another site showed it had 583 records in Google...that's a LOT considering that many other sites might only have 15-20. As for improving quality, that requires full SEO analysis as John said, something you either educate yourself about or pay to have done.

Google Webmaster tools and Analytics are a good place to start. Make sure the site is "visible" with webmaster tools and showing no errors. Analytics will tell you where people are coming from, where they're going, and how they travel through. Follow the patterns long enough and you'll figure out which pages need to be improved.

I can't say enough about cross-promoting your sites via other media than just Google. Bing just took over for Yahoo's search...have you used their analyzer tool yet? How about social media? To do a good job, you have to be persistent and consistent, posting inbound links (in a non-spam or annoying manner) regularly. My most successful customers actually get more inbound links from other sites and social media than from Google, by a large margin....but they also never stop trying to improve either avenue.

As I tell every potential client, there's no silver bullet. It takes patience, work, and detail to be on top of the rankings.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Kristi941

I'm not going to do an SEO review of any websites as I prefer to get paid for that kind of work. And I think SEO reviews are a waste of time anyway. SEO is nothing more then a properly built website. If a website isn't search engine optimized, then it wasn't built properly in the first place and the owner has other issues to worry about other then search engine rankings.

If you want to improve the search rankings of any site you need to make sure the website is:


Accessible (search engine are the ultimate accessibility deficient user)
Usable (the easier it is to use your site for humans the easier it is for search engines, too)
Valid semantic markup (HTML that properly marks up content tells the search engines a lot about a page's content)
Good internal linking structure (this actually falls under usability but since it is so important I listed it separately. Make sure you interlink between your pages liberally but appropriately)
Quality content (if the content stinks no one is going to want to link to it)


These points apply to every website and should be done regardless of SEO.

If you don't know what some of those points mean then this is a good time to learn about them so you can build a better website. Better websites get better results. Both in SEO and generating revenue (however your site does that).

(I wrote this basic checklist for SitePoint years ago. It still applies today as it is just fundamentals and they never really change).

Vote Up Vote Down