Help ranking for a keyword

[bilsonx]

So I found a keyword that is labeled as "Low Competive" on Google Adwords. About a week and a half ago I optimized the page using the SEOMOZ On-Page optimization tool. It says that I am 100% with everything. My website is new but it has been around for about a year. I haven't gotten into linking and the more in depth SEO. After doing some searches though I noticed a lot of other new website that are atleast ranking in the top 50 for certain keywords, so I figured I could get my page to rank atleast in the top 1000 for this "Low Competitive" keyword. Could someone take a look and see if maybe I over optimized it or did something that would make this keyword not rank even in the top 1000 on google? Any advise is appreciated. I am obviously very new to SEO, but I am someone that likes to do and learn everything for myself. Thanks in advance!

The keyword is: Nitro Monster Truck

The web page is: http://www.rcnitroshop.com/nitro-monster-truck

[RyanKent]

Right there is the challenge Bill.

Some site owners are passionate about their products and services. I have one client in England who sells packing boxes. You are probably asking...how can a person be passionate about packing boxes?! Well, this client has run a family business for 30 years. He will go into detail on the differences between a "cardboard box" and a "packing box". When he speaks, you can hear the enthusiasm in his voice. He expects his family will be in the same business 30 years from now.

Meanwhile, there are dozens of other similar sites which sell packing boxes, but from examining the competitors I get the impression these companies just throw up sites selling various products and really don't have any commitment to the business. They may sell packing boxes on one site, watches on another, and radio controlled cars on a third site. They don't care and are just in it for the money...and it shows clearly! That's the difference.

If you are focused on one site, you commit to that site's success. Your articles are much higher quality, the site's look and feel is better, the customer service is better and so forth. Many of the Google changes over the past two years are helping to separate the authentic businesses from the people who run a dozen websites. It is getting easier and easier to help legitimate businesses rise above their competitors.

If you are selling well on eBay, that's great. Selling on your own website puts you in direct competition with the other sites who are doing the same thing as you. It then becomes a pure competition. The more committed site owner wins (assuming they also work smart).

[bilsonx]

Hey thanks a lot, that was very informative and helpful. I don't know that I "Love" RC Vehicles but I do know that I love to make money and run a business, and RC Vehicles have a nice markup value for a good profit. That is actually how I am doing business right now is drop shipping through eBay. My plan is to succeed selling RC Hobby products so that I will have the experience to be able to expand and sell other products as well. I think of drop shipping as advertising for a company and I think that once I am more successful with this product I will have the knowledge to move onto the next. Maybe 10-20 years from now I will own 8-10 different websites selling different companies products. Maybe even have some employees by then. I don't know exactly where I am headed but I do know that I do have a huge passion for all of this because I sit here 8-10 hours a day doing research and trying to better my current business. So what would you say a good budget amount would be to start out having my first website built? Also, something else that was confusing me, will the website builder I choose do the SEO as well, or should they be separate people? Thanks so much again, your information has really helped me.

[RyanKent]

No, I would recommend a developer for either choice.

If you are here at SEOmoz, I have to assume SEO is important to you. There are some people who put up a shop and live with obtaining 3 - 4 sales per month. If that is you, then a GoDaddy store or your current cart is fine.

If you desire a store which ranks on the first page of Google results and can handle volume, you need to go with a professionally developed solution.

I spent 7 years working for Verizon Wireless as a database administrator working with and leading a team of programmers. I have taken courses related to web design and have built numerous sites. I also have an analyst working for me who is close to finishing her certificate in web development. Even under those circumstances I would not build my own website.

Why? I am not a professional web developer. I do not have the formal training, the passion, the experience nor the tools to build a high quality website. If I had to do it, I am sure I would get it done but the amount of time it would take would be several times what a good programmer would take. Additionally, during that time I would not be earning revenue from my core job functions. Lastly, there is the opportunity cost which would be lost. It would take me a lot more time then a professional and all the time my site was not up I would be missing out on sales.

The question to ask yourself is...how serious are you? Is this website business something you are passionate about? If you love RC vehicles and feel you have found a new career, then I advise you to invest in that career. That effort begins with a professionally designed site. You will need thousands of additional dollars to set everything up correctly: Verisign for SSL, TRUSTe for your privacy policy, join the BBB, a locally hosted shopping cart, bank set up fees for accepting MC/Visa/Discover/AMEX, etc etc.

What drives SEO is passion. There are people in each state who want to have a site like yours. They set up the site, use a data feed from a vendor so they do not have to carry inventory, drop ship products, etc. etc. That is not the quality way to run the business. At most, it is the shoestring way to get started. At some point you need to make the transition if you wish to run with the big sellers.

[bilsonx]

So just to verify, your recommending Joomla + Virtuemart if I want to do it myself and Wordpress if I want to pay someone else to do it?

[RyanKent]

If you want to offer a competitive store, you need to host it yourself. Hosted solutions have too many limitations in my experience. There are changes you will want to make and then be informed you cannot make them.

I am not personally familiar with 3DCart but it is likely you can resolve the issues but it will cost time and money.

What many people do not realize is the various "free" and low cost solutions are simply hooks to pull you in. Once you set up your site you will then want better performance and realize you need to step up and incur some costs.

If you desire a professionally developed store which incorporates current HTML best practices (valid code, mobile site, security enhancements, etc) and best SEO practices (internal linking, site map, 404 page, etc) then a Joomla + Virtuemart solution or a WordPress solution is somewhere around $3k.

You can go with Magento Go or stay with 3DCart but you will struggle hard to compete with others who have professionally developed websites.

[bilsonx]

I guess I am kind of confused what you mean by "Low Quality" as well. Right now I am using Bing SEO Toolkit to correct the

[bilsonx]

Do you think it would be a better quality site if I switched it to Magento Go? It seems like a lot of what is making it "Low Quality" is out of my control with 3DCart. The only thing I can really change myself is writing better content.

[RyanKent]

Your content is very thin, your site is low quality, and to top everything else the content itself is duplicated multiple times. Your page would not necessarily be in the top 1000 under those conditions.

[bilsonx]

Thank you for all of that information. One thing that is bugging me though is that its not even showing up in the top 1000 for that keyword. Even with the problems I feel that it should atleast be in the top 1000? Am I correct?

[RyanKent]

Bill, I'll divide a response into two sections. First, allow me to respond to your direct SEO inquiries.

Regarding the redirects, when a page loads it provides header information to the browser. The header information includes codes such as 200 (all ok), 301 (page is permanently redirected), 404 (cannot find page) and numerous other codes. There are many methods to view this information. Since you are here at SEOmoz I would recommend installing the MOZbar on your Firefox browser. Analyze Page > Page Attributes then scroll to the bottom and you will see this information.

Regarding the content, you are absolutely correct. It is a common problem when a manufacturer provides a data feed then many vendors copy and paste the information from that feed. It is all duplicate content. In order to rank well you need to provide quality, unique content. Ideally you will spend some time with each product and share the details, some positives and negatives about the products. Any extra videos, images or other content you generate is great too as long as it is sincerely helpful to users.

Regarding cannibalization, that refers to when you have multiple pages on your website which are relevant to the same keyword. You have numerous pages which present "Nitro Monster Trucks" and even multiple pages with that exact same page title. Every page title on your site should be unique. It is perfectly fine to have one page titled "Nitro Monster Truck" and another page titled "Nitro Moster Truck Volcano S30". It is not ok to have two pages titled "Nitro Monster Truck" This subject gets complicated when you have similar content such as your products. You need to be careful with page titles, headers, ALT tags, etc. Internal linking should also be used to support the correct keywords on each page.

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Regarding performing SEO in general, it is wonderful you wish to learn. The best place to start is the Beginner's Guide to SEO. The Google Guide is also recommended reading.

SEO, Web Development and being a car mechanic have one thing in common. You can learn pieces of it in less then a day and see the positive results of your work. The challenge is it takes years to really learn and understand these fields. There is formal training, informal training, experience and tools involved.

Using web development as an example, there are shopping carts and CMS software such as WordPress which allow a user to install site software, replace logos, add images and content then have their site up and running in under a day. The challenge is a professionally developed site which utilizes all HTML and SEO best practices would likely take a solid month to develop and customize for you. The month timeline assumes an experienced programmer who has the training, knowledge, experience and tools to do the job. If you are earning 80k/year on ebay, your site has a chance to do serious business. I would definitely employ a professional developer. Each month your site is not up you are losing sales.

As a final note, there are many developers who claim to be professionals but do not build quality websites. There is a long list of items to look for in a quality website. Be careful in how you select a developer. Treat it like selecting any other professional. Don't simply go for a flashy ad or the best price.

[bilsonx]

In summary, if you wish to start ranking your website pages it will require a much more serious effort. From a SEO perspective, the site needs a tremendous amount of work, or to be redesigned. From a content perspective, you need to be willing to take the time and write unique, compelling content for each product in order to rank well. I define "ranking well" as landing on page 1 of Google results. If you are satisfied with ranking in the top 50, you can simply put effort into the existing site and it can happen.

I do realize it is going to take a lot more work and I am willing to put the work into it. I am just trying to get the right information on what I should be working on to make the site better. I am taking one step at a time and this is the first product I have attempted to change and optimize for SERP. I figure once I can get this page at least in the top 50 that I would better understand SEO and would be much more effective when trying to optimize the rest of my products. Do you think this is a good strategy?

presently your site does redirect the non-www version of URLs to their www equal, but it takes an extra hop. Check your redirects to make sure they can happen in one hop

I am not sure how to test this or how you knew about this, but I disabled the canonical URL through 3Dcart control panel. Does that make it any better? How can I test this myself? After disabling the canonical URL and I run the page optimization it gives me this error in the optional field:

Canonical URL Tag Usage

Moderate fix

<dl style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">

<dt>Number of Canonical tags</dt>

<dd>0</dd>

<dt>Explanation</dt>

<dd>Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today.</dd>

<dt>Recommendation</dt>

<dd>Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page.</dd>

</dl>

The "related items" and "accessories" content is available on many pages throughout the site.

Is this a bad thing or were you just pointing out that the content wouldn't be unique?

The "video" section has no content at all other then presenting a YouTube video.

So should I write a paragraph above it related to the video?

a major concern is cannibalization and duplicate content within your own site.

So this is basically referring to copying the manufacturer's website content? I am confused on what you mean by duplicate content throughout my website. Each product is different.

What's left is the Description section. This area is your best opportunity to show something unique, but that does not happen here. I took your first sentence and performed a Google search including quotes: "The Nitro Monster Truck RTR Volcano S30 replaces the Volcano SV. "

So would it be a good rule of thumb to not copy content from the manufacturers website since it will basically be the same content as everyone elses that are selling the same products? Does it hurt rankings if your content is not unique?

Thank you so much for taking the time to review my page and give me good advice. I really do appreciate it. I am looking for any help an advice I can get. This stuff is extremely hard to learn and very time consuming I have noticed. Right now I mainly sell on eBay which I do pretty well, but I would like to start moving my sales to my website. I have only received 2 sales in the last year on my website and about $80,000 in sales on eBay so I know it does need a lot of work.before I will start getting anything even a quarter of what I am making on eBay. I have actually even considered hiring someone to build my website, but I enjoy doing this and would actually like to learn this stuff anyhow.

[RyanKent]

Hi Bill, I took a look at your site and there are a few things I can share:

• the label of "Low Competition" from Google AdWords applies to PPC advertising, not organic ranking

• presently your site does redirect the non-www version of URLs to their www equal, but it takes an extra hop. Check your redirects to make sure they can happen in one hop

• a major concern is cannibalization and duplicate content within your own site.

A primary function of search engines is to index unique content. Can you point out the content on the URL you shared that is unique? The header, footer and sidebars are likely consistent throughout the website. Your page offers 7 sections: main, price, options, description, video, accessories, related items.

The "related items" and "accessories" content is available on many pages throughout the site.

The "video" section has no content at all other then presenting a YouTube video.

The main section is images of the item with no text. Images do count as content but Google cannot read images. I checked only one image but the name is "Diplay11.jpg" and there is no ALT text. One shortcoming of most onpage optimization tools is they cannot properly check images although it should have flagged the image for not offering ALT text.

The "price" and "options" sections each have extremely little text and what is there can be found on other pages throughout the site.

What's left is the Description section. This area is your best opportunity to show something unique, but that does not happen here. I took your first sentence and performed a Google search including quotes: "The Nitro Monster Truck RTR Volcano S30 replaces the Volcano SV. "

<cite>www.rcnitroshop.com/Nitro-Monster-Truck-RTR-Volcano-S30</cite>

http://www.rcnitroshop.com/Volcano-S30-110-Scale-Nitro-Monster-Truck_p_8.html

The last URL above also has a page title of "Nitro Monster Truck". A page title usually gives a pretty good idea of the keyword for which you are attempting to rank.

In summary, if you wish to start ranking your website pages it will require a much more serious effort. From a SEO perspective, the site needs a tremendous amount of work, or to be redesigned. From a content perspective, you need to be willing to take the time and write unique, compelling content for each product in order to rank well. I define "ranking well" as landing on page 1 of Google results. If you are satisfied with ranking in the top 50, you can simply put effort into the existing site and it can happen.