There is nothing wrong really. You site just isn't well optimised for the keywords "vibram five fingers". I would start by looking at your on-page SEO factors. If you do the search "birthday shoes" where do you come in the results? Position 1 - so right off the bat that tells you what your site is better optimised for other than "vibram five fingers". Once you have your site better optimised for "vibram five fingers" you then need to get going on the off-page factors and link building is the first thing you should be doing. As an example, the site in position one is http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/ and they have 14,500 back links to their domain with a good percentage linking back to them as "vibram five fingers". You have far less back links to your domain (2,790) and the majority of them are linking back as "birthday shoes" or "vibram five finger fan site" for which you come at position 1 again.

That should give you enough to go on for a while :)

L

lturner wrote:

There is nothing wrong really. You site just isn't well optimised for the keywords "vibram five fingers". I would start by looking at your on-page SEO factors. If you do the search "birthday shoes" where do you come in the results? Position 1 - so right off the bat that tells you what your site is better optimised for other than "vibram five fingers". Once you have your site better optimised for "vibram five fingers" you then need to get going on the off-page factors and link building is the first thing you should be doing. As an example, the site in position one is http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/ and they have 14,500 back links to their domain with a good percentage linking back to them as "vibram five fingers". You have far less back links to your domain (2,790) and the majority of them are linking back as "birthday shoes" or "vibram five finger fan site" for which you come at position 1 again.

That should give you enough to go on for a while :)

L

Thanks -- definitely am starting to be a lot more proactive with the use of "vibram five fingers" in my permalinks and titles.

No way I catch up to the official site, but if I can swing doubling my backlinks, that'd be a start.

So one friend took a look at my site and his instant thought was "you have as your h1 tag 'birthday shoes'" ... light bulb.

So what I did was re-style the header of the site so that the "birthday shoes" was just a div and the subtitle, which is more descriptively accurate, is the h1 tag. It'll be interesting to see if that has any significant impact on my SEO. Something to think about for anyone using the evocamp template, too (that's what is the base skin I customized for birthdayshoes.com)

NealO wrote:

So one friend took a look at my site and his instant thought was "you have as your h1 tag 'birthday shoes'" ... light bulb.

So what I did was re-style the header of the site so that the "birthday shoes" was just a div and the subtitle, which is more descriptively accurate, is the h1 tag. It'll be interesting to see if that has any significant impact on my SEO. Something to think about for anyone using the evocamp template, too (that's what is the base skin I customized for birthdayshoes.com)

BTW another thing that may have been causing SEO issues is that the layout of evocamp puts the micontent (middle) column above the blog post content. That, in conjunction with the nav bar links, ends up leaving the content of the blog fairly far down in the raw HTML, which may (or may not) affect crawling accessibility. I know that for my site, my midcontent column was actually taking awhile to load, which meant that the important stuff took even longer to load.

Incidentally, having looked at that and then decided that I didn't really want 3 columns on individual posts, I killed midcontent on single posts. So here's the main blog:

http://birthdayshoes.com

And here is a single post:

http://birthdayshoes.com/kick-back-and-relax-hammock-time-in-kso-vibram-five-fingers

Additionally, I killed the navigation section (just turned off all widgets) and stuck my navigation at the top of the far right sidebar, so that again, this HTML loads after the individual posts.

Any feedback you guys have is much appreciated!

NealO wrote:

lturner wrote:

There is nothing wrong really. You site just isn't well optimised for the keywords "vibram five fingers". I would start by looking at your on-page SEO factors. If you do the search "birthday shoes" where do you come in the results? Position 1 - so right off the bat that tells you what your site is better optimised for other than "vibram five fingers". Once you have your site better optimised for "vibram five fingers" you then need to get going on the off-page factors and link building is the first thing you should be doing. As an example, the site in position one is http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/ and they have 14,500 back links to their domain with a good percentage linking back to them as "vibram five fingers". You have far less back links to your domain (2,790) and the majority of them are linking back as "birthday shoes" or "vibram five finger fan site" for which you come at position 1 again.

That should give you enough to go on for a while :)

L

Thanks -- definitely am starting to be a lot more proactive with the use of "vibram five fingers" in my permalinks and titles.

No way I catch up to the official site, but if I can swing doubling my backlinks, that'd be a start.

I'm new here and have done plenty of seo work in the past. http://birthdayshoes.com/ has between a 98 - 100% rating for the keyword "vibram" and 97% for the fingers. All in all your site is very relevant and should rank higher, (http://www.vibramfivefingers.com) doesn't rank well for "vibram five fingers" even though they have it in their url. As a matter of fact, the google algorithm doesn't rank them at all. Other sites all link back to them using the "vibram five fingers" key phrase in the page title and anchor text which helps their ranking. Also your home page title does nothing to help your seo. You might believe so because its the first words in the title, but it isn't right (seo expert advice). Using the proper page titles will help you move up in the rankings. If you contact me for assistance, i'm very sure I can help you.