Real Talk: Have you broken down the link profiles of everyone ranking higher than you and figured out how to match and exceed them? Assuming your domain isn't penalized and you have on-site optimization done properly, the next step is breaking down everyone outranking you and beating them.
This post covers it nicely: How To Steal Your Competitors Rankings
Visited OPs site, had to destroy harddrive.
From the looks of things, you need to:
1) Up the exact anchor text for that main keyword if you want to try and rank for it, it's only at 7% currently. Shoot for 20-30% in general, but specifically try and match the competition.
2) Really push on-site interlinking. You show about 300 pages in the index, you should be heavily interlinking all of your pages to spread your link juice around.
3) I'm going to assume you don't have the cleanest link profile based on this nofollow/dofollow ratio: [was an image from ahrefs, but basically the root domain has 27,000 dofollow links and like 3 nofollow links] ...You probably want to focus on mixing in some better links, such as link network stuff, manual comments, or follow this strategy: The Link Building Empire (these aren't necessarily better links, but by using tiering, you'll at least eventually end up with some stronger links hitting your site)
Also, I would imagine those 25k dofollow blogroll links from blahblahblah.net aren't helping much considering how many other links are on those pages as well...
Shoot for 20-30% in general
Real Talk: Have you broken down the link profiles of everyone ranking higher than you and figured out how to match and exceed them? Assuming your domain isn't penalized and you have on-site optimization done properly, the next step is breaking down everyone outranking you and beating them.
This post covers it nicely: How To Steal Your Competitors Rankings
the problem with analyzing the top 10 in your SERP is.. you get a mix of authority sites that can take a beating that your site will likely never be able to achieve.
the failed logic with "look at the top 10" method is, say your trying to rank for Raspberry Ketones. you use a tool to look at the top 10 and you end up getting Amazon.com, WebMd, Wikipedia, and say 1 Newspaper site and a mix of other non authority sites. You also get the churn and burn site ( oh hi guys ) and spammers that are ranking for maybe that week as well and THEN maybe a couple legit sites that are on your level.
when you look at the results including those authorities, your average will include those sites, who can take a hell of a lot more punishment ( anchor text %, # of spammy links, rate of links built, etc ) then a site like yours ( even if not new, but not an authority yet ). You also get the spammy site averages too, which will only rank for a few days mixed into your data which gives a false impression of what is really working and just shows you a loophole.
at best, you end up with dirty ass data that is not good for anything.
this is why tools and methods put into the hands of noobs are still just worthless data points. you need to actually know how to use the tools/methods before you start and whats going on in the background.
also, what if you look at this data the day before an algo change you never know that happens, like hummingbird? yeah... too many points to consider. just do good seo, dont try averages.
Here's the answer I gave OP for anyone interested:
By definition, the sites ranking highest for a keyword are doing good SEO
By definition, the sites ranking highest for a keyword are doing good SEO
Sorry, but I dont alwaya want their metrics in my data. Just the same as I dont want a page from Amazon that is just ranking in the SERP based on the domain authority alone.
2) Really push on-site interlinking. You show about 300 pages in the index, you should be heavily interlinking all of your pages to spread your link juice around.
Death sentence since the first penguin rollout and more so every incarnation it seems. I try to keep the TOTAL % of anchored links at under 30% and I often think that's too high.
Real Talk: Have you broken down the link profiles of everyone ranking higher than you and figured out how to match and exceed them?
just do good seo, dont try averages.
How do you explain overnight bought PR6 domains from auctions ranking with a couple million spam links ranking highest then? I don't think that is good SEO.
Sorry, but I dont alwaya want their metrics in my data. Just the same as I dont want a page from Amazon that is just ranking in the SERP based on the domain authority alone.
Also, manually filtered SERPs. Your method and data doesn't work for any of those examples.
Are you talking main navigation, in-content, sidebar, header/footer or combination of all?
Based on my testing in-content links have the most effect, however I'm not sure if your recommendation is based on an existing poor navigation setup, or bad/lack of in-content linking.
Also what are your thoughts on keyword-rich internal links? I've noticed that you can and will be penalized if you get too crazy with them, even on legitimate websites. I try to link single words close to the exact match anchors I want to rank for, which definitely moves the needle.
Overall I've been focusing a lot less on exact phrases in both offsite and onsite links and more on context & depth, which has been working pretty well for me on the longtail side.
Head terms without spam is a tough nut to crack for me with all the recent changes and paranoia of penguin/panda.
As much as you and I hate this, we are not in a position to decide what good SEO is...the search engine's rankings are the only source of what is currently "good SEO". Like I said before, by definition, the sites ranking highest for a keyword are doing good SEO.
There are different types of "good SEO" and the definition depends on what you're going for. Per your example, that's good SEO in the rank and bank world. White hat projects that last a long time in the ranking is good SEO in the "what Matt Cutts wants you to be doing" sense.
There is no universal "good SEO" set of techniques, it's entirely niche dependent. What works for ranking for Payday Loans isn't what is needed to rank for medium competition product SERPs and what works for those isn't whats needed for extremely low competition SERPs where none of the ranking pages even have a single backlink.
There is no such thing as universally "good SEO" beyond the most basic set of best practices that won't guarantee rankings anyways. The bottom line is that good SEO is what your competitors are doing that are outranking you in your niche and SERPs.
Death sentence since the first penguin rollout and more so every incarnation it seems. I try to keep the TOTAL % of anchored links at under 30% and I often think that's too high.
Unless you're into churning and burning, then by all means, bump that up to 80% single anchor text and enjoy that brief stay at the top.
Anyone who doesn't want to make it through the next offline penguin filter, take this advice.