Hello All,

My site has been in Yahoo (Non-paid) and Google for about 2 years now. I have changed the title dozens of times to see how I can move up the "food chain" in the search engines. I currently have a Google PR of 3/10 (last time I checked) and am in the top ten ranking in Yahoo for the two search phrases "Build Muscle" and "How To Build Muscle".

However, I am do show up in Google for those same search ranking phrases (not even in the top 1000!!). Please look over my site as best as possible and please let me what you think I should do to optimize it for both Yahoo! AND Google.

Site URL: http://www.howtobuildmuscle.com.

I thank you in advance for all your help, thoughts, and suggestions!

Regards,

-- Antonio

Get a nice design going on. Right now its fine, but i mean, theres always room for a nice menu or something

Design is poor or say very bad/ use some body builders post,, in attractive manner./

use flash to build your page.

Thanks Monte/Vinoth for your advice!

Hi Antonio if you want to get good rankings in google you need to get alot of backlinks with your keywords as anchor text, go through your competitors links, see how many they have and get a comparable amount. go to seo-guy.com and read his free seo tutorial, you could get some tips there on how to improve your onpage seo.

I'm actually curious how you got a good Yahoo! ranking. I'm doing so-so okay with google but seem to be failing with all the rest.

Hello cscgal,

I think the main reason I am in the top 10 or so in Yahoo for those two set of keyworkds is because of the domain name itself. "HowToBuildMuscle.com". I might be wrong, but I think yahoo really rewards sites that have descriptive domain names. when you do a search in yahoo, they parse out the "how to" in "how to build muscle" so I come up pretty high in yahoo's ranking when someone searches for "how to build muscle" and "build muscle".

If I thoroughly confused you, I apologize.... :-| ....as you can tell, I'm still fairly new to SEO.

-- Antonio

It's true that to a very limited extent the domain name has to do with rankings in the SERPS. However, in your case, I think it has more to do with that your site title for your homepage contains the term: "how to build muscle"

Here's my thoughts.

Currently the thinking with Google ranking is that various on page factors and off page factors effect ranking. I've not even taken a look at your site so I won't comment on on page factors. I will, however, comment on off page factors.

The MCDAR keyword tool here: http://www.mcdar.net/KeywordTool/keywordtool.asp allows you to compare your site for a give key phrase with the top 10 in Google.

From this here's what I think:

You need more and better quality links to your site. You have only four Google links showing, and only 36 Yahoo links. Also your links need better anchor text, you want people linking to you with:
or
You can tell from the MCDAR report that you are not doing well for anchor text as your 'allinanchor' rating is only 50 and 45 for your two terms. The allinanchor rating is how your link anchor text compares with your competitors for the search term you are interested in.

Google supposedly regards site size and site freshness as important. You have only 8 pages indexed. Get more. Also if you have only 8 indexed I suspect they don't change often. Add fresh content. Take a look at the number of pages your competitors have indexed on the McDars report.....

For on page factors take a look at http://www.seo-guy.com , he has a good basic SEO tutorial there that you should work through.

Hello Mark,

Thanks for the great advice. I will definitely incorporate what you wrote about and run with it.

Oh, and the MCDAR keyword tool is great!

Thanks again!

-- Antonio12