I have a discount shopping site and when i search google with the keyword discount codes, the site is not at number one.

I have tried changing keywords, increasing the number of keywords in the main body of the index and cannot get the page to number one.

Is there something fundamentally wrong with the page? I realise there is not much text on the page, but i wanted the page to look as it does and not pack text in it to scam the search engines.

Cheers

Andrew

That's a competitive phrase. You're going to have to work hard to rank number one for that and even then, if you are lucky enough for that to happen, it will takes years of constant work to achieve it.

Get more and more relevant back links for your keywords.

Research what other site rank best in that particular keywords, that will help you to work out on a strategy based on benchmarking.

For getting your site top for your keyword you will have to optimize your site properly. Concentrate on onpage optimization such as use them within your title, h1 etc... and also concentrate on offpage factors such as getting backlinks with your targetting keywords.
Hope this will help you.
Regarding ranking, you have to keep patience and would have to work hard for maintaining it.

The easiest thing as always is to research top five competitors and see what they have that you don't. Usually a lot more

I agree with that. But don't get the keywords that are too high in searches if your site is new.

Yeah, initially try to concentrate on less popular keywords and once you top them you can go ahead with more popular highly targetted words.

Backlinks are critical. And yes, having content means that people will link to you whether you ask them or not. Without a doubt, build some content. Start a blog. In fact, you can share stuff about Black Friday or talk about how saving money helps. This all relates to your niche so it will be linkable, which ultimately puts your site in a more authoritative position.

When it comes to Google, the two key things to bear in mind are that backlinks and regular content is king.

I never have put any thought at all into what keywords I rank for or potentially want to rank for. Instead, I work on building content that is focused on the user, not the search engine. If I'm lucky enough, users will link to it, which will improve my rankings in search engines for natural terms contained within the page.

I think that one of the mistakes a lot of people who go after specific keyword terms make is that they pick keywords that are sales pitch buzzwords, and aren't even actual query terms that users are very likely to type into the search engines. If you write your copy with natural language in mind, you'll appeal to users, they'll link to you, and your search engine rankings will improve for natural language phrases that users are likely to Google for in the first place.