Google's being a ratbag!

[2under2blog]

Hi there everyone,

After the initial sage advice I received here, my blog has been going from strength to strength and now I get at least 100 hits a day, which I am utterly thrilled with.

However, having delved deeply into my stats, I see that most of this traffic is coming from social networking. Nobody is finding me through Google despite my best efforts in SEO. Which frustrates the hell out of me as I've never failed at SEO before

I heard somewhere that Google isn't a fan of Wordpress sites - is that right?

I would be so grateful of any advice for getting my site to find favour with Google. I mention my key phrases (2 under 2, two under two, baby and toddler) as much as I can in H1 tags and descriptions but still a search for these terms never brings my site up.

The results that do come up are great but they're out of date and contain nowhere near as much info as my site (and others that I also think are great).

Help!

www.2under2.co.uk

Definitely not putting anyone to shame lol - your blogs are all fantastic & I'm seriously impressed how much you all know about SEO seeing as its presumably self taught? I did a degree in digital marketing, only to essentially realise that it's 85% luck of the game - all you can do is keep trying & testing (Analytics Experiments is fantastic for that btw - you can set up 2 variations of the same page & split test them to check which keywords or design works better for conversions) ...& accept that every time you 'crack it', google moved the goalposts with a new algorithm update

Ok, just taken a proper look at your site...

• keywords metatag definitely stuffed ;) I know in Wordpress they do offer this field option, & earlier SEO guides may suggest using it but Google are soooo bolshy about keyword stuffing penalties these days that many prof SEOs advise not to use the meta keywords field at all. If your page is optimised correctly, it should be simple to pick out the keyword anyway

• as suspected, your titles & descriptions are often very long. I just googled a few of them and found a lot of truncated ('cut off') titles I.e in the 'If it weren't for my husband' one, you've lost the keywords 'baby and toddler' due to the title being cut and the description is identical to the title tag so Google has decided its not really adding any value & replaced it with the first 2 lines of copy on the page. These cut off at 'I'm at the end of five days....' so don't really inspire people to click through. It's better to write a unique description for each blog with a few keyword variations (not too many!) which describes what the reader will find on the page. Descriptions, however, only help your click through rate (how many people decide they actually want to visit the page) not your ranking. For ranking, it's page title which is golden. Looking at your page titles, they are all just the name of each blog plus your site title & slogan. Titles are your main, main place to put the keyword of each page. With a title like 'These are a few of my favourite things | two under two - coping with a baby and a toddler' (as an example but same applies to most pages), my first thought = what's the keyword for the PAGE, not the overall blog? 'two under two' or 'baby and toddler' as phrases do not appear anywhere in this blog - so those title keywords don't match up with the page content - & 'my favourite things' is such a broad phrase (plus is going to be competing with lots of Sound Of Music sites!) I'd need to specifically google 'my favourite things two under two' to get this: & anybody doing that already knows what they're looking for so you don't need organic SEO to catch them .
  Also don't be afraid of abbreviating or creating shorter, snappier titles. If the main title on page is 'a few of my favourite things' the page title could be My Favourite Things - Two Under Two Blog. But I'd really try to aim for more specific / relevant keywords than that in your titles. If your SEO set up on Wordpress is automatically taking the blog title as the page title, look into plug ins which let you manually alter this.

I always recommend envisioning every single blog or page on a website as an entirely new mini SEO project. Song just name it after the site itself or give your blog titles which do not have keywords in that you hope to rank for. If a keyword does not appear on your page & isn't something you're trying to rank for, I'd avoid using it in your title tags (at least 80% of the time).

• when picking and using your keywords, always use the Google Adwords Keyword tool to check out: competition & search volume. The poster who mentioned that you are trying to rank for highly competetive phrases is spot on. You can use the Keyword Tool to look for less competetive variations of the same phrase. Alternatively, if a term has less than 500 (ideally less than 1000) recorded for search volume, I personally would find a different option...unless you're going for very niche & specific keywords. Always set your search to 'exact match' - broad match etc show all combinations for a keyword scattered about. For example, a broad match on a keyword like 'sneakers' might return results for football sneakers, golf sneakers, sneaker pimps etc etc - not very helpful if your site is specific to only one type. Similarly, I notice that in quite a few places, because your target phrase is 'two plus two', you've scattered the keywords about - so there may be a few mentions of the term 'two' on a page but not the specific whole phrase. Whilst it is good to break things up a bit to avoid the keyword stuffing issue, you do need 2-3 mentions per page of the EXACT key phrase you want. One of these should appear in the H1 heading with, perhaps an alternative version or a phrase which describes the content of the page as your H2.

*finally, as guessed - lotta lotta keyword cannibalisation happening on this site! Pick out unique keywords or variations for every single blog. Don't let SEO rule your content, but do keep it the front of your mind and write blogs around keywords if you want them to really rank well.

Ok, must stop now & finish the article I'm writing!! always happy to help if you do have any q's...SEO for Dummies is a brill starting point. & your content is very readable by the way, I really enjoyed it :)

BoymeetsWorld - wow, i'm in awe

holy carps! Thank you so much boymeetsworld, I can't believe how much effort you've gone to for me! I am away from tonight for the whole weekend but I plan on sitting down and applying all of your advice next week. I'll be fascinated to see the results.

Thank you again, so kind of you to spend so much time on this. And it's great for me, I need to really brush up on my SEO for my business so this is priceless.

And thank you for the compliment, I love to hear that it's very readable :)