I do some SEO work at my firm, and have done it for years. I try to do things by the book, high-road, high-ethics and never SPAM anything.

Let me, if I may, ask for some advice for the first time from you guys. The site in question is http://www.abingdonrugoutlet.com

The terms in this case are: braided rugs, braided area rugs

...compare to www.kathysbraidedrugs.com (not my site)

I'm trying to determine how it is that www.kathysbraidedrugs.com out ranks our site, with over 3000 rugs, all static, template optimized, and more.

What am I doing wrong here?

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Your thoughts are always helpful, and thanks for any replies.

Scott

backlinks my dear Watson, your site is showing just 1 backlink on Google.

there "may" be other factors, but a 10 second glance on both sites shows me the above

Shak

At first glance, it looks like you have only 1 backlink in Google, while your competitor has 31 backlinks.

You might want to work on finding websites to submit your website to or link to in order to increase the links pointing back to your website. A good place to start is by looking at the backlinks of your competitors, you may find some places you can also link to there.

also your main page has a 3 PR... thus inside pages are lower and all references from your own site are not included since they would all be below the PR4.
You need to get some links... try look at rug forums and rug directories and look for the ones that do not ask for a recip.

If you ranked well for years, it was probably due to lack of competition. The competitors are wising up- you need to get moving on those links!

Maybe too high of prominence, not enough weight to "Braided" ?

>>ask for some advice for the first time from you guys

Well you asked and I happen to be in the mood, so here goes.

>>high-road, high-ethics and never SPAM anything.

There would be no reason to spam or do anything unethical for this site.

>>The terms in this case are: braided rugs, braided area rugs

First take a look at the applicable search terms - way more than just those you mentioned. The first number, before the phrase, is the number of searches the Overture tool shows. The number after is the number of pages returned at Google for the searches.

46,513 - area rugs - 1,100,000
3,279 - disount area rugs - 550,000
1,653 - wool area rugs - 135,000
950 - round area rugs - 230,000

8,551 - braided rugs - 93,900
1,772 - contemporary braided rugs - 62,400
409 - braided area rugs - 72,700
607 - wool braided rugs - 59,800

You can see that you've got a whole lot more keyphrases to go after than just the two you mentioned - 8 right there, plus the brand names and many more possibilities. Besides the numbers, comparing number of Overture searches against Google's pages returned, you have to look at who it is that's being competed against. The *best* keyword phrase, and the one that's really most applicable and accurate because you've got more than just braided, is area rugs. There's some healthy competition there including PR6, so the route to go is to try for the easier, less competitive ones first while you're going through and making textual and navigation improvements on the site and building up some quality inbound links.

Ideally, your homepage should target area rugs, since it's the broadest and covers the entire site most accurately. But competition is too stiff for the site right now as it is, so discount area rugs could be the runner-up choice for now. You'll have to optimize an existing interior page or add a content page for braided rugs, so you could go for that in addition on the homepage, and tie it in with the interior page, trying to *force* an indented Google listing at the time the rankings would move up. There should be an interior page targeted for each of a few of the search terms above - again, tying them in with the homepage. It's pretty easy to see which ones they are.

Now your index page has braided area rugs in the title, and you can see that that's far from the most desirable. Planning out which interior pages need to be optimized or added for which keyphrases would come next, and the homepage needs to be restructured and redone, with some rewriting and optimization - adding appropriate keywords in the right places and tending to some of the HTML and anchor text elements that aren't there right now.

>>...compare to www.kathysbraidedrugs.com

Her homepage has keywords included in the text (actually more than I'd generally like for Google, but it's OK for Ink/Yahoo) and in addition, she's got *partial* keyword phrases in outbound anchor text on the page pointing to interior page on her site. Not only that, she's "handcrafted" so she's got a lot of linking opportunities because of that and also has braided rugs in her domain name so she's got inbound anchor text for it. Great for her, but you've got a broader product line and you'd be too limited if it was all that way for you. Even though it will take a while, you can go for the best phrase of all - if you don't try you'll never know if you might have achieved it.

All your interior pages need to be worked up and optimized, with TEXT added to the pages, planned and grouped toward targeting those keyphases above, and more, and the brand names. Before it turns into 9 pages worth here, let's wrap up and just take a look at only one interior page just to get an idea of one direction that could possibly be taken for starters. The Milliken page

http://www.abingdonrugoutlet.com/Milliken/Milliken.html

You're taking cash out of your pocket and throwing in the river by not utilizing the golden opportunity you could have for well-done anchor text with an improved internal navigation system. You need to plan out and implement not only a couple of topical site map type pages, but also a hierarchical navigation scheme, both for anchor text and improved distribution of Page Rank throughout the site. The PR is dissipating and losing too much for pages several clicks away from the homepage.

This page *absolutely* needs text navigation added on the bottom and some optimized descriptive text added to the page - without a shadow of a doubt. Not only for search engines - to sell your rugs. Then also , you've wasted the golden opportunity to make use of something as highly valuable as alt attributes for your images (also necessary for usability purposes) - particularly the ones that serve as links.

Those pages with just the smaller rug images are based on the same principle as thumbnail images on pages on a graphics site. They need to be utilized so that your pages can rank for the manufacturer names - like Karastan area rugs. You definitely want that one, and it's easily done, you've already got the thumbnail structure in place to do it. 'l'm tempted to show an example, but hesitant to post links. ;)

So you can do a lot for your anchor text right on the site, and getting good inbound links shouldn't be hard at all, while looking at these few search terms I came across a few good ones without even looking for any. There's also a decent PR in the ODP category and the site should qualify if it's submitted according to guidelines.

Disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is just with a quick superficial look, so take it FWIW and do some studying up on your own.

More keyword rich text backlinks are needed for one thing...

Your site just has products and links. Kathy's has lots of information text. Give google some content to read.

Some good quality directory listings would help a lot, and there should be a lot available in that industry, or closely related.

I agree strongly about the text. After your index page you are mostly links. Add descriptions to all of the links and your PR will go up. I’ve found Google rates link sites poorly and lately I’m finding a lot of webmasters in the same situation you are in asking basically the same question.

Okay, after quite a bit of work, I have taken your recommendations to heart.... with the following updates:

* Site Maps (dynamic and static) are on the site.
* Link text on all thumbnails
* Improved navigation
> Next - I have the client writing textual information for the brand/collection pages.

There is still work to do, but hopefully this will help us.

Thanks for all the advice.

Also don't forget the alt tags....

Yep, I did the alt tags.

Just a point of clarification on this:

Add descriptions to all of the links and your PR will go up.
PR is numerical and depends on the value of links to a page. It's a separate factor from the description. It's still valuable to do, because it's good to have relevant text in close proximity to the links both for search, to have text on the page, and for the benefit of users.

What is the command / tool to get the info below.?
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First take a look at the applicable search terms - way more than just those you mentioned. The first number, before the phrase, is the number of searches the Overture tool shows. The number after is the number of pages returned at Google for the searches.

46,513 - area rugs - 1,100,000
3,279 - disount area rugs - 550,000
1,653 - wool area rugs - 135,000
950 - round area rugs - 230,000

...Let me, if I may, ask for some advice for the first time from you guys. The site in question is http://www.abingdonrugoutlet.com

The terms in this case are: braided rugs, braided area rugs

...compare to www.kathysbraidedrugs.com (not my site)

I'm trying to determine how it is that www.kathysbraidedrugs.com out ranks our site, with over 3000 rugs, all static, template optimized, and more.

What am I doing wrong here?...

Scott - Something I didn't notice mentioned here is that kathysbraidedrugs.com has a natural advantage over you for "braided rugs" because of the company name.

People and directories linking to that site will generally put "Kathy's Braided Rugs" in the anchor text of the link, and that will drive up the apparent relevance of the site on all current search engines for searches including braided rugs.

On the other hand, the link text to your site is like to be "Abingdon Rug Outlet," which helps you on searches with the word rug, but that's about it for anything you want to target. You'll get some boost for rugs (plural) on Google, because of stemming, but not that much, really.

So, you're going to have to created articles about your target phrases, as suggested by Marcia and others and get deep links to them, use internal navigation and text links within your site, and you're going to have to work very hard to get inbound links to your pages that contain the anchor text you want.

I didn't see link building in the list of what you've been doing, but that's going to be a vital factor... much more important than alt tags.