A little confused about SERPs

excessive34

New Member
Hello all =)

A bit new to the scene.

Here's my question, I've created a website (Gaming Forums) and am working on back-linking,etc.

Currently, 84th in the google ranks for the keyword "Gaming Forums"

Upon looking at the source codes for some of the higher ranked websites, most of them dont even have that specific keyword in the meta tag not to mention have keywords at all.

I'm just a little confused as to how their ranking so high without keywords or relevant keywords.

In any case... http://www.gdgforums.com if anyone needs to look at it.
 

ian

Administrator
Staff member
having the words gaming forums in the url helps
but mostly it takes inbound links with that anchor text, and of course time.
If you build a good forum, and it becomes popular, even with no SEO effort, it can become popular on its own.
What does gdg stand for?
 

ishie

New Member
SERP isn't only based on keyword tags. There are various factors as well, such as domain age, site authority, content, quality of backlinks, among others. "Gaming forums" is a competitive keyword, so you need to exert effort to generate tons of quality backlinks to improve your SERP.
 

no1chance23

New Member
The keywords contained within the content are more important. The META tags are just supposed to direct Google to find what these keywords are easier!
 

nedo

New Member
Yes because meta tags dont counter any more
They do count and they are still important.

What is going on here is that your forum is still new, and you need to work hard to reach first page, it will take you roughly 6 months before Google starts to look at your forum like more serious one.
Than you will start slowly advancing towards top.

Those forums might have good backlinks, and they might be several years old, which in a way gives them advantage, but it doesnt mean that they wil lstay on top forever.
 

craig@kudo

New Member
It is about the long haul

As said in the last reply, it is about the long game. On page SEO can get you so far, then the real hard work begins as you try to build high quality links back to your site. By high quality I mean links with the right anchor text coming from high PageRank pages.

Are there any other factors that contribute to the link quality?

Web Design Cornwall
 

no1chance23

New Member
As said in the last reply, it is about the long game. On page SEO can get you so far, then the real hard work begins as you try to build high quality links back to your site. By high quality I mean links with the right anchor text coming from high PageRank pages.

Are there any other factors that contribute to the link quality?

Web Design Cornwall

Yes!

The fewer outgoing links the better, which is why blogs with hundreds of outgoing links are not so great.

Also links at the start of a web page will carry more weight than those at the end!

Also if the site is ranked highly by Google it must be valued by the search engine and therefore contain quality content and link juice. Therefore the better the site, the better the link!
 

Webby49

New Member
Agree with lots of the above. One more piece of advice. 'Gaming forum' is a very competitive keyword, use Google's Keyword Analysis Tool to see what other keywords are being search that are similar to this, target some longtail terms as well that incoporate 3+ words as they will be much less competitve and you have a much better chance of ranking highly for these. Realistically, outside of being on the first page of Google you won't be getting much traffic for a keyword however many people are searching for it.
 

che09

New Member
A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.
 

jumpingspider

New Member
The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the Keywords have matched content within the page.
 

cizzlingeast

New Member
also i am going to agree with all the others,according to me ,what is more important to get ranked high is to have good backlinks and old domain age with the king factor quality content that should be posted regularly for a long time.
 

eonic

New Member
Looks like a good forum design though, 84 isnt bad at this stage IMAO considering how many gamin forums there could be....
 
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