I am a Auditor newbie and as such am confused by the results.

1. I am using Serif WebPlus X4 to prepare the website and where it uses "strong" for the text it uses additional info such as "strong-C2" and no "/strong". I presume this is why I get a "nil" for bold text. Do search engines still see bold this method? Is there anyway around this or do I have to use a HTML editor?

2. I am using a keyword which has a good KEI but the first 10 competition sites are not using it. Because of this I am told to reduce its %age to zero (ie don't use it) and I currently have a "red" result. Surely this can't be right.

3. I am being told that the "body text" of competitors is 1500 to 2000+ words against certain keywords but looking at their sites I can't see how this is true. How is this calculated?

Well, the best way to go would be for you to send us your project via Help -> Send project to support. We will take a look at all the specific cases and give you suggestions.

As for the bold tags - the SEs consider these ones:


The rest of the tags, the ones that are created using your CMS stylesheets will be read by Google (not other SEs) with 50% probability, although they claim to be browsing style sheets, it would be best to use the commonly accepted tags.

I think it depends on the "Doc Type" as to which one is considered standards compliant, but it seems <strong> is good to go regardless of Doc Type.'

It is good to know that the other SE's don't consider/apply the style sheets and Google is only about 50%. I wasn't aware of that.

Good info.

Great response from SEO to my problems. The update is

1.The way Serif webplus works does not show "bold" or "strong" body text in WA. I don't know if google etc see them or not, but just in case I used a HTML editor to put in bold text.

2.There is a problem of using keywords which the competitors are not using so I am getting reds. It seems to me that I should still use the keyword and optimise my site to that despite being graded down because of it as that is the keyword I want to use.

3.In my ten competitors I have ehow and wikipedia. Due to their PR, backlinks and age I can't yet compete with them but they affect my recommendations, such as number of words in the text body. Against one keyword there is an average of 2200 words. And for all the keywords it is between 1600 and the 2200 words, which is too much for a retail site. Therefore it would be an advantage to remove sites such as wikipedia from the calculations to check the real competitors.

Andy

Hello Andy,

Me again. #3 above makes sense to me if your other competitors are ranking on the first page for your keywords.

I doing an Insurance Broker client and local searches are dominated for the first 3 to 4 organic positions, but then his local competition ranks in organic listings in positions 4, 5 & 6 then a couple of national Insurance Online Quote sites that have thousands of high PR back links.

So I have only done competitive research on his local competitors and it is starting to pay off. I have his landing page for the keyword search showing in 4th position on page one of Google.

If I tried to do what it will take to compete with the big boys, (Nation Wide, Progressive, SafeCo etc. or the national mega quote sites) it would take for more time and money than I am budgeted for this project.

So IF what you are talking about is local organic listings, it has been my limited experience not to try to compete with the old big boys. At least not if there is some local competitors on the first page of the SERPs.

Hi Mike

I am in a niche where there is lots of competition but it is all low PR 0 to 2 and very poor backlinks. So I am very hopeful of a good page position. So if I take out wikipedia and ehow that leaves the competition I am really against. I have tried to optimise my keywords to produce a page percentage that is greater than any competitors page including the two sites. On some keywords I have over 80% against a maximum competiton of 30%, despite the fact I am being downgraded because I am optimising for keywords that the competion are not using. I am now registering with the high (4 PR upwards) indexes. Creating sites on social media with page backlinks,and going to relevant wordpress type blogs, that allow www.sites to be added, to comment or answer a question with my site pages added.

Unfortuantly my domain name is new so I have to hope that doing the above is enough to get into the top half of the first page! Then I will get volume and this should again move me up.

If all this doesn't get some results in the next couple of months, I don't understand how anyone can get a new business to get results on the web.

Cheers

Andy

You've got the right idea in my opinion Andy on removing Wiki and Ehow.

OldSchool