Question for SEO experts

[Hacker]

I set up my blog a few weeks ago (a feat in itself ) and since then I have been doing a lot of reading and site tweaking to improve my SEO. I use a tool called Website Grader to try and measure how effective these tweaks have been. On my old Flash site the score would hover around 47 but it has gradually crept up to 93 since the blog went live which I was quite pleased about considering my numptiness in this area.

However, when I type in Hertfordshire wedding photography to Google I am nowhere to be found and my aim is to get onto the front page with this (and similar) search string. After typing in the above I took the top three results and ran them through the competitive intelligence element of Website Grader and was quite surprised to find they had quite differing scores and results yet still managed first page results.

is this because my blog is new or should I be doing something else? I have included a partial screenshot for reference:




Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[gingerweasel]

On rare occassions google place sites in the 'sandbox' which means they don't show in their search rankings. Often this is because a complete site springs up from no where.

The search engines love sites which grow over time and add fresh content on a regular basis. You'll see how often the spiders visit to crawl your site in your visitor stats in cpanel.

These days keywords play only a small role in a sites ranking. The key thing is to get inbound links to your site. The more inbound links you have the more google will consider your site a source of expert information.

However not all links are created equally. A simple link to your site is not the same as a link with your keywords in the link title.

 

[cymruchris]

Some of the sites at the top of the rankings have been there years - it takes quite a feat to knock them off... Yours being a new site (relatively) will take time to grow up the rankings, no matter what kind of score u get... Sometimes you have to be patient As long as you've done all you can, sometimes you just have to sit and wait...

 

[Hacker]

Thanks guys!