Why my site is not ranking for particular keyword

Question

My site is only 3 days to be 6 months old.

This website is unique, that is there is no competitor to this type site in India, providing comparison of payment gateways in India, besides the payment gateways companies itself.

I've optimized it for key word : "payment gateway"

I've changed the url's twice, latest being 3 months back, in which case Google Webmaster gave plently of 404's. I corrected the useful 404's and left meaningless ones as it is.

What is the reason it's not ranking well for payment gateways? Even site with single page about "Payment gateways" seem to be ranking better than this.

Is it does to: 1) Lot of outbound links to in-context companies and information 2) 404's as reported in Google Webmaster

My another site is successfully getting 1500 unique visitors daily and is up in Google ranking. I don't know why it is not!

Answer 1

You say "optimized it for "payment gateway"but what does that really mean? Did you create the site with search engines in mind or users? If you had search engines in mind then it probably comes across as "over optimized" which is a nice way of saying spammy (from a search engine point of view).

Lots of outbound links can hurt as you are "sending" a lot pf PR to other sites and removing it from yours. But this in and of itself isn't a big deal. What would be a big deal is what kind of incoming links do you have? I bet it's few and weak ones at that. I also bet your competition has stronger incoming links then you do.

A lot of 404s indicate a poorly maintained and/or built site. If you've got a lot of 404s you probably have lots of other errors that aren't doing you any good, too. Fix your site and makes sure it works before you wonder why it isn't ranking well.

Answer 2

The very first point to keep in mind is your website should be search engine friendly. For a website to rank in search engines there are lot of things to be worked on. There should be good number of backlinks coming to your website from high PR websites mostly preferred website with PR 3 & 3+. Also it is important to make sure that your website have the targeted keyword in proper place, by proper place I mean title tag, description tag, keywords tag, H1 tag, URL(if possible) and the most important "Content", as "Content is King".

Answer 3

If I look for "payment gateway" I get 7,630,000 results. That is your competition, and having an "unique website" (I think you mean "website with unique content") is not enough to be the best out of the 7,629,999 others. You need to optimize your site according to the current SEO practices (make sure your optimization isn't based on obsolete practices like meta tags, keywords density and more), you don't break Google's TOS (don't sell links, don't link to websites banned by Google - that would put you in a "bad neighborhood") and the most important: get high quality back-links. For that you'll have to make sure your website has a very good, useful, spread-worth content, will be functional, visitor-friendly and more.

Answer 4

You will find that Google is different in other countries. It does not crawl 3rd world country content as fast as 1st world. The factors are different as well. Its very difficult to tell because there are so many factors.