Help please - new site not ranking

[marmoset]

Hi folks
I am a reasonably experienced SEO person, but am having a problem with a client site that I have been doing seo on for over 3 months. I'm not expecting it to rank No 1 in such a short time as I have experience, but the home page is not ranking AT ALL. It has been set up by the client's designer in Wordpress, which should be fine. However I am suspicious that there is something wrong in the coding, set up, config etc. It has plenty of backlinks already. Perhaps someone with some tech knowledge could look at the site and let me know why the home page is not ranking? Any help appreciated and I hope I can reciprocate in future!
The site is
Caravan Hire NSW, Brisbane, Gold Coast QLD | Hip Caravans

[brett]

I don't have a technical perspective for you, but one of the things I see immediately is that if I do a site:Caravan Hire NSW, Brisbane, Gold Coast QLD | Hip Caravans there are only 8 pages showing up, but there are plenty more pages on the site.

What is particularly strange is that it seems the home page is not indexed but some inner pages are.

Have you checked within Google Webmaster tools to see if there is anything strange being reported there?

[marmoset]

Thanks Brett

Yes it is very strange - I don't discount that the designer who set this up did something - probably unintentionally - that 'broke' the site as far as Google is concerned. I have just had the WTG team get back to me and say the main database was corrupted, and they have now fixed it. Hopefully that will explain the lack of home page ranking. If anyone else has any clue what is happening with this I would really appreciate your input.

cheers again

[marcus]

What does the robots.txt say for the page?

What does Google Webmaster say...any crawl errors for that page?

Anything strange in the sitemap submission?

a search for

site:Caravan Hire NSW, Brisbane, Gold Coast QLD | Hip Caravans


this is what is actually after site <http://hipcaravanhire.com.au/>



shows that google has indexed the homepage.

Before going deeper into the site, consider this:


<meta name="keywords" content="caravan hire in nsw, caravan holiday, caravan hire queensland,caravan holiday, carvan hire nsw, caravan hire qld,caravan hire, camper trailer hire, rental, nsw,qld,queensland,goldcoast,brisbane,travel australia, byron bay,glamping,hip caravan hire, caravan hire nsw, qld, brisbane, travel australia,caravanning,camper trailer hire,rental,quality vans,hip caravans, clarkes beach, nsw caravan hire, gasmate bbq, byron bay lighthouse," />


That screams spam ...cut this down to <6 in my opinion

[marmoset]

Thanks Marcus
No that is why this whole thing is weird - no errors reported by Google, correct sitemap and robots/txt set up. Nothing I can explain. The only issue is that the designer of this site has only provided 90% access to the site, and there is no actual 'home page' to deal with. I think it is made up of a combination of templates, sliders and widgets. I can't access the keywords, but I don't think they explain the enormity of this problem.
Thanks again- if anyone else has any feedback I would love it.

[c14h20o4]

Hiya Marmoset,

This is going to be real quick before I go to bed but, don't you think the analytics code is a little high up in the source? When I get a chance, I'll take a closer look though.

Good night
Chris

[rand00]

This site home page is showing in Google now!

[TuffeyJ]

First if website is in Wordpress than you not have to do alot of on page work and designing or coding. Just check your site on Google by writing complete URL of website, if it appearing then its mean that your off page SEO work is not helping your keywords to rank.

[brett]

ust check your site on Google by writing complete URL of website, if it appearing then its mean that your off page SEO work is not helping your keywords to rank

Say what? Do you really believe this?

[Mike Taylor]

Marmoset,
I use a number of themes that don't have a home page -the home page layout is defined by the widget configurations. There are provisions for adding all the meta data to the virtual pages, though.