I am a big fan of search engine optimisation – SEO.

But it can be so frustrating at times.

Let me outline for you the keywords that I’m trying to crack and have been since March 2005.

Brisbane Web Hosting and Australian Web Hosting

These are big players in the keyword marketplace. They fetch a high price on Google Awords and Yahoo Search Marketing (the old Overture)

I have advertising in both and it costs me, but it without it I would have no targeted traffic generation at all. Notice the bolded word targeted. It’s the best kind to push for.

Over the last few months I now have a good ranking i.e position 1 and 2 for Brisbane Web Hosting, and 2 and 11 for Australian Web Hosting, MSN and Yahoo respectively. But I’m still not showing in Google.

Now why is that. The Google web crawler visits my site up to 3 times a day, yet I still don’t show for my main keywords that I’ve optimised for.

I do show for other obscure terms that I never would have guessed people would be entering.

Aparantly Google has a sandbox (a trap they keep you in) for high profile keywords that you can only get out of over time. Supposedly up to 18months. How ridiculous that I have a number 1 postition in Yahoo but don’t even show in Google. My content is fresh, I am a legitimate business, but I’m still shut out.

The worst part is that there are listings in the first 10 pages that are just rubbish. I’m not talking about taking a front page spot here, I just would like to at least be in the first 10 pages and work it up from there, like I did with the other engines.

I have yet to work out what to do about this. I’ve been told by experts that I still need more links to my site. But when I do a check on the competition even on the first page of Google, I actually have better links and more of them than they do.

Will update the blog once I find a solution. If anyone has any ideas for me to try, I’m all ears.

Aaron