Why is my rating so low

well said fobbyfisher

Get better at tactics, I guarantee a couple months of doing a lot of tactics will get your tactics rating somewhere around 1500.  Your rating will follow and you'll definitely be around 1100-1200.  If you understand the opening principles, don't worry about learning complex openings, its a waste of time for someone even at my level.  

Tactics really doesn't seem to be my issue, although I'll try practicing them for awhile and see if I improve. As far as I can tell, my opponents aren't leaving much in the way of tactics for me to try. When they do, I get them. And it's just suspicious as far as the ratings go, because once I break 950 or so the games start getting much easier. Maybe it's just because very low rated players do some weird unexpected things?

I think you just getting better, don't worry before long you will start to face stronger opponents, but my advise to you would be challenge players at 1300-1600 so you can up your game a bit you will loose a lot, but if you analyze the games you will learn a lot more than playing people who are at your level basically if you wan't to be at 1300-1600 you have to play these people in slow games obviously than once you reach that rating you challenge people who are at 1800-2000 and so on. Basically to up your game you have to be willing to take some beating from better players you will see some more advanced ideas in the action, so once you will face a player at your current level it will feel like a breeze. 

I played a 1600 rated player and beat him and I play my friend who's 1500 rated and win about 1/4 matches. When I do get beat by players at that level, I have no idea why. And then when I ask them for advice it's as if they have no idea how they make decisions and they just give me the same generic advice about studying tactics that everyone else does.

Just accept a challenge and I will give you some tips on where you need to improve and so on I am not the best player in the world, but I do now a fair bit more than you.

Truth is, that's all you're going to get, for two reasons:

a) because at levels under gm 99.9% of the games are, in one way or another, tactical brawls. That's all chess is at sub-gm level. Forget complex battles of miniscule advantages and things of the like.

b) most people know no other advice other than to repeat the same oft used formulas 'develop, study tactics, analyse your games' so they repeat what they were told once. Notice that nobody gives you an a-to-z on how to analyse your own games. Which means telling you 'analyse your games' is as useful as telling you 'study a bit more' without pointing any concrete steps.  

Read post by @fobbyfisher.There is no magic wand that will improve your game follow the advise you will improve,it will not happen overnight.Put the work ,wait for the reward.For tactics you can do them at chess tempo free of cost.

Your tactics rating is 550, trust me at your level there are tactics everywhere.  You simply dont have the pattern recognition yet.  Have you seen Hikaru do puzzle rush on youtube?  He simply is going off of pattern recognition and the intuition that comes from doing a million tactical puzzles over his life.  I think trying to do multiple things at once, like studying your games, learning openings, etc, can become overwhelming and make the game seem even more complicated.  If you put all your energy into tactics and tactics alone, I guarantee you'll improve quickly.

I've only done tactics puzzles 3 or 4 times lol. I'll try doing it some more and see what results I get though.

I just did the five it lets me do per day and I got all five. I'll have to find another site where I can do them all day.

Why do you think that game was challenging or barely a win?
You gain a material advantage fairly early on and then proceed to trade pieces. You even get a nice mate instead of having to grind him down completely.
Maybe you expect too much?

Because if he gained tempo on me he could have easily turned the tables in only a move or two. I never had what I would consider an absolutely winning position.

In Chess Tempo site you can do tactics all day long

 You can always lose with a blunder ofcourse, but after  you take his rook he is simply losing and never recovers. He is down material, you are fully developed, have pawns in the center and the king is safely castled. He really has no chance here but to hope you make a big mistake. You won comfortably by any standard.

Still dancing with your queen all over the board while to good rooks white bishop done exactly nothing throw the whole game on top of that king is in the middle of the board. I am just wondering what exactly was going throw your mind when you played the game can you analyze the game you just pasted and let everyone know what's really going on than you will get some better advice. In any case did you  had a chance to check out my message? which I send about our game where you didn't have a plan, exactly the same way as you didn't have it in this.

My plan was to free up the diagonal to the kings pawn, but he kept doing everything to make sure I couldn't. So I decided to go after checkmate on the h7 pawn instead. When I moved my knight into position, he left his bishop unprotected, so I took it. Since I saw that this came with check, I decided to trade for his rook as well. After that, my only plan was to get my queen to safety and continue developing, but he kept attacking my queen so all I could do was move it around the board until I lost. I moved the bishop out so that I could castle, thinking that I was up so much material, that was all I would need to do to win. He had given no indication at this point that he was a good enough player to see a revealed check double-attack so I wasn't looking for it.

And as for our game, I did have a plan which I executed. Part of the ponziani gambit is to sacrifice the bishop to check the king on the next move and take a hanging piece. That was my plan from the beginning of the game. After that, I could not find any strategy that would allow me to break through your side without losing substantial material, so I was completely lost.

During your game on post 37, during moves 9 and 10, you missed Qxe6.

On move 14, you should have exchanged queens since you were a full rook up.  Placing your queen on b3 allowed black to gain counter play.

When I went on chess tempo to do tactics I got about 70% of them. That doesn't seem bad.