A Begginer. Learning Lots. Need Advice.
-
About a month ago I took over a SEO for a small RV company here in Florida. My responsibilities include:
SEO, Adwords, Video Production, Inventory Update, Newsletters, Social Media, Etc.
I feel a little overwhelmed, but we are a small company and we probably won't be hiring more people.
I'm weak in some areas and strong in others. In the SEO area I'm weak. My question is, in the SEO area, where should I be focusing most?
I break my SEO responsibilities into a couple areas:
- Keyword Research (A lot of competition)
- Back-linking
- Social Media
I know there are more. But where should be my main focus, and how should I go about doing it?
Website is http://www.floridaoutdoorsrv.com
I would kind of like some one to give me an idea of where I am, and what should I do next.
SEOMoz has given me a lot of errors and it's little overwhelming.
Thanks in advance for the advice!
-
I hear you!
Well they are at the "fore front" of the RV industry. And actually I really like some of what they bring to the table, some of the more obvious things like title tags and meta descriptions I have little control over which is frustrating!
We are supposed to get an update to the site here in a week or two, I'm hoping some of this will be taken care of. But we can't switch right now, because honestly they are probably one of the best in the industry as sad as that sounds and we drop in rankings and it's a big pain everytime we switch companies.
I'm going to look into getting their name taken off of our site. It might be part of the contract, I'm not sure.
I have also been trying to make unique content for each page, but I usually do a little at a time. Any advice I welcome from as I'm a beginner at SEO.
So my take aways from you are:
Unique Title Tags
-
One thing that's immediately obvious is that you're having massive problems with your title tags. Every page needs to have a unique title tag, and your title tags should be 55-65 characters long. Rewriting thousands of title tags is going to be a challenge, so prioritize your most important landing pages and do those first.
Duplicate content is a challenge for any e-commerce website. If you have thousands of products on your site, and many of the products are very similar, it would require an amazing amount of time to craft completely unique product descriptions for all of them. Again, focus on your key landing pages.
Also, I don't know how you got hooked up with your web design company, but they have a link to their site in your footer, which is seriously sketchy. Not to mention that their website is a trainwreck. That might explain the CSS problems George mentioned. I would seriously think about working with a different web developer and designer. If your site is poorly constructed, that can cause SEO problems -- to say nothing of user experience and conversion rates.
-
Okay, I've added a screen shot of my most common problem.
I just got my guys to do a 301 Redirect from
floridaoutdoorsrv.com/index.php to floridaoutdoorsrv.com
Hope that helps!
-
Okay, so I am looking into a redirect for the /index.php page.
I have to work through the CMS company we use, unfortunately!
The article was helpful!
-
It would help if you said what errors you're getting. Duplicate content? Title tag issues?
-
I suggest taking things one step at a time. Your reports from SEOmoz may include tons of errors, but you can often fix tens or hundreds of these errors with one fix. I see some technical updates you can make to your pages that will help clean up the source code and perhaps make your pages load faster which will help.
A couple quick technical tips:
Clean up the inline CSS used on your pages. Use your external CSS files to hold this information.
Don't use relative URLs if you don't need to. You can fix a number of linking issues by just using absolute URLs.
Here's a helpful post from Paddy Moogan:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/common-technical-seo-problems-and-how-to-solve-them
More to come later. Hope this helps!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do I need to add the actual language for meta tags and description for different languages? cited for duplicate content for different language
Hi, I am fairly new to SEO and this community so pardon my questions. We recently launched on our drupal site mandarin language version for the entire site. And when i do the crawl site, i get duplicate content for the pages that are in mandarin. Is this a problem or can i ignore this? Should i make different page titles for the different languages? Also, for the metatag and descriptions, would it better in the native language for google to search for? thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lynetteboss0 -
Pagination do you still need unique titles?
Hi Guys, For pagination, if you have implemented the rel Prev/Next tags correctly, is it fine to have duplicate titles in the series example: Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/2
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/3
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/4 Some people mention that you should make them unique and add the page number example: Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/2
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/3
Title Tag: Black Dresses URL: http://www.site.com/blackdresses/4 Keen to hear what you guys thing? Personally, i think its fine to have duplicate title tags when you have properly implemented rel Prev/Next tags as Googel will see the series as one. Cheers.0 -
We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301s?
We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301 redirects or will search engines know to remove the old 404 pages from the SERPs? We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrandOptimizations0 -
A/B Split Testing - Rankings Drop? Need an expert opinion...
We are running an A/B split test (Started on 12/12), and a few days after we started the test, we fell from position 9/10 (about 3 weeks on page 1) to position 11/13, and we've been there ever since. We are still running the test. We disallowed the test page in robots.txt, but that's all. no canonical no noindex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC
-no Google Experiments code. Theoretically, Google could crawl the site, and find the page, but then the page is disallowed. The alternate page is not indexed. Could this explain the rankings drop?1 -
I need your brains please - client site dropped significantly in search since hummingbird
I need your support. I've been doing "SEO" for several years - but sticking to sustainable methods. No junk links Decent content Decent site etc The site is advisein.com and it was ranking well for several terms such as: best lsat prep best lsat preparation best lsat course etc. Also there are some youtube videos (with the google thumbnail) that were doing extremely well in search and even those dropped in the rankings. Can any of you tell if there are some glaring issues that I am missing that would make the website and youtube videos drop 30 - 40+ spots in SERP's over the past few months after dominating for the last 3 years? Thank you in advance and I welcome additional questions and any ides....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Intergen0 -
Help Needed With .htaccess RewriteRule
Hello Fellow Mozzers, I would really appreciate a little help as I have been banging my head against a wall for the last few hours trying to create a .htaccess RewriteRule. I have around 300 URLs that I need to 301 redirect following a site re-build, they are in groups of similar urls but infortunately not broken down in to folders. Here is an example of a few URLs:- https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-ellwoodii_2.htm
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-ellwoodii-200225cm-6670.htm
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-ellwoodii.htm
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-ellwoods-gold.htm
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-lemon-queen.htm
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-yvonne-200cm-66.htm All of the above URLs need to redirect to a new URL:- http://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana Here is the RewriteRule that I currently have but it isn't working:- RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)_chamaecyparis-lawsoniana$ https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana [R=301,L] Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks
Ade.0 -
Seo advice / plan ? penalized ?
I built an ecommerce site for a client of mine just over 9 months ago now. To begin with the serps were great, everything was listed in the results but for some reason a few weeks in all the results vanished from google and now we're lucky to find anything. I've been as far as page 200 and havent found any results. Its been like this for a solid 8 months so i can only presume that the site has been penalised in some form. Searching for unique phrases from the site doesnt even return results. The website in question is = http://goo.gl/A6Gz2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfxpixeldesigns
keywords we're aiming for = coloured contact lenses, fashion contact lenses
Target = Google UK Now im not really an seo guy but regardless of this my client has hired me to see whats going on and correct it. I've been scratching my head thinking all sorts of things but none of which im certain about so i'm looking for someone to point me in the right direction before i do anything drastic. So to begin with here are some of my suspicions which i personally think are affecting ranking and possible penalisation. #1 - Too many links on the page
#2 - Possibly over optimised
#3 - Lack of content on the product and category pages
#4 - Lack of backlinks and links in general coming from other sites My main concern is the lack of links from other sites and the odd link coming from low quality sites. I've also just found out that my client has been using an automatic link submitter which i've always thought of as a big no no. Some of the sites these links have been submitted to have nothing to do with the keyword we are targetting and are sort of spammy sites containing all sorts of links. Im wondering if these poor quality links could have caused the site to be penalised, google may be seeing it as a spammy site due to this. Whats your opinions on the above, are my suspicions correct and can this be recovered ? My planned course of action is to be as follows: #1 - Re write the content currently on the site so that it is better written and include more keywords, especially long tails since i think these will help bring the serps up.
#2 - Write detailed category and product descriptions as well as making sure every page has some well written content with links and keywords.
#3 - Keep the above pages to one main subject / keyword so that google doesnt get confused.
#4 - Get some links on popular and relevant sites, the only problem here is the lack of fashion contact lens sites. Does anyone have any advice on how to find these or where i should be getting links placed. Are directories worth while ?
#5 - Get more involved in the social side ie facebook, twitter I will be building on the above over time, aswell as running google ads moderately for our chosen keywords. Is there anything i have missed, anything i shouldnt be doing. Please advise. Thanks.0 -
Need some help with a tricky 301
I can't find anything online that deals with this issue. I have a page getting indexed by Google at mydomain.com/widgets and I don't know why. No links to it anywhere. The page it is closest to is mydomain.com/reviews/widgets and so I tried to set up a 301 to point one to the other. The problem is each individual widget review is at mydomain.com/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name and so when I redirect /widgets to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets it also redirects each individual product to mydomain.com/reviews/widgets/reviews/products/widget-name. Is there some way to just redirect /widgets without having it affect each product review? I cannot change URL structure either, nature of the site. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0