If I hired you/your company to do my SEO ...

[Prime85]

If i hired you or your company to do SEO for my site (http://goo.gl/XUH3f) what would be the first steps you'd take?

I'm pretty sure i've covered all of the basics myself, I'm just left trying to figure out what i should do next... rankings have been going up and down for the last few weeks, but even when they're up, they're not high enough (and then they go back down anyway) ...

I know some of you are going to say build links, please at least give me an example of one or two sites you'd try to get to link to mine...

I'm open to any advice or feedback as I'm just a website owner who's been doing their own SEO & learning on the fly...

Thanks a lot!

[irvingw]

looks like you're doing pretty good at a quick glance. a couple of things:

a) make the social media buttons open in a new window so the user doesn't get kicked off of the site

b) why are you nofollowing nav pages like contact us and blog. When you nofollow you throw away that PR, better to pass the PR instead of discarding it. Nofollow is for linking to external sites not internal. Page rank sculpting stopped working for nofollow when Google decided nofollow means PR still gets split equally on the page but not passed.

c) catalog page has no catalog  http://monsterbins.com/free-catalog/

[Prime85]

Thanks Irving... I'll have a look into the nofollowing strategy and we'll make adjustments...

Just out of curiosity, if you say my site appears to be doing things properly, why do you think my rankings are not improving, in fact, they either remain steady (on pages 3-5) or decline..

[SEOAndy]

Hi Prime85,

The reason you won't see increases past those pages is simply because you have very little outbound links coming to your site. You can do all the work on-site but if your keywords are semi-competitive links are important and procuring those high quality links are what will drive you up the rankings.

Thanks,

[irvingw]

Well it's not a mess like a lot of sites we see, no major glaring issues from a technical standpoint.

Here is the biggest piece of advice i can give you. You rankings should mostly come from long tail searches for people looking for certain types of bins my guess would be, yet your particular product pages are not properly optimized for rankings.  For example

http://monsterbins.com/snt180-2710

"snt180-2710" in the URL should be something more descriptive like

http://monsterbins.com/**genuine-stack-nest-blue-totes**

or if you need the product number to make URLs unique: http://monsterbins.com/-genuine-stack-nest-blue-totes-snt180-2710

and the title tag, url, and H1 tag should match in the exact order (assuming "Genuine Stack Nest Blue Totes" is your target - just showing as an example)

<title>**Genuine Stack Nest Blue Totes** | 18x11x6 | SNT180-2710title>

and the name should be in a h1 tag

NOT <p>SNT180-BL Genuine Stack and Nest Blue Totes - 18x11x6p> RATHER <p<span class="start-tag"> </p<span>>SNT180-BL 

# **Genuine Stack and Nest Blue Totes** - 18x11x6

p>

You do have some product information on the page in the tabs which Google can read so that is good.

Also homepage is only PR1

[MarkScully]

To be honest, the homepage is a bit of a mess. I know you rather not hear it but, your site needs a lot of work.

Visually it's quite off-putting and the very large section of text you have on the homepage is stuffed full of keywords.

This is how Google sees this page -

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TOKOKtpzdCgJ:monsterbins.com/&hl=en&gl=ie&prmd=imvns&strip=1

'Monster Bins' is bolded and used over 10 times.

It's not clear what payment method your website accepts and to be quite honest, I would be very hesitant to make a sale on there.

[irvingw]

it's not as bad as many sites in terms of keyword stuffing and those are really easy fixes.

you bring up some good usability issues though. the site could definitely use a full audit.

[Prime85]

Irving, the funny thing is that i rank well for most of the individual parts, type any part on my site into google and you'll see that... It's the category pages and subcategories i'm having the issues with....

Mark, every now and then someone says my homepage is a mess and the design is bad... however for every 1 person that says that, i get about 5 that say the opposite and actually tell me they like the layout and it's actually a very well designed site....

In regards to the text at the bottom of the home page, how is that stuffed with keywords?  1) Monster Bins is the brand name, should i not use it on my site, 2) every last piece of text in that box at the bottom of the page is written properly and not just put there to have keywords included, it is all there to explain exactly what we do and who we serve and it's in proper english 3) There are no keywords in that text box that are overused, according to SEOMoz's general rules about keyword stuffing....

any other feedback from anyone?

[MarkScully]

Agreed - A full audit covering SEO related issues and usability is required.

I do feel that focusing on SEO when there are much more glaring issues would be a pointless exercise.

Generating traffic to a website is not an effective use of time when the landing page isn't optimized for conversions.

I would suggest hiring a graphic designer for some freelance work and working with someone on a full audit to prioritize the biggest issues.

I'd be surprised if the site is generating quite a large volume of sales as it stands. It just doesn't convey trust and reliability from my perspective.

[irvingw]

you can use the brand name, not needed that many times for SEO since that's your domain names. I don't feel the homepage is really stuffed.

Regarding your homepage, let the bounce rate tell the story. Everyone has an opinion, use AB testing and path analysis to get the bounce rate as low as possible.

All your category pages appear to be PR0. Is this a new site, looks like it was registered since 06 but maybe was parked all that time and not a site? New sites take time, PR and incoming links are important for rankings.

Lose the keyword tags on the pages, useless and slightly stuffed, can only hurt won't help.

<meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">plastic bins,plastic storage bins,plastic storage containers,plastic containers,bins,bin,shelf bins,quantum bins,plastic shelf bins</a>" /> 

[Prime85]

Thanks for the advice, i truly appreciate it

Anything else from anyone else?

[irvingw]

Category pages are PR0. They are higher competition and therefore harder to rank. If the site is new it might take some time to build up juice and trust.