Site has no SEO done on it. It wasn't considered during design. What to do first ?

[ternit]

They opted for videos to explain to people what the website is about, but it ain't working for them. What steps would you take in order to get this site to rank higher without completely changing the design(changing design is out of the question they are low on funds). They also built a blog on wordpress.com and added a .me domain to it.

For obvious reasons I'm not mentioning the website.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Are the videos self hosted?  Hosted elsewhere?  Is there anything else on those pages besides the videos?

[ternit]

Hosted on Vimeo with only the name of the page as tittle. There is nothing else except the videos and about 40 words. The words don't even describe the business, they are just marketing mambo jumbo like "join the revolution"

[PixelgemsCreative]

First I would do title tags and meta descriptions.

I would also encourage them to have transcripts of the video on the page, or available on a detail page.

Another obvious thing would be to share the videos in a way where they will like their company on facebook/google+, or link to their website page.

Include keyword rich headings in the H1 tag for each video, along with a short description of each.

That would be a start.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

This would be the right approach.

I'd follow it up by following this guideline: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

For Vimeo Pro it suggests switching it to the old embed format.  Then create a video sitemap, and use proper microdata markup to try get a rich snippet in the serps.

[irvingw]

wordpress SEO plugins. weeding out pages with low content, fixing technical issues like dupe content canonicals, 404s, 302's. etc

[BedeFahey]

Are they looking for Local rankings, or National?

You mentioned a WordPress blog. Is the entire site on WordPress, or just the blog?

I'd start with keyword research, if that hasn't been done already. Spend some of what sounds like a limited budget and get it done correctly.

Then I'd provide a video transcription or summary of the video, and ensure title tags were well-structured for the keywords. Investing time or money to get some decent content on there is worthwhile.

As Irving said, deal with 404's, 302's etc.

If they're looking for Local rankings, they'll probably decent bang for their buck in putting together a solid Google/Bing/Yahoo listing and building some citations.

[TommyTan]

I agree with Randy that you should first go through your website and change all the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions.  Once you are done, you might want to go through your website again and try including keywords related to that page in the content area and also add the keyword in the H1 Header (usually Title of that page).  Furthermore, you might want to fix up some internal linking anchor text on your website.

The next step might take more work. If the URL is not well formatted; meaning you have signs and numbers in your URL, you should 301 redirect all the pages to a optimized URL page.

As for optimizing the videos, I suggest uploading it to YouTube and embed it on your website.  Optimize the Title and Description with keywords.

[TheeDigital]

Ternit,

I would ignore a blog.wordpress.com.  This isn't giving you any natural traffic.  You want the blog on your site.

I seem to agree with everyone that your goal should be to focus on optimizing your current website with keyword rich titles, h1s, meta description, and meta tags.

If you have any pictures on these pages, I would also look into title tags and alternate title tags.

Also if you don't have any social media accounts set up, do this now and make sure that you have plug-ins in place, to make your content is easily shareable.