Local Personal training studio needs SEO advice. Is directory submission they way forwards?

[DAlondon]

I have a local personal training business and am struggling to push our website to the top of local personal training searches despite already having a better domain and trust score than almost all of the higher ranked competitors. The website has only been live around 4 months but I was wondering if submitting to paid directories would help me to rank on page one? our website is www.danielalexandra.com

[SoftzSolutions]

No, paid links go against Google’s guidelines and your website will get deindexed for that.

Here are the few things that you can do -
1. Get your website listed in Google Places
2. Add a link back to Google Listing Page from your website
3. Get listed in some high quality local listing sites
4. Use microformat code for presenting contact information in the footer section of the website

And no idea why you are addressing the same user agents twice

User-agent: *

Disallow: /go/

# End Link Mask Generator output

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Disallow: /wp-includes/

[SteveTheWoodsman]

Just after a cursory glance at your site, I noticed that your load times are horrible. So I ran a test at webpagetest.org and your load time is 11.3 seconds.  You probably don't see that because your browser has a cached version of your website since you've visited it repeatedly.  However, Google is grading you based upon a load time of 11.3s.

See here for the results of your website:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121228_X3_AGM/ 

Then see here for why that is negatively affecting you:
http://www.socialdesignstudios.com/webpage-speed/ 

Some other points:

1. Add rel=author
2. Start driving a social media campaign (it will help you in the SERPs as well as your audience particularly loves it)
3. Offer a scholarship (see here - point D)
4. Create a Meetup, link it to your page and get a Bootcamp going... Meetup.com will provide great referral traffic as well as clients.
5. Run your site through an HTML/CSS validator to make sure you're not getting held up by simple corrections. 
6. Create some "big content" and then push it to your distribution channels to get some good backlinks.

At the end of the day you have to remember that you've only had the domain for 4 months and only have a PR1 rating.   But whatever you do... don't focus on directory submissions. It'll end up biting you in the end.

Best of luck!

[DAlondon]

Hi there,

Thanks for this, very useful.

Is there a simple way of speeding up my load times significantly, 11.3 seconds is very slow, I wouldn't hang around to have a look.

Thanks

Daniel

[SteveTheWoodsman]

Hi Daniel,

While 11.3s is bad, I had a client who had 14.x seconds and when it was all said and done we were able to get him down to 0.86s on average.

You bet there is a quick way to speed up your website.  And you're in luck since you are running WordPress... go install the free plugin W3 Total Cache (W3tc).  There are others... don't use them.  W3tc is by far the best, albeit it can be a little complicated at first blush.

To overcome the complications, either hire a pro to set it up for you (around $250) or go to gtmetrix.com and do a test on your site.  Keep in mind that GTmetrix will always understate your load times so only use webpagetest.org or pingdom for getting an accurate result.

Once you have the results, scroll down to the tab labeled "Page Speed" and you will see where it says "recommendations." When I run a test on your website the #1 thing it shows to fix first is combining your images using CSS sprites.  That might be a little hard unless you've done it before so I would skip it and go to "leverage browser caching".  Click on it and it will drop down and tell you what you need to do and what are the problem pages.  In this case, you need to specify browser caching of at least one week.  So now go to your website and to the W3tc plugin you just installed and look for the browser caching setting... if I remember correctly it is in the general settings but I could be wrong. I believe you'll have to set it in seconds.

Then do that for the rest of the items on the GTMetrix report.

Once you are done with that, go install Yahoo's SmushIt plugin for Wordpress. Then navigate to it a do the bulk smushit... part of the problem is just the fact that your page size is almost 2MB... mainly because of photos.  Once you run the smushit plugin, your page size will be more around 500KB.  That's still about 5 times what it should be so you should really take advantage of CDNs (W3tc will help with that) and maybe hosting all your images on a subdomain so that you can take advantage of HTTP's ability to load from multiple resources at once.

Last thing, in the future, when you upload photos to your website, make sure that you are uploading in a size that is just the right fit.  WP will allow you to upload a photo with sizes up to 2MB and then will resize for content but you'll still be loading the full size in the background... thus killing your load times.  And if you have the option, choose JPG over PNG as it compresses better... unless you need the alpha channel.

Be on the lookout... I hope to be posting an article to SEOMoz's UGC blog that covers all this in more detail soon.

Best of luck!

[dawnieando]

You'll find that compressing a lot of your images will help considerably with page speed.  I've a great fan of pingdom.com and have seen load times go down with direct correlation with increased rankings.  Watch out for redirects which add load times and limit the in page coding and calls to scripts.

There is still a place for directory submissions as a part of an overall link building strategy but you need to get the technical and content parts of the '3 pillars' sorted first.

[DAlondon]

Thanks so much for your help here, please let me know when you post your article up so I can have a look through.

Best wishes

Daniel