On Page OPtimisation Query

[jennie.evans]

6 weeks ago, we attempted to improve the on page optimisation for the following keyword 'wedding venues ''edited''' on the following page:

''edited''

I just checked when the page was last crawled by google by checking the cache date in the SERPs which is the 27th of May 201?.

We have been tracking the keyword 'wedding venues ''edited''' with the moz keyword ranking tool for the last little while and we've seen no real improvement, in fact we've dropped back a bit in the SERPs to 53rd (Moz says 'Not in top 50', it was 53rd when i last manually checked).

I understand that we have to be building links to our site, but i still hoped we would be doing better than this for this keyword with the work we've done

does anyone have any advice on how we can improve? Have we over optimised?

We would really appreciate any help!

[wissamdandan]

If you wanna send signals to google  that this page is one of the most important pages on your website then you have to show it in the structure. you homepage is poor. leverage the authority of the homepage to pass to that page and similar pages you have that are important for you.

leverage internal linking from other pages to that page or by launching a blog.

cheers

[jennie.evans]

Hi Wissam, thanks for the response...

I will definitely take that into account. the site is new as of Januarry 2013.

I didn't fully understand 'You homepage is poor'. Do you mean that it is not good, or that we're not utilising the potential of it to link to important pages on our site?

We do have a sensible internal structure as far as users are concerned, maybe not as far as google is concerned. We do have a blog: ''edited'' and we do send links to the categories from time to time...

Does anyone have any views on the on page optimisation in my first post?

[TakeshiYoung]

Looks pretty good to me. Some other areas of optimization could include:

• Including some more synonyms on your page, instead of just exact keyword match
• Add social signal buttons, especially a Google+ +1 button
• Use semantic markup to help search engines understand the content of your page, and possibly display rich snippets

But like you said, links are the main signal when it comes to search rankings, so focus on building some high authority links.

[wissamdandan]

/magazine have a decent internal structure and links .

why doesn't the homepage have a comprehensive links, menu, maybe more content or even the same structure that you have on the magazine page?

My point i m trying to relay, that the most linked page on any website is always the homepage ( 99%) so leverage the authority that is coming through your homepage to your subpages

[jennie.evans]

Thanks Takeshi,

Would you recommend building high authority links to the specific page in question?

''edited''

Or more to the homepage to increase the domain authority?

I still feel we ought to be doing better than 53rd in the SERPs for ''edited''... If it were you guys, would you allow more time before pivoting?

I also read somewhere to be very careful with rich snippets, is this not something we should worry about in this niche?

(Apologies, I'm a newb!)

[jennie.evans]

We've had advice to be careful not to overload the homepage with internal links throughout the site hence only having the 4 to our 4 'next level' local homepages...

If we built a comprehensive link structure on the homepage, it would very quickly breach over 200/300 internal links (and counting) as we expand...

Maybe we could link to very important pages ranking wise...

[wissamdandan]

Having 4 or 200 /300 both are fine

Google can handle that and definitely after the structural update "caffeine".

coming back to our issue one question i have how many clicks will it take you to go from the homepage to the page we are talking about  ?  (hope you understanding from where i m coming from)

can this page include more informationational text about the weddings in Bath (500 to 700 words) ? which you will link to all the "subpages" under Bath (like venues, all venues, marquee hire and many others? )

[TakeshiYoung]

If you can get links directly to the page, that's great, but links to the homepage will benefit you as well. Pagerank 2 is very, very low. Improving your link profile will go a long ways towards helping your pages rank better.

What is your concern with the rich snippets, exactly? Having things like review stars showing up in the search results will help improve your clickthrough rate from the SERPs.

[jennie.evans]

Currently, it takes 3 clicks to go from the homepage to ''edited''

The page can definitely include more informational text. The only issue is that we are launching multiple sub-regions, of which ''edited'' is only one. So far we have launched ''edited''. We will be launching many more over
the next few years. So the informational text can't just be about ''edited''... So if we linked to all the sub-pages for all the sub-regions, it would be a whole ton of links, that would grow exponentially as time went by...

[jennie.evans]

We struggle to think of high authority sites that would actually link to use. We do ask the wedding suppliers who feature on our site, but their sites tend to be PR 0 - 2 (3 at best). And the site users are people who are getting married, most won't have websites, let alone high authority websites, to link to us. Any thoughts

I'll have to speak to the person about rich snippets again, and do some research myself (i've heard of them but don't fully understand how they work).

[TakeshiYoung]

This is a great list of link building ideas that should help you think outside the box:

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

The overall goal with your SEO and internet marketing efforts should be to become a recognized brand in this niche, because Google is looking more and more at brand & authority for its rankings. But some good links will definitely be a good start.

Here is a good resource for rich snippets/semantic markup. It's actually very easy to implement, and should take you no more than an hour tops.

http://moz.com/blog/schema-examples

[wissamdandan]

my apologies i forgot to mention the link that i recommend the text in it

i meant this one http://www.theweddingsecret.co.uk/weddings-in-bath.htm

[jennie.evans]

Aha, ok yeah that makes more sense now. I'm sure we can include text on ''edited''.

Although, ''edited'' is only 2 clicks away from ''edited''.

If we were to link to ''edited'' from ''edited'', would it still be a good idea to link to ''edited'' from our homepage? That would pass on the most 'juice'...

Or would the site structure look a bit funny then?

Thanks for all your help, much appreciated