Small Business website help please. All help is appreciated and thank you in advance.
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Hello I am working on my families website, it is a Colorado barn construction site.
I am new here, so any and all help is appreciated. I have already gotten some excellent tips for general seo, but now trying to pinpoint in on a target.
I am reading as much as I can everyday.
My questions are:
Keywords... Ok so when I type in keywords and the results come up, even with an exact match, I am 12 pages back. So what influences the keyword rankings? Is it best to add in like say a service into a paragraph? Like I have been using Ubersuggest or however its spelled, and so would you take keyword phrases and then try to naturally add them to paragraphs? Is this how rankings are created? Thus your site being found? I have major competition that does not even have the keywords I type in, found on there site, and they still rank #1. So I feel that it must lead into my next question DA.
Domain Authority: I assume domain authority comes into play. The leading company in my world has a 50 and I have a 15. I am trying to raise this, and using the Moz tools I see my competitor has like 400 edu links. So in some ways it seems like wow get as many edu links as possible. But now it seems like this is not good? Like everyone is afraid to get links that may be considered spam in nature. That being said, would you still go after edu links?
Media: So kind of an odd question, but does adding a video to a home page help bounce rates? Like maybe if they sit and watch a two minute video that is interesting, then they may check out the rest of the site? Or for the sake of load times, do you keep the homepage as fast as possible?
Thank you for any tips. Also if you view my site, please give me any negative feedback as you can to help me improve.
Thank you
Chris
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Hi Chris,
Without wishing for it to sound like I am avoiding answering your questions, one of the best things you could do is read the MOZ Beginners Guide to SEO. You will find this is the best resource to start learning from and chock full of everything you will need to know.
I hope it helps,
-Andy
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Based on your questions I believe reading the guide Andy mentioned is definitely where you should start.
Do you build barns everywhere in Colorado or just a specific area within the state? If you only do a limited area, you should be focused on local SEO which different. Here is a post I put together curating some awesome local SEO learning resources. http://www.stellarseo.org/blog/local-seo-guide/
If you let me know about the area you are targeting with your services, I will be able to give you more specific advice.
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It would help everybody help you with SEO questions if we could read your site code easily. Right now the code is compressed into one long continuous line of code. That saves a little file space, but makes it almost impossible for humans to read.
If you go to most webpages, right click in a blank area, and select "View Source" you will get a screen showing the code displayed as one item per line, with hundreds of lines. This lets humans easily look for things that are important for SEO. Your webmaster likely has the code this way already on their own computer, but has been making and uploading a compressed version to webhost. Ask him to upload the uncompressed version of important pages.
Other than that, you should hire the service of someone skilled in doing LOCAL SEO - that does not mean some guy who lives in the same area you do. It's a special sort of SEO procedure that is quite different from those of us with a national or worldwide customer base.
You can probably do quite well by spending a reasonable amount with Google Adwords (PPC ads) if you set your ads to display only in the regions you serve.
Also do you have Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics set up for your site? Those will be valuable.
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It seems fine to me in IE, but in Firefox it is one line. I am my own webmaster and it's just wordpress.
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Good morning Chris! I went and looked in IE. There it is not a single line, but it is a solid block of code that is not really readable by humans. It needs spaces in the code.
Do a "View Source" at my site EasyDigging.com, or even here on this Moz page, to see how code should be displayed for humans to easily read it (and look for problems and give suggestions)
Wordpress is easy to create with, but has it's own special challenges for SEO. Are you using any of the SEO plug-ins for Wordpress, like Yoast?
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Hi Chris
For keyword targeting information I would look specifically to these resources;
- http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization
- http://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday
Think of a page as having a central topic which is the page's purpose. Then make that page fulfill that purpose as best as possible. So if it's Colorado Barn Construction - what is a person who types that into Google looking for? And give it to them.
Link building - I would go after links that;
- Can also get you referral traffic
- Are on pages that rank for keywords in Google
- Have good engagement, like comments and social shares
- Are relevant (at least loosely) to your industry
- Are not on sites that were obviously built for links (like blogs which accept any writer, blogs that don't focus on just a few niche topics)
- I would stop using exact anchors like "colorado barn construction" to create links
(see your question)
I would go after EDU links if they fit the criteria above.
Some link building resources;
- http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
- http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/link-building-resources.html
A video can definitely help engagement - but add a video if you would add a video and knew nothing about SEO. In other words, add a video because it's the best thing to have on that page and don't worry about the SEO implications.
A great resource on how to rank in general;
Also the periodic table of ranking factors will give you a good overview of all the factors;
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Although this could help us read the code, I'd say it's pretty low on the priority list as far as where to spend time/energy. The site is WordPress, so unless they recode the theme or get a developer to do it, it's going to have to be compressed code.
There are many tools which can aid the process of evaluating a site's code;
- http://www.browseo.net/
- fetch as Google - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/158587?hl=en
- a header checker like - http://urivalet.com/
- plugins like the MozBar - http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar
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