What recommendations do you have for the SEO of this site?

[BobGW]

Hello,

Could you glance at this site and let me know if you see anything we could improve upon?

www.nlpca.com

A couple of notes: We're over-optimized for the term "NLP" on the home page. We're removing the footer links soon. We have 2 locations: San Francisco, CA and Salt Lake City, UT. Our main keyword is "NLP Training" but we would like to rank higher for the keyword "NLP". Also note that we're completely white hat, but we have international site-wide backlinks, and a couple of site-wide backlinks in site's footers - all friends and colleagues of ours.

[David-Kley]

I'll take a look at it for a few minutes

First, I noticed that you have two home page URL's, that could get picked up as duplicate content. You only want one true URL to display for the homepage, or subpage. Example:

http://www.nlpca.com/index.php

http://www.nlpca.com/

This is a common item, especially if you are using a CMS. Easy to fix, just use a 301 redirect to send the index.php to the standard URL. If you need help, I can send you the redirect code tomorrow.

Some of the page content is a bit long, ad I'm not sure your users, (even those who are really interested) will read through it that deep. See if there are additional ways to break up what you are trying to say. How? On a page, if you have to change the subject, or go off topic, you should give that content it's own page. Page count increases, chance of ranking for the specific topics increases, possible user retention and on-site time increases. "Meet the Trainers" and "How We Teach" could each be their own page, and if the methods used to teach are similar, this can be linked to from multiple pages. Example:

http://www.nlpca.com/DCweb/dcwebnlp-hypnosis-language-patterns.html

You should also take a look at the URL structure under the training dropdown, as it includes /DCweb on some, and doesn't on others. This may be intentional due to where the service is offered, but if not, focus on making them as clean and focused as possible.

Your main directory links in your menu force users into the submenu, and miss a valuable opportuniy to have the main top level pages be links into the categories. For example, if you are on the home page and click the training link, you get this "http://www.nlpca.com/#" and the page doesn't go anywhere.  Think about how you could use this top level page to direct your users where you want them to go.

name="keywords" content="NLPCA" />
http://www.nlpca.com/master-practitioner-training.html
name="description" content="The NLP Master Practitioner Training is offered by the NLP and Coaching Institute. It covers Sleight of Mouth, timelines, and much more. It is offered in both Utah and San Francisco." />

Keywords are very brief. Think of all the items a user would type in to find these services AND items that are on page to revise your keywords. (if the keyword phrase is not mentioned or covered on that page, chances for ranking for it will decrease) Descriptions currently on site are very matter of fact, and are not worded in a "natural" way of speaking. Think about it like this, if you only had one sentence to sum up the whole page to a person who wanted to know more, what would you say? This seems to be a site-wide issue, so come up with a strong back end SEO template, as this can save you some time when editing.

Yikes! H3 tags out of place! Your page should flow in the most natural order, h1, h2, h3 etc.
http://seo-browser.com/index.php?address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nlpca.com%2Fmaster-practitioner-training.html&button0.x=52&button0.y=17&button0=Simple

Use SEO-browser to look at how your page renders to a search engine. If you need it to visually appear a certain way, use css classes to make the p text look like an h3, or use inline styles. Inline styles can increase page load time, so it is best to use classes where you can.

After you get that all fixed up, be sure to use image compression and a minify your css for the fastest load time possible.

No Authorship. 
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http://www.nlpca.com/master-practitioner-training.html
Even if you rank in a SERP, the listing will not stand out. Use reviews, authorship, and ANYTHING you can to get the listing to jump out at a user. On a page full of blue links, its nice to be the cool guy (or girl), plus people tend to click on those a lot more too

This is a good start. Hope this helps, and best of luck! Let me know if you need any additional advice.

[shoppal]

Hey David,Nice analysis you did for nlpca.com.
Can you help me out finding major issues with my site www.shoppal.in

2 Main things I need your suggestion for are:
1. Am I stuffing the keywords in individual pages like http://www.shoppal.in/zovi-coupons. Auto generated keyword "Coupon" is arriving several number of times on this page. Is it stuffing which can be taken as over optimization ?
2. Does you feel "rel=Canonical" should be maintained in individual pages. I am new to this and really need guidance.
Regards