Quotery.com Suggestions?

[RafalJ]

Jason,

You seem to understand the concepts very well so as Kevin has said, just keep plugin along... use that 5k, or part of it, on your own marketing ideas and eventually you will get there...

You can still promote that video you know? It's a bit depressing for my liking but I see people sharing similar content on social media sites nearly every day.

The spammy example you gave is technically not spammy - it's a website for content publishing, article is in relevant section, fairly well written and is linking to relevant websites (even though it's 3 different businesses) using no-follow links. It certainly isn't spammy but I can see why you would expect more for your 5k.

Good luck!

[Kingof5]

Adhering to Google's SEO recommendations is your biggest problem. You won't be successful for a long time - if ever - doing that, and don't let people here brainwash you into thinking you will be.

[EcommerceSite]

You have certainly built a nice looking website. I looked at this page, http://www.quotery.com/mark-twain/?PageSpeed=noscript and assumed you wanted this page to rank for the keyword "Mark Twain quotes".

1. Have you looked at changing your url to http://www.quotery.com/mark-twain-quotes/

2. Your first image has correct alt text, but the ones after that say "grid-author". Instead of using the same picture 20 times on this page I would either get rid of the pictures after the top one, get a variety of pictures, or at the very least fix the alt image tag.

3. I see at the very top you have "Mark Twain Quotes" in your h1 tag. But not anywhere else on the page, even though Moz showed you used it 4 times in the body. When I looked at the source code it seems like it appeared mostly with the addthis buttons. Keyword density is pretty dated but I would try to have it in at least one place in the body.

[JasonMOZ]

What — specifically — are you referring to?

[JasonMOZ]

Thank you for the suggestions. Originally I was under the impression that urls didn't carry much weight anymore, so I decided to stick with the simplest url structure possible (cater to the user). But I think you bring up some fair points that I'm going to try.

What are your thoughts on www.quotery.com/quotes/mark-twain instead?

or maybe even...

www.quotery.com/author/mark-twain/quotes instead?

[DonnaDuncan]

Hi Jason,

I have a couple of suggestions.

1. The site is slow. That will bump up your bounce rates and impact your rankings. You should try speeding it up.
2. You have a ton of redirects going on. I did a partial scan of your site and found roughly 20% of the html files found were redirected. For example http://www.quotery.com/rick-warren redirects to http://www.quotery.com/rick-warren/. If it were me, I'd check to see if I had an incoming traffic or links to these pages and if not, I'd delete them and get rid of the redirect. It'll help speed your site.
3. You also have a lot of duplication. For example http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/15/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/16/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/17/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/18/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/19/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/20/, and http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/21/ are all competing to rank for "william shakespeare quotes". I see you've canonicalized them so they point to themselves, but that isn't helping. You should be pointing the pages to http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/ or using rel = next / prev.
4. Your title tags all contain your brand name. That's unnecessary. Yes I see Brainy Quotes does the same thing, but that doesn't mean you should too.
5. Your search is funky. I searched for "h jackson brown" and found 0 results. I searched for "h. jackson brown" (notice the dot after the h) and found two.
6. Your site architecture is very flat. That's spreading your SEO equity too thin. I'd group content differently.
7. You have a lot of "thin" content, less than 400 words per page. I'd be looking for ways to beef that up.

Those are just a few things I noticed. You should probably get an independent audit of the site and supporting processes and use it to identify risks and opportunities, and then set priorities for next steps.

[JasonMOZ]

Thanks! I'll have my developer work on fixing some of this. Could you please elaborate on: "Your site architecture is very flat."

[DonnaDuncan]

This is a great post to help with site architecture. Published in 2011 and still relevant today.

Site architecture determines, in part, how your link equity is distributed across the site. Right now you have it spread too thin because the vast majority of indexed pages sit in the root directory. I think you'd be better off grouping pages by related topics, much like you have in your left-hand margin, by author and topic. Read the post and see what you think.

Another thing I though of is when I search for a quote, I tend to type in whatever I can remember of it. For example, if I search for "never give up", brainyquote is the 2nd result I see. They have that specific text in their title tag. I don't see quotery anywhere in my search results. It doesn't have quote text in title tags.

Now in this instance, you could say it's because the actual quote is "never give in" (in vs up), but you could use that common misconception as an opportunity to add more text to the page and increase your chances of ranking.

Another example is a search for "nasty, brutish and short". You guys don't show up anywhere although I do see you have that quote in your inventory.

[Kingof5]

If Google tells you to do something for better SEO, it's unlikely to produce any significant results short-term. You might get some results if you stay at it for years.

I'm not going to endorse any specific tactics, but if you rely on Google for your SEO advice, you're being fooled. Google DOES NOT want people to be able to manipulate their search engine - why would they give you accurate advice on how to do it?

[EcommerceSite]

I think either of those would be better. If you do the change make sure you do your 301s correctly.