Any thoughts?
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I am new to seo and seomoz. Any thoughts on how to get started with the below site:
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That's a pretty broad question!
If you haven't done so, go through everything in the beginner's guide to SEO.
On quick view, I see that you've got your business name as the first part of your title on each page. I usually like to put it near the end, and reserve the beginning for my most important keyword.
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I agree with Dunamis but would like to add a few things I noticed.
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you are missing a canonicalization tag on your pages. You do have issues with duplicate pages. http://www.allianceconcretepumps.com/ and http://allianceconcretepumps.com/ both lead to the same page, which Google will see as duplicate content. You can fix the issue by deciding which version of the page you prefer (the www or non www version) then adding a canonical tag to all pages.
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meta keywords are no longer used by Google. I suggest you remove that line of code.
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Your Alliance Customer Testimonials block is great. When you click on it to play the video, it takes the user to a new page that is completely blank except for the video player. It would be much better to just go ahead and let the video play on your landing page. If you were to move a visitor to another page, at least provide your normal page container (header, footer, etc) along with a button the user can click to navigate to other pages.
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Your Featured Concrete Pump image shows a javascript on mouseover, but when you click on the image nothing happens.
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This looks like a great site for applying SEO. You have some good content to start with.
I'm sure lots of comments will flow in... here are some of my thoughts.
- Markup. I would suggest thinning out the code and getting rid of the table-based layout. Part of good SEO is making sure your page loads nice and fast.
- Home Page Layout. I noticed the Used Pumps button at the top takes you off site. To an affiliated site, I hope? The image area is just fading images, you could replace the Flash there with a javascript equivalent and get the added benefits of adding alt attributes to the images and perhaps even laying some image titles over the tops of the pics for additional key phrases.
- Page Layout. I took a look at the New Concrete Pumps page as an example. In the HTML, you should list the main content area before the sidebar and use CSS to float the sidebar left. You already have heaps of links in the navbar. Coming the this page just looks like more and more links. Moving the sidebar after would help.
- Page Titles. I noticed your Meta Title is <business name="">| New Concrete Pump Trucks, while the anchor text to get there from the home page is New Concrete Pumps, and the page title is Concrete Pumps. This seems like a lost opportunity. You have 80 chars to use up in the title... put your key phrases first and be sure to include the phrase (or variation thereof) in the page title. Is this page about Concrete Pumps or NEW Concrete Pumps?</business>
- Images & Links. Alt attributes help to describe the image they are attached to; Title attributes help to describe the link they are attached to. I'm not really seeing this utilized.
These are just some initial thoughts. Getting the code in shape will be a great foundation to start building your SEO campaign!
-John
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Hi,
Welcome to the wonderful world of SEOmoz!
The site seems to have a decent approach to SEO. Although its always worth reading the beginners guide as mentioned. I'd also agree with Ryan regarding the multiple entrances to the site, although i'd use a 301 to do this rather than canonical. I'd recommend re-directing the site to the www.allianceconcretepumps.com/ version. Have you verified webmaster tools yet? You will find this very use full indeed and can also select in webmaster tools which site version is displayed i.e. the www.allianceconcretepumps.com/.
What I did notice is that some images are missing alt text (the descriptive image text used by screen readers/search engines), one example of this can be found on your home page - the image in the 'May part specials, another is the images in 'featured concrete pmp' and 'testimonials' at the base.
If you view the site as googlebot (download the moz tool bar, you will be able to do this easily once the moz toolbar is installed), then look at the page you can see that some potential seo value is lost by not having the alt text added in. Viewing as google bot will also highlight other potential areas for improvement.
personally, i'd also see your meta description tag as being overly keyword rich, try to make this a little more engaging and descriptive rather than keyword stuffed.
You could also do with building some links with some varied anchor text from a broader range of root domains. Check out some of the blog post on SEOmoz for link building tips.
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Thank you very much for taking the time to comment. I value your input and will try and address some issues. Unfortunately, my hands are tied in terms of access to anything other than titles, descriptions, keywords and alt text and general content. But for me that will be plenty to keep me busy. Thank You! I am trying to soak up as much as I can on these topics, so, I appreciate your help! Dave
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Thank you for checking this out! I have read about the canonicalization tags, I will look into it further and figure out where to put it. I will look at the other items as well. I do appreciate your findings. Thanks again for your time!
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Thank you for checking this out. I will make a list and work at knocking these off one by one. Thanks again, if anything else comes to mind feel free to let me know, I will not be offended! Dave
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Thanks for taking the time to check this out. I willl spend some time going through the SEO guide. Hope I am not to pre mature in communications here, I was just looking for some traction in order to get moving forward. Thanks again for your time and comments. Dave
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