Please take a look at the SEO of my site

[BobGW]

Hello,

I was wondering if you guys could analyze my site and give me pointers on how I could improve it's SEO. I'm a health and wealth coach, NLP coach, and life coach in the Boise, Idaho area.

bobweikel.com

Also, any link building advice you can give would be great. Here's my backlink criteria

Age (as old as possible)

A lot of unique content

A clean site

Backlinks going to that site

Facebook followers

Which of course means high search engine rankings

Thanks

[MarkLoud]

Hey Bob,

I dont want to get into the whole link building aspect as this is quite an indepth thing to do, however I thought I might just throw a few on site suggestions.

1. you are using multiple H1 tags and are not using H2. I would fix this

2. Your meta descriptions are too long for the search engines (Google) to pick up without making it a synopsis ending in "...", I would try to get this down to 165 chars so you can control what is being shown in the SERP's

3. Your articles could do with having customer Meta titles and descriptions

This was just what I saw on first glance, I will let you know if I see anything else

Mark

[john4math]

Do you have a blog, a Facebook page, or a twitter account?  I didn't see links to any of these things.  If you're continuing to write articles, that would be a good way to get your content out and build a following.  That's a good way to show that you're a credible source for NLP coaching.

Some of the content doesn't read quite naturally.  For example, if you were speaking, would you ever say Boise and Idaho as much as the bottom paragraph on the home page?  It reads like you're stuffing keywords for Boise, Idaho.  Some of the paragraphs in italics at the bottom of your pages read the same way for other keywords.  These look like they were written soley for SEO.  The keywords you've placed at the top of your home page and some other pages doesn't bother me that much, but it also looks like keyword stuffing to me.

I don't like the title text on your tabs, as when I roll over a tab and there is sub-navigation, the title text appears and covers the first item in the sub-navigation so I can't read it.  For example, roll over "Free 30 Minute Sample Session".

Put alt text on your header image, and any other images on your site.  Alt text should describe the image.  If you want to display text when a user rolls over the image, you can place title text on the image as well.

Strive to keep the site up to date.  Your training sessions page says "$79 if You Register by May 25".

Remove links to pages that don't exist.  For example, if you click "Calendar" in the navigation, and then click the "The Wealthy Mind Information" link, you get to a 404 page.

If you have more testimonials, I always like seeing a page with lots of testimonials so I can see what people are saying.  You have a couple of good ones on your home page.

Your jquery JS files aren't being found on any pages that have a subdirectory.  On the home page, they're found properly at http://bobweikel.com/wp-content/themes/StudioBlue/jquery.min.js and http://bobweikel.com/wp-content/themes/StudioBlue/jquery.cross-slide.js.  On your Free 30 Minute Sample Session page, it's trying to find them at http://bobweikel.com/free-sample-session-2/wp-content/themes/StudioBlue/jquery.min.js and http://bobweikel.com/free-sample-session-2/wp-content/themes/StudioBlue/jquery.cross-slide.js.  It's trying to reference them in the "free-sample-session-2/" directory.  You can change the references to these files from relative to absolute to fix this.  For example, instead of pointing to "/wp-content/themes/StudioBlue/jquery.min.js", point to "http://bobweikel.com/wp-content/themes/StudioBlue/jquery.min.js"

Do you get a lots of newsletter signups?  You might consider having a page for newsletter signups, and using that area on the side of all your pages to have a box to contact you, or a box to sign up for a free 30 minute sample lesson.  This might be a good A/B test to run to see which has the most traction for your site.  Or you might have room to have two boxes on the right there...

The best things I did when starting out was setting up Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, and poking around in those.  Also, using the page inspector in Chrome, or the Firebug add-on in Firefox can tell you a lot about what is happening on a webpage.  That's how I found the jquery errors.

[evolvingSEO]

TITLE TAGS

The ONE on-site small change you could make and possibly yield the best result are the TITLE TAGS.  Home page primarily, but the others too.

Right now, you have:

Life Coach Boise Idaho | NLP Boise Idaho | Hypnosis Boise | Hypnotherapist Boise

Try only targeting 1 keyword and your location. That's it. So maybe:

Life Coach - Boise, ID | Bob Weikel & Associates

Then target the other keywords on other pages.  Traditionally speaking, each keyword you're trying to rank for should have its own page.  So have a page for each one of your services.

You don't need to repeat words so much in the title tags.

For location based businesses, title tags generally work best (in my observation) when they target one keyword, the location, and the company name.

I hope this helps - its the "most bang for the buck" IMO

-Dan

[BobGW]

Hi Dan,

Interesting. I was always taught to focus on 4 keywords per page. Is there an exception for local SEO? It would be nice if you could provide some documentation

[evolvingSEO]

Sure

I think this page on title tags sums it up pretty well.

Note the suggested format: primary keyword - secondary keyword | brand

So the suggestion "Life Coach - Boise, ID | Bob Weikel & Associates" fits this model.

Keyword 1->Life Coach

Keyword 2->Boise, ID

Brand->Bob Weikel & Associates

This format keeps it under the recommended 70 characters, fits in the two primary keywords and brand, keeps it user friendly in the SERPs and displays concise relevancy to the contents of the page.

The thing is, if you have a page that's well written and valuable to the user for each topic/service you provide, its easy to create title tags that fits this model eloquently.

This doesn't mean you can't target more than one keyphrase to a page - there can be other ones in the body of the content of course - synonyms and variations etc.  But pick one version that works best in the title

-Dan