Optimizing a large mess

[ptdodge]

An agency referred me to a client who wants a proposal for SEO.  The website has been recently completed, but it a complete train wreck.  I just ran a Moz crawl and I'm looking at 303 issues to fix out of a site with 377 pages.  I just downloaded an xml sitemap, hoping to prioritize what needs to be done, however I'm not getting a clear sense of the hierarchy.

In your opinion, what is the best way to attack a project of this size?  I am clear on the client's business goals, so I can work on the most crucial pages first, but I can't leave the rest of the site a mess.  Should I start by gathering for links that have no user value and plan to block them with meta tags?  I'm used to optimizing much smaller sites, so any advice on how to approach this proposal would be much appreciated.  Thank you!

[Lumina]

I don't think anyone can answer this question unless you explain what issues are present on the site, If you can provide that information, then I or someone else may be able to assist you - or at least give you a direction.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I would start by looking at fixing glaring errors and then making sure all best practice is in place, and one of the best places to find this, is in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Should I start by gathering for links that have no user value and plan to block them with meta tags?

Can you explain this a little more please? Do you mean internal or external links? Or do you mean pages?

When it comes down to it, there isn't really a huge difference between smaller and larger sites, but you do have to be mindful of making sure you don't inadvertently block a path or group of pages by noindexing / nofollowing.

You will also find that different SEO's will have different ways they would approach SEO on any site. For example, I like to start any new project with an audit to see what state everything is in.

-Andy

[BlueprintMarketing]

I agree with the other guys you need to give us much more information before we can be of help.

Like Andy said.

Start at the beginning, look what Moz campaign manager has told you it is a remarkable tool that really shows you a lot so dig in. Find out the answers to how to fix whenever the error our issue is.

When you get too technical SEO large sites I am talking 500,000 pages are a lot more complex but if you are able to do this on a 50 page site. Just think of it as that and keep going.

Discover the issues then go through every error in reference http://moz.com/learn/seo

I would recommend checking out distilled.net/U in addition as it can be very helpful if you are trying to troubleshoot but so can Moz

if you have a paying client and you are willing to put the work in why not pass this one off to Yoast he will give you a report telling you what is wrong with your site and how to fix it.

I know that you have enough resources through Moz though to find the information. You need to fix this.

I am interested in seeing the Moz data as well as screaming frog and feed the bot.

To help shed some light on this in addition to what you should already have.

if you want to send a private message with the current crawl data I would be very interested.

To be honest a 377 page website with 300 and some odd issues not "errors" hopefully is not the end of the world.

All the best,

Tom

[ptdodge]

Thanks for your responses, everyone.  Sorry my post was vague.  I should've run that through the meat grinder a few more times before posting.  The problems with the site are many and varied.  Lots of duplicate content pages, duplicate titles, missing metas -- most of which are pretty minor league.  There are tons of pages where the only content is nothing more than a large graphic between the header and footer, with no descriptive alt tag, and this, I believe, is causing the duplicate page issue.  The pages have no h1, h2, etc.  Just graphics.

There are many superfluous pages, as well.  They have a restaurant page, and instead of linking out to those restaurants they link to another internal page that just includes a logo and phone number.  Just to make things interesting, the site is also trying to be bilingual.  They are using a WPML translation plugin and several of the pages are duplicated in French.  I need to dig and see if that is contributing to the crawl errors.

It's amazing to me that this site just launched.  It's one of the worst WP hack jobs I've ever seen.

Now that I've gotten in the dash and seen the menus, I have a better sense of what all these pages are and it's not quite so daunting.  I just need to dig my way out, one page at a time, like you said.  You guys are the best.  Thanks for your help!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Sounds good! Keep us updated with how it goes.

-Andy