What is wrong with this site
-
Hello,
I need advice regarding design ( current design as well as any changes ) and seo advice as to what we should do to promote the site. The site in question is -
Thanks
-
Hi Atul.
Shelly offers a great response and gets a thumbs up from me. A few points of feedback to add in addition:
-
the site is currently duplicated. It is available in both the www and non-www URL format. This major issue needs to be addressed
-
The site is social with facebook. Add google+ and twitter as well.
-
Social sharing can be added to each and every "product" which in this case is the papers.
-
For the home page, I dislike seeing index.php. It is not helpful to users nor search engines. Which URL looks nicer to you? http://allkindofessays.com/index.php or http://allkindofessays.com/
-
The GoDaddy SSL certificate is fine, but the "SSL Certificates" text underneath it is totally unnecessary and I would remove it.
-
On your home page the sidebar has "Subjects" and the exact same links and subjects are shared in the main page area. I would suggest one or the other but not both.
-
Shelly mentions a XML sitemap but I would recommend an HTML sitemap for users, not XML. The XML sitemap is great for search engines, not users.
Good luck.
-
-
Atul,
To start with, I would direct you to the following resource;
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
It contains surprisingly good tips for people beginning SEO and some gems for experts alike.
Looking at your site, I would suggest the following;
-
Reduce the number of links on your home page. The big 'blob' of links of the tops looks incredibly spammy on first glance and you need to categorise these. Perhaps under a 'New Essays' category and then maybe just include a few 'featured' new additions at the top. Adding an image and a short description for each of these may also help with the look and feel of the site.
-
Get rid of the ' in FAQ'S at the bottom and replace it with a small s. Not a big one, but it's bad grammar.
-
Your H1 tag is too long. It should concentrate on a particular keyword or brand you are targeting for your home page. Perhaps 'All Kind Of Essays'
-
The alt text for your images could be better utilised. Put some more appropriate and keyword rich alt text.
-
The page is missing a meta description. Although not a big impact on SEO, it's useful to show in the search engines so that users have an idea of what the site is about
-
You need to start building some quality inbound links to the site. The beginners guide above has a good section on this. Make sure the links are high quality, perhaps guest blogging. You could also submit the site once it's cleaned up to some quality directories such as Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web. Avoid spammy directories.
-
Is there an incentive to donate a paper? I can't see one at the moment. Maybe you want to be creative and award users points or something similar to attract paper submissions.
-
There's no text on the home page describing what your site is about. You need to have an informative and eye catching blurb to describe the page. You can then drop the odd keyword in here and use it to hook people in so they don't just bounce straight back off your site.
-
Create an XML sitemap
-
If you want to restrict Google's bots to access certain sections, create a robots.txt file in the root directory.
I would definitely consult the guide at the top of this response, it should help no end; it also contains useful links to other useful articles on how to optimise a page well and build links effectively.
I hope this helps
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site name in page title - leave it or remove it?
Hi all, Recently came across some authority blog (quicksprout to be precise) which stated that apart from main page, contact page, about us and some other generic pages, site name should be removed as it might produce duplicate content. example "How to blog | Example Site name" This mostly is the issue with tags and categories pages as it shows on Moz issues. Is that really a problem and site name should be taken off them? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies1 -
Hit by Panda 4.1 and it couldn't be more wrong!
Hi, I'm scratching my head with this one, I have a website with around 40 pages of unique content produced by a professional copywriter who works magazines and PR agencies - each page has around 750/1000 words - according to Google the reading age is intermediate as you would expect from a good copywriter, I have anchor points jumping around the page to information the user shows an interest in - this happens I have video recording and heat maps. I also receive 100s and on some pages 1000s of social shares from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and G+. I wanted to build a site the way Google wants you to so I have done no link build at all, everything focused onsite so I just spent the last 2 months making the whole site responsive for mobile and tablet devices - I also spent time getting the load time down and 'was' in the process of hooking into a CDN for extra performance. Ive done everything I can to make the site just good and its reflected in the social sharing and natural links from sites such as huffington post. On the 23rd my sites rankings which were solid for over 2 years have crashed, but what's worse is ive been dropped and replaced with sites using the same tactics as the Payday Loan industry, and it seems great favouritism has been given to sites containing Adsense - I can see ranking one page sites with less than 300 words content and 3/4 ad units above the fold and sites which have taken chunks of content off Wikipedia and rank. Thumbs up Google, great job.
On-Page Optimization | | followuk0 -
Google Site Search & SEO benefits
Hi all - I've had a comb through the forums here but can't seem to find any updates on whether there any tangible benefits for using Google Site Search. We're currently exploring using Lucene, Oracle Endeca, & Google Site Search - but from what I've read so far there are no quantifiable benefits for choose Google over any others. Everything I've read is rumor-mill...anybody have experience or references? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | kenno690 -
Should I use nofollow when interlinking large, networked sites?
My company runs a network of very large networked sites, each with thousands of content pages. In our main navigation we are currently not nofollowing links between these networked sites. The links appear on every single page in the top navigation, and there are thousands of pages on each site. I am worried this will look to Google like we have suspiciously received thousands of links from one domain - one link from every page on the domain. Should we be nofollowing these navigation links between the different sites in our network?
On-Page Optimization | | Natasha90040 -
E-Commerce Site - Duplicate Content
We run an e-commerce site with about 250,000 SKUs. Certain items, such as a micro USB car charger, will be applicable to several different phones. Example: http://www.wirelessemporium.com/p-165787-samsung-galaxy-proclaim-illusion-sch-i110-heavy-duty-car-charger.asp http://www.wirelessemporium.com/p-165856-sony-xperia-ion-4g-lte-att-heavy-duty-car-charger.asp As one can imagine with so many items, unique content for each item description page can be a challenge. What would be the best way to address this on a large scale?
On-Page Optimization | | eugeneku0 -
Site structure suggestions/feedback
I asked this on Reddit and got some some decent answers. I'm curious to see what the pro's of SEOmoz think. I've got a lead generation site for forklift parts--liftxparts.com. You can think of it similar to car parts, where we have sections for specific brands (e.x. Toyota forklift parts) and sections for specific categories (e.x. forklift filters). Right now, the site is structured in two main levels: the top level is a dozen or so brands (separate pages for Toyota forklift parts, Clark forklift parts, etc), and then the second level is the categories (separate pages for a dozen or so different categories like forklift filters, forklift engine parts, etc.).If you check out one of the pages, like Clark forklift parts for example (our top landing page)--liftxparts.com/clark-forklift-parts.html, you'll see that on the brand pages (they're all structured the same), we list all the different categories (with links to the same second level category pages) and "search" buttons. All pages point to the same lead capture form.This has been working pretty well--about 90% of visitors end up on our lead capture form, and a high percentage of those convert. We're working on increasing organic traffic now and I'm thinking our structure could use some improvement.Looking at the analytics, there are a lot more impressions for keywords like "clark forklift" than "clark forklift parts". One gap I've uncovered is while our average position, and by extension CTR and traffic, for phrases like "clark forklift parts" is quite good, it's not so good for broader and higher searched terms like "clark forklift". Should we add another level of hierarchy targeted to just general brands? So now we have content for clark forklift parts, but should we add a page for terms like "clark forklift"? Or should we just add some broader content to the existing brand pages? The pages are quite long already, I'm afraid adding more content to the bottom of the page isn't very functional. Our thinking is that we can increase average position for higher searched terms by adding content targeted to those terms. The question is how exactly to go about it and how to work it into our current site structure? Any feedback related to our site structure or even just related ideas about other ways to approach our goal of increasing organic traffic would be very much appreciated! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | wisamabdulla0 -
Good Site Navigation verses Success
I have been experimenting with the number of links on our pages verses the number of hits we get. Success seems to be tied to having hundreds of links on a page verses ease of navigation. We have a research company that sells research on educational topics. Last November I decided to divide our category of literature research topics into 10 different subtopics and redistribute the links to the subtopic pages. The main literature research page had over 800 links on it. It was one of our top performing pages. I was hoping that by spreading the links out in logical categories i could distribute the wealth and have better navigation for the user. Now after 6 months the traffic to that page has dropped 800% and the sub-pages have only gained a very minimal percentage. Overall, the hits in the literature genre have dropped from 560 per month to around 80. Ouch! I thought Google would love this strategy, as it reduced page load time, links on a page and made the navigation logical and easier to see all available options. Not the case. Question is: Should I keep the subpages but go back and put all the links back on the main literature page, putting it back up to 800 links? Should I get rid of the subpages, because the links will all be on the main literature page if I move them? Any advice is appreciated! Karen
On-Page Optimization | | eworld0 -
Canonical Tag for Ecommerce Site
My client has an ecommerce site with over 1,000 products. We have a ton of duplicates because of how their ecommerce system handles product pages. Each time a new product is added, there is a default product page created (/product/12345-product-name.aspx). Each time that product is added to a specific product category, another, separate URL is created (/product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx). The site has over 1,000 duplicates (at least one for each product) because of how the ecommerce system structures URLs. We are unable to have unique content on /products/12345-product-name.aspx and /product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx because both pages pull from the same database. Their webteam informed me that they can't implement canonical tags on individual pages, they must be dynamically added to the site all at once. Thus forcing me to choose all of the default product pages as primary URLs. Both types of URLs are getting indexed and the product URLs that were added to the categories are SEO friendly so I'm leary to eliminate one or the other with a canonical tag or a no index. Suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | DynoSaur0