Help optimising this site

[Bristolweb]

Hi

I have been optimising this site http://seakayakdevon.co.uk/ which is a wordpress site

since making  changes to it recently the site is now indexed and appearing among its competitors. trouble is they still are placed higher rn the SE rankings.

i wish to optimise for local search i.e on Google places etc. but the trouble is there is'nt a physical address for the business it is run from various coastal locations. any ideas how i can still market for local search- maps etc.

I have done the following optimisation:

• sitemaps
• title tag,
• description tag
• improved content
• removed duplicate content an blocker pages
• replace image text and replaced with header tag
• improved page names - making them static

any advice of guidance would be greatly appreciated- will the fatc its built in wordpress limit its ability to gain better ranking in the SE?

Thanks

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Bristolweb,

Mark Aspey has given a very helpful response. Essentially, this boils down to the business owner being willing to use his home address as his base of operations from which he heads out to meet clients for their kayak trip. Without an address and local phone number, the business cannot participate in local. With one, he can, and he should definitely take the steps of hiding the address as presumably no transactions take place at his home office.

Do not worry about building the site in WordPress. It's a fine tool for building excellent sites. If the client plans to use the dashboard to build new pages and posts, be sure you've included something like the All-In-One SEO Pack or Yoast's plugin so that he has the ability to write unique title and meta as he adds to the content of the site.

[Nola504]

Hey Bristolweb,

One other thing I would do in addition to Mark's reply is to redirect to the www version of your site. You can preserve a little link juice that way.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Awesome site tho, makes me want to hit the water!

Peace

[ak1lz]

WordPress will not limit its ability to gain rankings.

A Few Google Guidelines for Places;

Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist.

A P.O. box is not considered a physical address.

You also are not allowed to use more than one listing per business.. in example.. spread among the coastal locations you want.

Without a physical address, it is impossible to be on Google places legitimately.

I would just place your business in your home address. Make content specifically for the coastal locations you are interested in marketing too. Sorry but there is not much you can do about the local listing situation and how you would like it to be :[

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Bristolweb-

Nice job on the site. Here are some things you can do to help your ranking:

For local search, if you don't have a physical address, then you can use one of the owners home addresses. verifying and posting the address is a two stage process. The address can be verified by postcard at the owners home, then when you go to add content on the listing that is confirmed, you can hide the address....and remember, you might not even have to hide the address if the product being sold is a non-retail product and people willbe doing eveyrthing online. First things first...get the business verified by postcard.

Second, once it is verified, make sure you utilize the SEO opportunity online. Make sure you put as much keyword rich content on the listing and make sure you have pictures and phone number and the website linked........

Third, do some research on the competitors and find out where they have generated links; (use the opensite explorer tool to identify those links). Then generate some solid content (or have them generate it) and then start doing some link building. There are a bunch of super solid artricles on link building in SEO MOZ and if you want the basic outline, go to their zSEO guide. here is the link        http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Wordpress isn't limiting their SEO value but instead is probably improving their value as it is one of the better CMS's to use for SEO. Make sure you have an SEO plug in installed that will help you generate better SEO (SEO by Yoast is super solid). Make sure you have the XML sitemap correctly created for google and other search engines to use when they crawl the site. Make sure the site has been indexed by all the major search engines.

Good luck.

Mark