How To Get Started?
-
I am very new to this website and signed up within the month. I have seen the crawled results of my website www.davidwaddleton.com but I just don't know what to do with the information.
For example I get duplicates/errors/suggestions and I look at them but don't know how to fix them.
Can you please recommend how I can move forward as a newbie? I feel overwhelmed with the amount of errors and duplicates. There are hundreds!
-
For figuring out the reports, be sure to go to the help hub that Mike mentioned at http://www.seomoz.org/help. We have a lot of details there about what each of the notices and warnings mean.
Do feel free to come here and ask questions. Welcome to SEOmoz!
-
Hi David
Without knowing what your errors are, it's hard to say but, I notice you have a wordpress site, so I'll offer another add-on suggestion to the other excellent suggestions above.
Some of your errors might be 404 errors - there is a great plugin called redirection. If you have 404 errors, work through each one and redirect it to an appropriate page.
404s usually happen when you change the url, or remove a page. Google has indexed those pages/urls and if they are no longer available Google will return a 404 error page. With redirection you can point the old page to a new, appropriate page with a 301 redirect.
Hope that helps.
-
Hi David,
Read the Beginners Guide to SEO.
That will should answer 97% of your questions.
Then read the SEOMoz Help for 2% more.
And finally ask very specific questions here for the final 1%.
Good luck.
Mike
-
Hi David! Welcome to Moz!
I usually start with fixing duplicate content issues. Once these are fixed it gives you a better perspective of where you actually stand because duplicate content issues can inflate the number of errors/warnings you see.
Best way to fix duplicate content issues is to make sure you have one URL for each piece of content and use rel=canonical tags if needed. It looks like you have WordPress with the Yoast plugin installed so that makes things a lot easier.
Hope this helps!
Zach
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
-
Does the content in Joomla modules get indexed
Hello Moz, we are using Joomla to build websites. In Joomla you can put content in modules. What we would like to know if would search engines index content in modules, as it does with content attached to menu links? Thanks Ian
On-Page Optimization | | Substance-create0 -
Will German meta data help an English USA-based site get found in Germany?
I think I already know the answer to this, but I'd love a second opinion. If you add German meta data to some web pages will it help those pages turn up in search results in Germany?I'm assuming not. It's an English, USA based site, doing well here for English searches - and I don't want to mess that up. A German site is being planned, but this client is hoping the English site could be found in the meantime. ~Caro
On-Page Optimization | | Caro-O0 -
Getting the Titles and Headings Right on Product Pages. Userbility vs SEO
Hey Mozzers, I am optimising a chaotic section of the site including many similar products. Writing unique content etc. The titles and urls were all over the place so my first job was to tidy them up so I could make some sense of the situation, especially as sometimes they didn't even match! I should point out were on Magento, so product name = Both the Heading and Title of the page, the meta title can be set separately. When i refer to title I mean both <title>and <h1></strong><br /><br />Before they existed as such<br />URL: domain.com/200-x-0-5-g-rs-232-balance.html<br />TItle: PC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br /><br />This format was (Product Code, Capacities, Resolutions, Accuracy, Product Title)<br /><br />The issue was all 60 products in a page followed this format. Navigating through the page was a nightmare and was just a jumble of numbers and highly confusing even to me who learnt what they all mean, especially when you had 8 products from the same range you got presented with<br /><br />APC-1234 200 x 0.5g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1235 500 x 1g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1236 1000 x 2g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1238 5000 x 10g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1239 10000 x 15g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1210 20000 x 25g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance<br />APC-1211 50000 x 50g x 0.3 RS-232 Balance</p> <p>I changed them to something more user friendly.<br /><br />URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />This has seen the following benefits<br />- URL is now clear and means something to the user<br />- Product titles are easy to navigate and the page is more pleasing to the eye<br />- The jumble of numbers in the title are now all labelled and shown below each product listing in bullet point so the user can see the basic spec of a product without having to decipher any titles<br /><br />Upon reflection I has a couple of concerns I was hoping you could discuss, I am wondering if I have made the titles too simple.<br />1) I have no product code in the title<br />We have our own products manufactured and sell existing brands with their own product codes. Some of these can be lengthy. Adding them makes them hard to the eye and the page looked cramped.<br /><br />The codes are listed beneath each product title on category pages and on a list on the actual product page, but no where in the titles. <br /><br />2)None of our products have a brand listed in the title<br />None of the products on the site had brand names in anything but the images when i started and as such it snuck under my radar. But should i pre-fix all titles with a brand name?<br /><br />Should </p> <p>URL: domain.com/200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: 200g Precision Balance</p> <p>become</p> <p>URL: domain.com/BRAND1-200g-precision-balance.html<br />Title: BRAND1 200g Precision Balance<br /><br />My instinct tells me to change things to include brands as its useful to the customer and should have an SEO benefit, but to leave out product codes as they are accessible to the customer where they are now and dont make things messy and unreadable.<br /><br />As always, thanks for the input!</p></title>
On-Page Optimization | | ATP0 -
Where would I start with optimizing my site
I am new here and am would love some constructive community feedback about a website I am working on:
On-Page Optimization | | paddyaran
Things like tags, serps, content, loading time, design, functionality, and anything that will improve.... The site is www.aranislands.ie Thanks!!0 -
I want to improve our client's website structure, so he gets more traffic locally. What advice do you have ?
We want to "revamp" our client's website, by improving the overall looking (content, images, structure). Our client is a small retail business but wants to have more traffic. What advice can you give me ?
On-Page Optimization | | marketingmedia.ca0 -
Is it impossible to get out of Panda? Matt Cutts says if you fix the problem you "pop back" but if so why are their so few examples?
In this video matt cutts says: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IzUuhTyvJk about 15 "once we re-run our data (every few weeks) if we determine your site is of higher quality you would pop back out of being affected" Panda has effected thousands of sites and a lot of smart people have been working on the problem for about 2 years since the first panda was launched, but I can only find 1 site that has "popped back" to their original rankings. e.g. http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-two-years-later-losers-still-losing-one-real-recovery-149491 Apart from Motortrend.com I can't find any sites (of reasonable size) / case studies of sites that have solved the panda problem, and were definitely hit by panda. Which doesn't feel right, some people have deleted a ton of pages, redesigned their site, improved their content, etc with no success. Therefore is it a pointless exercise? Therefore, is it better to simply give up and start a new site?
On-Page Optimization | | julianhearn1 -
I have home tab in 2 menu's which calls the same hompage article. How do I get over this
I am getting duplicate content for this article. I need 'home' tab on two menus.
On-Page Optimization | | rajendraksh0 -
Reducing the site's header to get more content Above the Fold
The user bizzer posted the following question on the post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guide-to-ads😞 "I've got my above the fold area very light on advertising since Panda. But reading #4 about the "template" makes me wonder if I should go further and reduce the height of my header area and maybe even remove one of my two sidebars, so as to increase the content-to-template ratio above the fold. Make sense?" What do you think?
On-Page Optimization | | rpedri0