New site just launched - would appreciate some feedback!
-
Hi,
Some may have seen me around the forum recently asking a few questions about my website which was being re-vamped. Well its now live.
Would love some actionable advice / constructive criticism.
Website background: It started life as a website displaying dates for UK bank holidays, noticed some good traffic/sharing so decided to open it up to UK occasions. This resulted in more traffic and social sharing so over the last month I have re-built the whole website to be responsive and 'I hope' professional / interesting to visitors.
I also opened it up further into other UK dates such as sporting events and festivals - these categories will gain more pages as well as new categories to come. I'm hoping to turn it into a little UK resource for this type of content.
Thank you.
-
Ive added your idea of links inside table to body content so thanks for that.
Those social buttons are using the addthis service, just styled against the theme of the site. But I see what you mean, im thinking of dropping it altogether and using the sharedcount.com API in a format similar to mashable. It aggregates all social shares into one number and cuts down the button clutter.
Thanks for your help on this, I think the 'true' aim for me is to make my landing pages better than any other I find - I think if I achieve this ill be heading in the right direction.
Ill give it 3 months and share where im at in another post.
-
How important do you think social sharing for SEO is for this type of content?
I honestly don't know. If you are getting a lot of traffic from social sources then it might pay. Right now you are giving massive amount of page space to social sharing. I would simply use a very sleek AddThis.com widget.
Would say A/B testing for more social shares be a high priority?
I would use AddThis.com widget in an obvious spot. I think that the quality and usefulness of your content will be the major driver of social shares if you use an obvious widget.
-
Thanks very much for coming over and making some suggestions.
1. Good point, I will create some anchor points in the table to info lower down page. I see what you mean by 700px down, I wanted to put a little content above it because I didnt want Google crawling it and just finding thin content above the fold - I will have a look at this tho and see if I can find away to get the good stuff higher up.
How important do you think social sharing for SEO is for this type of content? Would say A/B testing for more social shares be a high priority? or forget that just keep adding content?
Thanks.
-
I think that you are off to a good start and have some good content in the Bank Holiday area (I didn't look at others).
If this was my site I would do a couple of things.....
-
On this page http://www.followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays a person must scroll down to see the real content. There is a lot of eyecandy at the top but what people really want is deep. The first bank holiday date is 700 pixels down! I would redesign to lift that up a lot higher.
-
On the bottoms of your pages you have paragraphs that explain the bank holidays. I would link the name of the holiday in the table to those explanations. That will help optimization and allow visitors to BAM... get that info.
Nice work.
-
-
Yeah its a good idea, I think I need a few more pages to make it worth the users time but I could see a basic account login then each page containing a add/remove button which works against the users personalised calendar. Maybe even just a cookie instead of an account but guessing it would be super annoying if that cookie got deleted.
We have something kind of half way, so if you entered rootdomain.co.uk/august you can see pages being combined into a group depending on date - once these pages are full enough (9 pages) we are going to create some functionality for the user to select one and view it.
-
Looks fairly nice, clean design. The calendar-part could use some work though. What about a calendar for the current/coming year(s) where you enter all the dates/events and allow users to just use checkboxes to decide which dates to show on the calendar? Would be much easier to use, as it is now it takes way too much work for a visitor to check the dates for several holidays/events/whatnot.
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
-
My big and famous website is ranking worse than unknown sites, what to do?
I have a major, popular and well-established website in my niche (lil peep merch) (lilpeepmerch.net) in my country, known as the largest, or one of the largest. But even with 12 years and loads of quality content, my website ranks WAAY worse than unknown ones, most of the time not even showing up on the searches at all, or ranking like page 7 in Google, while my rival, who does the same thing I do (and sometimes worse than what I do, like just publishing news when I publish news, and information, in-depth articles) ranks page 1 in Goo. I use Yoast SEO, try to do everything I can (but I'm no developer and have no access to my site codes), but my only good result is for one specific keyword.
Branding | | FitBoyAwesome0 -
Renaming of Link within Site Links - Brand Issues
Hi, We welcome your thoughts on the current problem we are experiencing: When searching for our client's brand name, their previous sponsors name is shown within the Site Links to a very important page. We are keen to change this reference within the Site Link but keep the link itself. We have untaken the following without any change to the words used within this particular Site Link: 1) Removal of previous-sponsors name sitewide: Title tags Alt attribute Anchors Page names Image names 2) Removal of sponsors name from 200+ sister sites: Title tags Alt attribute Anchors Page names Image names 3) Modification of [previous-sponsor + client] within Wikipedia:
Branding | | PhilYarrow
There were 250+ mentions of the sponsor + client within Wikipedia. References have either been deleted or changed to past tense. (Google has been extremely slow at indexing these changes.) 4) Removal of off-site mentions:
After using Advanced Filters within OSE, we extracted all links that included the previous-sponsors name. We filtered these by DA and approached these sites and requested they update their links/on-site content to include the up-to-date name. This included large news organisations and reference sources. We also used Google operators (inurl, inanchor, intitle) to search for references mentions of [previous-sponsor + client]. We used Buzzstream to collate this data and contacted hundreds of sites sorted by DA. 5) We have twice requested demotion of the Site Link via GWT without success. Google clearly see's the Site Link as too important to remove it. The following is useful background information:
The [client + previous-sponsor] worked together for 5+ years. Our client is known by it's own brand, but it was also called in certain arenas as [client + previous-sponsor].
Fresh mentions of [client + previous-sponsor] are frequent. Examples of this are from collectors merchandise and videos that are posted frequently. The page being shown within the Site Links is essential. It cannot be moved. With a PA of mid-70's.
We have changed the Title of the page multiple times, without any change to the Site Link. Thanks
Phil0 -
Is it OK to have two similar business sites share their Social Media (just one FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)?
These two businesses are owned by the same company (industry is event planning). The parent company has been in business 20+ years and caters to a corporate crowd and the more recent company started by the parent caters to consumers (weddings). Would this have any negative seo implications if they share social media accounts? or is this perhaps just more of a strategic issue i gather. And i would gather that its best for each to have their own blog. Would greatly appreciate some insight!Thanks, Christian
Branding | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
'The Guardian' Is Moving to a New Domain
'The Guardian' Is Moving to a New Domain according to this article on Mashable - http://mashable.com/2013/05/24/the-guardian-dot-com/ Interested to see all the thoughts from SEOs to see how you would suggest they could implement this correctly, without dropping traffic / rankings etc...
Branding | | Webrevolve0 -
If someone leaves a review on a website, is there any way to syndicate this out to 3rd party review sites?
a client of mine receives loads and loads of review on their website but few on 3rd party review type sites. i want to be able to push reviews left on client site out to these other sites. is this possible?
Branding | | Christoffa0 -
How do I improve the ranking of a site, which already receives huge volumes of traffic?
I have taken over the SEO campaign for one of our largest clients. They already receive over a million visits a year due to the brand itself. However, I'd like to start targeting some new search terms to diversify the incoming visitors. Any advice on this type of situation, beyond traditional SEO best practices? Thanks in advance!
Branding | | underscorelive0 -
Splitting our main website in Two... What is the fastest way for the new sites to become a brand in Googles eyes.
In a couple weeks our main website (which generates all of the revenue) will be split into two because of a long term branding / identity crisis. So my question is, how can i make sure (besides obvious 301 redirects) that these 2 new fresh urls become a brand as quick as possible in googles eyes? So far i am thinking of things like: press releases, blog posts with brand mentions. I am not ignorant and expect this to happen overnight, but we need a strong foundation to build on, which is why i am asking Anyone got a list / case study / advise so I can really blow it up on launch week? Thanks 🙂
Branding | | Hyrule0 -
New Social Media Site + META Tags for User Profiles
I'm currently in the process of building a social media site and was deciding whether or not to add META descriptions/keywords for individual user profiles. After reviewing Facebook, I noticed that in the META Description field, user profile pages just inherited the values for Facebook (there were no META keywords); and, when I reviewed LinkedIn, there was no META description/keywords at all. After this investigation, I figured it might be a question best addressed to the SEO community. With that, what do you guys think? If you were building a social media site, would you have META description + META keywords for each user's profile? If so, what would be the best way to optimize the individual profiles so they rank highly within the search engines?
Branding | | NiallSmith0