Starting out on my first site. Feedback and thoughts would be great
-
My first sports site is ready www.sbat.com/tips and www.sbat.com
Content is going in slowly, and signed up for a pro membership on here.
Looking to use this site to build up my SEO knowledge.
We go live tomorrow, but any early thoughts would be great
Will be in and around here alot trying to learn from the Gurus
Gary
-
Best advice: Do it right the first time. What does that mean:
1. Having the sitemap.xml file accurate and ready to be submitted.
2. Not focusing just on Google. Submit your site and links links to all webmasters.
3. Making sure your site is complete, meaning all meta, titles, and urls are all unique and filled out with relevant information. Some of your titles are not specific, such as:
http://www.sbat.com/livescores/ - Page title is Live scores...think of how users will search for your page. A More appropriate title would be "LIve Sports Scores | Live Soccer Scores from Around the World" or something similar.4. Getting rid of duplicate URL's. If you are using a CMS, then you want to make sure you follow this rule: One url to one page of content. View more on this topic here: http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/5-htaccess-rules-to-avoid-duplicate-content
5. Making sure your images and alt text is properly filled out. For example: Dont label images image123.jpg, name them what you want to rank for, such as stl-cardinals-jersey.jpg or something like that. You never know how users will search for content or answers, so optimize as broad as possible.
6. Submit all pages in webmaster tools using "Fetch as google". This allows you to submit individual and sitewide crawls of your site. Helps in getting pages indexed/reindexed faster
7. Plan ahead. Launch of a website then hoping it will rank well is a fast way to not rank. Think of ways to gain additional validation and backlinks. Press releases can be a great way to do this when you are just starting out.That should get you started. 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
-
Redirecting an Entire Site to a Page on Another Site?
So I have a site that I want to shut down http://vowrenewalsmaui.com and redirect to a dedicated Vow Renewals page I am making on this site here: https://simplemauiwedding.net. My main question is: I don't want to lose all the authority of the pages and if I just redirect the site using my domain registrar's 301 redirect it will only redirect the main URL not all of the supporting pages, to my knowledge. How do I not lose all the authority of the supporting pages and still shut down the site and close down my site builder? I know if I leave the site up I can redirect all of the individual pages to corresponding pages on the other site, but I want to be done with it. Just trying to figure out if there is a better way than I know of. The domain is hosted through GoDaddy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
Advice on Getting this site ranking?
Hi there I'm looking to optimise this site for SEO -> Gets about 3,000 visits per day but all from branded searches. Gets virtually no 'keyword searches' It's just a landing page at the moment. Would you recommend I integrate a blog with it, so we can start targeting more long tail keywords (free football game etc) Any thoughts/advice appreciated 🙂 Thanks Howard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HowardK0 -
First link importance in the content
Hi, have you guys an opinion on this point, mentioned by Matt Cutts in 2010 : Matt made a point to mention that users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He said put your most important links at the top of the article. I believe it was Matt hinting to SEOs about this. http://searchengineland.com/key-takeaways-from-googles-matt-cutts-talk-at-pubcon-55457 I've asked this in private and Michael Cottam told me he read a study a year ago that indicated that the link juice passed to other pages diminished the further down the page you go. But he can't find it anymore ! Do you remember this study and have the link ? What is your opinion on Matt's point ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | baptisteplace0 -
Questions about turning my wordpress site into an ecommerce site. Experience needed.
I have a wordpress site that is about a product that is now getting some great traffic. Right now It has affiliate stuff on it. I want to sell my own product so I will be turning this wordpress site into an ecommerce site. I want to redesign it so I am not looking for simple plugins to just add a cart. The part I am really confused about is what to do with my posts and categories? How does that work when turning this site into an ecommerce site? Lets say the site is "hats for adults" My post pages are things like "funny hats for adults", "hats for adult men" etc etc. Would I turn these posts pages into like category pages that have a category of products. Or should I create real categories and have my developer turn those into the ecommerce category pages and then redirect my posts to those categories? Maybe I don't even know what I am talking about. Is this even making sense? This is a small site (5posts and 1 category) and most of the traffic will come from the homepage keywords anyways.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises0 -
Pages un-indexed in my site
My current website www.energyacuity.com has had most pages indexed for more than a year. However, I tried cache a few of the pages, and it looks the only one that is now indexed by Goggle is the homepage. Any thoughts on why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernatj0