Optimizing a large mess
-
An agency referred me to a client who wants a proposal for SEO. The website has been recently completed, but it a complete train wreck. I just ran a Moz crawl and I'm looking at 303 issues to fix out of a site with 377 pages. I just downloaded an xml sitemap, hoping to prioritize what needs to be done, however I'm not getting a clear sense of the hierarchy.
In your opinion, what is the best way to attack a project of this size? I am clear on the client's business goals, so I can work on the most crucial pages first, but I can't leave the rest of the site a mess. Should I start by gathering for links that have no user value and plan to block them with meta tags? I'm used to optimizing much smaller sites, so any advice on how to approach this proposal would be much appreciated. Thank you!
-
Sounds good! Keep us updated with how it goes.
-Andy
-
Thanks for your responses, everyone. Sorry my post was vague. I should've run that through the meat grinder a few more times before posting. The problems with the site are many and varied. Lots of duplicate content pages, duplicate titles, missing metas -- most of which are pretty minor league. There are tons of pages where the only content is nothing more than a large graphic between the header and footer, with no descriptive alt tag, and this, I believe, is causing the duplicate page issue. The pages have no h1, h2, etc. Just graphics.
There are many superfluous pages, as well. They have a restaurant page, and instead of linking out to those restaurants they link to another internal page that just includes a logo and phone number. Just to make things interesting, the site is also trying to be bilingual. They are using a WPML translation plugin and several of the pages are duplicated in French. I need to dig and see if that is contributing to the crawl errors.
It's amazing to me that this site just launched. It's one of the worst WP hack jobs I've ever seen.
Now that I've gotten in the dash and seen the menus, I have a better sense of what all these pages are and it's not quite so daunting. I just need to dig my way out, one page at a time, like you said. You guys are the best. Thanks for your help!
-
I agree with the other guys you need to give us much more information before we can be of help.
Like Andy said.
Start at the beginning, look what Moz campaign manager has told you it is a remarkable tool that really shows you a lot so dig in. Find out the answers to how to fix whenever the error our issue is.
When you get too technical SEO large sites I am talking 500,000 pages are a lot more complex but if you are able to do this on a 50 page site. Just think of it as that and keep going.
Discover the issues then go through every error in reference http://moz.com/learn/seo
I would recommend checking out distilled.net/U in addition as it can be very helpful if you are trying to troubleshoot but so can Moz
if you have a paying client and you are willing to put the work in why not pass this one off to Yoast he will give you a report telling you what is wrong with your site and how to fix it.
I know that you have enough resources through Moz though to find the information. You need to fix this.
I am interested in seeing the Moz data as well as screaming frog and feed the bot.
To help shed some light on this in addition to what you should already have.
if you want to send a private message with the current crawl data I would be very interested.
To be honest a 377 page website with 300 and some odd issues not "errors" hopefully is not the end of the world.
All the best,
Tom
-
I would start by looking at fixing glaring errors and then making sure all best practice is in place, and one of the best places to find this, is in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Should I start by gathering for links that have no user value and plan to block them with meta tags?
Can you explain this a little more please? Do you mean internal or external links? Or do you mean pages?
When it comes down to it, there isn't really a huge difference between smaller and larger sites, but you do have to be mindful of making sure you don't inadvertently block a path or group of pages by noindexing / nofollowing.
You will also find that different SEO's will have different ways they would approach SEO on any site. For example, I like to start any new project with an audit to see what state everything is in.
-Andy
-
I don't think anyone can answer this question unless you explain what issues are present on the site, If you can provide that information, then I or someone else may be able to assist you - or at least give you a direction.
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
-
On-Page Optimization on a service based Site?
Respected members, my question is that if I Wanna run a website that provide service like olansi do, But i need to know the On -page effect like How Can I make a plan to secure my position against my Service based competitor site?
On-Page Optimization | | younus_7831 -
Help finding someone to handle crashing site/site optimization.
I need someone who can handle website/WordPress issues as they come up.For example, my site has gone down 4 times tonight, and my host can't figure it out. They also keep recommending that I optimize my site, but I don't know how. I need a go-to web person for this sort of thing. Any recommendations?
On-Page Optimization | | cbrant7770 -
Optimizing a product category vs. a bespoke content page
Hi there, I work for a furniture retailer in the UK and I have a question about ranking for search phrases. Say I'm looking to rank for the keyword phrases: 'Tempur mattress' and 'Tempur mattress liverpool' and I have a category at: www.mysite.co.uk/tempur/ which list all of our mattresses, would I be better trying to optimize this page for those key phrases or would I be better generating a new page, say, www.mysite.co.uk/tempur-mattress-liverpool.html Thank you for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
Optimize CSS Delivery
Hi, I am loading 3 CSS files here: http://www.viatrading.com/wholesale/9/Domestics.html PageSpeed is telling me I "should fix" the delivery of these CSS Files (see image). I read https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/OptimizeCSSDelivery , but can't figure out which is my case. The CSS are big, but even if I split them in several, all CSS files are still showing up as render-blocking. I moved them to the header/footer, but the message is still appearing. Do you know what might be the problem and how to solve it? Thank you, Screen_Shot_2015_09_10_at_4_44_23_PM.png
On-Page Optimization | | viatrading10 -
Content Optimization - Multiple Keywords or One?
I have three web pages I'm trying to increase traffic to (and thus conversions). I've carefully researched and selected 15 keywords. There's about 3-5 keyword groupings that are similar enough so I can optimize each page with all of them (for example - autobody, dent repair, scratch repair). I see a couple ways to approach optimizing the pages: select one main keyword to put in the header and support it with the other 2-4 keywords in the content body select 3-5 keywords and evenly optimize the page for each (several headers and sections about each) pick one keyword per page I'm constrained to three web pages since it's a clients website. Otherwise I'm guessing the best method would be to create content for each keyword in something like a blog. I basically see the pros and cons as this: including multiple closely related keywords on a page will bring more traffic and thus overal conversions; however it will take longer to rank for those keywords. Focusing the content on one keyword will increase conversion rate and take a shorter time to rank that page since it's more focused, but less overall traffic and conversions. With the page number constraint and increasing conversions being the goal of optimization, what are your thoughts on the pros and cons of each choice?
On-Page Optimization | | reidsteven750 -
On Page Optimization not updating after SSL change
Last week we changed our URLs to be only HTTPS (they were a mixture of both for a couple of weeks). We did this by adding a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. However, the On Page Optimization is now showing the same URL/Keyword twice for a few of our pages. One has a grade A, one has a grade B. The grade B complains about "Rel Canonical" not matching, but the other doesn't. This is pretty confusing - should it not have crawled the pages and noticed the 301 redirects and combined the entries or removed the HTTP ones?
On-Page Optimization | | RitchieF19800 -
Local SEO Title-Tag Optimization
Hi Everyone! A bit of a greenhorn SEO here, and I'm trying to learn a bit more about some of the best practices in local SEO. I'm wondering if anyone can help me with the following scenario: Business: Dental Care & Surgery Location: Springfield IN Name: Springfield Dental Care Experts (example) Website: 18 content pages, pages dedicated to each service Since there are 18 pages to work with, there are plenty of places for us to mix-up the title tags. However, I am still unclear as to what the best way would be to do this. I understand that the Geo-modifiers should go at the front, and that the brand name is considered optional. Would tags such as this make sense? Springfield IN Dentist | Springfield Dental Care Experts Nearby town Mountainview IN Dental Care | Springfield Dental Care Experts Last question: The website has pages for each of the services offered by the dentist, ex: Dental Cleanings, Consultations, Fillings, Surgery, etc. Should each of the pages be included in the title tag? Springfield IN Dentist | Springfield Dental Care Experts - Dental Surgery My concern is that buy adding this, the title tag would be too long. Thank you for taking the time to read and respond!
On-Page Optimization | | kbaltzell0 -
Optimization for allready indexed web without seo before
Hi, I have some questions. I have 2 Joomla web sites who needs seo optimization, but there are allready indexed in Google: 1/ Will rel=canonical fix the problem for duplicated content for allready indexed pages? I have read different solutions but I haven't tested them all. I puted rel=canonical on the first web site that I started to optimize, but Google WMT shows me very small or not at all decreasing of duplicated content. Would it need more time? 2/How can I show search engines to craw and change the cache for a page that is allready indexed faster than 1-2 months? 3/ What is your opinion and experience? With done changes for one website for a low competition keyword /the web site was not optimized for search engines before/ how much time will it take usually for Google to see the changes made and change the ranking for some keyword?
On-Page Optimization | | vladokan0