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
-
How to get stars in my search results?
Is it possible for me to take my Google reviews and show them under my homepage as stars when my page is shown in search results. I provide a service, so I don't have separate product reviews. My homepage is what ranks most in the searches I target. If this is possible, what is the best way to do it technically? I have a wordpress site. Thank you in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | CalicoKitty20001 -
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 -
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 -
How does a keyword get crawled and pointed at a certain page
I was wondering if you can give me some insight on how a keyword that I put on my campaign gets linked to a specific URL on my website by SEOMoz or Google. For example: updating a brick fireplace is my keyword. On the campaign when I am looking at my on page optimization, the URL assigned (or given) to it is my homepage. How is this determined and is there a way around it and or directing it to the correct page? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SammyT0 -
Telephone numbers on page getting classed as 404s by SEOMoz
Hi there, I have a number of clients who have their telephone numbers on their sites (understandably of course!) and SEOmoz is classing them as links and therefore a 404 in the crawl software. The protocol is added in the code so if viewing the page on a mobile you can call the client. Should I be doing anything else? Webmaster does not pick these up as 404s so I am wondering if this is an SEOmoz bug or that I should be adding a no-follow? Thanks jT
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
How do I get this program to see url with www. and with out www the same
The program is showing pages with www. as a differant page from a page with out the www. first, this is showing up as duplicate pages when they are the same page, how do I filter this?
On-Page Optimization | | masterplumbertom0 -
Getting 403 error in forum
Hi all, I am getting 403 error for my site where it is throwing error for the following url http://www.topuniversityforum.in/members/member id/ignore and it is showing 7 similar url for 7 user ids. I want to know how can i resolve it and if it is going to have any negative effect on its ranking.
On-Page Optimization | | akhilendra0 -
Using AJAX to get a meta description to show up
We're unhappy with the meta descriptions google is picking up for our links in SERPs so have started using AJAX to stream in the content google was previously picking up for meta descriptions. This worked and it doesn't seem to have impacted traffic coming to our site, however since the day of that change our bounce rates have gone up significantly, even for pages that we did not push this change to. Is it possible that doing this caused Google to treat our site differently site wide? Is there anything we should be cautious of when doing this? I know the bounce rates could be impacted by users being better prepared by the google meta descriptions, however it doesn't explain what's happening to parts of our site that we didn't do anything to. -Billy
On-Page Optimization | | RealSelf0