Looking to hire an SEO for a Technical Review of my site
-
Hi
I am new to SEO. I am the photographer and blogger behind the photography blog ShootTokyo. I am looking to make sure my site is optimized the best it can be for SEO. My site is a hobby for me but has really grown. I am looking make sure I have best practices implemented. I am not looking for quick fixes or try to cheat the system but to make sure I have a good solid foundation in place for SEO.
I don't have a lot of experience nor a lot of free time so I want to make sure whatever free time I spend on this is really productive. I am looking to initially hire someone to do a technical assessment of my site and identify any fundamental issues I should address first. Once I have the assessment I am looking for advice on putting together a work plan on what I need to do and the best way to approach it. How can I best use the tools Moz is offering me? Which things are higher value that I should work on first, specific to my site? For more technical things I might hire this person to implement them or teach me how to implement them.
If this is your business can you please let me know what your qualifications, experience, a link to your site and give me a range of what you might charge for something like this (you can email me details if you don't want to post here). If this isn't your business but have a recommendation I would love one.
I am Tokyo based so ideally someone either in Asia, Europe or West Coast of US as it makes it easier to connect live if needed.
Thanks
Dave
-
As Egol has said....it's all true...and as he never takes any consulting....he's unavailable
But DO look up Alan on google - and you'll find he's one of the best known, most revered, most reputable audit guys out there...in fact I couldn't even name a peer of his....he's def the one to contact.
-
David,
EGOL has already offered some good guidance. Beyond that though...
Since you've openly posted this request I'll respond accordingly (I do not usually even think about direct pitching in Q&A).
I've been doing internet marketing 20 years, SEO 15. My primary business the past few years is site audits. If you would like to learn more, you can visit my site, where I go into depth about my background and what you can expect from an audit. Pricing is also communicated there.
-
Wow, you do have a lot of fantastic photos of interesting subjects. Why doesn't McDs have those nice burgers at my local restaurant?
This is what I would do if I owned your site. My goal with these would be to attract increasing amounts of traffic.
-
Unlike most photographer sites we see here, you have a nice amount of text content. That is great. My goal would always be to kick it up a little more and say a bit more about each photo or a bit more of an introduction or a closing piece for each page of the site. I know that you took a lot more photos than what are posted here. Maybe comment on why you like each photo, why you selected it, more about what it shows. Every additional diverse word related to the topic on the page has the opportunity to attract more traffic. Place names can be especially valuable.
-
The Archive Pages VS Category Pages. At the top of your blog you have links to archive pages. I think that you would get a lot more browsing by visitors if those were replaced by your category pages. That is my assumption. I would test it to find out if my site gets more pageviews per visitor with categories instead of archives in the top navigation - or you can include both archive and category in the top nav.
I used to include archive pages on my sites but from experience they attracted very little traffic from search. Why? Their title tags did match very many queries in the search engines. You can check your analytics to see if this is true. Are they pulling in traffic from search? In comparison, my category pages pulled in a lot of traffic from search. Also, my archive pages were not viewed very much. So, I removed my archive pages from the site. That directed all of the power that originally went into them into other parts of the site and I believe that elevated the performance of the site overall.
-
Linking between your topic pages. I don't see a lot of linking between the content pages of your site. If you have other pages with related photos, related locations, related topics, etc. you can lift visitor engagement by linking to them. Also, the text links in your content are simply slightly darker font. I would change that to a bright blue and underlined. That shouts the presence of the links and attract attention. That should move more visitors between the pages of your site and up the engagement, maybe up search performance too as google finds more keyword connectivity between your pages, lower bounce rate, higher browser rate.
-
Title tags. In my opinion, your title tags are brief and very often include only very common words such as "Behind the Scenes" and "Lunch in the Clouds". These generally don't perform as well in search as titles with the nouns of products, geography, people, organizations, etc. Consider changing "Lunch in the Clouds" to... "Lunch with Mt. Fuji and Tokyo Through The Clouds". I think it will get more traffic from search. I would do this with lots of the titles if this was my website.
I hope that you find something useful here. I offer this information to be helpful. I am not looking to be hired because I have enough work on my own sites.
-
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
-
Customer Reviews
Is it OK to only get reviews on Google and not on other citation directories? Should I focus on Google+ or Google Places?
Image & Video Optimization | | BobGW0 -
For Local SEO on a business with many locations, should the city be included in the business name?
For a franchised business with ~50 locations spread across the US, should the city be included in the business name when building citations? Fictional example: We have a staffing franchise called 'Hamilton Staffing'. They have 50 locations in the US. They are all called 'Hamilton Staffing'. We need to finalize the correct NAP information so we are consistent in building citations. For the name, should we just use 'Hamilton Staffing' for all of them? Or should we use 'Hamilton Staffing - Chicago' and the like for other locations? It looks like InfoUSA and Axciom are just using 'Hamilton Staffing', whereas Google is using 'Hamilton Staffing Chicago' and the like. Thoughts on this?
Image & Video Optimization | | brianspatterson0 -
Duplicate Video within site
My questions is about duplicate video content. I haven't been able to get a clear understanding from reading the previous threads. We are hosting our videos with Vimeo and embedding into our site. I want to embed them in 2 locations - on our features page with Java (Can be seen here http://simpletexting.com/features/). I also want to embed them in our resource section so that we can link to them directly. I am wondering what the best way to do this for SEO and whether there is a chance that google will penalize us for duplicate content? If leave out the videos on the features page in the XML sitemap, does that address the problem? There are 2 threads I saw on the topic and they have somewhat conflicting opinion from the same person. http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-video-content-question --Duplicate video on the same site is not a problem http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-video-onsite-how-do-you-treat-this-in-sitemap -- Duplicate videos are a problem as google can recognize them as such due to audio wave patterns, video length etc. Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | SimpleTexting0 -
What is the best way to embed a link back to our site in our video embed codes?
Our site has over 100 great videos. We are currently streaming them all from our YouTube channel. I noticed SEOMoz is using http://www.wistia.com and that when I copy and paste a video from SEOMoz that code has a link back to the SEOMoz site in it, which of course is awesome for SEO. My question has several parts: Is this possible to do with an embed code from YouTube? Specifically directed towards SEOMoz: Which of the 3 types of player did you choose, HTML5, Flash or javascript? Why? Is Wistia just creating a video feed, or are they actually hosting your video content too? Our goal is two-fold: 1. We want people who embed our videos to be also embeddding a link back to our site and 2. We want our videos to be found in SERPs and have those direct people to our site instead of our YouTUbe channel. I'd welcome any comments regarding video SEO in this thread. Thanks!
Image & Video Optimization | | danatanseo0 -
Google+Local Reviews have gone? Any ideas?
Hi Since Google switched places to Google+ Local lots of the reviews that were on the listing are no longer showing? A customer of mine brought up the point when visiting the store today, when they are logged into Google they can see their review under Your Activity, however when they are logged out the only review is listed under 1 Review from everyone and the review is no longer being shown? Any ideas on what is going on? Also with local search / places optimisation has the best practice guidelines changed now that is transformed into Google+ Local? If so it would be great to share any links on getting the most out of this new + local service
Image & Video Optimization | | ocelot0 -
Should You Geotag Pages For Local SEO?
If so can where do I insert the geo tag? I want to do this for a landing page in a different city, and i've simply put the Geo tag in this landing page. Is this right? Help, NEWBIE!!!
Image & Video Optimization | | Buzzwords0 -
SEO benefits of linking logo to homepage?
Hello All, It will be helpful if anyone can list the benefits of linking the company logo (on every page of the website) to the home page, and how important it is in terms of internal linking / SEO factors. Thank you.
Image & Video Optimization | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
Local Seo Help!
Hi everyone, Google Places is going to be the death of me. I have asked a few questions on this topic before but nothing seems to work. Here are some of my problems/concerns: It keeps deleting my description!? Have you seen this before? The "more about this place" section has not been updated since I claimed the listing over 3 months ago. The website it lists at the top of that section is our old website address which no longer works. The site was through a site builder and the company will not forward the domain to the new site. Are there any companies or services that can help build a great profile and help increase my rankings? I am starting to think this is over my head. Do I delete the page and start over? Any advice? Please! Company Website: http://www.petmedicalcenter.com Google Places: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&biw=1523&bih=863&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=pet+medical+center+of+las+vegas&fb=1&gl=us&hq=pet+medical+center+of&hnear=0x80beb782a4f57dd1:0x3accd5e6d5b379a3,Las+Vegas,+NV&cid=13431404354265657899&ei=EQolTpqREdSlsQKMlPXXCw&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=placepage-link&resnum=1&ved=0CCMQ4gkwAA FYI: I have added a lot of links between when I signed up for SEOmoz and the linkscape has not be updated in over a month an a half. I really appreciate your help! -Brant
Image & Video Optimization | | PMC-3120870