Round 3 & still no indexing for varicose veins :-(

[Nightwing]

Greetings from 11 degrees C partly suuny Wetherby

Every so oftem you hit an SEO mission that just consistently hits a brick wall. For the third time i'm investigating why this page:
http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/ fails to even reach the bottom of page 3.

Ive gone back to basic and ran an SEO audit of sorts in an attempt to see if I'd missed anything. Here is the audit:

http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/audit-for-moz.jpg

So my question is please:

From a technical SEO perspective is there anything wrong with this page http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/varicose-veins/what-are-they/  to explain why it does not rank for target term "Varicose Veins"

Thanks in advance,
David

[Nightwing]

Morning Nick,

A big thank you for taking time out to look at this. You've confirmed a vague hunch that the site architecture is inherently jinxed and morre importantly given me hope i can get the dismal ranking sitution out of the mire

Have a great weekend & thank you again

[NCMM]

Hi there David

From looking at the site, some past experience and Matt's responses, my view would be there are a few challenges facing you:

On a prior project, I came to understand that 'phlebology' is one of those highly spammed and abused areas of search that has all sorts of people trying to gain high ranking positions with poor quality sites, so there's probably a higher-than-normal barrier to entry for anyone new or new-ish into the market. Given the potential volumes of traffic out there, neither the spamming nor barrier to entry are that much of a surprise, so you have your work cut out for you!

I don't think the scrolling widget at the footer of your site will be doing you any favours as it links out to separate domains that are immediately redirected, which might look very suspect to search engines, and it's obviously there to create a number of links out. I'd strip them off.

I think you'd be far better to adjust the overall navigation of the site so that users and search engines can clearly flow from the top-level navigation down to the VV page (and others). At the moment the architecture seems somewhat awkwardly arranged and I would recommend re-organising it so there's a flow from the top down that follows the advancing detail of the content e.g.

Home

• Veins

-- Varicose Veins

--- Varicose Veins Sub-Topic

(repeat for all other topics!)

At the least better links in the main content on the Home Page, the For Patients Page and the Veins page down to the VV page would help a great deal. The VV page is presumably one of the most important on the site so the internal link structure should reflect that.

There is nothing on the 'For Patients' or For Specialists pages (http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/for-patients/ & http://www.collegeofphlebology.com/for-specialists-outer/) which will act as a red flag to Google. Those pages should act as high-level content resources, providing links down to lower pages.

Content-wise you're competing against some very high quality pages and I think you'd be best to review those and have a serious conversation with your client to show that (being blunt about it) a relatively short page summarising VV isn't going to have a great chance of really competing with a very high quality page from Patient.co.uk that goes into great detail on the condition, provides simple diagrams and is written by someone with a pretty high profile. I would encourage you to read into what Google is saying - if they are returning long, detailed high-quality pages at the top of the search results, that's what you need to provide to compete.

Link-wise there's a lot to do as you're competing with some of the most authoritative sites on the web - Wikipedia, NHS…without the great quality content you're going to struggle to gain links…chicken and egg as so much of SEO is, but that's where the fun is.

You could do a lot more on the Authorship and 'News' side and I'd recommend: pulling all the news into a 'News' or 'Blog' section that sits right at the top-level of the site architecture; the articles could have better pseudo-meta data e.g. a better by-line, a better date of publication and some categorisation.

On the authorship side, creating a Google+ profile for Mr Mark Whitely and linking the content he has published up to the profile will do you no harm at all. The same would go for anyone else publishing on the site.

Technically (and this might be a temporary blip with our connection) the site seems a bit slow to load, perhaps worth looking into.

In short, there are some navigational issues, there are some content issues, but you have what is the ultimate source of content - surgeons, so with effort there's no reason the site can't do well.

Hope that helps.

[Matt-Williamson]

Ah I see - I personally think having it as a footer link will not help in the way it would as part of your main navigation which for a start would put it above the fold so search engines would give it more weight and also the fact that it will carry across your sites navigation..

Did you see the addition I made to the response above re your homepage?

[Nightwing]

Hi Matt, yes we put a scrolling link nav in the footer of the homepage routing thru to the varicose page.

[Matt-Williamson]

Looking at opensiteexplorer.org your page only has a page authority of 13 and inbound links to your page look few and far between - have you thought about trying to build on this to help with your page ranking?

Have you thought about giving a direct link to varicose veins using this anchor text from your homepage http://www.collegeofphlebology.com because from what I can see getting to the page you are trying to rank for a competitive term it would appear that is several levels down the navigation structure of your site - unless I have missed it at a quick glance?

I would also say that your homepage appears to have a title that is targeting varicose veins and treatments but you don't appear to mention varicose veins in your body text and it isn't a specific link in your navigation which would help...