First Website
-
Hi Everyone,
I have just published my first website and was wondering if anybody would like to help me with some hints and tips. This is my first time branching into SEO and could really do with some help. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
The site address is www.theremovalistsguide.com.au which targets the furniture removal industry in Australia.
Thanks for your help.
-
Thank you for your feedback Peter
-
Hi Rob,
I'm not sure any SEO tactic can be described as the best approach. It's really more about following through on a number of elements that all focus attention on a particular web page and your site as a whole being better optimised to be found and indexed by search engines for the customers you are targeting.
That said, it is true that building backlinks to your website is still an important ranking factor in SEO, but then before you do that you need to be sure you are targeting the correct keywords for the pages on your site.
Probably a good way to start doing that is to perform analysis on the websites of your competitors and look at what keywords they are targeting and where they are drawing backlinks from. You can do that using Moz's Open Site Explorer tool. By putting in each of your competitors' websites into that you will see where they are receiving links from (so with some location you can grow some too) and what anchor text they are using which is often an indicator of the keywords they are targeting.
But on all of the above, try to keep in mind that you are optimising your website for your target customers and not search engines. A search engine is just acting as a broker in your relationship with your customer. Try to understand the mind of your customer and what they will be searching for and then check to see how competitive some other keywords may be and what search volumes are available for them.
I hope that helps,
Peter -
Thank you for that Peter, i'll make those changes. The more l read up on SEO,the more l hear that followed links are the best approach to ranking higher in the SERP's. Can you give me any advice on the best approach for this?
Thanks again for the response.
-
Thank you for that.
-
Hi Rob
Congratulations on publishing your first website.
First comment is the site looks very clean and its navigation is very clear. Whilst content is very important for a website, the look and feel of the site needs to engage you to browse and read, which I think your site does. That is an important aspect of SEO because the more people browse and read your site the more Google will take notice and it will help to grow the authority of your website.
In terms of other optimisation of the site, you need to do it systematically and incrementally rather than take a scatter gun approach. A planned approach to what you do will help you to grow your understanding of SEO. The Moz tools are excellent for helping you do that, plus I recommend you read Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO which will give good foundations to your learning.
One thing I would look at changing on your site is how you have structured your Title tags. All of your pages start with your site name: "The Removalists Guide" rather than what the page is about. I would reverse the order so, for example, on the Costs page the title is something like, "How much will it cost to move home? - The Removalists Guide".
Having the main words at the start helps both people and search engines to better understand what the page is about. In deciding on a Title of what the page is about, I would try to get inside the head of the person searching and what they are looking for or the question they are asking. Hence my wording for your costs page of "How much will it cost to move home?" rather than "How much will my move cost?" You need to include the word "Home" as it is important to what your whole website is about.
Similarly, with your home page, make the Title something like, "Helping you choose the right removal company" rather than "Helping you choose the right company" - the right company for what? Whilst I understand your site is about "removalists", and that is fine as your brand name, it's not a word understood necessarily by your potential customers - at least not in my part of the world (UK) it wouldn't be.
So, I hope that gives you a good starter. I am sure you will receive some great tips from others.
All the best to you,
Peter -
Just a couple of minor things I noticed right away that often seem to come up with brand new sites - Your logo and Home link on the top bar.
The logo directs to http://www.theremovalistsguide.com.au/#, and the Home link directs to http://www.theremovalistsguide.com.au/index.html. However, your homepage is simply http://www.theremovalistsguide.com.au
This is basically 3 different versions of your homepage, which you definitely don't want. In Google Analytics, you'll eventually see traffic going through all 3 of these, which you don't want since you're splitting up page authority among all of them.
Start by linking your logo and the home button to http://www.theremovalistsguide.com.au and 301 redirect the /# and /index.html pages there too. The pictures on the left hand side also direct to the /# domain, though I imagine you'll be changing that to a different page soon anyway.
Hope that helped!
-
Rob:
If you haven't done this yet, research the keywords for your business. Make sure you use these keywords in a natural way on the pages of your website. For each page, put your main keyword in the title tag, url and H1 tag. Depending on the website platform you are using, you should be able to do this fairly easy. Make sure that you have keyword specific alt tags on all your images. Get your website listed with all the online local listing directories, especially Google places. Set up Facebook, Twitter, Google plus and Tumblr pages. Work with industry related websites to mention (citations) your business and website.
Keep in mind that all your content on your web pages and social channels need to be engaging and natural. With the launch of hummingbird, it appears that Google is looking more for themed and topic-based web pages, so give the users what you think they are looking for.
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
-
When I crawl my website I have urls with (#!162738372878) at the end of my urls
When I crawl my website I have urls with (#!162738372878) at the end of my urls. I used screaming frog to look check my website and I seen these. My normal urls are in there too, but each of them have a copy with this strange symbol and number at the end. I used a website builder called homestead to make the website and I seen a bunch of there urls in my crawl as well - http://editor.homestead.com/faq is an example I recently created a new website with their new website builder and transferred it to my old domain. However, I didnt know they didnt offer 301 redirects or canonical tags(learned about those afterwards) and I changed my page names. So they recommended I leave the old website published along with the new website. So if I search my website name on google, sometimes both will show in the results. I just want to sort this all out somehow. My website is www.coastlinetvinstalls.com Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matt160 -
What is the best comments system / plugin for websites
Hi, What is the best comments system / plugin for websites that not harm seo Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut0 -
Google cache from my website give another website
Hello, Some time ago, I already asked a question here because my homepage disappeared from Google for our main keyword. One of the problems that we showing up was the Google cache. If you look to the cache of the website www.conseilfleursdebach.fr, you see that it show the content of www.lesfleursdebach.be. It's both our website, but one is focus on France and the other one on Belgium. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.conseilfleursdebach.fr&oq=cach&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j0j69i60j0l2.1374j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Before, there were flags on the page to go to the other country, but in the meantime I removed all links from the .fr to the .be and opposite. This is ongoing since January. Who has an idea of what can cause this and most of all, what do do? Kind regards, Tine
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TineDL1 -
URL strategy mobile website
Hello everyone, We are facing a challenging decision about where our website (Flash Gaming website) is going. We are in the process of creating html5 games in the same theme of the flash games that we provide to our users. Now our main concern is to decide how to show this new content to the user? Shall we create brand new set of urls such as : http://www.mydomain.com/games/mobile/kids/ Or shall we adapt the main desktop url : http://www.mydomain.com/games/kids/ and show the users two different versions of the page depending on whether they are using a mobile device (so they see a mobile version) or a pc/laptop (so they a see desktop version). Or even redirect people to a sub-domain : http://m.mydomain.com/ The main idea we had is to keep the same url structure, as it seems that google is giving the same search results if you are using a mobile device or not. And creating a new set of urls or even a sub-domain, may involve a lot of work to get those new links to the same PA as the desktop URL that is here and know since a while now. Also the desktop page game should not be accessible to the mobile devices, so should this be redirected (301?) to the mobile homepage of the site? But how google will look at the fact that one url is giving 2 different contents, CSS etc, and also all those redirects might look strange... we are worried that doing so will hurt the page authority and its ranking ... but we are trying to find the best way to combine SEO and user experience. Any input on this will be really appreciated. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drimlike0 -
Is it worth paying to add an article to another website?
I have done some research into the types of sites that my competitors have inbound links from and upon closer inspection it appears that in many cases they would have had to pay for this kind of exposure. I already do a lot of guess blogging (for free) in an attempt to get my content out there, but is it worth paying to add my content (with backlinks) to established sites with good Domain Authority or PageRank? I, as I'm sure do a lot of you, have been inundated throughout my SEO career with offers to pay £X for this and £X for that. What is a good rate to pay? Is it dependent on what you expect to get back or is there an industry norm? Happy for general chatter on this as I want to try it but if I am to get the budget from my manager I need to be certain it will pay dividends and is worthwhile.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Website is not getting indexed in Google! Not sure why?
I just came up with my new blog, its not live yet but the 1<sup>st</sup> landing page is ready, up and running… all is fine but here is the only problem is its not getting indexed in Google and I am not really sure why? .xml sitemap is there Google webmaster and analytics are there Website contain at least that much real social shares that it should get indexed in Google Few Links may be coming from Famous Bloggers and SEOmoz (both sites are very authentic in their respective domains) It’s the 4 day the website is up I don’t think website is not getting indexed in Google just because it contains 1 landing page and a thank you page! Any clue or help will be appreciated. www.setalks.com is the domain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MoosaHemani0 -
Should subdomains be avoided for brand new websites?
When creating a brand new website, will setting it up as a subdomain provide ranking benefits? I understand that if it's an existing domain, it's better to use a subfolder because a subdomain is treated as a different domain. But is there any reason not to start a website with the keyword in the subdomain? For example: keyword.domain.com The SERP's are dominated by websites which contain some variation of the head term, but the disadvantage of doing a similar this is your website looks very similar. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonDavies540 -
Moving wordpress to main website - errors galore
Hi there A while back I asked whether I should move my established blog on wordpress over to my main website http://www.gardenbeet.com. The overwhelming response was to move it. I still have not seen any benefit other than problems (2mths later). Maybe something is Not Quite Right? Here is a list of issues? Any insights would be welcome. I have installed Yeost SEO plugins 1. A blog category (garden art) ended up outranking my main website for the term Garden Art - so I did a 301 on the garden art category - main website has now regained its ranking in the top 3 position (was number 2 before the move). 2. I have removed the categories from the blog as a 301 on the Garden Art catgegory would not make sense to a user. I decided to use tags as a navigational tool instead. I figured that because I have over 500 tags I could not have had the tags out rank my main website for any key term. So far correct. But now i have wanings from SEO moz 500 missing meta tags,(for the tags) - do i really have to write over 500 meta? over 160 long urls and titles - when i commenced the blog I had no idea that Urls and headings were linked in wordpress ( my developer does not think i should rename the urls and use a 301 as I already have a tonne due to a site rebuild) - is it OK to leave the long urls and fix the title only? On wordpress I had bewteen 400-900 users on my blog a day (using wordpress analytics) - now only 200 (using GA) - Yes I now have increased links to my website but have seen no imrpovement on my SERPS - will i see an improvement in my rankings? my wordpress site use to have page rank of 3 -
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GardenBeet0