SEO frustration...is my website too busy?

[gohawks7790]

My real estate website, www.RiverValleyGroup.com, is currently not ranked in the top-50 for any of the keywords that I am currently targeting. I am targeting keywords such as 'Louisville homes', 'homes for sale in Louisville KY', etc....I am starting to think maybe my site needs to be revamped? I'm fairly new to SEO and have no idea how to get on the 1st page of Google for targeted keywords. Please help!

[gohawks7790]

I'm not the business owner and part of my position is to get our website positioned as high as possible but not sure how honestly. Would you care to elaborate on what's wrong with the site? I feel like something is wrong but not really sure what and would love to an expert's point of view.

[EGOL]

Trying to give you an honest reply here.

This website has the potential to be an important source of business to your company.

There is nothing wrong with trying to learn what is needed to fix it yourself and moving forward slowly.

However, in my opinion, this website has a lot of problems and the effort that you are putting into blogging on it right now is a waste of time.

You can choose between these:

A) to continue slowly and waste a lot of time

B) hire a pro to get the site up and running quickly and put your time spent blogging to better use.

Option A is the more expensive of the two, because the lost time could have been spent making money.

[gohawks7790]

Thank you for the helpful response EGOL (I thought I had responded on this post and didn't mean to create a duplicate post...apologies!)

1. So I attempted to clean up the title tags on nearly all of my pages...does it look better to you?

2. Do you feel the design of the website needs to be changed to help SEO?

3. Google Webmaster Tools says that structured data is not detected...is this hurting me SEO efforts?

[MoosaHemani]

EGOL nailed lots of points here so I will quickly go though it again before going further.

-          The title tag is not optimized. You should have to have around 65 characters of a title that that also includes your targeted key terms. Also craft your title in such a way that it pleases humans and not bots only.

-          Meta description tag is not optimized as well. May be Google no more look in to it but still you should use it as a way to increase CTR from organic search. My advice would be to re craft the Meta description tag that encourages real audience to click to the link and get in to your website for more.

-          Keywords tag is present but I don’t think there is any need of this here. Bing might consider this as a signal so having few keywords that you are targeting on the page is a good idea.

-          XML Site Map is also missing

-          Website contain good amount of duplicated content so the advice here is to create a content that is unique, original and focus the targeted audience.

Few other things you can do to get to the first page of Google for your targeted key terms are:

-          Get yourself register to Local Citations and Yellow pages with the consistent NAPs.

-          Make sure you are not getting a link back to some lousy or irrelevant websites. If you are, then you have to clean it up or penguin might attack you.

-          Get some quality links from different relevant websites.

Also, my advice here would be to look for a SEO consultant and get the audit done for your website. Once you will have the problems at the front of you, next thing you need to do is to fix the problems and see how your website is getting better it terms of rankings from your desired key phrases.

Hope this helps!

[EGOL]

If you want to rank for "Louisville Homes".   The very first step is to have a page on your website that has razor optimization for that query.  You want it in the title tag, you want it in the

, and you want it on the page.  Not a lot.  Once each and maybe twice on the page.

You currently have two pages about Louisville.  Their title tags are shotgunning... here is one of them.

<title></span><span>Louisville neighborhoods cities nearby counties | Shop for a Louisville house | find Louisville homes | city information on Louisville Ky homes | Louisville Ky house prices | Louisville Kentucky house | homes Louisville Kentucky | Louisville Ky houses for sale | Louisville Ky homes for sale | Homes for sale Louisville real estate |downtown Louisville condos | Highlands | Lake Forest | Polo Fields | Prospect Ky | Oldham County | Hurstbourne | Springhurst | Waterfront Park Place | Anchorage | Middletown | St Matthews| Florence Ky | New Albany Indiana homes for sale | Jeffersonville Indiana homes for sale | Ft Mitchell homes for sale | Fort Thomas homes for sale | Floyds Knobs homes for sale</span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></title>

Let's make that page a finely crafted arrow with a title tag something like..

<title>Louisville Homes from River Valley Group</title> or something similar.

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I would also decide if I need two websites.  Here is another one... http://www.rivervalleyrealtygroup.com/

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There is a lot of duplicate content on the site.  Could be causing a panda problem.  See here.

This is common on real estate sites but it does cause problems.  Google sees lots of duplicates out there and refuses to show all of them in the search results.

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You could have an unnatural links or a Penguin problem.   The southernindianahomes.wordpress.com site is a platform that has tons of links pointing back at your main site.   Looks manipulative.  On the heidi site the left navigation, a huge one, is nothing more than links pointing back at your main site.

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The site has waaaayyy too many pages.  Google suggests 139,000 pages.  These might be a lot of old listings with a lot of them being duplicated from many other websites.  You might need a way to keep them out of the index and focus on original content for the properties that you control.

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Because this site has a lot of opportunities for improvement, my suggestion is to hire an SEO who can do a review of SEO basics.  But who also knows all about panda, penguin, unnatural links, duplicate content problems... and clean up the main site and the satellite sites so that you are not doing things that will cause problems with google.  Google could be holding this site back for numerous reasons.

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I only work on my own sites.  Just letting you know that I am not recommending hiring someone because I am looking for work.  The site has problems from basic basic level on up.  What I saw above is just from a really quick look.  Digging deeper will probably find a lot more.