What can this charity site do to improve SEO?
-
Hello wise ones,
We have been working with the charity Volunteers of America to create a new site for their car donation program at carshelpingpeople.org
They are a national charity with extensive local programs run by regional affiliates, so the site is divided into a small national section linked to Regional Affiliate sections. You get to the regional sections either by entering your zip code or clicking on your state in the bottom nav of the national pages. Right now we have developed regional sections for Michigan, Nevada, Maryland, Washington D.C., New Jersey, Delaware and the Philadelphia area.
The site is about 2 1/2 months old, and while our conversion rate is pretty good (7%) our organic search ranking isn't improving as quickly as we'd like to see. Car donation is a very competitive space, and we would appreciate any advice on how to improve the SEO of the site.
Thanks so much.
-
Hey thanks Dan!
That's good advice about the keyword research. We did that and every page of the site is optimized for one or two strong keyword phrases - we chose both high KEI phrases from Wordtracker, and high volume Google search phrases.
We have H tags and image tags on every page as well, and have kept the content at at least 500 words of quality original content on every page we can.
I haven't tested the on page optimization tool at SEO Moz, but will check it out.
I think we employed most best practices for our on page SEO. Our linking is just getting off the ground, though.
- Steve
-
Hi Steve
The best place to begin is keyword research. What are the exact terms you're trying to rank for? Use the adwords keyword tool and SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool to find out what's best to target. Then see how you're ranking for those keywords already, and seek to improve only the ones that;
-
have good amount of search volume (use exact match, not broad)
-
you feel you can rank for fairly easily (then you can move on to harder ones)
-
offer transactional intent - aka the keyword types insinuates a desire to use your services
To optimize:
1. Look at your website technically and make sure it can be crawled by the engines. Run the site through a variety of tools like Xenu Link Slueth, or the SEOmoz crawler in the campaigns, or check google webmaster tools for errors.
2. Optimize your website for those keywords. You can use the on-page optimization tool at SEOmoz.
3. Then look at backlinks, and aim to acquire high value, legitimate links.
You should also check out the beginners guide to seo and the resources here
-Dan
-
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 do elements that are displayed when scrolled impact SEO?
Hi, We are wanting to implement Animate.css and Wowjs on our site and were concerned about the SEO impacts. Basically when the page is loaded, if the element is not within the viewport then the HTML tag (i.e. div tag) have a style="visibility: hidden" and once the element is within the viewport it will change to have style="visibility: visible". Would having the style="visibility: hidden" negatively impact SEO?
Web Design | | KendallHershey0 -
Client Portal and SEO Considerations?
Hi Moz and Moz fans, We are looking to add a client portal to the website. Basically, I haven't found too much on this with regard to SEO. The idea would be that certain parts of the website would be hidden under a pay wall and for subscribers, they would be able to see all content. I am wondering if anyone has any experience with that and what SEO considerations to take into account. One thing we are particularly concerned about is how Google will index the portions of the website behind the pay wall, if at all. Obviously, we would rather that they don't index it, so that people can't find a way to get to the info without paying. I would imagine it would have to do with the type of coding, however, I am not a coding guru, so I am not 100% on that. Anyway, anyone that has any experience in this kind of thing and can comment on this at all, any comment is welcome. Also, any documentation that could be helpful would be welcome too. Thanks
Web Design | | Brian_Dowd0 -
How Progressive Enhancement Will be Helpful for SEO?
We have bundle of webpages where we load the content dynamically with the help of Ajax. Since we, need to implement Ajax crawl scheme for making Google to read those Ajax dynamic content we planned to go with hashbang URL's (!#) by creating HTMl snapshots. But last week Google withdrawn their support on crawling the Ajax crawling scheme we are planning to go with progressive enhancement approach as stated by Google in a press release. So, I just want to know what is meant by progressive enhancement and how we can implement in the case of webpages where we load the content dynamically with the help of Ajax? Please advice me on this.
Web Design | | Prabhu.Sundar1 -
Wordpress Site Structure and H1 Tags
We are working on optimizing a client's website and asked the client's webmaster to change a handful of H1 tags. The webmaster said they could not do to the existing names being pre-set in the design. The website is built in Wordpress. The client has repeating H1 tags due to the 'design'. I have attached a snapshot of the backend. Is there a rule around Wordpress site structure where this doesn't happen? Is it worth changing? If so,what is the best solution. Thank you ahead of time. ylAMvNg.jpg
Web Design | | seoessentials0 -
How do I optimize a site designed to be one scrolling page of content?
Our website uses section ID's as its navigation so all the content is on one page. When you click About Us, the page scrolls down to About Us. Products, the page scrolls to Products section, and etc. I am getting crawl errors for meta descriptions but will this go away once the main domain has this info? We just added the meta keywords and description to the header and since the navigation sections use the same page, I assume it will correct the errors. Any other advice on optimizing for site designs like ours would be great. www.theicecubekit.com is the site. Thanks,
Web Design | | bangbang
Chris0 -
Does page speed worth for SEO?
I always broken my head to try to follow all pagespeed guidelines. I increase my pagespeed significantly, but i didnt saw any effect in my SEO performance. In my keywords, my concorrents are crap on it (I have score of 90 and they are at 60-70).Does google gives importance to it?
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
Flash and SEO
When I search the seomoz site for "flash and seo" I only see older articles, 2008. Is there anything newer you can point me to for a current discussion on the impact on SEO of flash sites?
Web Design | | panderson3210 -
HTML5, semantic web & SEO
HTML5 is supposed to revolutionize the way browsers, web clients and services are supposed to "understand" information on the web. I have been planning on converting my site to HTML5 ever since it went into a working draft last spring, however I wanted to know if upgrading to HTML5 would offer any SEO benefits or if it would actually have a negative effect on how my site is perceived on the web. I guess my real question here is "Do search engines recognize HTML5 sectioning?" Is content found in semantic sections like <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <aside>, treated any different than content inside generic HTML4 containers like, or ? </aside> </nav> </footer> </header>
Web Design | | TahoeMountain400