Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Guys,

I'm quite new to all things website wise. I understand the 'basics' of SEO (i think) and i'm alright with html but my experience stops there.

Since i signed up to SEOMOZ, i've realised the importance of SEO and therefore our company has now employed 'an expert' to help us to go forward who happens to work for our web hosting company.

Throughout the discussions, they strongly emphasised the importance of blogging and having a proper blog setup on our site and so we went along with the suggestion along with the SEO.

Before we began, i went away and redesigned our site updating a lot of the content, the layout etc to basically give them a much better starting point because ultimately it would only benefit us.

They have just started the work this month and to say i'm underwhelmed is an understatement!!

With regards to the blog, as i didn't know what they were planning to do, i created three links at the bottom of our pages which looked like blog posts, a general blog page, and some blog posts which are all simple html pages.

I assumed that they would then go away and create the blog thereselves and then obviously add it to our site. They have just come back now and said to me that as our site doesn't have a CMS, they will have to forward me the weekly posts and i will have to add them to the site myself and post them to our facebook and twitter pages.

I am not particularly impressed with this as this is what we have paid just over £800 for which supposedly included them setting it up and managing it and did not include the SEO which is a lot of money for a small company as ourselves.

What i wanted to know is that from our site as it stands now: http://www.customdesignedcable.co.uk, would it be difficult to include some sort of blog system that would integrate into our pages on the footer and the blog page or would i have to redesign the site through something such as joomla? I have never used joomla and i've only just found out that it exists.

I'm asking on this forum as all of you guys know what your talking about and before i go back to them all guns blazing tomorrow, it would be great to be 'well up' on how difficult it would be and what the easiest ways would be to do it just to give me some ammo because i think they are talking out of there backsides!

Any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated!!

Big Thanks Guys!!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Chris.

Hi Todd,

With regards to SEOMOZ's on page optimisation tools.

Would you suggest that i only include the keywords in the body just the one time or would you suggest that i should go with the minimum of 4 mentions?

Thanks Todd!

Chris.

Hi Todd,

Thank you for the response!

So following on from what you have suggested, would i be better off selecting the three keywords with highest traffic and optimising to them specific keywords?

Thus cutting out quite a lot of the variants?

Would you suggest that i run with that then for the time being and see how we rank/how many conversions we get whilst leaving the site design the same?

I've just loaded up the link, i will read it now!

Thanks again Todd!!

Chris.

Hi Guys,

I'm Chris & i'm a noob to SEO.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for offering your support! It is greatly appreciated!

I work for a small family run company called custom designed cables and we manufacture bespoke cable and bespoke retractable cables.

I posted a couple of days ago about how to move forward with our site.

Our website has been targeting specific keywords and their variants across the relevant pages to somewhat reasonable effect.

Since signing up to SEOMOZ, i have been trying to narrow down the keywords that we target per page and also tried to improve the content on the pages with the help of the on page optimisation tool.

I have a few questions that i would like somebody to help me with please if it isn't to much trouble.

Firstly, for our keywords, there are a lot of variants. For example, we braid cables.

Here are some of the variants of this keyword: cable braid, cable braiding, cable screen, cable screening, cable shielding etc etc.

The way i have gone in the past has been to try and target all of those keywords on the relevant page. Now, writing content has been the issue as whilst trying to write good informative information, squeezing in all of the keywords has been a problem and more than likely affected the readability of the page.

From what i have learnt since i signed up, this is not a good practice and therefore i have tried to narrow it down somewhat yet i don't really want to lose potential customers finding us by only targeting one or two of the keywords. This is a similar situation for most of our keywords on the majority of our pages.

What is the best way to approach this? If i was to write a page per keyword, i don't believe that it would look very good as we could end up with over 100 pages with say 5 or 6 of them talking about the same subject which then leads onto the problem of writing good content. It would be difficult to write good content for pretty much the same thing across such a wide number of pages. If this is the solution though then i would more than happily tackle it.

What would be the best way to move forward?

The next issue that I have is that since i have been modifying the pages with the help of SEOMOZ, the number of enquries that we have received have fell off the charts.

We used to average around 50 enquiries a month from the website and since i have modified the site, i'd say we've had probably 20 since the end of February.

The funny thing is though, we have also averaged around 200 hits more per month since the changes. So the hits have increased yet the enquiries have died.

I was wondering if anybody was willing to take a look at our site: http://www.customdesignedcable.co.uk to give me some general feedback as to why this may be happening and what your overall opinions of the site may be with regards to the layout, look and general feel etc because i am beginning to wonder whether or not the design is what could be causing us to convert so little of our new found visitors.

If anyone could also provide me with actionable feedback with regards to our keyword targeting for our pages that would also really really help!

I am currently considering re-designing the site in it's entirety and i am interested in your opinions on whether or not this would be a good way to go.

Any help that you can give me would be greatly appreciated guys!

Thanks again!

Chris (Just another website/seo noob desperately attempting to avoid the sack)

Hi,

Thanks for the reply!

To be honest putting three keywords on each page isn't something that i have added since i've started with SEOmoz.

We were actually targeting 4,5 and 6 per page before i started doing this

I fully accept your point though but would we not miss out on variations of keyword in a search? Such as cable braid or cable braiding? Or would i be better to just go with two separate pages one for each keyword?

Thanks again!

Hi Guys,

I'm Chris - SEO Noob & appointed website man @ www.customdesignedcable.co.uk

I signed up to SEO moz at the end of February and i have slowly but surely been trying to implement the on-page optimisation suggestions with my selected keywords against the appropriate pages.

Since i have done this, our pages are still ranking but no where near what they were at before.

Out of 70 keywords, we've gone from at least 60+ pages on the first page down to 20+ and the number in the top three has dropped from 55 to 33.

Obviously i'm no seo guru far far from it but all of the changes that have been suggested i have adhered to and the result is the exact opposite of what i was hoping for and expecting.

I'm after some advice as to how to use seomoz to target my keywords to google primarily to get these page rankings back. Should i just upload backup copies of the site?

How would you suggest that i move forward to try and achieve at least similar rankings to what i had previously?

Any help is much appreciated as most of our enquiries come from the internet and it has almost completely dried up these last couple of months.

Thanks Guys!

Chris.

P.S. Would redesigning the site look, layout and feel with the same content negatively affect seo?

Also, as a completely separate question, how come sites with content that is a lot worse than ours rank higher for the same keywords as ours?

Thanks Again

Hi Harald,

I don't think i made myself clear in my description.

The problem lies with the SEOMoz dashboard.

For some reason, it keeps having problems accessing my analytics account and i've had to disconnect it and reconnect it atleast 4 times since last week.

I was asking if this is something that i was causing?

Thanks Harald!

Hey Boys & Girls,

I'd just like to say Hi, currently loving the site and the feedback that i'm now able to receive.

Just a quick question, signed up last Wednesday and connected my Analytics account.

So far, it has had a problem atleast 4 times where i've had to disconnect and re-connect it to my campaign which then erase's the data that it has received.

Is this a common problem or am i doing something incorrectly?

Thanks Guys!!