Newbie to SEO and SEOMOZ help
-
Hey everyone i just came across SEOMOZ today, i have been building websites for 3 years now but SEO is something which has always been a scary topic to consider trying to master. I have made a decision to do this in 2012 and i have been looking for a software package which can stear me and teach me. I have been reading the site help today and i feel totally swamped! i have created my campaign but a lot of the results dont make much sense to me and i am unsure of how to fix the errors they found. For instance the crawl diagnostics shows i have 5 4xx client errors. They show me a link to the page where the error is http://www.mydomain.com/category/latest-news/function.require but when i go to see what this is i just find an error 404 not found page.How do i go about removing this error if i have no idea where the problem is? I have started reading SEO User guide and beginers guide and i know it is going to take me a long time to get use to this all, but i am struggling to find the starting point and hope someone can possible help me find the first few steps. Thanks
-
Ok guys so i am exactly a month into my seo career, and i have learned a decent amount, but to be honest i still feel swamped!
Anyway i have no linked up with a friend and we are going to work together for 12 months to teach each other SEO.
There is so much content on this website i don't think i will ever read it all, but i have looked at the 2011 MozCon Video Bundle and id like some advice.
Would these videos help a rookie? or are they more advanced viewing?
-
Hi Stephen,
You are correct in your assumption that SEO is not the kind of thing you should sit and wait on, although there is some of that. For instance, there will be times where you do all you think you need to do or can do for a site and then you will wait for Google to re-cache the site and see how they treat it in the rankings. There is definitely that element to SEO. (Although there are also some things you can do to help your site get noticed faster by Google) But, where you are right now is the learn, learn, learn stage. Like I said in my first comment, I think a couple of weeks of learning is going to prove to be very valuable for you.
The changes you have made just might move you into the top 50. But, keep in mind that up to 73% of all Google searches end in the first five listings and up to 90% never go to page two. So, the ultimate goal is that top 5 on page one. That's where the real magic happens.
I have a feeling that your teachable spirit and your tenacious digging will get you there, Stephen. Don't forget, there are lots of people here on SEOmoz that will be willing to help you along your journey.
All the best, Kirk
-
thanks guys, i actually have been reading about seo now off and on for about 3 months, but i took your comments on board above and have spent the last two days reading those booklets.
I have this 30 day trial so have started playing about with the software. I have so far created a campaign for a restaurant website i recently made and researched keywords which could prove good for their business but are not in to high a competitive field.
I selected three keyword sentences to use on the website and have ran the page optimisation for each. At start i had grade F on all and my site wasnt showing in top 50. I have today worked on this and brought two of the sentences up to a grade A report and one to a grade B. I have set the analysis to run each week from now on to hopefully see growth.
im now about to look into the rest of the link building etc etc. But this part seemed rather simple to implement, but i assume its just not a case of now sitting back and watching the site move up the search engines is it? can i assume that this work alone may get me into the top 50 at least?
Stephen
-
Welcome Stephen.
I agree with kbates, do some homework before jumping in and implementing. The SEOMoz Beginner's Guide is a good one, so focus on that until you start to feel a little more comfortable.
I also like Google's official starter guide: http://bit.ly/w2wa65
In regard to the 4xx client errors, the 404 page IS the error. It's not that there's a problem on the page, it's that the page doesn't load.
You don't want to link to pages that return a 404. You'll want to either fix the problem so the pages load, or remove any links to them. Removing the links is the easiest move if you don't know why the page returns a 404.
-
Hi Stephen,
The first thing I would recommend is that you hold off on performing any SEO stepsuntil you have a little better understanding of SEO. A week or two (or more) of intense reading and asking questions BEFORE you attempt changes to your site will be well worth the wait, IMHO.
Best of luck in your new adventure. SEO is an awesome thing and SEOmoz is a highly respected community with a ton of resources to help you get educated quickly. Everything you need is probably right here.
Read on!
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
-
Menus, Ecommerce & SEO
Hi Our Dev team have updated our website with a new menu structure, they have given us 2 options to choose from. 1st option I think is better for SEO - this will be showing top 8 categories and then subcategories once you hover over category 1. Not much change from our current structure, just a slightly different layout. (I have added an image example of what option1 will look like) 2nd option - is preferred by management - shows all 24 categories & no subcategories. My question is, will removing the current subcategories from the main menu make them lose rankings & make them harder to rank in future? I'm guessing everything will move down a level in the structure and lost page authority... Does anyone have any articles/case studies to prove this point? Any help is much appreciated 🙂 Becky DKzgD
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
SSL for SEO?
To obtain an SEO benefit from an SSL is there any particular type or brand which is recommended or has a track history? It seems you can pay anything between $20 and $???? (For that matter whatever you want to pay!). Any experience gratefully accepted! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
SEO question
Hi there! I'm the SEO manager for 5 Star Loans. I have 2 city pages running. We are running our business in 2 locations: Berkeley, CA & San Jose, CA. For those offices we've created 2 google listings with separate gmail accounts. Berkeley (http://5starloans.com/berkeley/) ranks well in Berkeley in Gmaps and it shows on first page in organic results. However the second city page San Jose (http://5starloans.com/san-jose/) doesn't show in the Gmaps local pack results and also doesn't rank well in organic results. Both of them have authentic backlinks and reviews. It has been a year already and it's high time we knew the problem 🙂 any comment would be helpful. thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moonalev0 -
Technical SEO
Where can I find knowledge of enhanced and technical SEO for all type of websites ( mainly E-Commerce)? Please share some good sources (PDFs, Videos, Checklist etc)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Seo black hat tricks
I have a competitor in the local area. He registered a new domain name. www.orangecountypatentlawfirm.com. It was created back in 11/10 and updated a few months ago on 11/13. My domain is ocpatentlawyer.com. I put my domain and his domain in the open site explorer. The peculiar thing is that my competitors website mirrors identically to my domain. (see attached image) my competitors website rose through the SERP very fast. I never saw it coming. Anyways, I wanted to know if he was using some type of black hat seo trick to hi jack my domain authority to get his own website to rank higher? Plus, if so, does it hurt my ranking? compare.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjd710 -
How can I improve my rankings in Google with help of seomoz
Hey guys, I have joined seomoz today and set up campaigns for my sites. I got reports about keyword rankings, errors, notices etc. But I am still confused about how to use seomoz in order to improve my rankings. My point is does seomoz provides any services for improving position in google or simply seomoz provides only reporting? These reports are good but my ultimate goal to join seomoz is to improve my rankings for my each website and each post. Please help. BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
Corporate pages and SEO help
We own and operate more than two dozen educational related sites. The business team is attempting to standardize some parts of our site hierarchy so that our sitemap.php, about.php, privacy.php and contact.php are all at the root directory. Our sitemap.php is generated by our sitemap.xml files, which are generated from our URLlist.txt files. I need to provide some feedback on this initiative. I'm worried about adding more stand-alone pages to our root directory and as part of a separate optimization in the future I was planning to suggest we group the "privacy", "about" and "contact" pages in a separate folder. We generally try to put our most important pages/directories for SEO in the root as our homepages pass a lot of link juice and have high authority. We do not invest SEO time into optimizing these pages as they're not pages we're trying to rank for, and I've already been looking into even no-following all links to them from our footer, sitemap, etc. I know that adding these "corporate" pages to a site are usually a standard part of the design process but is there any SEO benefit to having them at the root? And along the same lines, is there any SEO harm to having unimportant pages at the root? What do you guys think out there in Moz land?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_edvisors0 -
Web fonts & SEO
Hi everyone ! My question is regarding web fonts. We are currently working on a new design for our website and we're thinking about using web fonts instead of images containing the fonts we'd like to have. I'd like to know if web fonts can affect SEO as they need to be downloaded on the visitor's computers and consequently can slow down the load time of our web pages. If anyone has used web fonts in the past, do you have some specific tips to share ? Thank you in advance for your answers! Jeremie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxxum0