SEO NEWBIE!!!

[BeLaRouge]

I am trying to get my website (and business) to the top of the search engines..just like everybody else here.    I have no idea what I am doing and I have to do this myself, because I do not have the extra money to hire somebody to do it for me.

So, my question is...  Where can I go to figure out how to do this?  I don't know some of the "lingo" used.  Like it slow crawled my sites and it wants me to fix a few things and I don't know what it is talking about.

HELP!!!

Becky

[BeLaRouge]

Brice,

Thanks for your reply...  This is where I get lost...  Most of what you said is like a foreign language to me.  Sorry...

A few things that I can answer are:

The Press Section is supposed to be just press photos. Is that a bad idea?

The Client Section... I do need to finish the content part, but I am waiting on my clients which are being slow about it. lol

Everything you said sounds awesome... I am so sorry that I don't understand most of it.    I wish I could afford to get you to fix it all for me.  You sound like you know your stuff.

Do you have a website or email address?

Becky

[Reis_Inc.]

Hi Becky,

Nice, clean site!  Here is my feedback for the BeLa Rouge Agency site (please note that I am assuming you know what keywords you are going after RE: the post above):

• Global Changes
  • Update you title tags, generally placing the most important keywords first (but keeping the titles so that they accurately describe the page the user is on - EX: Theatrical Talent | BeLa Rouge Agency)
  • Specify your meta-description tags (these will show up in google, and should clearly describe your pages).
  • Add more text to the pages on the site.  The text shouldn't be superflous, but at present your site is primarily images, which isn't great for SEO.
  • Edit your image alt tags so that they describe the pictures.
  • Update your URLs so that they are SEO friendly.  EX:  Change "http://www.belarougeagency.com/index.php/our-clients/glenn-pakulak" into "http://www.belarougeagency.com/our-clients/glenn-pakulak"
  • Update your HTACCESS so that urls with a trailing slash automatically direct to a URL without a trailing slash (or use canonical tags).  Your developer will know what this means.
• Homepage
  • Add clear messaging to this page, "Premier talent agency" or something along those lines.  You need to tell your users who you are and what you do in about 3 seconds on your homepage.
  • Provide a call to action.  "Submit Headshots" or "contact us".
  • Pull in sticky (constantantly updating) content.  If you made the press section into a blog and fed that into the homepage, that would work.  You could also put social feeds on the homepage to help with this.
  • Once you have text on the homepage, add interlinking into the internal pages (link anchor text to relevant interior pages of the site).
• Press Section
  • Instead of having only images in this section, create articles with rich content.  Try not to duplicate content that is already on the web, leverage this section as a place to offer compelling, rich content for your users.
• Client Section
  • Finish the incomplete pages in this section.  It's good to have a complete site, this shows that you are a professional company.
  • See if you can get your clients to link to their completed profile pages on your site from their social media channels.
• Talent Section
  • Create landing pages with H1/H2 and supporting text.
  • Optimize this section as the others (more text, interlinking, page titles, descriptions, etc, etc).

You have the bones of a decent site, it just needs to be fleshed out a bit.  Ranking in google doesn't happen on it's own... it takes a lot of work (especially with the new updates to google).  Everything I mentioned above will get you on the right track on your site optimization, but the tricky part is getting natural links (what you need to really kill it in google).  Start updating your site and post again when you would like it checked again.  Once the site is up to snuff, you have your keywords together, etc... I can help direct on link building.

Cheers,

Brice

[BeLaRouge]

beckyteague1.bodybyvi.com - this one is saying:

Issue: Blocked by meta-robots

<form class="report" action="/campaigns/258338/issues" accept-charset="UTF-8" method="get"><label for="issue_id">Show:</label>Blocked by meta-robots</form>

This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.

http://www.belarougeagency.com - this one is saying:

Title Element Too ShortMissing Meta Description TagThanks for taking a look at them for me.  I really want to figure out how to get these at the top of the search engines (esp BeLa Rouge Agency).Becky

[Reis_Inc.]

Hi Becky,

What is the URL for your site, and what is it saying?  Also, I will paste here what I put into another post, and append a few steps at the top.

• Add Google Analytics to your website.
• Sign up for google webmaster tools.
• Sign up for google adwords.
• Perform keyword research.
• Prioritize a portion of your keywords based on high search volume, high relevance to your product/service, and low competition (pick out the best words from your list).
• Create Keyword groups from your priority list (you want to go after 10-15 keywords per landing page.  This can be done through effective keyword grouping).
• Create a landing page / content strategy to accomodate your keyword groups.
• Build the pages (or modify existing pages) accordingly, ensuring that you take in to account all of the onsite optimization techniques (H!/H2 structure, URL structure, interlinking, content relevance, keyword frequency, etc).
• Once you have the pages up, perform some research to determine the best places to get inbound links (I use Open Site Explorer on competitor sites to see where they get links, to start, and PageRank (google chrome plugin) to find a nice list of viable inbound link opportunities.
• Work with the inbound link opportunities and use a SERP tracker to monitor your progress, making modifications to the landing pages or link building campaigns as you go.
• Don't forget conversion optimization!  Test those landing pages out and make sure they are converting for you, if not then try things out like clearer messaging/calls to action, trust factors, etc.

Additionally, your site itself may need work in order to be acceptable for SEO.  If you post your URL, I'll check it out.

Ref.: http://www.seomoz.org/q/i-did-great-keyword-research-but-now-what

[BeLaRouge]

Will do...  Thanks.  Becky

[StreamlineMetrics]

I would suggest starting out with the SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to SEO - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo