How To Get Started?

[dwaddsy]

I am very new to this website and signed up within the month. I have seen the crawled results of my website www.davidwaddleton.com but I just don't know what to do with the information.

For example I get duplicates/errors/suggestions and I look at them but don't know how to fix them.

Can you please recommend how I can move forward as a newbie? I feel overwhelmed with the amount of errors and duplicates. There are hundreds!

[KeriMorgret]

For figuring out the reports, be sure to go to the help hub that Mike mentioned at http://www.seomoz.org/help. We have a lot of details there about what each of the notices and warnings mean.

Do feel free to come here and ask questions. Welcome to SEOmoz!

[littlesthobo]

Hi David

Without knowing what your errors are, it's hard to say but, I notice you have a wordpress site, so I'll offer another add-on suggestion to the other excellent suggestions above.

Some of your errors might be 404 errors - there is a great plugin called redirection.  If you have 404 errors, work through each one and redirect it to an appropriate page.

404s usually happen when you change the url, or remove a page.  Google has indexed those pages/urls and if they are no longer available Google will return a 404 error page.  With redirection you can point the old page to a new, appropriate page with a 301 redirect.

Hope that helps.

[Mike.Goracke]

Hi David,

Read the Beginners Guide to SEO.

That will should answer 97% of your questions.

Then read the SEOMoz Help for 2% more.

And finally ask very specific questions here for the final 1%.

Good luck.

Mike

[ParagonDigital]

Hi David! Welcome to Moz!

I usually start with fixing duplicate content issues. Once these are fixed it gives you a better perspective of where you actually stand because duplicate content issues can inflate the number of errors/warnings you see.

Best way to fix duplicate content issues is to make sure you have one URL for each piece of content and use rel=canonical tags if needed. It looks like you have WordPress with the Yoast plugin installed so that makes things a lot easier.

Hope this helps!

Zach