First Website
-
Hi Everyone,
I have just published my first website and was wondering if anybody would like to help me with some hints and tips. This is my first time branching into SEO and could really do with some help. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
The site address is www.theremovalistsguide.com.au which targets the furniture removal industry in Australia.
Thanks for your help.
-
Thank you for your feedback Peter
-
Hi Rob,
I'm not sure any SEO tactic can be described as the best approach. It's really more about following through on a number of elements that all focus attention on a particular web page and your site as a whole being better optimised to be found and indexed by search engines for the customers you are targeting.
That said, it is true that building backlinks to your website is still an important ranking factor in SEO, but then before you do that you need to be sure you are targeting the correct keywords for the pages on your site.
Probably a good way to start doing that is to perform analysis on the websites of your competitors and look at what keywords they are targeting and where they are drawing backlinks from. You can do that using Moz's Open Site Explorer tool. By putting in each of your competitors' websites into that you will see where they are receiving links from (so with some location you can grow some too) and what anchor text they are using which is often an indicator of the keywords they are targeting.
But on all of the above, try to keep in mind that you are optimising your website for your target customers and not search engines. A search engine is just acting as a broker in your relationship with your customer. Try to understand the mind of your customer and what they will be searching for and then check to see how competitive some other keywords may be and what search volumes are available for them.
I hope that helps,
Peter -
Thank you for that Peter, i'll make those changes. The more l read up on SEO,the more l hear that followed links are the best approach to ranking higher in the SERP's. Can you give me any advice on the best approach for this?
Thanks again for the response.
-
Thank you for that.
-
Hi Rob
Congratulations on publishing your first website.
First comment is the site looks very clean and its navigation is very clear. Whilst content is very important for a website, the look and feel of the site needs to engage you to browse and read, which I think your site does. That is an important aspect of SEO because the more people browse and read your site the more Google will take notice and it will help to grow the authority of your website.
In terms of other optimisation of the site, you need to do it systematically and incrementally rather than take a scatter gun approach. A planned approach to what you do will help you to grow your understanding of SEO. The Moz tools are excellent for helping you do that, plus I recommend you read Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO which will give good foundations to your learning.
One thing I would look at changing on your site is how you have structured your Title tags. All of your pages start with your site name: "The Removalists Guide" rather than what the page is about. I would reverse the order so, for example, on the Costs page the title is something like, "How much will it cost to move home? - The Removalists Guide".
Having the main words at the start helps both people and search engines to better understand what the page is about. In deciding on a Title of what the page is about, I would try to get inside the head of the person searching and what they are looking for or the question they are asking. Hence my wording for your costs page of "How much will it cost to move home?" rather than "How much will my move cost?" You need to include the word "Home" as it is important to what your whole website is about.
Similarly, with your home page, make the Title something like, "Helping you choose the right removal company" rather than "Helping you choose the right company" - the right company for what? Whilst I understand your site is about "removalists", and that is fine as your brand name, it's not a word understood necessarily by your potential customers - at least not in my part of the world (UK) it wouldn't be.
So, I hope that gives you a good starter. I am sure you will receive some great tips from others.
All the best to you,
Peter -
Just a couple of minor things I noticed right away that often seem to come up with brand new sites - Your logo and Home link on the top bar.
The logo directs to http://www.theremovalistsguide.com.au/#, and the Home link directs to http://www.theremovalistsguide.com.au/index.html. However, your homepage is simply http://www.theremovalistsguide.com.au
This is basically 3 different versions of your homepage, which you definitely don't want. In Google Analytics, you'll eventually see traffic going through all 3 of these, which you don't want since you're splitting up page authority among all of them.
Start by linking your logo and the home button to http://www.theremovalistsguide.com.au and 301 redirect the /# and /index.html pages there too. The pictures on the left hand side also direct to the /# domain, though I imagine you'll be changing that to a different page soon anyway.
Hope that helped!
-
Rob:
If you haven't done this yet, research the keywords for your business. Make sure you use these keywords in a natural way on the pages of your website. For each page, put your main keyword in the title tag, url and H1 tag. Depending on the website platform you are using, you should be able to do this fairly easy. Make sure that you have keyword specific alt tags on all your images. Get your website listed with all the online local listing directories, especially Google places. Set up Facebook, Twitter, Google plus and Tumblr pages. Work with industry related websites to mention (citations) your business and website.
Keep in mind that all your content on your web pages and social channels need to be engaging and natural. With the launch of hummingbird, it appears that Google is looking more for themed and topic-based web pages, so give the users what you think they are looking for.
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
-
URL structure for am International website with subdirectories
Hello, The company I am working for is launching a new ecommerce website (just a handful of products).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lvet
In the first phase, the website will be English only, but it will be possible to order internationally (20 countries).
In a second phase, new languages and countries will be added. I am wondering what is the best URL structure for launch: Start with a structure similar to website.com/language/content (later on we will add other languages than english) Start with a structure similar to website.com/country/content
3) Start with a structure similar to website.com/country-language/content (at the beginning it will be all website.com/country-en/content) What do you think? Cheers
Luca0 -
Adding videos to a website
Hello! We are producing multiple videos (each about 1-minute long) for a company website. We have decided to use Wistia to host them, in order get the full SEO benefits of links to the videos. I have two questions: 1. Would it definitely be better for SEO to divide up the videos and place them on the various existing pages of the site that are related to the video content, rather than putting all the videos together on a separate video page? 2. If we do put different videos on different pages, would it be a bad idea also to have a video page with all the videos together? Would this be considered duplicate content? Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
Getting links from spammy websites on the same IP
Hey, I'm getting a ton ( 22k) of spammy links from another website which has the same IP address as mine. I've not received any notification from Webmasters but I think I'm getting massively penalized for the same. 1)Should I just go ahead and disavow these links? 2)Are there are other steps with regards to the technical aspects such as Hosting and Domain configurations I should look into to stop this and get ranked properly. 3)Do I need to submit a reconsideration request to Google after I've cleaned up this mess or will I need to wait till the next scrawl? Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | suchde0 -
A First For Me: Client Wants New Website & Completely Updated Content
A client that I worked with on another project has approached me asking if I can handle the transition from his old website to his new website. He already had the new website designed and the URL structure is completely different than the old one. Normally this would not be a problem, just 301 redirect each page to the new page. However, this client has COMPLETELY redone his website from the ground up including navigation, pages and page content. The old website has been around for 8 years and is ranking for some good keywords. The reason he decided to build the new site is because the URL of his old domain is very long and for whatever reason he didn't like it (I'm assuming this would be misspellings of people trying to get back to his website and long email addresses, but he didn't clarify). I have never dealt with such a drastic change before and wanted the SEOMoz community input on the best way to pass authority/link juice from the old domain to the new one. Thanks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bo-Jangles0 -
Backlinks from one website to my 3 websites (hosted in 1 c-block) ?
We are making some linkbuilding. And have very nice backlinks offer. So we are planning to put our 3 websites in it. Our 3 websites are on separate IP, but same C-block. Can it be a red flag for google? Can i put my 3 backlinks in one blog post?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Is it worth paying to add an article to another website?
I have done some research into the types of sites that my competitors have inbound links from and upon closer inspection it appears that in many cases they would have had to pay for this kind of exposure. I already do a lot of guess blogging (for free) in an attempt to get my content out there, but is it worth paying to add my content (with backlinks) to established sites with good Domain Authority or PageRank? I, as I'm sure do a lot of you, have been inundated throughout my SEO career with offers to pay £X for this and £X for that. What is a good rate to pay? Is it dependent on what you expect to get back or is there an industry norm? Happy for general chatter on this as I want to try it but if I am to get the budget from my manager I need to be certain it will pay dividends and is worthwhile.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Why do branded manufacturer websites have multiple pages for their products?
My favorite golf ball is the Srixon Tour Yellow ball. Srixon has a product detail page here (www.srixon.com) AND there's also a product detail page here at shop.srixon.com. Is there any sort of SEO penalty here because there's some duplication? Does the fact the store is a separate subdomain make this more allowable? Many branded manufacturer websites work this way but it just doesn't make sense to me to have two product pages that you have to manage content when you can have just 1 with a call to action. I also work for a branded manufacturer and am considering rebuilding our website from the ground up with the online store and the main/marketing website blended into one to eliminate this duplication. We have this same duplicated marketing/store setup as well. any feedback is greatly appreciated. Confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmmmy0 -
Should I Combine 30 websites into one?
I have a Private health care company that I have just begun consulting for. Currently in addition to the main website serving the whole group, 30 individual sites which are for each of the hospitals in their group. Each has it's own domain. Each site, has practically identical content: something that will be addressed in my initial audits. But should I suggest that they combine all the sites into one domain, providing individual category pages for each hosptial, or am I really going to suggest that each of the 30 sites, create unique content of their own. This means thirty pages of content on "hip replacements" thirty different versions of "our treatement" etc, and bearing in mind they all run off the same CMS, even with different body text, the pages are going to be practically identical. It's a big call either way! The reason they started out with all these sites, is that each hospital is it's own cost centre and whilst the web development team is a centralized resource. They each have their own sites to try and rank indivdually for local searches, naturally as they will each tend to get customers from their own local area. Not every hospital provides the full range of treatments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ultramod0