SEO Optimization is causing rankings to drop
-
The more I improve my site and the more links I try to get it seems that my site is just ranking worse and worse.
Any ideas? domain name: www.musillawfirm.com
Top Keywords wanting to rank for:
Melbourne FL DUI lawyer
Melbourne FL immigration lawyer
cocoa FL DUI lawyer
cocoa FL immigration lawyer
-
Oh - and one last suggestion - just above the two addresses in the bottom area of all pages, have a statement about how you serve Brevard and Collier counties. So something like "The Musil Law Firm has been serving Brevard and Collier counties since XXXX". And have a similar but unique statement to that on your home, About and Contact pages directly in the main content area of each.
-
Mario,
The first thing I would suggest is that every page on the site needs enough unique quality content to set it apart as a truly unique page. there's no hard and fast rule to how much content each page would need, but a general guideline I recommend to clients is between 400 and 1000 words.
As much as it would be ideal to be able to ensure you're found for every single area of practice for every single town you're targeting, it's best to start by optimizing your site for the larger geographic area, and for the two locations you have a physical presence in.
To that end, I would suggest shortening your page Titles to focus on two or at most three word keyword phrases, and including Brevard | Collier FL in each title which allows you to begin to be found for both counties. So for example, your main Criminal Defense page's Title might then be "Criminal Defense Attorneys Brevard | Collier FL".
Next, I'd suggest putting both location addresses in the footer of each page where those "spammy" type links had been. These should be in HTML so search engines can pick them up.
From there, I would encourage you to then get both office locations into Google Place pages as verified listings. A good article on how to do this can be found at http://themilwaukeeseo.com/2010/11/07/google-places-guide/ and another at http://www.sugarrae.com/seo-sphere/how-to-pimp-your-google-places-page-for-better-rankings/
After these are set up, get your listings into Yahoo Local, Bing Local, CitySearch, Yelp, YP.com, Superpages.com, and any relevant directory specific to each county - these would be smaller sites but highly refined because they're dedicated to your locations of choice.
That's a pretty strong start in the right direction.
-
Thank you for the suggestions -
How would you recommend that I target the different geographic locations in my area. My location consists of many small towns right next to each other and I can serve all of them, so I'm trying to figure out a way to target all of them. I was told by a local seo "expert" to setup the separate landing pages. Apparently that won't work.
-
Thank you for the suggestions -
How would you recommend that I target the different geographic locations in my area. My location consists of many small towns right next to each other and I can serve all of them, so I'm trying to figure out a way to target all of them. I was told by a local seo "expert" to setup the separate landing pages. Apparently that won't work.
-
After looking at your site, I have a couple of questions and suggestions about the site in general. Remember, it's not just rankings, it's also visitors and conversions and visitors trusting your site.
-
The latest Open Site Explorer crawl is showing only 13 different domains linking to you, and not all of those are relevant (such as the five-page skylifeguard.com site that links to STD tests, XBox 360 cheats, and a couple of dozen other sites including yours.
-
Remove that pop-up! When i try to view another page on your site (not trying to leave the site), I get a big window that asks me if I'm sure I want to leave the page. It's not helping your users have a positive experience.
-
Is the blog content unique? I'm seeing what looks like the same content on several other blogs. Also, the "223 comments" next to a blog post but the message of comments being closed and no comments being shown is confusing.
-
If you haven't yet, verify the site in Google Webmaster Tools to look there for any messages from Google regarding the site, and to see more information about the site.
-
There have duplicate content within the site. There are twenty pages that appear to be identical, except for the city being targeted.
-
-
Mario,
No offense, but you apparently don't understand SEO best practices.
Example 1: The links in the footer area pointing to each town? That box with all those links is an old-school method of driving SEO value. Nowadays, links in footer areas offer much less ranking weight. When they're all stuffed with the same words, that's even worse because it pretty much waves a red flag saying "spam over here".
Example 2: Links in the footer for various towns - there is so much duplication of content across these pages that they're all harming you, not helping. When a page has mostly the same content as another page, it's a problem. Multiply that by every town linked, it's a nightmare.
Example 3: when I go to one of those and click into the DUI & Criminal Defense link, it doesn't go to a unique services details page with several paragraphs of unique text. Instead, it goes to a page with a small amount of text followed by several links. So pages at this level are nothing more than link pages, and thus offer little value to the overall SEO.
Example 4: http://www.musillawfirm.com/criminal-defense/criminal-mischief/ Look at that page. There's almost no unique content dedicated to that page's topic. What little text is there that's unique is overwhelmed by the duplicate content that exists in the header, sidebar and footer area). Why would search engines consider this page important to someone doing a search?
So before you do any more "optimization", I would highly encourage you to learn what real SEO in 2011 means.
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
-
Are SEO fundamentals accurate or real?
Hi I've been studying about seo for quite a good time. I have learned about linking building, on page optimization, and so on but I in the real word all these fundamentals seems not be followed but google's algorithm and here is an example. On google.com.br (brazilian google) I'm trying to rank for the main keyword "airsoft" and its variation for the website www.qgairsoft.com.br. But the the top 1 os SERP is: http://lojaairsoft.com.br/index.php But this website doesn't follow almost any seo advice: 1. It has almost no backlinks at all 2. It has no good content (both on pages and doesn't have a blog) 3. url's are not user friendly 4. It doesn't have a mobile website 5. It has almost no presence on social media, with almost no interaction 6. It doesn't have H1 7. I doesnt have any "canonical" set 8. It has a lower DA 9. It has a lower PA 10. Moz metrics are lower 11. It is not as old as my target website... 12. .. I think you got the point. And dispite all that the website do better than my website and also better then other websites with theoretically better 'seo'. What is wrong? What I am missing? Does all these principals really matter for ranking?
Link Building | | qgairsoft0 -
Press Releases & Blogs for SEO
Hello, If I put out too many press releases/blog entries out can google penalize the site? Also other than wordpress or blogger are there any other free blogs that are worth while? Can hosting on the main site help also? I was thinking of hosting on the main site but I wasnt sure If I needed to buy a new domain name, or just host it as XXXXXX.com/blog Thank you!
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Question about ranking and links
Hi, Some back ground info first: My DA/PA is 42, the competitors who show up in the search engines for the term I am after have DA/PA 55/60. I have been creating anchor text links which target the term im after through guest blogging usually blogs with DA/PA 40+, I did this consistently with a guest post every 3 days for about a month so that's around 10 guest posts. And I also did some brand name blog comments, but these were no-follow and added sig to some forums. This moved me from page 5 to page 1, position 4. I then stopped and over the last 3 weeks it slipped to position 6 then to position 8. The competition doesn't look to actively target this term looking at the data from opensite explorer there main anchor text is there brand names. Why would I be slipping through the results? Not moaning just want to understand why so I can counter it. I was thinking about going for social signals through a blog to help.
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
High Ranking, Low DA & PA
I have some low competition words that I am trying to rank for, I have a competitor that is using similar words but outranking people with more links DA, and PA. How is this possible? I do see alot of people in our niche buying domain names that match exact keyword searches, with little or know backlinks ranking top 5. Thank You
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Sites Ranked Again - Post Penguin SEO Help
Got destroyed by Penguin because of questionable links. I had most of the links removed and my sites have been restored for the most part - though lower than they previously ranking for keywords. What is the best SEO strategy to move up in rank? Link Building strategy? Is there a penalty for domains that have keywords in them?
Link Building | | veed230 -
How important are directory submissions to my off-page SEO?
Hi Guys, One area of my link building that I carry out is looking for online directories and social bookmarking websites to submit my website to. I do this in order to gain some backlinks to my website. What I want to know is are they really worth my time, and if so, which types would you say are the most important? I have obviously been through many directory lists, both on SEOmoz and on other websites, and also performed various searches to find relevant directories to my website. I just feel that posting up a link that lies deep in a directory online that, more often than not, have very low PA and lots of outbound links will offer very little in terms of SEO. If anything, this could really bring down the quality of my links and be detrimental to my website, right? This is a subject that I have been thinking about for a while and especially with the recent algorithm update from Google and the attack on many web directories that are, lets say, 'not playing by the rules', I'm worried that this will have a negative impact for my website. Let me know your thoughts guys and if you have any tips on how to get higher quality links from these kind of submission then I'm all ears! Matt.
Link Building | | MatthewBarby0 -
Why is my Page Rank 0.
Hi, I am trying to understand why my Page Rank is 0. Many forums say that it is because my site has been blocked by google. Any help with this would be much appreciated. http://davincidrivers.com
Link Building | | MariaPerrone0 -
Website is Dropping in PR
Hey there. I'm new here at our company, and I'm working on SEO for a website we are working on (www.greenthumbdepot.com). We are doing some link-building (forums, articles, blogs, directory submissions, etc) and are currently trying to find some good quality links, as well. After 3 months, the site was on page 15 for the search term "hydroponics nutrients" on Google, and on the first pages of organic search for Bing and Yahoo!. However, looking again, our website has disappeared from the first 50 pages of Google (according to SEOMOZ). From what I can see, the incoming links are not spammy, and the articles we have been submitting have been driving a small amount of traffic to the site. Are we doing something incredibly wrong here? We've changed the meta tags a couple of nights ago. I'm a noob here, so please go easy on me! I'm learning... so thanks for any advice you can give. -jen
Link Building | | RENDEV0