A Begginer. Learning Lots. Need Advice.
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About a month ago I took over a SEO for a small RV company here in Florida. My responsibilities include:
SEO, Adwords, Video Production, Inventory Update, Newsletters, Social Media, Etc.
I feel a little overwhelmed, but we are a small company and we probably won't be hiring more people.
I'm weak in some areas and strong in others. In the SEO area I'm weak. My question is, in the SEO area, where should I be focusing most?
I break my SEO responsibilities into a couple areas:
- Keyword Research (A lot of competition)
- Back-linking
- Social Media
I know there are more. But where should be my main focus, and how should I go about doing it?
Website is http://www.floridaoutdoorsrv.com
I would kind of like some one to give me an idea of where I am, and what should I do next.
SEOMoz has given me a lot of errors and it's little overwhelming.
Thanks in advance for the advice!
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I hear you!
Well they are at the "fore front" of the RV industry. And actually I really like some of what they bring to the table, some of the more obvious things like title tags and meta descriptions I have little control over which is frustrating!
We are supposed to get an update to the site here in a week or two, I'm hoping some of this will be taken care of. But we can't switch right now, because honestly they are probably one of the best in the industry as sad as that sounds and we drop in rankings and it's a big pain everytime we switch companies.
I'm going to look into getting their name taken off of our site. It might be part of the contract, I'm not sure.
I have also been trying to make unique content for each page, but I usually do a little at a time. Any advice I welcome from as I'm a beginner at SEO.
So my take aways from you are:
Unique Title Tags
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One thing that's immediately obvious is that you're having massive problems with your title tags. Every page needs to have a unique title tag, and your title tags should be 55-65 characters long. Rewriting thousands of title tags is going to be a challenge, so prioritize your most important landing pages and do those first.
Duplicate content is a challenge for any e-commerce website. If you have thousands of products on your site, and many of the products are very similar, it would require an amazing amount of time to craft completely unique product descriptions for all of them. Again, focus on your key landing pages.
Also, I don't know how you got hooked up with your web design company, but they have a link to their site in your footer, which is seriously sketchy. Not to mention that their website is a trainwreck. That might explain the CSS problems George mentioned. I would seriously think about working with a different web developer and designer. If your site is poorly constructed, that can cause SEO problems -- to say nothing of user experience and conversion rates.
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Okay, I've added a screen shot of my most common problem.
I just got my guys to do a 301 Redirect from
floridaoutdoorsrv.com/index.php to floridaoutdoorsrv.com
Hope that helps!
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Okay, so I am looking into a redirect for the /index.php page.
I have to work through the CMS company we use, unfortunately!
The article was helpful!
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It would help if you said what errors you're getting. Duplicate content? Title tag issues?
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I suggest taking things one step at a time. Your reports from SEOmoz may include tons of errors, but you can often fix tens or hundreds of these errors with one fix. I see some technical updates you can make to your pages that will help clean up the source code and perhaps make your pages load faster which will help.
A couple quick technical tips:
Clean up the inline CSS used on your pages. Use your external CSS files to hold this information.
Don't use relative URLs if you don't need to. You can fix a number of linking issues by just using absolute URLs.
Here's a helpful post from Paddy Moogan:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/common-technical-seo-problems-and-how-to-solve-them
More to come later. Hope this helps!
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