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Do you know SEO?

28 Oct 2015 15:40 #44828 by fats
Do you know SEO? was created by fats
Hi all,

Lfan and I are up to our collective armpits in work both here and in real life and we are looking for help with improving the site's search engine position, so what we are looking for is someone who knows SEO techniques and can help and assist us in improving our standings with google et all.

We are looking for someone to help us work out where we are going wrong, where we need to improve and what we are going well, the role will be an advisor in the short term, but if things work out we will look at changing the role to something more structured.

If interested either PM me or reply to this thread.

Fats

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29 Oct 2015 23:31 #44857 by pocketfull
Replied by pocketfull on topic Do you know SEO?
I'm already plenty busy myself but I can offer a little advice based on my own experience. It's not my main area of specialty, but it is part of my day job. That said, what follows is just my two cents - I don't claim to be a SEO hero.

Broadly speaking, there are two main parts to improving a site's ranking in Google (and other search engines) and how they relate to SWM:
Point 1. How SWM is linked to from elsewhere on the web, how many links it has and from which other websites
Point 2. How the SWM site and its pages are optimised

Point 1 can be a bit of a minefield in my experience, and it's also quite a big topic. The obvious thing would seem to get as many links as possible from everywhere that you can, but if you aren't careful Google will see this as you trying to cheat them to get up the rankings. Google themselves - to paraphrase - recommend getting your content right and then links from elsewhere will "organically" follow. I would advise you to follow that rule of thumb and err on the side of caution because Google are very good at identifying spammy links and have been known to penalise sites for having spammy links.

As for Point 2. There are 3 things you could do, in descending order of how much effect they would likely have:
1. The HTML <title> tags are important for SEO. I notice currently on SWM, each page's <title> tag seems to begin with: "SuperWomenMania.com - SuperWomenMania - " and then is followed by page-specific info. It would be better if the page-specific info came first. This is because earlier items are taken into account more. One notable exception would be on the home page, which should start with SuperWomenMania, because that is the keyword you should target, i.e. when people type in "SuperWomenMania" into Google, people should not only see your site first, they should see your home page first. Further to this, I would personally try having "Super Women Mania" as part of the <title> tag too on the home page to see if the site will rank more highly if people type in just "super women".
2. I notice the site doesn't currently have META description info in the code. In the Google results, this is the small blurb that is shown under the page titles to try to coax potential visitors to the site (although it is not always shown, sometimes Google shows other relevant info from the page in question). It is worth noting however that Google don't rank directly from any keywords in the META description, or it only has a small effect. If a plugin for the CMS could set the beginning of a forum post or the first text on each page as the META description, this would probably work well.
3. You could look into preparing an XML sitemap for Google and submitting it to them. This is basically a list of all the pages of the website. Ideally, it would be good to get a plugin so this is done directly from the CMS. So when new pages are added (for example, a new story or forum post), Google will know before having crawled the site itself. This may help the site rank higher for breaking new perhaps.

A lot of site traffic will most likely arrive from the "long tail". This means that rather than 90% of potential visitors typing in "Super Women" and hopefully arriving to the site, it's much more likely 90% of potential visitors will type in lots of wild and wonderful search queries of all shapes and sizes, and therefore only 10% will be from obvious keywords and phrases. Here's an image that illustrates what the long tail is (and probably better than I just have): www.quicksprout.com/images/longtail.png ... The good news here is that the long tail has less competition so it is easier to rank more highly for the long tail.

Apologies for the stream-of-consciousness mind dump. Hopefully some of that info is useful.

My DeviantArt: j1a2c3k4.deviantart.com/
A simulator which works out what happens when a boxer fights a super girl: shefightshimwhowins.github.io/
The following user(s) said Thank You: lfan, fats

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