Hey all, thanks for this great resource! Being new to the SEO game, I am really getting beat down by some other sites out there. I can't figure it out either, some are just REALLY bad. My goal is to be first page on google for key words: Shoe Repair. We are currently about 100th, which is still a step up from where we were about 6 months ago when I started making changes to the site... but still light years from the target. I did practice a few "gray" practices when I started, but that was before I really knew better... Site age is about 5 years old, and I am getting links.. What am I doing wrong? www.hoovershoerepair.com Any tips would be HUGELY appreciated. Thank you.
Hi i have just learned yesterday something. Google cant recognise keyword in the url unless, they are separated with hypens. I see that your site has some PR. If i were you i would register hoover-shoe-repair.com TLD. I think that, using the keyphrases in the url will really help optimizing for SEs. Fewer backlinks will be need for the same solution. In this case you will have to solve the duplicated content problem. Otherwise, i would shorten the title tag "Hoover Shoe Repair" would be enough, with the description containing "repairing shoes for over 25 years!". I would place the keyphrases on anchor text of the incoming links. Using keywords in headings <h1 - h3> would help improve rankings. And redesigning the site without tables will also help.
That's not true AT ALL. My main competitor gets a lot of "link juice" off having our best keywords AS his URL, without hyphens.
So, tables hurt page rankings? Great... I know tables, don't know CSS. Do broken links hurt you a lot on site wide ratings, or just the page they link from? I have 76 missing pages from being stupid when I started out.
Yes, you are right i have just made a search for the keyphrase "seo book". The 1st is seobook written bold fonts. It is interesting. The tables don't hurt the PR, but replacing them with divs will shorten the code and increase visible text/html code ratio, which is also an important factor. I think, the broken outband links harm the rankings.
Thanks for the tips guys, I really appreciate your time. I am pretty new at this (as if you couldn't tell) - and every little bit helps a lot. I have removed all references to bad pages, and the black hat seo stuff. I also took your advice about the heading tags for my keywords. That part is going to be a little tougher than I thought to get it to fit in and look right. Any other glaring errors? Shoe repair is a pretty hard suybject to find relevant links to, as the only other pages out there dedicated to the trade are other shoe shops we are competing with to get online business, but I am still trying. Thanks again! (Will be working on eliminating the tables someday.) ---- *edit - Here's anothe rissue I just thought of. When we first started the idea of using the web to do mail order shoe repair, I made another domain called shoesrenewed.com - it has basically the same site setup as www.hoovershoerepair.com - with a lot of duplicate content. THis is actually a subdomain off of the hoovershoerepair domain on the server. My question is, does this duplicate content hurt me, would a redirect to hoovershoerepair's front page hurt me, or should I just delete the whole thing and put a parked page there? THanks!