SEO help please

[philiporchard]

Hi,

I'm new to this board, and looking for some fantastic SEO tips...
We have some weird results on Google for our sites, and wondered if anyone has some useful insights
Our primary optimised page for 'Letting Agents in Cardiff' is http://www.cardiff.co.uk/2527-Local-Services/2959-Letting-Agents-in-Cardiff/

Currently though, if you search for 'Letting agents in Cardiff' it doesn't appear anywhere in the top 100 listings.

Moreover, if you search on Google for 'letting agents in Cardiff site:www.cardiff.co.uk' which searches for only pages from our site - Cardiff.co.uk, then our primary optimised page doesn't show up in the results until page 4!

Any thoughts? Thanks

[ukgimp]

Not sure about the link but that is up for LM to decide.

I am on my iPhone so can't dO a full review. Did spot one thing.

Your urls can be messed with. Eg you change the numbers and the category changes.

You need to make the query tie in so that words match the numbers.

Eg. 

Fishing-1234

I could change the number and without checking I bet I could change the name to anything I wanted.

[ukgimp]

http://www.cardiff.co.uk/2527-Local-Services/2959-Letting-sexshops-in-Cardiff/

This URL still works.

[Peter]

 

[philiporchard]

http://www.cardiff.co.uk/2527-Local-Services/2959-Letting-sexshops-in-Cardiff/

This URL still works.

This is due to cleaning dirty URLs. Certainly not uncommon.
Take a listing page on up my street - you can probably change the name of the business in the URL and the URL will still work:
http://www.upmystreet.com/findmynearest/shopping/80stoyshopcom-located-in-cardiff-5422298B-toy-shops.html

or take this listing page: http://www.qype.co.uk/ukd31-stockport-heaton-moor
You can probably change the business name in this URL too, and it will still work.

This is due to URL re-writing. Certainly not uncommon as far as I was aware.

[jonnyp]

Hi Philip,

Nice domain name looks like you have quite a few...

I actually get you at #97 for [letting agents cardiff] so the page does rank, the question is why doesn't it rank better.

Quite simply it is down to links. I had a quick scan of your backlinks and it would appear that apart from Wikipedia (nofollow) and your own network of geo domains (which are all on the same IP and seem to all suffer from the same complete lack of links) you have barely 10 or 15 domains linking to you, none of which are particularly high quality.

The lack of content on the page won't be helping either as it doesn't exactly 'add value' but that's by the by, until you have some real links you won't see any traction at all. Its also worth thinking about Google Places and how their major moves into local search would affect your site as for now that page just looks like the yellow pages and is easy to duplicate just about anywhere. Guides on letting in Cardiff, expert advice and the like are far more likely to bring lasting benefit.

You should focus on one of your many city domains first, and spend about £500 on submitting to some of the better directories like Yahoo, Business.com, Joeant, Botw and some others to get some easy trrust, then start generating some genuinely useful info, news and comment on the town or city you choose and networking with other local and national sites to earn links from them, plus perhaps sponsoring local events. Best to start with a town you know really well so you can publish a really excellent site from which you can learn what works and what doesn't to apply to the other domains.

It will take some time and you should probably start with just one or two to prevent yourself from spreading too thinly, but while the domain names are great they will go nowhere without some time and love invested in them - to not really focus on making them shine is a bit of a waste of some great names!

The community angle is not a bad idea mind, but you will probably need to 'seed' it off the start to really get it going - nobody likes signing up and participating when it looks like they're going to be all alone..

Cheers,
Jonny

[ukgimp]

Re urls thing

While it may be common when actually do client work this is one of the first thing I check along with canonical URL issues and a few other things. The reason is that search engines make errors and sometime people can link to the wrong URL by accident or in anger.

If I was feeling nasty towards you I could create links pages to you on made up urls but as the entire query is based on the number I could litter G with duplicate pages.

It is a simple fix. Grab the number and the name and put that in a query and use that in your SQL so that it can be messed with.

Eg

Select data from Table where cat_num = '1234' AND cat_name = 'fishing'

That way the two match up.

Just because big sites do it does not mean you are safe.  Fix this IMHO or one day be prepared to fix the 1000's of pagesyou may get in google that are duplicate.

Nothing personal, just saying   :-)

Note : typing in iPhone so spelling may be bad

[mick g]

@ peter 

[ukgimp]

Hello Philip

You need to delve deep to find the issues.

1. Root out all potential problems.

Run through this old one of mine

ukgimp.co.uk/2007/03/09/6-simple-ways-to-protect-your-website/

2. Start chucking a few pages through a KWDA (ukgimp.co.uk/kwda/)

3. Clear your pages of crap, so take CSS off page, JS offpage, put your site and pages on a diet. Look online for extenral libraries. Important as ever due to load times

4. Consider GZIP encoding to speed your stuff up

5. Get some more actual content on your page. Use somethinglike parabuilder

6. Now you can begin the offpage stuff.

7. Do some directory runs, lots of people will do this for peanuts. Make sure you rotate anchor text and titles and descriptions

8. Think of some reason to get real press releases out there.

9. Distribute some articles that point back to the site.

10 Fake some decent reviews, big long ones

11. Create some guides about cardiff to get some links coming in, maybe tie that inwith press release.

12. See what the monsters of the game are doing. A well know bloke brought these people up the serps
http://www.city-visitor.com/walsall/printers.html

13. Ask the people who have added their own business to link back to their profile page. This can be a wonderous tactic, but dont tell everyone.

14. Track and track the changes.

15. While you dnot have the power in the domain yet, maybe avoid trying to get all the searched pages indexed, eg bottom right. robots.txt /search/ for now. You are spreading yourself thin.


Hope that helps, I am now off to continue "Operation Clear Shit Up"

[philiporchard]

Thanks for taking the time to post
all v helpful. Great forum.
Thanks for top Doug - if you're around!

[edo]

Hey Philip. As jonnyp said, it's all about links. Whether you want to go white, grey or black hat is up to you, but looking at your link profile I'd suggest you need to increase your number of links by at least tenfold and most of those should be from decent enough PR sites...in order to be competitive on the first page of Google for the search term "letting agents cardiff". Adding content will clearly also help as you'll get a fair amount of long-tail traffic which will lead to long-tem residual links, but it's links you need. 

[dougs]

Pleasure Phil

Cheers Gimp........when we having lunch matey:) Loads happening:)



Phil

Just checked your backlinks........take each major site you have and host with a different hosting provider ( not needed now for Google, but maybe in the future, hence getting different class c's/datacentres etc)

Link naturally between the sites....but only one or two links

Write 20 press releases about cardiff.co.uk (eg) and pay for each release to goto a different pr company that will pass juice, like prweb. Repeat for all domains.

Do same for top 10 article sites

Pay for each site to be listed in yahoo, joeant......main paid directories

Create a news section on each site and get approved into Google news and each day write a decent news story about the main story of the day for the city in question.

Asked everyone you know who has domains if they will link to something suitable on your sites.......trade anything

That should cover the basics and then the war begins:)

Doug












Doug

[ergophobe]

4. Consider GZIP encoding to speed your stuff up

Easier said than done if you want to catch everyone who can accept compressed pages.

A good portion of people who can handle gzipped pages are not getting them because anti-virus programs like Symantec (for certain), McAfee and Norton (I think) mangle the Accept-Encoding header because they don't like to decompress in order to check these files on the fly. But of course, the smart folks at Google have a way to force gzip compression even in absence of valid Accept-Encoding headers

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/07/12/velocity-forcing-gzip-compression/