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anaconda

New Member
Last summer I hired someone to do some SEO work on my website. At the time the site was designed completely in Flash. (When I built the site I didn't realize that Google didn't like Flash!)

The company I hired didn't make any SEO changes to the actual site because I had done some work with meta tags myself. They improved the rating via back linking alone.

After many months of not progressing any further I was advised to redesign the site in Joomla allowing Google to trawl the site for relevant text. I didn't have any money for the redesign so I decided to learn Joomla myself.

I rebuilt the site with the landing page as a blog (text heavy). I'm a wedding videographer so I wanted the actually wedding website to be very visual . On the main site (the one with all the back linking www.videoproductions.ie it has a wedding button in the main menu menu. When you click this it launches another site that is very visual with large images and no text on the 1st home page (www.videoprouductions.ie/weddingvideo). The idea behind this was when conduction searches the main site with all the back linking and text heavy would be the one Google finds (www.videoproductions.ie)

The new site joomla site has been launched for over two weeks now and I've noticed that its actually falling in the ratings (I'm now on page 7) I rang the company I was dealing with and ended my SEO relationship and I feel I will have more success on my own. I have the time and not much money. I figured out everything else so far so I'm hoping I will conquer this SEO problem too!

The company I hired did do a lot of back linking when checking with www.majesticseo.com I can see these figures

External Backlinks
7,536
Referring Domains
21
19 Referring IP addresses
19 are Class C subnets
3 Indexed URLs

My region is small just Ireland but there is a fair bit of competition for the first page! The top guy in Ireland for wedding video has these figures.

External Backlinks
13,409
Referring Domains
1,107
625 Referring IP addresses
518 are Class C subnets
746 Indexed URLs


I can see that my referring domains are low? What are they and is this part of my problem?

I'm fairly technical but not familiar with SEO at all. After asking around this is some of the advice I've gotten so far.

Back linking is the major thing.
I was advised to add this plugin tool http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef/10134 to my joomla website to help improve SEO.
Mentioning key words in the body of my text is important (but not too much as this is stuffing and Google will punish you for this!)

How do I go about back linking? Do you think I should use this plug in? What's the best advice when it come to meta tags? Is there anything else I can do?

I know there is a lot there but I'm a 'noob'! I'm very frustrated with all of this as I've spent ages creating two website that no one will ever see if I can't get this SEO sorted.

Frustrated but willing to work!

Ana
 

davidbrett

New Member
Hi Ana,

I think you are competing for too generic keywords. Instead of targeting Irish level phrases such as Wedding Video Productions Ireland you could target more Niche phrases. What are your most important target markets? In the short term you have a better chance of ranking for more targeted phrases such as Wedding Video Productions Mayo etc.

Also according to Yahoo your link popularity is 75 compared to Keith Malone.ie which has 12702. I think there is more work to be done here also. Have you looked for links for hotels and venues that you work with? I work with a number of hotels that would be interested in linking to a site like yours.
 
K

Kieran

Guest
Did you 301 redirect your old site pages when you moved to Joomla?
 

link8r

New Member
Last summer I hired someone to do some SEO work on my website. At the time the site was designed completely in Flash. (When I built the site I didn't realize that Google didn't like Flash!)

Google is ambivalent to flash and can index and OCR flash (and PDF). Flash-contained sites are pretty much just a collection of images on a single page (for the most part).

Did you rebuild your site in pages using HTML/PHP/ASP/Other?

The company I hired didn't make any SEO changes to the actual site because I had done some work with meta tags myself. They improved the rating via back linking alone.

Sounds dangerous - assuming if you didn't know Flash was a bad container to base your site - how do you rate your tag knowledge? Google asserts it doesnt use a Keywords or Description tag for ranking but that doesn't stop people writing/reading about it or even being experts in the field....

After many months of not progressing any further I was advised to redesign the site in Joomla allowing Google to trawl the site for relevant text. I didn't have any money for the redesign so I decided to learn Joomla myself.

I rebuilt the site with the landing page as a blog (text heavy). I'm a wedding videographer so I wanted the actually wedding website to be very visual . On the main site (the one with all the back linking www.videoproductions.ie it has a wedding button in the main menu menu. When you click this it launches another site that is very visual with large images and no text on the 1st home page (www.videoprouductions.ie/weddingvideo). The idea behind this was when conduction searches the main site with all the back linking and text heavy would be the one Google finds (www.videoproductions.ie)

I've seen this strategy a good few times. I've no idea why. You'd swear text was evil or something. Just because you produce video doesn't mean your site has to be only visual. Sky News are a news channel but they have text. The argument is lost on me.

Each page develops its own authority - you can't build additional pages and hope they will somehow correct the old one.

The new site joomla site has been launched for over two weeks now and I've noticed that its actually falling in the ratings (I'm now on page 7) I rang the company I was dealing with and ended my SEO relationship and I feel I will have more success on my own. I have the time and not much money. I figured out everything else so far so I'm hoping I will conquer this SEO problem too!

Two weeks isn't a lot of time. Was your new site even indexed in that time? Most new sites don't get re-indexed for up to a month at a time. Crawling/submitting a sitemap is not indexing - they're separate systems.

I think you're just focusing on A) where you want to be and B) how you want to be seen. The hardest advice to take is to consider your target audience. If you think that everybody just types in "videographer" and buy's from the first person they see, then this will be a great place for you to start - people don't.

People in Kerry aren't going to be interested in a videographer in Donegal or a photographer in Wexford. They're going to use "longtail" searches - so develop your site and give it some time to grow. Two weeks is nothing in the overall timeline for a new website.

I haven't checked your site but I can't imagine that you would have created the same architecture as someone building them for years would have. Its not about knowledge, its about combining knowledge and experience. If you want to learn, its going to require some patience because you can only gain experience on cause and effect.
 

anaconda

New Member
Hi Dave,

The main keyword search I asked my SEO company to work on was 'Wedding Video' within Ireland. I see your point about more specific searches like wedding video mayo. Should I build this into the text and meta tags (on site) or is there something I have to do off site to help work on this?

I haven't asked anyone to back link my site. I didn't realise the importance of this! I assume getting hotels and related industries to back link is way more valuable than the 7,536 External Backlinks I have already?


"according to Yahoo your link popularity is 75 compared to Keith Malone.ie which has 12702" How do I go about working on this? It's probably obvious to everyone here but I'm starting pretty clueless!

Thanks

Hi Kieran,

I don't think this has been done. The company I hired done a lot of work in back linking last year but nothing new has been done since I moved the site. The actual web address is the same www.videoproductions.ie but how do I conducting a 301 redirect?

Hi Link8r

The OLD site was flash and the new one is Joomla so this is no longer a problem (thank God!)

The new site is very text heavy with the blog on the main home page, It's only the wedding tab that opens strong visual pages.

I understand that two weeks in not much time in the larger scale of things but the problem is that when the Joomla site was launched it ranked on page 4 and since google done it's crawl over the last two weeks it suddenly dropped to page 7! I'm worried if I don't work now it will keep moving in the wrong direction.
 

link8r

New Member
Hi Dave,
The main keyword search I asked my SEO company to work on was 'Wedding Video' within Ireland. I see your point about more specific searches like wedding video mayo. Should I build this into the text and meta tags (on site) or is there something I have to do off site to help work on this?

I haven't asked anyone to back link my site. I didn't realise the importance of this! I assume getting hotels and related industries to back link is way more valuable than the 7,536 External Backlinks I have already?

Link obsession isn't a good place to be in. I also think it's unfair to quote somebody else who isn't online or participating. All I can reply to this is - if you grow a network of links with companies that recommend you then each link will probably be more valuable than thousands of other random links.


Hi Link8r

The OLD site was flash and the new one is Joomla so this is no longer a problem (thank God!)

The new site is very text heavy with the blog on the main home page, It's only the wedding tab that opens strong visual pages.

I understand that two weeks in not much time in the larger scale of things but the problem is that when the Joomla site was launched it ranked on page 4 and since google done it's crawl over the last two weeks it suddenly dropped to page 7! I'm worried if I don't work now it will keep moving in the wrong direction.

There are 3 parts to Indexing:

1. Crawl Map
2. Crawl
3. Indexing

You can only test when a site was indexed by looking at the cache date across the different servers in the plex.

Have you setup Google Webmasters tools, are there any messages and what happens when you fetch your home page as GoogleBot? Does it match the source-text of your home page as you see it in your browser?

Two weeks isn't even enough to get full Webmasters data in 99% of cases.

To troubleshoot,

1. How old is the domain please?
2. How many pages are indexed?
3. If you google "mydomain.com" (insert your domain) - is your domain first or is there a different domain first
4. Do you have a 404-error page
5. Do you have an XML sitemap and is it submitted

1. if the domian is less than 12 months, then popping up and down is part and parcel of it. You can't expect to outrank the people on page 1 if they're already doing SEO. FYI - there are other Videographers on here all the time asking the same questions
2. to check this, either get it from Google WMT or do a search for "Site:mydomain.com"
3. If your site is number 1, then you're probably 99.999% not under any penalty, not that I expect you are
4. You should have one...
5. you should have one...
 

anaconda

New Member
1. The Domain name is 2.5 years old.
2. I'll look into to it, I tried googling google WMT but didn't get any links, do you have a link for this?
3. My domain name appears to be first in the search so no penalty....good news :)
4. I don't know I'll look into it
5. Again I don't know

Hard to believe I don't know these things when I actually built the site! I used Joomla templates so I'll do some digging around and figure this out. I haven't set up Google Webmasters tools either so I'll look at this too.

PS "there are other Videographers on here all the time asking the same questions" this isn't good news
 
K

Kieran

Guest
Hi Kieran,

I don't think this has been done. The company I hired done a lot of work in back linking last year but nothing new has been done since I moved the site. The actual web address is the same Wedding Video Productions Ireland - Wedding Video, Wedding DVD, Wedding Videography but how do I conducting a 301 redirect?

Look at the link previously sent and it shows you how to do this. If you have deleted certain files on your site that were getting traffic then it is a good idea that you use the 20 to direct them to another page. If you have no record of the structure of the other site then this is difficult or even impossible. It is accomplished by edititng (or creating if you haven't one) a .htaccess file and putting in appropriate lines for each file. TThere are various syntax that can be used but is is along the lines of

Redirect 301 /old/url /new/url

I wouldn't sweat this too much and as <a href=""> </a> stated in his reply it could take a bit longer if your site is a replacement for the old one to get indexed and crawled.
 

anaconda

New Member
Thanks for all of this advice...

I've a bit of work to do based on the points raised above....I'll make the necessary changes and report back on results.
 

andywozhere

Member
Hi Anna,

As a user I think the split between www.videoprouductions.ie and www.videoprouductions.ie/weddingvideo is not working for me. It is confusing to have two separate formats with different navigation layouts. If you are hell bent on having a separate look/layout for your weddings section I would look into developing a completely separate site targeted solely at wedding photography.

In terms of SEO I think you might find http://static.googleusercontent.com.../search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf useful for some general guidance.

Finally.... as you are dealing with a lot of images you should really also be using the "alt" meta tag to describe your images.
 

trickobrien

New Member
I just noticed a couple of things on your site
1) none of your images have title tags
2)There is no mention of your keyword on index so keyword density is poor
3)Y0ur wedding video area has no text at all ie, /weddingvideo
4)Most of your backlinks are not related to your niche and most have low PR

Hate to be the messenger of bad news-but I think you need a re-design
 
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