[NeilCawse]

Hi guys,

I claim to be a web designer and joomla developer - not a SEO expert. However I think I know the basics and a few of the advanced stuff but I can't seem to get good traffic to my personal website (<200 unique per month)

I understand the concept of using keywords in title, headings, meta keywords and description and content, and by using woorank I've completed about as much as I can at the moment.

I get good search results really for "joomla plymouth" and hanging around the bottom of page 1 for "web design plymouth" - an SEO company suggested I should reshape my site for "london website design" (which is why I've included cities in some titles - unfortunately not really in content)

Should I simply be aiming for "freelance joomla" or "freelance web design" to broaden my search exposure rather than limiting myself to "plymouth"?

woorank suggests that loading time is an issue, is this because of the USA server, or simply the size of the first page?

my site is www.neilcawse.co.uk

Any suggestions on the SEO would be greatly appreciated!

[BlueDreamer]

First things first, if you're based in the UK then use a UK server, hosting in the USA will do you no favours.

I think you need to approach this from a different direction. As someone who knows about Joomla instead of endlessly chasing after traffic from search engines extend your reach to customers. There are a number of things you can do:

1. Be very active in the Joomla community, ie support forums - once you get known for giving good advice and solving solutions for others that can generate a lot of enquiries
2. Write about Joomla, authorative blogs/articles on your own site will help your UK rankings if you are on a UK server (too much competition on US servers)
3. Write a free module or other Joomla addon, and offer it on your site

[Sogo7]

Take a step backwards for a moment and look at you site from the potential clients perspective.
Does your site provide the information that they want?

Extoling the virtues of joomla over a bespoke design has merits, being both cheaper to implement with an almost stock template and can be deployed rapidly. Remember two of the fundamental questions all clients tend to ask are 'how much' and 'when will it be done' (9 out of 10 want it done dirt cheap and yesterday but that's another problem)

Joomla also has a large number of bolt on modules for a wide variety of functions, these can all be promoted as features, with luck it will trigger the 'kid in a candy store' mindest and convert the vistor into a client. Of course if you don't show & tell them.. they wont know they exist.

[jheg]

Hi Neil

I am a novice too but hopefully I can pass on some useful tips like your text 'Welcome to my site. I have a passion....' is an image and it need not be as you can get the same effect with css and search engines can see it. Regarding the location of your server you can at least tell google of your geographical location see here

Your h1 tag seems to be hidden I'm not sure if Google would penalise you for this or not?

The meta keywords is no longer a ranking factor as far as I am aware. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but as I understand it it only serves the purpose of allowing your competitors see what keywords you are trying to target.

Your nice sliding images are all above the first paragraph on your page in your code so might want to bring that part down in your code and absolute position it back up so that when your page is crawled it reads more about what the site is about first rather than looking at all those images - if that makes sense?

Hope it helps
Ja

[neil0wen]

Your load time is good for me. However you could try GZIP if you want to improve website speed!


0.169 second(s) (80.494 s/Kb)

[NeilCawse]

Thanks for your feedback guys, lots there for me to think about.

Thank you

[NeilCawse]

neil0wen, on 30 November 2011 - 01:07 PM, said:

Your load time is good for me. However you could try GZIP if you want to improve website speed!


0.169 second(s) (80.494 s/Kb)

are you in the USA? - really tried getting gzip to work but gave up. Just need the right code for the .htaccess for the apache server 2.0+ - think its mod_deflate, but like I said, couldn't get the bad boy to work

[shawdesign]

Also, I dont think anybody has mentioned Sitemaps. Have you submitted an XML sitemap to google etc? This will help them to index all of your content, and will ensure no pages are missed out in their index.

David

[NeilCawse]

shawdesign, on 30 November 2011 - 01:44 PM, said:

Also, I dont think anybody has mentioned Sitemaps. Have you submitted an XML sitemap to google etc? This will help them to index all of your content, and will ensure no pages are missed out in their index.

David

yep sitesmap included. 30 pages I think. Am I right to assume that more pages that include my keywords would help as well?

This post has been edited by NeilCawse: 30 November 2011 - 02:38 PM

[neil0wen]

No I'm in the UK.

What I would say is that getting positioned highly for any web design term is usually quite hard, and you are not likely to gain a massive amount of traffic without a lot of effort.

I would suggest social networking to gain more business.

To get higher in the SERPs increase the amount of high quality relevant backlinks. Include the word Plymouth in your headers and opening part of your body text, and put Plymouth in front of London in your title tag. London is mega competitive and will be next to impossible to get ranked for!

There are some useful SEO bits on the link below.

This post has been edited by neil0wen: 30 November 2011 - 04:48 PM

[rallport]

Hate to keep saying this, but rank is now (more so than ever before) based upon high quality content that people want to link to.

If you have nothing worth linking to, then you'll get very low amounts of traffic.

For web design sites and especially personal web design sites that's very hard.

For instance, without sounding harsh, why would anyone want to link to your web design page at /webdesign.html ???? There's nothing unique or link worthy about that.

I'd advise a good blog, with some regular, relevant posts - that do tend to attract links and build some useful content.

[Cristebo]

As I see, the problem is that you have only few visitors per month, and you don't know exactly for what keywords to optimize your website. First of all think about what service you provide, and if you plan to run local is your decision and is a good decision if you don't have so much experience.
So..-first step is - be sure about what service you provide
-second step - Analyze them on Goole Adwords Keyword Tool

If joomla plymouth have only 500 searches per month, is clear that you can't have more than 200 visitors monthly.

[Ceronza]

The first thing I would do is to make all of your title tags of each page unique. When Google sees duplicate title tags in each page they will hit you slightly for it.

Try not to go over 66 characters in the title tag also as it is rumored that Google doesn't rank any keywords after 66 chars but I am not sure if this is fact. I do know that the keywords wont appear in the SERPs after 66 chars.

I would also look at adding more pages to your services section. Why not add a web design page, web development, SEO and CMS page that the user can click on. This then gives you more pages to target specific keywords. I think doing this method will allow you to be more competitive with your keywords and you will attract more traffic.

One last thing I would recommend after having a quick look at your site. Look at restructuring your heading tags. Your h1 tag is duplicating "Plymouth Web design, web development, SEO services" on I think every page. I would put what is currently your h2 tag as h1. This again promotes to Google that each page has unique content and worthy of ranking for different keywords to get more traffic.

Then you need to do the obvious off page methods of being active in the relevant communities and posting on forums, blogs comments, web 2.0 sites, guest blogging etc. But get the on page SEO right first and this will make this happen a lot faster.

An extra note about the server location, it really does help a lot. I made the same mistake of hsoting a site in the US and targeting UK traffic. As soon as I moved my site to the UK my site went from position 5 to position 1 for one of my main search terms I was gunning for.