Need some SEO help

pbarrera

I built a site with RW and a local company that specializes in SEO took a look at and said the following after one of our account executives asked them for SEO suggestions:

(BEGIN COMMENTS)
A lot of this is vital to build the foundation of a solid SEO strategy before we start other aspects of this SEO program.
· Corrected issues in the header of all pages - search engines bots were being blocked
· Generated and submitted sitemap to search engines
· Added GZIP, Expire Headers, and Caching to the site - aids in load speed of page (load speed is an important part of ranking well with Google etc)
· Began optimizing code, organization of elements, etc. This will be ongoing...
(END COMMENTS)

Sounds like they are making changes to the html files and any edits done in RW will override their work upon publishing. But, beyond that, is there something I can be doing directly within RW so that a third party doesn't have to do the above?

I work and build sites at a advertising agency and SEO issues are becoming more and more an area of concern regarding any sites we build and maintain. I don't really know much about SEO or the code that RW exports. But if there is something I can do in RW to help, I'd like to learn.

Anyone have any thoughts that relate to this?

Thanks.

Phillip B.
Fort Myers, FL

yuZool

Interesting read @pbarrera

You can do all that within RW for future projects so you can maintain good onsite optimisation in-house.

Use Loghound's Sitemap plus for generating and submitting sitemaps. You can also use this to set page descriptions and metas to cover the expiring etc.

Speed is important as I mention here: http://www.yuzoolthemes.com/call-me-bullet/

You can minify the styles and js files to help speed up things. Do this at the theme level in "application support" by editing the theme file before exporting / publishing.

Not sure what the bots blocking was... again Loghound's plugin can set "yes please index this page" options in the header.

For link building I have two articles here: http://www.yuzoolthemes.com/seo-link-building-baby-steps-for-rapidweaver-users/

I believe RW is awesome and you can do these changes for your clients in house so that, as you say, post-publishing it is easier to keep updates in-sync. Getting guys in to this is a nightmare with keeping updates in order.

A future approach could be to ask them to consult and send you the changes and then you build them into your RW project file.

Let me know how you go

I have a feeling SEO for RW is a growing topic so will be blogging more about this

pbarrera

@yuZool:
Thanks, Michael, for your suggestions and the links. Very good, useable information. I use Loghound's Sitemap already but I had a setting wrong that resulted in the most serious of the problems - the blocking of the search bots. Your info and blog links have caused me to dig deeper and think differently. Perhaps this is a good place to start for me.

BTW, great website and I really dig your Portfolio theme. Bought it and look forward to using it.

Thanks again.

Phillip B.
Fort Myers, FL

yuZool

Great to hear @pbarrera and glad it was useful I'm hoping to have more SEO articles over time as I think it's an area that a lot of RW users would find useful to discuss.

Thanks for your purchase Philip and hope you can make some rockin' projects with it soon.

Keep in touch

logosgraphics

Your best bet is to check out http://www.rapidweaverseo.net.

1LDesigner

You can everything they listed yourself and it's free and easy. To be sure about everything they mentioned, especially "optimization of code or organization of elements" I would have to see your site. Here's some of the top things you can do to get your site optimization, though this is not an exhaustive list:
1 - Make your URL string semantically organized. Instead of having inner pages read /page10/index.html for example, change it instead to /about-us.html (example) or whatever is relevant to that pages name.
2 - Always give the page a title (about 50 characters) and meta description (about 150 characters).
3 - Use keywords that people are actually searching for - you can use Google's Keyword Tool for this.
4 - Generate a sitemap: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
5 - Submit it to Google Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
6 - Google Webmaster Tools can show you if their bots are being blocked in the Health >> BLock URLs section, you can also see what keywords they see your site as targeting in Optimization >> Content Keywords

There's a lot more you can do with your page, but I'd have to see it before I made those recommendations.

Hope that helps

pbarrera

@JHawes -
Thanks for the info. The site in question has already been altered by the third party. I could republish my RW to another location on our server if you really want to look under the hood though. Let me know.

I do appreciate the suggestions. I'm saving them along with some other suggestions I see on the forums. I'm got to get my head around this SEO stuff!

Thanks.

Phillip B.
Fort Myers, FL

pbarrera

@yuZool:

Michael, I think I understand all your suggestions except for one:

"You can minify the styles and js files to help speed up things. Do this at the theme level in "application support" by editing the theme file before exporting / publishing."

Can you clarify what you mean by this? It sounds like this is something done outside of RW. Is the "theme file" the index.html file found in the theme contents? If so, what would I do to it?

Thanks.

Phillip B.
Fort Myers, FL

yuZool

@pbarrera - sure.

Yes, it's usually done outside.

In RW preferences you can minify and consolidate CSS - this is similar.

As standard all my themes are minified (CSS, JS etc) for speed. Nick Cates does the same.

If you want to do it yourself, I would recommend this: http://smallerapp.com/

It's now becoming coming for developers to minify html files too but this would be cumbersome with RW publish (would have to do it after publishing).

If you minify the theme's CSS and JS files with http://smallerapp.com/ then this would be cool and enough for now and fit in with RW publish.

Hope that helps