Older Site Needs SEO Overhaul

[bruceldr]

I have a site that's been on line since Nov 2002. It gets consistent traffic referrals from Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But I'll be the first to admit, I haven't done ANY SEO work in a long time.

A bit about the site:

33,000 pages of information about outdoor recreation
We have a sitemap (it may or may not work well)
We have incoming and outgoing links
Because of the volume of pages, we don't target an overall set of keywords, but rely on specific searches like "Katherine's Landing"

What can I do to make the site more attractive to spiders?

http://www.EatStayPlay.com

I don't have a huge budget for overhauls!

Thanks!

[Brillig]

If you've been around that long and you have incoming links, then you're getting hit by the spiders.

What you're really asking for, I'm guessing, is how to rank higher. Which leads to the question of what keywords or phrases are you trying to rank for?

[bruceldr]

When I look for how many pages I've got indexed in Google, I'm only coming with with a little over 4,000. Considering I have over 30,000 pages of information, I'm not really sure that's a good percentage.

Am I doing anything that is preventing Google from indexing those pages?

And, I'm specifically looking for help on the http://EatStayPlay.com domain, not the related blog of http://www.TheOutdoorPrincess.com -- that'll be another matter altogether!

Do you have any specific threads you could point me to for further reading?

[janessecret]

Indexing all the pages isn't that big a deal, you might be better SEO'ing what is indexed before worrying about every single page,,,

[morestar]

You've got something funny going on.

On this page eatstayplay.com, in your header you have an image that links to this page:

http: //www.eatstayplay.com/html/misc/index.html

which seems to be a duplicate page (no no) PLUS you have a comment around the link in that code as follows:



<!--ZOOMSTOPFOLLOW-->
<a href="/html/misc/index.html">
<img title="eatstayplay.com" alt="eatstayplay.com" src="/images/common/esp_home_icon.gif" border="0">
</a>
<!--ZOOMSTARTFOLLOW-->


From what I've gathered "ZOOMSTARTFOLLOW" stops the bots from crawling but you'd know that more than I would.

You need to look into this a bit.

[bruceldr]

Oh! Thanks a million. I'm going to have to look into that "ZOOMSTARTFOLLOW"

A former programmer of mine added that and I'd just been ignoring it. It never occurred to me that it might stop spiders!

I also need to look into potential duplicate pages and figure that out. I know we have some at the attraction level but that's done for HUMANS not spiders. I'll have to figure out a happy medium for people and spiders...

I've looked into a bunch of my internal pages (attraction, state, region, population center) and I'm not seeing that "ZOOMSTARTFOLLOW" coding on them. So, if this isn't on internal pages then spiders SHOULD crawl all links on the page, right?

Pages like:

http://www.eatstayplay.com/html/hi/a3136p492c2134.html
http://www.eatstayplay.com/html/az/l32p011.html

And I can't figure out why pages like these don't rank higher in the SERPS...


Since "ZOOMSTARTFOLLOW" is in the tags <!--ZOOMSTARTFOLLOW--> doesn't that mean that the contents of that tag is ignored?

Now I'm all types of confused!

[chrisJumbo]

If you have 4000 pages indexed I would work on building up those pages in the SEs with link building and there is plenty of information on this site about that. I would look at article writing/publishing, blog commenting, forum participation, etc. For the pages that aren't indexed, same thing. Give them some link love and the Goog and other SEs will gobble them up. :O)

[PoisonJam]

Start with keyword research and make sure you get it right as it provides the building blocks for any good SEO plan. Be sure to look at what keywords are already driving traffic via your Analytics though and make sure you don't compromise these. The easiest thing to better optimise for these. You'll probably find that you're getting some decent traffic from positions in the top 10 that you weren't even specifically trying for. Get your on-page right and you will probably move up a few positions in the SERPs.

Always start with the low hanging fruit - and it doesn't get much lower than improving on what you already rank for with little past effort :)

[microtekblue]

On-site coding needs to be fixed. Get rid of the ZOOM tags.

Also, having 30, 000+ pages that are duplicate content is not SEO friendly at all.

Maybe try to be more relevant, have less content, and get rid of any duplicate content.

Are you using a CMS? If so find a better SEF extension. If your using something like Joomla, try using SH404SEF.

Add Google Analytics to track your pages better.

[bruceldr]

Are you using a CMS? If so find a better SEF extension. If your using something like Joomla, try using SH404SEF.

Okay, so I'm not exactly sure what that means so can you please let me know in NON techno-babble? Sorry!

I'm using Site Analytics through GoDaddy. I have Google Analytics on a couple of other websites and I'm not really a fan of it.

And yes, I know exactly about getting results for "keywords" that I didn't even try to get. I get a ton of referrals daily from "Katherine's Landing" in Google. NO idea why but Google just LOVES that page.

What's the middle ground between user-friendly and SERP happy?

[microtekblue]

Well a CMS - Content Management System helps you create websites where you can manage the site and content without any knowledge of html or web programming.

If you have some sort of a back end to your site, then most likely your using some sort of open source CMS.

I would definitely urge the use of Google Analytics as it is the best site analytics tool available and its free.

Getting non important keywords to your site is not hard, and requires no seo skill set at all.

I don't know what "Katherine's Landing" is but its not a keyword related to your site is it? If it is maybe try to optimize for it more.

But IMO your site needs a ON-Site overhaul before you do anything else.

[weegillis]

How do you access the content of this site? (1) A control panel in a web browser? (2) An FTP client

What files are in your root directory? (1) index.html (2) index. / php / asp / ..

We all need to know this before we can go on.

The idea of having ALL your pages in the index is reaching, for any site. SE's only index the most relevant landing pages for the top search phrases for a site. Of thousands of pages, many or most of them are going to get stale. The index will reflect this over time.

[Bernd]

On this page eatstayplay.com, in your header you have an image that links to this page:

http: //www.eatstayplay.com/html/misc/index.html

which seems to be a duplicate page (no no)
Similar here:
http://eatstayplay.com/newsletter/index.html
http://eatstayplay.com/newsletter/
http://www.eatstayplay.com/newsletter/index.html
http://www.eatstayplay.com/newsletter/



PLUS you have a comment around the link in that code as follows:



<!--ZOOMSTOPFOLLOW-->
<a href="/html/misc/index.html">
<img title="eatstayplay.com" alt="eatstayplay.com" src="/images/common/esp_home_icon.gif" border="0">
</a>
<!--ZOOMSTARTFOLLOW-->


From what I've gathered "ZOOMSTARTFOLLOW" stops the bots from crawling but you'd know that more than I would.

No bot exept 'Zoom Search' cares.
bruceldr, did/do you have a site intern search with Zoom Search?

[NetProwler]

You have about 4000 pages in Google index and you have pages like the following showing up for a search:

Curlew Lake State Park - Colville, WA
Iron Canyon Reservoir - Redding, CA
Lakes Basin Recreation Area - Nevada City, CA
Lake Como - Hamilton, MT
Lake Natoma - Sacramento, CA
Information About Campgrounds In Wofford Heights, California

All potential keywords with manageable competition. But a closer look shows where your problems lie.

For example take a look at this page:a9122p162c2531.html
This page has this title: Lake Natoma - Sacramento, CA
It has multiple <head> tags throwing up lots of errors. Clean up your code. It may not be mandatory to have clean code to rank well - but it doesn't hurt. Anyway it won't choke a search engine's robot if you have properly formatted HTML.

Your site navigation is a bit hard to navigate too. You could try grouping the content in some sort of categories and arrange them on each page - the main categories. When I checked your site, I asked for a non-existent page to probe for the kind of CMS you use. Your site took about 5 seconds to return a 404 status. You need to take a look at that too.

But you really have good information there. :)

[Jeffwend]

If you change the structure of your website don't forget to use your 301 redirects.

[keyon]

One of the many details you'll ineveitably read about when researching SEO is how to write effective title tags. Maybe it's not a huge deal, but I noticed on the few pages I checked that your title tags start with "information about." Unless you know for certain that these are actual words people use in their search, I'd drop them. Just start the titles with your targeted keywords first.

[briguy]

When I look for how many pages I've got indexed in Google, I'm only coming with with a little over 4,000. Considering I have over 30,000 pages of information, I'm not really sure that's a good percentage.

My understanding, is that Google doesn't list all the pages that it indexed. Have you ran your site through https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit ?