7 Simple SEO Fixes

In a post several weeks back about our new Lake of the Ozarks website we received some feedback after one of our tweets was retweeted. Al Maguire, via Mark Faggiano, was able to offer some SEO advice to help with organic search results rankings. I would like to share some of the tips here and how we went about implementing them on the new ozarks website, thelakeoftheozarks.net.

Meta Tag Keywords should be more targeted

We probably didn’t focus enough on these the first time out. So we have refined the meta keywords for the site to be more targeted to local searches and make sure we avoid being lost competing for generic search terms such as vacation.

Before:

the lake of the ozarks, lake of ozarks, ozarks, osage beach, sunrise beach, camdenton, laurie, lake ozark, linn creek, missouri, vacation, rentals, boat rentals, marina, vacation planning

After:

the lake of the ozarks, lake of ozarks, lake of ozarks news, ozarks, osage beach, sunrise beach, camdenton, laurie, lake ozark, linn creek, ozarks missouri, lake of the ozarks vacation, lake of the ozarks rentals, lake of the ozarks boat rentals, lake of the ozarks marina, lake of the ozarks dining, lake of the ozarks restaurants, lake of the ozarks music, lake of the ozarks bars, lake of the ozarks nightlife

Reduce redundant links to add value

We removed the categories from the wordpress widget on the right sidebar from each page to highlight the important of the category links in the main header. This was in response to the comments…

the less links you have the more value/weight each one has to a search engine.  I would look to remove “categories” first since it’s just a rehash of the navigation – Al Maguire

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

We already had these in place. We are still so new that we aren’t getting great information from these tools just yet. As we advertise and get better known in the area and improve serp rank these should help us tweak additional keywords and links. We are being found in some searches now but we hope to utilize both analytics and webmaster tools further in the coming weeks and months.

Navigation should mimic page flow

On thelakeoftheozarks.net we have categories for the posts. The categories are listed in the navigation bar across the top. Additionally on the front page the categories are displayed with recent posts for each category. We have tweaked the category order for the navigation bar and the category recent posts to match. We ended up having to use a wordpress plugin to get the categories ordered dynamically. Check out the Category Order plugin for more information.

Include a sitemap.xml file

We actually already have a plugin to automatically generate the sitemap.xml file and submits it to the major search engines. Unfortunately, we are using Capistrano-Wordpress deployment strategy I wrote about, to deploy the Ozarks website. This means that some files get deleted if they aren’t saved in the shared folder.  At this time the sitemap.xml is not linked to the shared folder so it is lost when we deploy a site update.  The easy fix is to force a regeneration of the sitemap so it exists when the search engine crawlers come. Additionally, I could simply edit the recipe in the deploy.rb file to include the sitemap file in the linked shared folder.

Embrace SEO cheesiness

This is a great tip for SEO. Basically find the keywords to target and get them into the links and navigation throughout the site. We already do this some but we don’t take it to the cheesy level that I think is being suggested. So we took a first step to change the category slugs. In doing this we also made sure to utilize the WordPress Redirection plugin to avoid any 404 errors since some of our pages had been indexed already. The new slugs add the term lake or ozarks to give some more cheesiness. It isn’t over the top but it is a little something we hope helps moving forward.

Place meta tags just below title tag

The tip, “move the meta tags (that SEO pack from Semper Fi) to below the title tag“. Unfortunately, since we are taking advantage of a wordpress plugin to simplify the SEO tags for all pages and posts in our wordpress site we are stuck with the current state. The plugin hooks into the wordpress wp_head(); function and is typically placed just before the closing head tag. So for now we cannot change this without additional effort on our part. Not sure how much this makes a difference but we wanted to put into place as much of the advice as we could from an experienced SEO who has worked on large scale websites using these techniques.

Summary of SEO tips

Basically some of these tips are technical or questionable in helping your SERP Rankings but what can be said is that it is critical to understand your targeted keywords and make sure your content is high quality and full of your keyword phrases. At the very least great content with targeted keywords will being to help with your organic search results.