SEO Problems | Why Does My Website Need Optimized?

      As someone who manages the websites of several local small businesses, I must always be aware of the latest and most effective techniques and best practices of white hat SEO in a rapidly developing digital marketing environment. 

      I am a search engine optimization consultant and I fix websites that won't, don't or can't rank well enough to make organic SEO a cost effective choice for your business.  The latest, greatest looking website may have cost you more than you hoped and now that it isn't ranking the way you hoped, you're wondering if you wasted your time and money.  That may not be the case and one way to find out is to call me.

      Every CMS platform has some inherent SEO limitations, some more than others (sorry, Weebly), but many (Wix, Squarespace) have come a long way in 2020 towards optimizable code that is user friendly.  If you manage your content, you don't have to and probably shouldn't do your own SEO. 

      If you have a Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Shopify, Homestead, GoDaddy, WordPress, 1&1, Magento, Joomla website or any other platform with accessible source code, I can help you achieve the SERP results to grow your business.  Any CMS that allows you to edit the appropriate metatags and content is optimizable and any business owner that can login to the backend and update their code is a candidate for optimization.    

Custom SEO Services Available

Organic Search Engine Optimization
Wix SEO : Change of Heart
Jul 21, 2016
 

I’ve turned tides and recently narrowed my focus to almost exclusively the Wix CMS platform.  The developers have truly made it into a Google-friendly website solution. 

Baseline optimization results can be easily achieved with smart title tags and alt tags, but, most importantly H1 tag optimization cannot be overlooked or assumed.  There’s no real trick, but there are differing results based on placement, wording and structure. 

Three different client sites in particular on the Wix platform are currently performing as expected to slightly better than expected and two in particular have experienced relatively quick, significant ranking (for subpages no less!).  One is a multiple-location business with two separate divisions and is currently undergoing the first seasonal shift from one set of keywords (spring) to another (winter) as a Wix website.  The other is a startup that got the full press treatment including social optimization and has already ranked sporadically (under 10 days and without any backlinks yet appearing to offer support). 

Wix SEO Problems and Solutions (Part II)
Jan 19, 2016
I currently have three SEO clients with Wix websites and the results so far are favorable though mixed.

Nothing I have done for client #2 has moved the needle and I’ve done quite a bit.  The odds were stacked against me for a number of reasons (reason 1: Wix), not to mention total lack of backlinks.  The newest client is an author with a completely unoptimized WordPress site that is being relaunched with Wix so I look forward to the challenge with guarded optimism. 

Non-SEF URLs
When Google crawls a URL, the bots want to see clean, clear, concise and human-friendly syntax.  Running into a hashbang (www.website.com/#!services/c66t), quite possibly one of the least search engine friendly roadblocks may not prevent a site from being indexed, but it certainly can’t help it rank.  Most websites are only optimized for the home page and, fairly enough, often that is all they need.  Not knowing if it is worthwhile to even try to rank something that includes /#!contact/v324r makes my skin crawl. 

The Wix SEO mythbuster rebuttal cracks me up.  ­­

Myth: Long URLs & Hashbangs Negatively Impact My Site’s SEO

Your website’s URL is one piece of content that doesn’t play a part in your site’s SEO. Just like Amazon & EBay often attribute very long URLs to their list of products and still rise to the top of search engines, the content on your website is not affected by the length of your URL.

 Myth: Long URLs & Hashbangs Negatively Impact My Site’s SEO

URLs don’t play a part in a site’s SEO?  Sure they don’t. 

And it’s not the length of the URL that is the problem, it is the syntax.

Then this:

“this sign has no problem with ranking. This is the agreed sign for search engine that the site is based on Ajax technology.” https://moz.com/community/q/wix-is-it-any-good-for-seo

Translation: It’s not a problem because we say it’s not. 

I love when people try to tell Google what to do.

Blocked IPs
This is one of the scariest because it is difficult to tell how often it happens and how much it hurts your optimization goals. 

All three of these clients are candidates for an AdWords campaign in 2016 and the author will almost definitely be using PPC to drive website traffic and new book sales.  Unfortunately, Wix and AdWords don’t play nicely with each other and getting something like this:

Destination URL returning 404 Invalid HTTP response code

is the last thing you need to see when you’re trying to most effectively spend your digital marketing dollars. 

Some corporate, municipal and institutional intranets block Wix sites all together.  Very scary.  One of the companies I contract for recently required a security reconfiguration of my laptop and work tower and I can no longer load Wix websites using Internet Explorer 11 on either. 

Do you know how many people don’t bother trying Chrome or Firefox or even know anything exists other than IE Whatever They Have?  A lot of people.  Very scary.

Where’s my H1 tag?
The Bing SEO Analyzer says it’s not there, but when I look at the code its right there. 

That’s never good.

The more user friendly the CMS, usually the less tag management control you have, but this is just weird.  I also can’t trust them when they intermingle terms like Site Title (h1?) and Page Title (h2?) and Huge Heading (h3?) and they’re all styled and based on font and font size.  It just makes for an easy mistake that can hurt a lot. 

­

The beloved ?_escaped_fragment_ and Ajax crawling
This may have been your first indication that Wix might not be the most SEO-friendly platform out there.  Where’s my source code?

The truth is that moving anything more than one step from where it usually is will inevitably cause problems in any process.  Is this a scavenger hunt? 

 . . . with Ajax Crawling, your content, data and design are merged together and extracted far easier and quicker by search engines.

Easier and quicker, huh?  Thanks, but I’ll pass.

https://moz.com/community/q/wix-is-it-any-good-for-seo

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/learn-more

and this from just last October

http://searchengineland.com/google-working-on-fixing-problem-with-wix-web-sites-not-showing-up-in-search-results-233310

In the coming weeks, I hope to overcome or at least “get over” these issues.  The folks at Wix are always hard at working on retooling this stuff in an effort to beat the bad rap that they only semi-deserve.  I will keep you posted.  

WIX SEO Problems and Solutions (Part I)
Dec 21, 2015
Content Management Systems (CMS) are an extremely useful and convenient bit of programming innovation that allow even novice users to create beautiful and relevant websites with ease.  Unfortunately, many of them come with extreme limitations and one of them is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  In the case of Wix, optimizing one of their websites comes with special challenges but is not impossible.

Among the issues with no current solutions:

non search-engine friendly (SEF) URLs
blocked IPs 
conflicting header tags and confusion
?_escaped_fragment_ (WHAT?)
In my next post, I will explain how to mitigate the above issues as well as a step by step

guide to what you CAN do to help your Wix website show up in the SERPs. 

Why Social Media Matters: The Importance of Off-Page SEO
Nov 21, 2014
Social media platforms have gotten a bit of a bad rap lately, at least as a marketing tool, even as the number of engaged users has grown exponentially. 

your Facebook reach may have dropped significantly
you might not understand how to use LinkedIn
you might not understand WHY you should even use Google+ in the first place!
you might think social media is for kids (or that your customers don’t use it whatever the demographic)
‘Ello?
 

The truth is that not a single one of those reasons (except maybe ‘Ello) should make you okay with missing out on something that can easily and affordably grow your business.

Especially when you look at numbers like these:

Facebook users worldwide                                1.4 Billion
18 – 24 year olds using social media                     98%
Time people spend on FB monthly                 700 billion minutes
 

Whether you choose to embrace it or not, social media is growing and has become an invaluable resource for small business owners as well as one that cannot be ignored in good conscience if you expect to compete in the ubiquitous digital market.  Those 18-24 year olds might not be in your target market now, but won’t some of those kids be your customers 10 years from now?  Why not preframe by exposing them to your brand on the platform of their choice?

Personally, I don’t Tweet very often, crosspost to LinkedIn or Google +, but a Google search of the keyword phrase “SEO consultant Delaware” comes back with some very exciting results.  My Facebook Business page ranks higher than my website!  Not ideal, but I’m just glad that it is there.  Because of my on and off-page optimization efforts, my brand occupies 5 of the top 11 search results.  That LinkedIn profile that I set up (and optimized) doesn’t seem so worthless anymore, huh?  The bottom line is that Google indexes just about everything, so why not be there when they do? 

Optimizing for Yahoo (and Bing)!
Nov 19, 2014
Now that Firefox is making Yahoo their default search engine, you have to at least examine how well your website is optimized for them whether you choose to devote resources to improving your Yahoo SEO or not. I choose not to for a lot of reasons, but mainly because

(1) I rank pretty well already (see graphics) and

(2) I don't know how.

I do configure Bing Webmaster Tools, but I spend very little time (if any for some sites) analyzing or optimizing. I rank on page 1 but not very highly and I'm not too concerned with that either. My time is stretched pretty thin these days with all of these balls I'm juggling so I would rather spend what limited time I have concentrating on Google and the upcoming PPC Campaign. Plus, Microsoft's new Cortana and Windows 9 or 10 (or whatever) could shake things up a bit and I'm not changing a proven search optimization strategy until something sticks.

Is this even on your SEO radar?

Jamie Campbell is an expert Delaware SEO consultant specializing in local, organic search engine optimization using white-hat SEO methods and long-term ranking strategy with affordable and proven results for small business owners throughout Delaware and Pennsylvania.

Call 302-750-9678

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Small Business Solutions by Jamie
Wilmington, DE 19810

Phone: 302-750-9678

E-mail: jamie@302jamie.com

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