Will Taylor

Nov 10, 2009

12:11:21

#1

Thanks for the opportunity to bring this problem to you. You are a star. I work for a charity attached to a church. Rochford Community Church. Their old website, which is still live is http://www.rochfordcc.co.uk and was designed years ago by someone and given to our church leader who has been adding resources to it using contribute. The site has turned into a resource website and not a site to show the church.

About a year ago i started a wordpress.com blog to bring some up to date information about our church to the internet this site is http://www.rochfordcc.wordpress.com this has worked for a while but not ideal as it didn’t give all i wanted. I managed to blag http://www.rcc.co.uk from a very generous company that wasn’t using the domain any more and decided that a wordpress.org site was the way forward to include a blog on the site as well as information about the church.

The plan is to close the old church website but keep it forwarding to the new rcc.co.uk site if people still have the it bookmarked.

But my problem is this.

On searching for Church in Rochford, i believe one of the main searches that someone looking for a church would use, the new site is on the 3rd page. and don’t even show on the google map section at the top of the google search. A while ago i edited the business information and the rochfordcc.co.uk existing site was showing #1 on the maps listing and in google listing. (something has happened to completely remove us.

Please note that i don’y know much about web design and this is my 1st attempt at messing around with wordpress sites so i don;t know much.

So i looked into it a bit and have added some plugins that i thought would help:

Google XML Sitemap
All in One SEO pack
Ultimate Google Analytics (i know this won’t help with search engines)

So far this has done not a lot and i am wondering if i have not used them correctly.

Interestingly i have searched on yahoo and “church in rochford” brings the Rcc.co.uk site up on the first page, but not the map!

I have also just started a technorati account and added the site to that. (i have read that these sort of links help)

So where do i go from here and what can i do? I am very grateful that you would offer to help me and if you need any further information i am happy for you to call or email will@rcc.co.uk or 07817 3xxxx9.

Many thanks again.

Will.

CaptainSEO

Nov 10, 2009

12:56:53

#2

I’m not in the office until later today, so I will investigate and get back to you in a short while.

Will Taylor

Nov 10, 2009

15:14:56

#3

I’m just happy that you’re willing to look. Thank you!

CaptainSEO

Nov 10, 2009

18:13:40

#4

OK – I’ve checked it out for you. We’ll ignore the Google maps thing for now and look into that later.

We’ll concentrate on your ranking on Google in the first instance. I’m going to keep this fairly basic and give you some things to address right now, then we can take another look at it in a month or two.

Firstly, your homepage text. I copied and pasted the first part of your homepage into Google and found it to be duplicate content. This is a no no as far as Google is concerned. Google has no interest in showing sites in the search engine results that share content. They would be of no use to the users, so Google give preference to the first site it finds with the content and penalises all others.

This is the Google result: http://alturl.com/9u3q

You will see that your page content is duplicated verbatim on the Trinity Cheltenham website.

Action point: Make sure your website contains unique content. Your other websites need to be redirected if they share content. On the subject of redirects. You must use a 301 redirect which tells the search engines that the redirect is permanent.

One part of the Google algorithm you need to think about is “relevance” i.e. how Google decides what your website is about. This part of the algorithm covers many many factors but we will concentrate on a couple of major ones where you need to spend some time.

You appear to be using the correct custom permalink structure in Wrodpress which is /%category%/%postname%/ and you are using keywords in the URL correctly. For relevance, make sure that the page keywords appear in the URL, page headings and page copy. Don’t be tempted to use it in the page at a high density in order to rank better. That will not work. Make it readable to your human visitors and the search engine robots will be happy with it too. Search engines use readability formulae when analysing a website. Use the page keywords in the meta description too. The meta description can normally be copied and pasted from the first paragraph of the page. If this looks right as a description with the keywords early in the description, you have written the page correctly.

Note: When I say keywords, I mean a phrase of 3 or 4 words that reflect the page content.

Action point: Make sure you have these elements in place on all of your pages.

Another part of the Google algorithm that you need to address is “credibility” i.e. does Google think your pages are valuable enough (content wise) to appear in the search results. One method they use to calculate your creditability is the number of inbound links to your website.

You currently don’t have any links of use and you need to concentrate on this. Don’t go mad though. This has been abused by spammers and can hurt you if you overdo it.

Action point: Find some pertinent portals [of the web kind ], directories and websites and ask them if they will link to you. Ask if they will make the anchor text pertinent to the keywords. Something like “Church in Rochford” “Rochford Community Church” etc. I say again. Don’t overdo it! You only need about 4 or 5 for this to work.

That should give you enough to be getting on with. Follow the action points above as a strategy and you will get the rankings you are after.

Will Taylor

Nov 10, 2009

19:26:19

#5

Hey Captain, this is great. I will look at all these points closely. The content was lifted right at the beginning of the design, simply to give me content, the intention was to replace and i’ve just not got around to that! Thank you for the kick. As far as the rest goes i think i understand everything except for one that i’m not too sure on. Where / how would i add the meta description in wordpress. I am looking at a post page and there is nothing that says meta. would it be the description field on the SEO pack? If it is then on the latest post i gave the following as the description:

Tea & Toast, a community group run by volunteers from Rochford Community Church, a Church in Rochford, Essex. Ran a coffee morning / table sale / fund-raiser for cancer research. It was a great success!

Would that be about right?

So i’ll try and implement all of these things and come back to you on the maps things later down the line.

I will give you as good a recommendation as i possibly can! You’ve been awesome.

CaptainSEO

Nov 11, 2009

07:11:20

#6

If you are using the all in one SEO pack for WordPress, which I assume you are, it will automatically create your description tag for you from the first paragraph of the page. Make sure the first paragraph is well constructed and contains your keywords.

The description will be shown in the search results as a snippet with your web link so make sure it reads well and will encourage clicks to the site.

Note: The all in one SEO pack, doesn’t magically optimise the website and prepare it for search engines. It simply gives a little extra functionality that can be used as part of the optimisation process.

You can check the descriptions from a web browser by selecting view and then page source in Firefox or view and then source in Internet Explorer.

Good luck with it and feel free to ask any questions.

Will Taylor

Nov 17, 2009

15:23:29

#7

an update to http://www.rcc.co.uk: I have changed the text and started to mess around with the All in One SEO plugin. I have a few directories starting to link to me and a couple of blogs are going to link to me. interestingly google finds http://www.rcc.co.uk/church-life/ before it finds http://www.rcc.co.uk/ now. Iin fact 3 pages before! If this is to do with the text on the front page then that should sort it’s self out soon when google catches up with the site’s changes, i presume.

I have looked for text on other pages and hound the the phrase “At our core is a desire to at the heart of the community in which we live” doesn’t show up at all in google. See http://bit.ly/2vV762

I’m starting to worry that going down the wordpress direction has been a bad idea. Do i need to be making more links? More content on the pages, more links?

Any ideas? Or am i simply not being patient enough?

CaptainSEO

Nov 17, 2009

15:56:05

#8

You’re moving in the right direction. Patience is required now. Google may take a month or two to catch up with your changes. Googlebot hasn’t visited your site since the morning of 12th November (5 days ago), so definitely will not know about any changes made since then.

I can’t find the phrase starting “At our core” either. Where is it on your site?

As for using WordPress, it’s an excellent platform for constructing optimised websites, so don’t worry there.

Another tip for you:
Make sure the websites and blogs linking to you are not using the rel=nofollow tag on their hyperlinks otherwise, you will not benefit from link credit. If they are using WordPress or Blogger for example, the nofollow is default.

Maybe we should look at your maps listing in the meantime?

Will Taylor

Nov 19, 2009

23:38:31

#9

a couple of things: The phrase “at out core…..” comes from http://www.rcc.co.uk/community/
I’ll make sure the blogs work with the no follow tag.

I have the old blog still functioning http://rochfordcc.wordpress.com. I copied the posts from that to the new site and am now thinking that because there is duplicate text the new site isn’t getting searched for the text that is in those posts. Should i now delete the old blog and the posts from that. The old blog is searching well in google. This could be a problem?

Again, any support is going to be very well received and help with maps is no exception

CaptainSEO

Nov 29, 2009

11:03:47

#10

Sorry for the late reply. As you know, I have a broken jaw and have been away from my desk for a while.

Anyway, I was about to give some advice on how to redirect your WordPress blog to the new URL so as to keep the existing rankings and to redirect traffic, however, I see in my absence you have deleted the blog from WordPress.

That’s fine. You will avoid duplicate content issues this way, but there could have been a better way of handling it.

CaptainSEO

Nov 29, 2009

11:10:26

#11

The community page hasn’t been indexed (in it’s current incarnation) by Google yet. The last time Google visited that page was 1st October 2009.

Google will return again when you have some better links to the site. I see the community page is in your XML sitemap, so it will be indexed.

Now that brings us on to the sitemap. Deep breath. This is a mine field.

Make a couple of changes. Your home page importance is set to 10%. Needs to be 100 really. You have the page updates set to always. Be a little more realistic with this and set them to monthly / never or whatever is the case. Have a look at the importance ratings for the pages too and adjust manually to reflect the actual importance.

CaptainSEO.