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SEO wizards wanted


Pseudonym

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I think we've done some damage to our SEO rank over the last few years, as we moved from NZBodybuilding.co.nz, to Gymnation 1.0, to Gymnation 2.0, to Gymnation 3.0. Each shift involved some massive (but necessary) structural changes to the site, and I don't think we came out of it unscathed. :-(

 

Is there a SEO wizard out there who can help us fix things?

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4 hours ago, BeastBuilder said:

What is SEO ? Search Engine Optimization ?

 

Ps as you can tell I'm probably not the man for the job, but just intrigued at how you would go about sorting something like that.

Bro il break it down into simple words for you. You pay a small asian man some money and he wacks the tips of his fingers on a keyboard for a while until gymnation goes to the top of google. 

 

 

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Except that the techniques they use will usually get you penalised by Google, so you end up even worse off than you were before.

 

The one thing that does make a big difference is incoming links pointing back to us. If Google sees a lot of these, it thinks we must be worth ranking higher (which of course we are). But they have to be legitimate, reputable ones.

 

So if you see any content here you think is worthy, please link it hard!

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7 hours ago, Pseudonym said:

Except that the techniques they use will usually get you penalised by Google, so you end up even worse off than you were before.

 

The one thing that does make a big difference is incoming links pointing back to us. If Google sees a lot of these, it thinks we must be worth ranking higher (which of course we are). But they have to be legitimate, reputable ones.

 

So if you see any content here you think is worthy, please link it hard!

link it where, how? do you mean sharing on FB or something?

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Typically one of those guys that sits in the background here but I'm going through a website re-design at the moment too so I feel your pain! I've had to brush up on my SEO skills lately too and thought I might actually be able to contribute here haha. 

 

Sounds like you're on to the right track with wanting legit content being linked out there in a white-hat fashion. The other thing I would possibly mention is that after conducting research on WoM and WoM behaviours I found emotive/humorous content is typically shared more frequently and is more likely to 'change behavior' (depending on the campaign and the desired outcome) than extrinsically motivated behaviors. 

 

However, directly addressing your concern...Without scouring through everything I normally would (my brain is dying from having to go through this with my own company) I'd recommend checking out Hubspot's website grader and checking out their articles. Their articles are complete click-bait stuff but I'll be damned if they didn't actually have some good content in amongst it all. 

 

I know the grader doesn't completely cover everything or suit every situation. For example it is telling me that gymnation needs more meta descriptions and heading which I think might be a 'little' difficult to manage on a website like this where it is comprised entirely of a forum and user-generated content. Unless you were to specifically ask that of users as they post content. I come from a b2b and academic background so I'm not too familiar with SEO and best practice for forums buut I would look into developing a sitemap (one that updated automatically as threads are created? I'm not sure of the value vs time of that though). In the absence of a sitemap I'd just keep a very close eye on your google webmaster tools; specifically crawl errors. 

 

I'm also not sure how urgent it is 'right now' but the load time on gymnation.co.nz is a little high. Google is looking at setting up another area/page/service dedicated at reducing webpage load time and I suspect they will soon incorporate that into their SEO (similar to the mobile-responsiveness). 

 

The Google AdWords and  forums will provide a lot of help too (I know it is SEM but there is some SEO content in there too). You're more likely to get a response from some people who know what they're doing there; I've found some useful content there too. 

 

The other thing I'd possibly think of is looking at your search analytics under google webmaster tools. See what you searches lead to the most clicks for you guys, look to see if there are any content keywords you'd like to work on from there. Look at google adwords too, use the keyword planner to see what google recommends, what are some of the keywords that are working for competing websites.. then maybe work with some of the guys here to see if you can write articles that are not a part of the forum focusing on those keywords you deem important? Then encourage others here to share them? My logic could be wrong but my thoughts are that an individual is more likely to share an article than an article in a forum post (even if the content is the same). It might be something you could look at testing anyway.  

 

Hope you find something useful there anyway man. 

 

 

Edited by Inaccuraccy
Some shit popped into my head after initial post
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Good post, mate! You should definitely make more of them!

 

TBH, a lot of the stuff the Hubspot website grade is suggesting, we've already got in place. Meta descriptions are automatically generated using the first post of a topic (keywords are only used on pages like the front page, but most search engines don't look at them now anyway). We also have a sitemap in place, and webmaster tools tells me it's happy with that. So it's a bit strange that Hubspot didn't pick it up.

 

Yeah, I went through Webmaster Tools and found a heap of 404s that hadn't been redirected properly from the old versions of the forum. They've been fixed now, but I suspect some "link juice" was lost in the process.

 

 

On 13/03/2016 at 9:32 PM, Inaccuraccy said:

after conducting research on WoM and WoM behaviours I found emotive/humorous content is typically shared more frequently and is more likely to 'change behavior' (depending on the campaign and the desired outcome) than extrinsically motivated behaviors. 

That's really interesting. Thinking about it, I'm not surprised though. It tallies with my own experience. When we offer competitions with a huge prize (ie, extrinsic motivation!), we get a few people signing up to be part of it, but most don't stick around long-term.

 

On 13/03/2016 at 9:32 PM, Inaccuraccy said:

see if you can write articles that are not a part of the forum focusing on those keywords you deem important? Then encourage others here to share them?

Actually, we're doing exactly that right now. And not just for SEO purposes, but also to give the newbies a place to easily find the information they need to start. It'll be a good feature, for sure.

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Hah no worries. Happy to chat more about this kind of thing, I love it haha. 

 

That is quite strange regarding the sitemap! As long as google is happy then that is all that matters! I suspect the reason hubspot wasn't able to find it would be that there is no gymnation.co.nz/sitemap.xml (a lot of sites will use this to make it more easily viewable by google's crawlers. See: spark.co.nz/sitemap.xml or apple.com/sitemap.xml for example. But not every website will do it either, see: vodafone.co.nz/sitemap.xml). 

 

9 hours ago, Pseudonym said:
On 3/13/2016 at 9:32 PM, Inaccuraccy said:

after conducting research on WoM and WoM behaviours I found emotive/humorous content is typically shared more frequently and is more likely to 'change behavior' (depending on the campaign and the desired outcome) than extrinsically motivated behaviors. 

That's really interesting. Thinking about it, I'm not surprised though. It tallies with my own experience. When we offer competitions with a huge prize (ie, extrinsic motivation!), we get a few people signing up to be part of it, but most don't stick around long-term.

 

Exactly! It is quite effective at getting individuals to sign-up or whatever your required entry is for the prize but in the long-run it fails to change behavior unless you can continuously offer something of value in the long-run (I use the term value quite loosely, it depends what your target market values. On a website like this I would imagine it would be the community itself, the support of existing members and the useful content produced?). There are a few reasons for extrinsically incentivized WoM not being as successful. This isn't a widely researched area (it has begun as companies look into 'how to be viral') but all journal articles agree so far that people are a little bit suspicious of the purpose of economic incentivized WoM campaigns (as soon as they're suspicious they don't engage in the campaign as you would like them to) and that 'trust' factor you might have gotten from somebody engaging in WoM is gone. Sorry, I come from an academic background and can talk for hours about this crap. I'm not expert in the field of WoM but let me know if you want more, I can send a few articles your way. Also have a few articles around online communities and passive users if you're interested (could provide some insight on tailoring some posts/articles to encourage contributions/posts). Although I'd note that every online community is quite unique in itself so some of it may not apply. 

 

9 hours ago, Pseudonym said:
On 3/13/2016 at 9:32 PM, Inaccuraccy said:

see if you can write articles that are not a part of the forum focusing on those keywords you deem important? Then encourage others here to share them?

Actually, we're doing exactly that right now. And not just for SEO purposes, but also to give the newbies a place to easily find the information they need to start. It'll be a good feature, for sure.

 

That will be awesome! Cannot wait! Yeah, it will be a great resource to have there and should have a positive effect on your SEO I'd imagine. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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