SEO Guide – How SEOMoz has helped WebDesignDev

By Web Design | 6 comments | Reviews

Tweet

Today I want to show you how SEOMoz has helped WebDesignDev’s SEO. As you know, I get a lot of my traffic from search engines (about 61% from Google), so having a website that is very well optimized for search engines can bring a lot of traffic. I consider myself a self-taught SEO expert – I have been learning about SEO for the last 5 years and have applied numerous SEO techniques to my websites. This time was a little different – I heard many positive things about SEOMoz and  thought I’d take advantage of the limited time free 30 day trial of their SEO software just to see what’s wrong with my site. The results were quite stunning.

Upon logging in, you would see a screen like this:

As you can see above, I already have my campaign set up. To set yours up, you click click on Start a New Campaign:

Then, fill out the details and click Continue to Next Step:

Select all 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and click Continue to Next Step:

In the step above, you can put up to 3 competitors. I suggest putting the highest ranking websites so you can see what they are doing right, and what you are doing wrong.. Then click Continue to Next Step to go to the final Step 4:

In the step above, enter up to 5 keywords you want to track. The free trial lets you track 300 keywords in total, which should be plenty (you can set up the other keywords after you create the campaign). Once you enter the keywords, click Create My Campaign.

I am now going to fast-forward 1 day, after SEOMoz has successfully crawled my website. I’ve also added a total of 300 keywords by copy/pasting the top keywords from my Google Analytics.

Here is how my campaign summary looks:

I was shocked to see 6 errors, 2890 warnings and 4957 notices. I thought there was nothing major wrong with my site! SEOMoz actually gives you the breakdown of what kind of errors/warnings/notices you have and shows you which page has which errors.

It turns out I have 5 pages with missing or empty title, 1 page with 4xx error, a whopping 2385 pages with missing meta description, 324 pages with too many links, 176 pages with title element that’s too long, 2271 pages blocked by robots.txt and more. Here I was thinking that the free WordPress SEO plug-in I used would take care of all of my SEO. Not so fast.

Here is a small sample of pages with missing meta descriptions. Turns out that my author pages don’t have meta description set up:

But this is far not all. Inside the dashboard I am also able to see data such as competitive link analysis:

I saw that I have a total of only 175,192 links. While to you this may sound like a lot of links, my top competitors have more than 15 times that number! Also, the biggest difference I saw is the number of unique linking root domains.

That’s not all. Among other things, I am able to see exactly where I rank for ALL 300 of the keywords I added, and across all of the major search engines:

SEOMoz also tracks all of my keywords and shows me where  my rankings have gone up or down.

It’s great to be able to get this kind of SEO information right in front of me. Best of all, I got it all for absolutely free within several days of starting my free trial of SEOMoz. The lesson I learned is you never know what’s wrong with your website until you run a very thorough scan of ALL of your pages. Good SEO is extremely important as that’s what drives the majority of traffic, clients and ultimately money into your pocket. I am off now to start fixing all of the things that are wrong with WebDesignDev’s SEO. What’s wrong with your website? Sign up for SEOMoz free 30 day trial and find out for free.