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SEO analysis #1 bellinghambands.com

Bellingham Bands SEO Analysis
bellinghambands.com (domain contains important keyword ++)

This site is a local music / entertainmant site for a small market so ranking high for various search terms should be fairly easy.

Current #1 for Bellingham bands which should be expected for the domain name and site focus.

Before starting any major changes its a good idea to find out exactly where your site stand using analytics to see where your traffic is currently coming from. Use tools provided by the search engines to see how your site is doing and possible problems with your site.
Googles webmaster tools is the most detailed and since it is the most important search engine to do well in this one is a must to have. If you have time Bings webmaster center is fairly useful and looks like it will be something that will grow. Yahoos site explorer I have not used enough to judge and will only try if I really want to heavly optimize a site and I have the time. Most likely if you fix problems with Google or Bing you'll do fine on Yahoo.

Once you have a good picture of where you are its important to find out what keywords your site should be aiming for. One way of finding this is to search for your main site keywords (Bellingham bands) in Google, most Google searches now also offer links to similar searches. For my seearch it suggested similar searches for Bellingham music and Bellingham djs. I also use Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. While it is designed to help people find keywords to bid on for ads, it is helpful in finding related keywords and their search volume.

Now go over these portions of your sites pages (Not ordered by importance)

  • url
  • title
  • meta description
  • content
  • incoming links

URLs
Bellingham Bands has this done properly. While a URL will not necessarily make or break a site. I do not really believe that having keywords in your domain will help much, but if your site comes up in results the url will be displayed. The user is more likely to click on a link that contains some of the keywords searched for (keyword.com/keyword/keyword-keyword/) compared to a links domain.com/page.php?id=1923823928, but this could be made up for by doing well in the other areas.
Title
The individual page titles are one of the most important. The title should describe the page in as few words as possible and there should be no duplicate titles within the site (webmaster tools should warn you when this is found). If you have pages that are so close that the title does match find at least one word to change in order to keep this from happening. Bellingham Bands does this quite well but could add a word or two in order to expand the keyword gain from the title.
Meta Description
The meta description of a page is what should be displayed in search results and should be a short description of the individual page. How the meta description is created and displayed depends on the site itself. Bellingham Bands uses Wordpress and does offer a meta description tool although certain plugins may be required and a template that supports it.
Bellingham Bands does have a meta descritption for each page but they are all short and duplicate (webmaster tools should warn you when this is found).

Altering this to a short paragraph describing each  individual page would help out quite a bit with search ranking and click thru on those results that come up.
Content
Most of Bellingham Bands site contains good content although I'd add some content containing related keywords and phrases to increase the ranking for related terms.
Some of the pages only contain an image advertising an event and some pages contain a mix of content and images. For image only pages I would write a short paragraph describing the image and also use that as the meta description.
The images within the content do not contain a good alt description. This is what a screen reader would use to describe the image to someone requiring the use of a screen reader to understand what the image is. By describing the image in detail we can help those using screen readers and gain a few more keywords for the search engine.
Incoming Links
Having incoming links from other sites can not only help the search engines find your site, it is seen as a vote of confidence and can greatly increase your sites ranking.
For a site such as this that writes content about bands that will most likely have a website I'd encourage contacting easy band and ask them to link to the site. Some but not all of the bands covered do.
Request the links in a format that raises certain keywords such as <a href="http://bellinghambands.com" title="Local Bellingham Bands">Bellingham Bands</a>

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