Completely Discombobulated...I think

Hello everyone! I’m obviously a newbie, or more like an alien to this "stuff". Here’s my story/issues:

1. We recently hired a "company" to re-do our website and also do SEO (because we don’t know how to do it, hence hiring someone). Needless to say, they were good at the SEO aspect, but not so good at the website part.

2. We have a website (templates, and basic website stuff) but we are lacking on content, pictures, other important details that are relevant to our company.

3. The SEO company gave us control of the "Content Mangament", as in "here’s your log-in information, have fun"

4. So now I am left to handle the rest of it. I have been scouring the web for tutorials, instructions, a dummies guide, etc. and have found a lot of great information (I think it is at least, but I wouldn’t know because it goes right over my head).

5. My question is...is there a guide or "cheat sheet" somewhere out there that has strictly "content" instructions? I don’t think I need all the snippet, chunks, TV(???) stuff, just the basic adding/changing content, inserting pictures into text, linking from one webpage to another on our site, adding pdf’s.


Am I hopeless, or is there anything "simple" out there that can help me? I do catch on fast with technology related stuff, I guess I just don’t know where to start!

**Modified**

After my first post I thought I should have been a little more clear.
I know that with all the tutorials out there, that there must be one that can help me. My problem is, I don’t even know what to search for in these tutorials because this is so far out of my realm of knowledge. I’m fine reading the tutorials, but once all the coding/html stuff starts appearing, I glaze over.

So maybe if someone could just point me to the correct section of some tutorial that would help, so I wouldn’t have to guess if I am even reading the right parts for what I am trying to do.

I hope that once I get the basics under control, I will be able to learn how to do cooler "stuff"

Just in case it helps, here is the website I am referring to: www.winecellardesigns.biz

Well, at the very least your web designer had the vision to put your site on the best open-source CMS in cyberspace.

There’s a spattering of documentation all over the net, and I’m sure many will chime in with links to tutorials and what-not.

I am working on an online help section to provide my clients with, and I would be happy to share it with you. It is not nearly finished yet, but has enough content for you to browse and get better acquainted with MODx:

http://www.studioefx.com/modx-user-guide/

Let me know if it helps.

Mike

I think most of the tutorials and how-tos online are by people wanting to share their experience in the more advanced features of MODx (more advanced than simple content editing, that is), and at least to me it seems rather unusual that your designers would just drop it on you like this. It doesn’t take long to show a client around in MODx, and there’s also a nice feature for setting up internal Help files in a tabbed page in the Manager for documenting anything the client will be needing to do.

This would be a good place to start http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/Evo1/Content+Editing

As far as SEO is concerned, if you haven’t had it explained to you that your content itself will make a serious impact on your SEO, then I would not agree with your statement that "Needless to say, they were good at the SEO aspect..." It doesn’t matter how your site template is structured or how many keywords you have in the keywords meta tag in your template head if the content itself isn’t properly laid out and relevant. For example, my personal site didn’t show up in a search for my name (a relative looking for me found me through a search that led to a forum post I’d made on an entirely unrelated application) until recently, when I did some research on SEO. I made a couple of simple tweaks to my content, and within a few days such a search had my site in the first place, where it’s remained ever since.

Think of your web page as an outline for a term paper. The <h1> heading is like the title, and each subsection has its own inner headings to structure and organize the outline. <h2> for subsections, <h3> for sub-subsections, etc. Using the document’s pagetitle and longtitle wisely can give such a structured approach a good start. Then you need to consider what search terms will be most relevant for the subject of your page. Those terms should appear in the browser’s title bar (the <title>...</title> tags in the template’s head; I presume that the [*pagetitle*] and/or [*longtitle*] is used to generate that title), <h1> and <h2> headings of the various sections of the page , and be repeated within the content itself as the content expands on the theme outlined in the headings.

Your content needs to be so definitive on the subject that it gradually gets linked to by other sources, which increases your SEO. Doing a Google search for "MODx", my site comes in at the middle of the second page, because I don’t have "MODX" in a lot of my pagetitles or aliases (which are used to generate the URL for the page).

So as you (hopefully) see from this, SEO involves a lot more than having an "SEO website", it’s a whole way of looking at your content (the editing of each page, including page title, long title, alias and the content).

Sottwell are - as usual - spot on: SEO without content are not SEO!

There are at PDF-file aimed at content editors you can download here: http://sandbox.amdbuilder.net/editordocs/editorguide.pdf made by a other MODx user: Valeska Scholl. I hope this can help you!

Thank you guys so much for your input.

Mike and Henrick thanks for the links. I think that these will definitely help me on my journey!


Sotwell, I really appreciate your feedback. I especially agree with your comment about most of the tutorials out there are those wanting to do more advanced things. I also find it a little weird that the designers/developers didn’t do much to help.

I really think that they are more of an SEO company (rather than a packaged-deal type company), but decided they could do re-do our complete website too (bit off a little more than they could chew I guess).

I asked them if I needed to add keywords in the content I will be writing and adding and they basically said no, but if there happen to be some of our keywords in the text, it wouldn’t hurt. They told me that since they had done all of the "marketing" pages to be SEO rich (basically the FAQ questions that are listed at the bottom of our website), that I shouldn’t worry about trying to do the same with the content.

Is any of that true?!? I am starting (well not starting, but confirming) that they didn’t actually do what they said they were going to, and we paid them big bucks anyway?

It’s certainly an attractive site. Though I’m no oenophile, I can appreciate the eye candy!

Rather than guess or worry about SEO, try a few experiments, maybe 45 to 60 or so.

According to Nielsen NetRatings as reported by the Dallas Google Guru, searches in the United States upon Google, Yahoo plus MSN engines add up to 91% of the total. (The same top three captured 83% of the total in 2006, so the oligopolistic trend has only intensified.) Unless you have good reason to believe that Web search in Scottsdale is atypical, you expect considerable non-U.S. interest in your business, or you know that there is some small but important wine-oriented search engine to consider, you can restrict the study to the three top U.S. search providers without fear of being misled.

Therefore, create a table that looks something like this:

[table]
[tr]
[td]Search Keyword
[/td]
[td]Google Rank
[/td]
[td]Yahoo Rank
[/td]
[td]MSN / Bing Rank
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]custom wine racking
[/td]
[td]47
[/td]
[td]1
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]wine racking
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]cellar cooling systems
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]whisperkool
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]split system
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]wine storage
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]wine cabinet
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]vintique racking
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]commercial wine racking
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]cellar design
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]custom cellars
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]

[tr]
[td]And maybe 5 to 10 more
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[td]
[/td]
[/tr]


[/table]

Do the keywords above seem familiar? I lifted them from your site’s source code. You could brainstorm more keywords, jot down keywords that your customers and suppliers use to describe your offering and even examine the keywords on competitors’ Web sites.

Now the tedious part: For each keyword, perform a search using each search engine. For each search result, count down to the first citation that points to your Web site. Record that number in the table. (I took a look at Google and Yahoo, then entered a couple of results above.)

If page ranks on many of the keywords that matter to prospective customers are low, you are doing great. If not, you have more work to do, as Susan indicates.

I did one of these studies last week for a Japanese manufacturer of some wonderful products who has struggled to break into the U.S. market. I found that their page ranks numbered in the hundreds(!) for most keywords that they deemed important. No wonder that no one finds their Web site unless they already know the company’s name!

The exceptions were rather odd English acronyms the company had coined to describe their products and business. Since no one else in the world, customers included, used these keywords, they ranked absolutely ichiban on them.

Anyway, as you add content and trade links with others, keep testing your site’s page ranks. You should expect to see improvement.

Hints
Your site’s keywords don’t mention geography. Throw in some Scottsdale and Arizona references in the above test keywords and see how your page ranks look. Pretty good, I’ll bet. And that’s relevant, right? You aren’t likely to install a custom wine cellar in Schenectady, NY after all.

Schenectady? That reminds me: Do you find that customers misspell certain keywords? (Such as "vintique," perhaps?) If so, add those misspellings to your site’s keyword list. It won’t make you look dumb or foolish. It might provide a few "hits" you wouldn’t receive otherwise.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

For Google, the keywords have zero impact. That doesn’t mean other search engine don’t though, and usually I include them nevertheless for other search engines (and get a few extra hits from Yahoo).

Having friendly URLs (like you do) sure helps, as the keywords people search for might appear in your links, and that adds a bonus. Content remains one of the most important factors though. If not the most important.

Assuming you’ve read the links posted already, you’ll be ready to get working on your content and improve your website

I am completely overwhelmed-in-a-good-way at everyone who took time to help me out! Thank you so much, you have no idea how much I appreciate it.

Keep any ideas/advice/etc coming if you can!

Thanks!

Mike,

Any chance you have your user guide in pdf format?? I think it’s just what I’m needing.

Hints
Your site’s keywords don’t mention geography. Throw in some Scottsdale and Arizona references in the above test keywords and see how your page ranks look. Pretty good, I’ll bet. And that’s relevant, right? You aren’t likely to install a custom wine cellar in Schenectady, NY after all.

Schenectady? That reminds me: Do you find that customers misspell certain keywords? (Such as "vintique," perhaps?) If so, add those misspellings to your site’s keyword list. It won’t make you look dumb or foolish. It might provide a few "hits" you wouldn’t receive otherwise.

Yes, we design/build/install EVERYWHERE!!