Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Brian Lichtig on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 01/23/2015).

Looking to rank this link on our web page a little higher for the keywords

Looking to rank this link on our web page a little higher for the keywords: Columbia MD IT Support and Columbia Maryland IT Support. I have added several back links and done all that I can think of. Any help would be great to try and get it up on the first page.

http://baltimorecomputersolutions.net/columbia-maryland-support/?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Brian Lichtig: Looking to rank this link on our web page a little higher for the keywords: Columbia MD IT Support and Columbia Maryland IT Support. I have added several back links and done all that I can think of. Any help would be great to try and get it up on the first page.

    http://baltimorecomputersolutions.net/columbia-maryland-support/
  • Greg Baka: Your <body>, which is the real content, doesn't start until line 1448. That is not helping anything....
    Most of what's above it is tons of CSS that should be in a CSS file. Since you already have about 25 CSS files, why not add one more? (But seriously, that's way more CSS files than such a simple page should need...)
    All that bloated code is giving you a +5 second load time, which will also hurt your ranking.
    Hope this helps you +Brian Lichtig ;
  • Brian Lichtig: How does ; one fix that?
  • Greg Baka: Hi +Brian Lichtig ;
    You need to figure out which of those CSS files are being used, and which are not. It is very likely that just a few lines from each file are being used.
    The "Dust Me Selectors" add-on for FIrefox will tell you which CSS lines are being used, and which are not. Checking your page I see that 651 lines are used, and 5146 lines of CSS are not used.
    Take what gets used and combine it all into just one CSS file.
    This will help your page speed, but there are also other things slowing your page down. Run it through webpagetest(dot)org to see what parts are slow and how to fix them.
  • Daniel Lloyd Barrett: You would have to check the CSS on every page before removing any.
  • Greg Baka: Depends how it is done +Daniel Lloyd Barrett I do not delete any CSS files, but instead just create one new CSS file for each page that only contains what is needed for that page. Then in the <head> link only to that new CSS file and erase the links to all the other CSS files.
    That way the other pages are still OK, and only the page you are working on is cleaned up.
    A better way would be to check the whole site at once, as you suggested, but I don't think that Dust Me can do that. Can it?

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 01/23/2015).