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Category: On-Page Optimization

Explore on-page optimization and its role in a larger SEO strategy.

  • david305


    howdy, do curse words on your content article hurt SEO in any way or form? and if so is there a "list" of registered curse keywords that should be avoided?

    | david305
    0
  • VertiStudio


    Hello, I have on a main page over 50 images. The first page i want to optimize it for MAINKW (let's say). Now, if i use in the alt tags "MAINKW KW1", "MAINKW KW2", "MAINKW KW3" ... "MAINKW KW50" then Google may say that i stuff the MAINKW in that page? Those images are reprezentative for main Categories and i have direct links to them from the main page with the anchors KW1, KW2...KW50.

    | VertiStudio
    0
  • Amosnet


    I have recently switched my images to a CDN (MaxCDN) and all of the images within my post are now get loaded directly from the CDN. Will this affect my Google ranking? Do Google care if the image is hosted physicaly on the domain?

    | Amosnet
    0
  • PHDAustralia68


    I am having a few problems that I can't seem to work out.....I am fairly new to this and can't seem to work out the following: Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂 1. I am missing alot of meta description tags. I have installed "All in One SEO" but there seems to be no options to add meta descriptions in portfolio posts. I have also written meta descriptions for 'tags' and whilst I can see them in WP they don't seem to be activated. 2. The blog has pages indexed by WP- called Part 2 (/page/2), Part 3 (/page/3) etc. How do I solve this issue of meta descriptions and indexed pages? 3. There is also a page for myself, the author, that has multiple indexes for all the blog posts I have written, and I can't edit these archives to add meta descriptions. This also applies to the month archives for the blog. 4. Also, SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links on my blog page (also indexed) and their consequent tags. This also applies to the author pages (myself ). How do I fix this? Thanks for your help 🙂 Regards Nadia

    | PHDAustralia68
    0
  • mevseo


    Our search results page doesn't have a typical H1 tag because adding a true header would take up space unnecessarily. Therefore, we've assigned the h1 tag to be the breadcrumb. As filters are applied, the breadcrumb grows to include these filters. This breadcrumb is coded as bullet points, even though they're not the typical style of bullet points. Here's a screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/AjGC9iAYR3 For example, the breadcrumb: Home >> NYC Social Media Classes >> Adult >> Manhattan is currently coded as: | |
    |   | * class="first"><a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>/">Home |
    |   | * <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>/nyc/classes/social-media/age-adults/neighborhood-manhattan" class="Selected">Search results |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | id="cat_social-media" type="checkbox" checked onclick="setCategory('social-media')" /> |
    |   | # style="font-size: 12px; display: inline;">NYC Social Media Classes |
    |   | <label <span="">for</label>="cat_social-media"> |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | <nobr>id="age_adults" type="checkbox" checked onclick="setAge('adults')" /><label <span="">for</label>="age_adults">Adults</nobr> |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | <nobr>id="nbhd_manhattan" type="checkbox" checked onclick="setNeighborhood('manhattan')" /><label <span="">for</label>="nbhd_manhattan">Manhattan</nobr> |
    |   | |
    |   | | Right now that H1 tag just relates to 'NYC Social media classes', but we'd like to expand it to include both 'Manhattan' & 'Adults' - would that be ok? And if so, would it be better to put the tag before and after the tag?

    | mevseo
    0
  • MarieA


    Hi! I have 14 sub-pages i deleted earlier today. But ofcourse Google can still find them, and gives everyone that gives them a go a 404 error. I have come to the understading that this wil hurt the rest of my site, at least as long as Google have them indexed. These sub-pages lies in 3 different folders, and i want to redirect them to a sub-page in a folder number 4. I have already an htaccess file, but i just simply cant get it to work! It is the same file as i use for redirecting trafic from mydomain.no to www.mydomain.no, and i have tried every kind of variation i can think of with the sub-pages. Has anyone perhaps had the same problem before, or for any other reason has the solution, and can help me with how to compose the htaccess file? 🙂 You have to excuse me if i'm using the wrong terms, missing something i should have seen under water while wearing a blindfold, or i am misspelling anything. I am neither very experienced with anything surrounding seo or anything else that has with internet to do, nor am i from an englishspeaking country. Hope someone here can light up my path 🙂 Thats at least something you can say in norwegian...

    | MarieA
    1
  • activitysuper


    In general from what I have experienced a location specific extension such as .co.uk geo-targeted to the same location gives the best results when ranking BUT when I look at results from the US, page after page shows results of .com, surely if my above statement is true then a .us domain extension should rank better then a .com.

    | activitysuper
    0
  • Ferguson


    Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
    Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
    Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
    The pages will have all of this info in it's content
    BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!

    | Ferguson
    0
  • SamCUK


    I'm using wordpress and the all in one seo pack with the canonical option checked. As I understand it the rel="canonical" tag should be added to pages that are duplicate or similar to tell google that another page (one without the rel="canonical" tag) is the correct one as the url in the tag is pointing google towards it. Why then does the all in one seo pack add rel="canonical" to every page on my site including the home page? Isn't that confusing for google?

    | SamCUK
    0
  • DenverKelly


    Would it have a negative effect on SEO to have a link from the home page to this page... http://www.website/com/page1deep/page2deep rather than to this page http://www.website/com/page1deep I'm hoping that made some sense. If not I'll try to clarify. Thanks, Mark

    | DenverKelly
    0
  • Autoschieber


    Hi, I see a lot of sites with a year copyright statment in the footer like Copyright 2011 - DomainName.com or Copyright 2002 - 2012 - Domainname.com since new year a lot of sites (founded before 2011) still have 2011 instead of 2012 in the footer. Do you think the date gives any signals to google? Should someone update the date or remove it completely? I would tend to remove it completely since the page date for google is submitted in the HTTP header. But maybe the info could be of any use for the user. Any best practices?

    | Autoschieber
    0
  • KennethK


    Hi I would like to hear if someone could help me decide whether or not it is important regarding SEO that the menu name is the same as the keyword we want to rank for. The site is a static site and one of our most important keywords. To give an example. Our menu name is "cars" and we want to rank for "cheap rental cars".

    | KennethK
    0
  • Lobtec


    For some of our site we use Wordpress, which we really like working with. The question I have is for the categories and authors pages (and similiar pages), i.e. the one looking: http://www.domain.com/authors/. Should you or should you not use follow, noindex for meta-robots? We have a lot of categories/tags/authors which generates a lot of pages. I'm a bit worried that google won't like this and leaning towards adding the follow, noindex. But the more I read about it, the more I see people disagree. What does the community of Seomoz think?

    | Lobtec
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, I am an NLP health coach. I am starting to work with both life threatening illnesses and minor diagnoses. NLP is a type of personal development. I'm wondering what your opinion of the best domain would be, keeping in mind branding, SEO, and usability/rememberability. The term "NLP" is not well known. I will be doing both phone coaching and in-person coaching. My other website (BobWeikel.com) is not very strong because of the lack of keywords in the domain, but it's easy to remember. Options are: NLPTrained.com BobWeikelHealthCoach.com BoiseHealthCoach.com (I'm in Boise Idaho) RobertWeikel.com or whatever you suggest.

    | BobGW
    0
  • hith234


    Lets suppose that i have 10 NICHE products under me. Should i make one site for each product or one site overall. If i make 1 site for each product i get several advantages Domain name has keyword Title tags etc will be dedicated to one keyword only. Disavantage - Backlinking for each domain will become tougher. Advantage of one site onl Good management Seo / backlinks becomes easier Blogging to attract traffic becomes easier Can target a lot of keywords through business blogging Disadvantages Can become messy with unimportant keywords gaining importance. SO WHAT DO YOU THINK??? One site per product or One site for all products?

    | hith234
    0
  • nux


    Hello, I was curious about where to get related products from.  Currently I just grab some random products from the same category. Would there be any benefit to always linking to the same related products on a product page? Thanks

    | nux
    0
  • BoatOutfitters


    Hi there, I'm running a new e-commerce site (BoatOutfitters.com) and have a question about our product review pages. On our current campaign, we have a lot of duplicate page content errors. When we export the data, it's almost all blank product review pages (since we are new, we don't have that many product reviews yet). Our product reviews aren't run through javascript, so we originally did not add them to a robots.txt file - however, I'm now wondering if it's worse to have all of these duplicate blank pages, or is it not affecting our SEO at all? Should we just wait until these products have reviews which will benefit our SEO and then they won't be considered "duplicate pages" - right? Sorry if this has been answered before - new here at SEO Moz and just looking for some help. Thanks!

    | BoatOutfitters
    0
  • travelclickseo


    Quick question: I have been scouring SEOMoz.org along with webmaster forums looking for an answer, but we have a person who insists that the H1 tag be located in the Footer. I feel that is is fundamentally wrong because it is not the intent of the H1 tag, and I do not believe it is a best practice. That being said would we see what little value the H1 tag has disappear if we put it in the footer, would we be penalized, or am I being too vanilla by wanting to keep it in the Title position?

    | travelclickseo
    0
  • ostiguyj


    Hi, 
    I really don't understand why I have this message "No data available for this URL"
    in my SEOMOZ campain. (www.bienchezsoi.ca) When I look at my page rank, I get a score of 0 I have no idea of to fix it. Please help. Thanks

    | ostiguyj
    0
  • RobertFisher


    I was just inspecting a wire frame that is going out to a client and realized that the slider may interfere with the "content above the fold." Can't believe this had not struck me on others. If the Header has basic business info, etc. in it and you place a slider to display images in the area just beneath the Header or slightly down from it, does that decrease the amount of content seen a being above the fold? Or, is content above the fold established by virtue of H1,2, 3, etc.?

    | RobertFisher
    0
  • 77Agency


    Hi I have a question about URLs. Client have all URL written after domain and have only one / slash in all URLs. Is this best practice or i need to use categories,folders? Thanks

    | 77Agency
    0
  • KnutDSvendsen


    Google and Yahoo are the two major search engines in Japan. You can search using Western characters, and you often see English language results with Japanese (Chinese) characters next to them. As I don't speak Japanese, how do I approach SEO for my Japanese-language site? would appreciate any experiences and educational sources on the topic.

    | KnutDSvendsen
    0
  • HamiltonIsland


    Hi there, 2 part question: Is it best practice to try to rank for misspelled keywords that bring in lots of traffic or should you instead just try to rank for the correct spelling of that keyword and hope that you rank better on the misspelling as an indirect result? E.G. The misspelled keyword "Hamilton island accomodation" is a common misspelling that brings in traffic but we have an "F" rank for that term (obviously because we spell accommodation correctly on our site). We don't want to misspell anything but are there techniques to rank better for misspellings that won't hurt content quality? The On-Page Optimization tool says that our website doesn't rank in the top 50 on Google Aus for "Accomodation Hamilton Island" or "Hamilton Island Accomodation" but when i do a manual search, we actually are the first result. Is this an error with the On-Page optimization tool? Thanks!

    | HamiltonIsland
    0
  • paulinap1983


    I just want to copy my content on the page and use the first or as well the second sentence of the content self for my meta description tag. Is that OK? Or should the Meta description tag be different?

    | paulinap1983
    0
  • Bmeisterali


    Hi, I have been working on an e-commerce site and have been wondering if i should add the meta robot tag with no follows, on pages like delivery , terms, returns and the html sitemap? From what I have read this seems a good idea, but i am a little confused as what to do with the html sitemap. I can understand that having this on the homepage will allow crawlers quick access to the deeper pages within the site. But would it be better to guide them down the natural route of the category navigation instead? Thanks

    | Bmeisterali
    0
  • adriandg


    I know that it is important to have your primary keyword target as the first word or two words of your title tag.  But what about your meta description tag? does it matter where they keyword is in the description tag?  I see a lot of other sites stuffing their keywords right at the front of the description tag and it looks somewhat unnatural.  What's your take? do you put the primary keyword as the first word or two words of your description tag?

    | adriandg
    0
  • dimanyc


    Hi, I'm optimizing a large, consumer electronic e-commerce superstore. Based on client's choice of keywords, I'm using product category pages as my target urls. Because of the proprietary CMS structure, product names and titles, featured on my landing pages (product category pages) create a keyword overkill, affecting various ranking factors. For example, one of the target urls / landing pages, dedicated to a specific product category, mentions the keyword over 190 times because of so many product titles in the "body" section. Would inline "rel="canonical" help? If yes, what part of the website should it "canonize"? If rel="canonical" is not the answer, what strategies would you suggest? Thanks!

    | dimanyc
    0
  • TRICORSystems


    Should I have the same H1 tag in my header through out my entire site? Or is this considered to be  self canalization for my main keywords. For example right now I have an H1 tag with my main targeted keywords on every page on my site, even if the pages content doesn't necessarily match the keywords in the H1 tag.

    | TRICORSystems
    0
  • lwilkins


    I blog for hotels and I am wondering whether it is best to have on a wordpress tagline the name of the hotel such as Holiday Inn and Suites vs Holiday Inn & Suites. In Google AdWords, the "and" keyword always beats out the "&" word in exact search. The "&" just always looks cleaner. Also, when I refer to the hotel within a blog post, should I use the "and" or "&" in the name? Please help me understand which is best for seo. Thank you!

    | lwilkins
    0
  • Bandicoot


    Quick question - is it a best practice to add a footer link on each page of a website that points back to your home page, with the anchor text being your official brand name?

    | Bandicoot
    0
  • goperformancelabs


    Good evening, I currently have a blog that uses a popup window after 15 seconds that is used to add visitor to my newsletter. My question is :  Does it have a negative effect in SEO? Thanks in advance Maria Jesus

    | goperformancelabs
    0
  • jannkuzel


    Firstly I would like to comment on how helpful this site is. I haven't posted much before but have been reading tonnes of answers for many months now and have been finding it really useful. I used the SEOmoz scanner and the main problem highlighted was duplicate content so I started to add 'customer product reviews' I had received and unique 'further information' to each page (hopefully this was the right thing to do to solve duplicate content! : ) ) Then I looked at heading and title tags. Currently I set title tags for each product page to be "Brand Name- Product Name" but after doing some research we are thinking of putting Keyword Description of Product | Product Name | Brand Name (around 60 characters long). So is this the advised thing to do and create unique titles that are relevant to each specific product page for over 200 pages we have? In addition, any advice on setting optimum tags would be great. We keep reading varying tips online. I gather ideally h1 needs to be a shorter keyword rich version of the title tag? Many Thanks

    | jannkuzel
    0
  • Webat


    I am wondering if the urls should be in alphabetical order or if they should be set out in a way that reflects the sites hierarchy? Thanks.

    | Webat
    0
  • MitchellStoker


    There's a site that contains "+" signs in the URL in order to call different information for the content on the page.  Would it be better to change those to hyphens (-), or not that much value will be gained, so leave them as is? Thanks!

    | MitchellStoker
    0
  • daveupton


    Hi, Just a quick note. I hope you are able to assist. To cut a long story short, on the page below http://www.bookbluemountains.com.au/ -> Features Specials & Packages (middle column) we have 3 links per special going to the same page.
    1. Header is linked
    2. Click on image link - currently with a no follow
    3. 'More info' under the description paragraph is linked too - currently with a no follow Two arguments are as follows:
    1. The reason we do not follow all 3 links is to reduce too many links which may appear spammy to Google. 2. Counter argument:
    The point above has some validity, However, using no follow is basically telling the search engines that the webmaster “does not trust or doesn’t take responsibility” for what is behind the link, something you don’t want to do within your own website.   There is no penalty as such for having too many links, the search engines will generally not worry after a certain number.. nothing that would concern this business though.  I would suggest changing the no follow links a.s.a.p. Could you please advise thoughts. Many thanks Dave Upton [long signature removed by staff]

    | daveupton
    0
  • TakeLessons


    Typically H1 tags are reserved for page headings, i.e. on a blog post the blog post title is very often the pages H1, or top-level heading as the W3C puts it. On the SEOmoz home page they currently have "SEO Software." as their H1 tag, which seems perfectly reasonable and to me fits the W3C criteria. However, what if the primary keyword for SEOmoz was "seo community" so they decided to wrap just those two words in the sentence that follows on their home page and maintain the existing style of the words "seo community" with CSS. (see attachment) Are there any arguments against doing that? Would Google be able to detect this? If so, would Google care? I do believe the overall importance of the H1 tag has lessened to a degree, however I still believe they are valuable to an extent and would love to hear anyone's thoughts. 7NZcD.png

    | TakeLessons
    1
  • sjcbayona-41218


    Hi SEOMoz Guys, Hope you guys are doing well. I've been searching online and bumped into this archived page (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/34982/meta-nocache-affect-ranking). I would like to get an updated take on this issue whether or not the meta no cache code on a page bears negative/positive or no SEO impact / effect. <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" /> <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache"/> Thanks! Steve

    | sjcbayona-41218
    2
  • mtueckcr


    I would like to know if anyone knew if the relevance of a page changes if I bold the first few sentences. Our journalist wants to bold the first few sentences in every article to make it easier to read, how does that affect SEO?

    | mtueckcr
    0
  • oeroek


    I have a website with sauna reviews. These are mostly pages that exist for years and regularly change because comments/reviews are added by visitors and/or because I change information on the page. When searching in Google for competitive keywords I noticed that the snippet of my direct competitor included a date stamp in the format (9 hous ago). How can I include a time stamp in the snippet, and more important how can I make sure that the timestamp is very recent. Is it sufficient to add a date on the page every time the page is updated or is ther emore to it?

    | oeroek
    0
  • azguy


    I recently moved over from html to wordpress. I have the google sitemap plugin on the new wordpress site, but in webmaster tools, it's only showing 71 pages, and I have hundreds, but many are html. Is it okay, to submit an html sitemap as well as the wp sitemap that's already in there?

    | azguy
    0
  • CMoore85


    My dilemma For example: If I have a website ranking at number 11 for (Keyword) and there is a site named www.(Keyword).com ranking at number 12 for (Keyword), if I were to buy this site and redirect to my own site, would this be at all beneficial? Any advice would be much appreciated!

    | CMoore85
    0
  • rdreich49


    I'm sure this question must have been asked before but I can't find it. I'm assuming that the title tag is far more important than the page's url.  Is that correct?   Does the url have any relevance to Google?

    | rdreich49
    0
  • EAOM


    Is a h1 tag wrapped image with a optimized alt tag as effective as text wrapped in a h1 tag?

    | EAOM
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    I re-wrote the page title of a home page for a site I'm working on and made sure it's under 70 characters (68 to be exact) to comply with best practices and make sure it doesn't get cut-off in the SERPS.  It's still getting cut-off though and right when it gets to the brand/website name.  Does a "-" have anything to do with it?  Does that translate to an elipsis? Format: keywords - website/brand.com Can anybody tell me why this would be happening?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0
  • jaybrn1


    Ok I did a search and didn't see an answer to this exact question.  Most of them were about if a blog should be in a sub folder and not the blog posts themselves... so here it goes.  I have a blog on my website the blog itself is in /blog/ but the blog posts themselves are situated in the root folder so it looks something like mydomain.com/cool-seo-blog-post/ Is there any reason I should change this and make it read mydomain.com/blog/cool-seo-blog-post/

    | jaybrn1
    0
  • JesseCWalker


    I noticed one of the negatively correlated ranking factors was length of URL.  I'm building a page from scratch, we are trying to rank for 'Minneapolis Fitness' and 'Minneapolis Massage'. Is www.minnnepolismassageandfitness.com  just ridiculously long?  Or does the exact match outweigh the penalty for URL length?

    | JesseCWalker
    2
  • cestor


    I am currently building a retail e-commerce site in a highly competitive area. We have a generic brand name; e.g. kitchen-knives.com and we also have another brand name, e.g. 'slycers.com' We have 3 options that I can see and I would like to know which is better for SEO. Build generic.com as a blog site. Link to brand.com 301 redirect from generic.com to brand.com. Use generic.com as anchor text in all links 301 redirect from brand.com to generic.com  . Use generic.com as anchor text in all links Also, if there are other better options, then I would appreciate the input! thanks

    | cestor
    0
  • MikeDelaCruz77


    Hey Guys, With the recent farm/panda update from google i'm at a cross roads as to how I should optimize product pages for a project i'm working on for a client. My client sells tires and one particular tire brand can have up to 15 models and each model can have up to 30 sizes. IE: 'Michelin Pilot Sport Cup' comes in 15 different sizes. Each size will have it's unique product page and description bringing me to my question. Should I use the same description on every size? I do plan on writting unique content for each tire model however i'm not sure if I should do it for every size. After all the tire model description is the same for every size, each size doesn't carry any unique characteristics that I can describe. Thanks in advance!

    | MikeDelaCruz77
    0
  • lwilkins


    When I add a site name to my title tag with long-tailed primary and secondary keywords the title tag is longer than 70 characters. I need to include all three parts, so what should I do? At 70 characters the site name is usually partially cut off. I do not want to get penalized by Google, but I need to include the site name to have consistency. I am using the format Primary Keyword-Secondary Keyword | Site name

    | lwilkins
    0
  • walidalsaqqaf


    How useful is it to have links in the bottom navigation bar? I'm considering to putting a mini site map in the bottom navigation bar but was told that these links carry virtually no SEO value and could actually hamper it as it would bring the total number of links on the page over 100.

    | walidalsaqqaf
    0

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