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Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • I have a client whose site was built when they only served one market, and they now have that city in the majority of their URLs. I'm suggesting we redo the URL structure to remove this location from the main URLs (think homepage, about, etc.) since they have now expanded to three markets. They are seeing a lot of great organic traffic in that original market but are struggling in the new ones they've added so I'm helping to optimize their site. How critical do you think that removing that location from the URL is? I know we would need to implement 301 redirects, but wanted to get thoughts on this.

    | maghanlinchpinsales
    0

  • We recently changed the URLs from our site http://www.website.com (old)
    https://website.com/us/en/ (new) Our ranking is plummeting every since and I wonder if the new URL had something to do with it. Do you know if that change, could have impacted the ranking?

    | ederdesign
    0

  • I have an Insurance Agency and I'm working on new landing pages to hit our surrounding cities. my 1st question is: On my Homeowners Insurance Page, can I add a section for Area's We Insure. To look like this Area's We Insure Allen Plano Frisco McKinney Highland Park Then make each one linkable to it's City Landing Page? Is there any reason this would hurt my seo? 2nd Question: Can I have the City Pages hidden from my navigation- as I already have a huge drop down menu already. Would any of the above hurt my seo**? ** Huge Thanks in Advance!

    | MissThumann
    0

  • Is the meta title written only for google (try to stuff in as many keywords as possible) or is there a user experience aspect as well?

    | whiteonlySEO
    0

  • I'm working with a new and used furniture client and we're struggling to improve rankings for their site. In the last week, they went from 25th place to 50+ for houston office furniture. Any help would be much appreciated. usedcubicleshouston.com

    | pgmorgana
    0

  • We have a SEO related problem with subpages that all have PA of 1. We are suspecting some technical issues behind, therefore our question: Could the menu that only opens on-klick be responsible and would opening on-hover generally be prefereable? Also the subpages are bundled in categories that do not exist: home/kategorienotexistant/subpagewithPA1 Any help is appreciated. thanks in advance

    | brainfruit
    0

  • What would the effect of having too much be? Does google stop crawling after a number and punish more internal links?

    | brainfruit
    0

  • Hello All! I have a question about having my search term in my URL when the first two words are actually my domain name. For example, my domain is plutobeach.com and I want to optimize for events. Which is better? plutobeach.com/events plutobeach.com/plutobeach-events Is the latter keyword stuffing?  I'm using the on-page grader here and wondering how much of a difference that can make. Thanks! Steve

    | recoil
    0

  • Hello, I have 7 High Priority issues; 3 of them are missing or empty Titles. But when I click on the link I get a blank page with this;  **Site is not part of ARC ** Does anyone know what this means, more importantly, how the 'beep' do I fix it ?? 🙂 Mucho Gracias!

    | MissThumann
    0

  • We've read a lot about the power of updating old content (making it more relevant for today, finding other ways to add value to it) and republishing (Here I mean changing the publish date from the original publish date to today's date - not publishing on other sites). I'm wondering if there is any danger of doing this at scale (designating a few months out of the year where we don't publish brand-new content but instead focus on taking our old blog posts, updating them, and changing the publish date - ~15 posts/month). We have a huge archive of old posts we believe we can add value to and publish anew to benefit our community/organic traffic visitors. It seems like we could add a lot of value to readers by doing this, but I'm a little worried this might somehow be seen by Google as manipulative/spammy/something that could otherwise get us in trouble. Does anyone have experience doing this or have thoughts on whether this might somehow be dangerous to do? Thanks Moz community!

    | paulz999
    0

  • Well the title says everything... I really cannot understand why this happens... if you want to check by yourselves just copy paste the following in google: related:www.pccdkeys.com

    | dos0659
    0

  • I optimized several pages using Rand's post on Google Answer Box: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-appear-in-googles-answer-boxes-whiteboard-friday How long after the page is indexed should it appear? Lastly, how long should I wait before determining it will not get an answer box and reconfigure the page? No bad answers 🙂 TY KJr

    | KevnJr
    0

  • We are a UK based company who sell a have a holiday product mainly to the UK and the US markets. We are just reworking the website and hit the wall on whether we should be writing in British English or US English or do we just do both? Any help would be much appreciated.

    | Mutatio_Digital
    0

  • Can anybody help me with this error please... Error: A charset attribute on a meta element found after the first 1024 bytes https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fsocialmotors.uk%2F I have no idea how to find or fix this issue, i have spoke to my theme dev and they say it is not a problem with the theme, so i do not know were to turn now. As you will see in the link above there are a couple of errors, i do not know how to fix them either 😞 Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

    | Taylor17
    0

  • Hi there, Are there any guidelines for using meta data for web apps, specifically meta titles and meta descriptions?

    | AllenJaffe
    0

  • Hello, i have two questions. Issue 1 is that we are a classified ads site. I started thinking, analyzing why im not ranking even tho i have a lot more content than others and my backlink profile is also better. Googling the advertisements i see that 95% of it is duplicate content. People usually who advertise, add the same add to 10 maybe 30 sites. For google this is duplicate content. Any ideas what to do? I can manually edit ads, to write a bit of unique content, but that is not a long term startegy. Question 2: My titles are all the same - Unique Name - Keyword im trying to rank for. There is around 1000 of such pages. Should i mix the titles up or it is still better to have 1 keyword which will help me to rank?

    | advertisingcloud
    0

  • Hello, We found a critical error in our site internal link structure and the way Google indexes it. Website has 1000s of URLs that are basically 50% match to homepage. They all start the same example.com/category/random/random I can do a redirect match and 301 them to homepage. This way 1000s of bogus url are not indexed and no value given. Is it OK to redirect so many URLs to homepage? Platform is creating these URLs because of search query, where it adds all site content to one page. Currently this search page /category / has own canonical and all those duplicate content URLs have canonical to that /category /. To fix my plan is to a. Remove canonical from /category / that way all those duplicate URLs don't have it either. B.  Redirect match all URLs that have /category / in them to homepage. (this is most important page where 50% of that content is and should be the main page). Is this plan ok?

    | advertisingcloud
    1

  • Recently our keywords have plummeted with regards to anything hen related on our stag and hen website. We were on the first page ranking 6<sup>th</sup> for terms such as Newcastle hen and hen weekend Newcastle. Now were around 15th this has also began to happen with other keywords. Content wise our pages score 90+ on page optimisation, we do have various keywords on the pages alike our competitors and use the highest searched for term as our page title. Our page speed is good on mobile and desktop. I’m struggling to see why we can’t seem to crawl back up to the first page when people who are outranking us have minimal content on slow sites. I know we lack back links but this can't be the only reason? Our website is hangoverweekends.co.uk

    | andy_simpson
    0

  • Hi All, Has anyone experienced the home page meta title indexed with their Brand coming up first before their actual Meta title? I know google overrides the meta title sometimes when the title is not relevant, I understand that. This just started happening 6 months ago. I thought I would leave it to see if it get corrected. but no luck! Any suggestions? Many thanks

    | summer300
    0

  • Hello, I was reading hobo s post on duplicate content. Our web is in the classified advertisement industry and our site is built up like this Homepage (last 200 ads)  category 1(has the name we want to rank our homepage and around 350 ads) category 2 (around 100 ads)  category 3 (around 60 ads) Now our homepage has 200 ads that also appear mostly in category 1 but also in others. We are ranking our homepage as 11 th now on Google. I'm worried a bit that the 200 ads on the homepage are not unique, because they will appear in one other category. Is this OK? Is this duplication? Should we do something? Issue is that we at first started ranking our homepage where all ads were, now there are too many so we show 200 latest on homepage and then they are split into category pages.

    | advertisingcloud
    0

  • Hi, There is a lot of debate going on on whether to use a single keyword per page or multiple keywords per page. What I know for sure is that it is not advisable to repeat the same exact keyword in different pages. I need to optimize product pages, categories and pages for an online store and still do not know if it is better to: 1-work with one main keyword per page plus latent semantic keywords, 2-to optimize a page for multiple different keywords (2 to 4 keywords) which are strongly related to the main topic or to the product sold in a particular product page 3- use single keyword for each page (and no more than one keyword per page). Some seo gurus argue this is the best way to get higher ranking for that particular page in the serps. My personal opinion would be 1 or 2, but I would like to hear what you suggest and think about it. Any suggestion or opinion is welcome and appreciated. Thanks in advance

    | cinzia09
    0

  • Site is too slow. I am seeing this new code more than 1000 times in my home page- What should I do now? My site- http://a1stlucie.com/

    | Beachflower
    0

  • I know that duplicate H1 and H2 tags are a red flag for Google, but does the same apply for H3, H4 and H5 tags? A lot of my products have the same H5 tags and I'm wondering whether or not that is pulling down my keyword rank.

    | moon-boots
    0

  • Hi Everyone I work for a company that sell aluminium joinery under 3 brands which are, ostensibly,  competitors. With regards to optimising the websites, for keywords, should I be trying to optimise them for the same keywords, or should I use  different keyword variations of each?

    | APLNZ11
    0

  • I have a client with navigation across the top of each page plus the same nav links in a sidebar on every page. Can that duplication (or the sheer number of links) on each page have a negative ranking factor?

    | brm2017
    0

  • Our company plan to use in our product page a live chat support app. But  I concern about the page load time. The script is loading asynchronous and in the inner tests increase the average page load time with around one sec. Previously the load time was between 2.5-3.3 sec after the chat support increased to 3.8-5 sec, but sometimes there was extreme +10 sec worse results. My question is how much can this impact to our search engine rankings?

    | laszlo_muhi
    0

  • Hello, Our site is an basically advertisements / listings website. Structure is as following <last 200="" adds="">  (homepage trying to rank) < category 1 > < category 1 > < category 1 > < category 1 > < category 1 ></last> My question - each of the categories links back within the  menu back to homepage. The link text currently is last 200 adds. Can i use exact match anchor? Or should i use just last 200 ads? The issue is that one of my categorys (category 1) has already the exact match anchor im trying to rank for. So i can not use the same to link back to homepage. Im worried that google does not see any exact keyword anchor texts back to homepage hence will rank my homepage with lower strenght for that keyword . Im also worried that the category 1 page might now compete with the main homepage for this word (even tho at the moment category itself does not rank for this keyword) Can i link from footer back to homepage with an alternative keyword then to give some "context" to google more? Would this be spamming?

    | advertisingcloud
    0

  • Hi, I have quite a few orphan pages on my site and we see that our rankings have fell significantly over the past 6 months. Can this have be negatively affecting our rankings? Thank you.

    | whiteonlySEO
    0

  • My site is about jokes. I wonder what schema markup could I use to be more visible in the search results.

    | MichaelJanik
    0

  • We have a gallery here with our main categories of patches. https://www.stadriemblems.com/gallery/ If you click on one, say Fire Patches, you'll be taken to a page of just fire patches. https://www.stadriemblems.com/fire-patches/ But here's the kicker: If you notice of the fire patch page, there are also sub-categories to that. So if you click on say, Fire Rescue, you get taken one level deeper. https://www.stadriemblems.com/fire-patches/fire-rescue-patches/ I'm redoing this entire site (a project over five years overdue), and I'm wondering if it's really worth it to keep these three-level deep sub pages. I originally created them with long tail SEO in mind, making us be the only ones who come up when people search for very specific patches. But it's a big undertaking to redo all of them, and are they really adding any value?

    | UnderRugSwept
    0

  • Hello Experts, Can you please throw your knowledge on How to analysis Responsive VS Dynamic site? Also please suggest best tool to optimize both type of sites plus if I have to optimize manually then what is the best way? It will help lots of people as currently google focusing more on mobile site so we can optimize our responsive and dynamic site. Pls suggest. Thanks!

    | adamjack
    0

  • Dear, Moz We have been hard at work going some off site and on site SEO. However yesterday we got around 1600 404 errors from google, and ranking dropped from 7 in front page to 25. What we did: I found an error in Htacces, where my partner had this (rewritebase with double // and rule with // - I quess this started creating urls for google, because twww.website.com//category-category-cateory OK. But google says that they will not effect your rankings because 404s? Second think i found was that we had some urls, which had canonical tag to a page called search. Now that search (duplicate of homepage) we 301 to our main homepage. Can that effect ranking? You have 404s that have canonical to a page that itselft redirects (301) to homepage. We also removed the / splash. Nothing more.. Below is the htaccess, that had the double // error. Please comment. Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase //
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)/$
    RewriteRule ^ %1 [R=301,L]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.website.com [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://website.com/$1 [L,R=301]
    RewriteCond $1 ^(index.php)?$ [OR]
    RewriteCond $1 .(gif|jpg|css|js|png|ico)$ [NC,OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
    RewriteRule ^(.)$ - [S=1]
    RewriteRule .//index.php [L]
    DirectoryIndex index.php

    | advertisingcloud
    0

  • I have updated the meta title and meta description for my blog. After updating the meta tags, blog URL was submitted in the webmasters and it has been crawled and indexed by Google but only for the desktop version and not for mobile version. Currently, meta tags are not being displayed for mobile version in Google. I have also checked with robots.txt file, there is no problem with this file. PFA screenshots for reference. Kindly help me out with this issue. eWu1k8N PdimKGq

    | priyankadesai123
    0

  • I have a client whose home page meta description on the SERPs is not matching the description n the meta data. The SERP description is from an old DMOZ description. Any idea about the best way to update this?

    | bdcseo
    0

  • I'm updating some older pages and was wondering about potential penalties from having keywords that start with the same phrase.  It's a geographic area so there is the "full name" and the abbreviated name.  I'd like to have keywords for both. For example: virginia beach, va beach, virginia beach attraction, virginia beach things to do, va beach attraction, va beach things to do, virginia beach dolphins tour, va beach dolphins tour Is that spammy? I understand they don't have the same weight as they used to but I'd like to optimize for them anyway since I'm redoing some things. Thanks in advance.

    | recoil
    0

  • Hi All, I've always been unsure about the importance of content on product category pages. Nobody reads it. If you search for "living room chairs", you're just going to want to see a big list of living room chairs - not read content about living room chairs, how to choose one, etc. On virtually any ecommerce site, category pages have a paragraph or two of total bla-bla. Does this have any impact on search rankings? More specifically, will Googlebot see content on how to choose a living room chair and say "Yes! This is really helpful content"? Or, will it realize that the searcher intent on this keyword is really just to see a list of chairs, and ignore this content - or at least downplay its importance? WDTY?

    | BarryBuckman
    0

  • Hello, There is so much contradicting information about the homepage canonical URL. Many websites have all the links without the trailing splash but their homepage URL still contains the splash. Now Moz is an example with this. Their urls don't have the splash, and their canonical does not have the splash. Why is it so and why so much different ways people have it?

    | advertisingcloud
    0

  • Hi, I have got a website and some posts rank well, but I am not so interested in keep them for branding reasons. So I planned to do 301 redirects to home and remove those contents. Is it ok? Thanks!

    | patrizia_h
    0

  • Hi! For spanish speakers: ¿Hay por aquí clientes de agenciaSEO.eu? Estoy buscando una agencia de posicionamiento web y agradecería algo de feedback. In English: I'm asking for some feedback. http://agenciaseo.eu/ Gracias!

    | patrizia_h
    0

  • Hey guys, I'm doing a review on some schema on some of our sites. Most of them are generic using LocalBusiness. There are a few more specific schemas I could use, but not sure what would be the most relevant. Wondering if any of you have a suggestion or ideas? https://schema.org/Residence https://schema.org/LodgingBusiness https://schema.org/ApartmentComplex or I could just stick with LocalBusiness. I'm leaning towards LodgingBusiness or ApartmentComplex.... but when I think of LodgingBusiness I think of something temporary / vacation type deal like hotels. Apartments... kind of self explanatory, a condominium isn't exactly an apartment but perhaps it is more comparable to an apartment than a hotel, motel or inn. What are you thoughts on this? Also, which "format" is better to use RDFa, microdata, or JSON-LD. Does it matter?

    | donnieath
    0

  • Hi, I manage a few clients, but the one that is in reference to this question is a local law firm. They blog on a regular basis and we continue to monitor for and delete any negative backlinks. Their domain authority keeps rising, but they continue to lose rankings for tracked keywords. Has anyone else faced a similar situation? Does anyone one know what is causing this or what I can do to combat it? Thanks,

    | GavinAdv
    0

  • Just looking to get some opinions on this. Some coupon sites use "coupon" in all of their URLs - this is a practice I would avoid, as to me it is a little spammy. For example:
    .com/amazon-coupons/
    .com/ebay-coupons/
    .com/walmart-coupons/
    ... and so on for thousands of other brands. I don't think this is necessary, as Google will understand from the content, backlinks and the domain name (including the word "coupon") that brand pages are coupon-focused. Any other thoughts on this?

    | vanessakohl
    0

  • Hello Mozzers I don't understand this specific ranking example, maybe somebody can help? For the serach term "elipslife" on Google Switzerland a client's page ranks around position 13. A competitor's page ranks at 9. And I don't get why: the competitor's page has no content and its DA is lower. Its PA is higher so I set a link in the client's homepage navigation a couple of weeks ago to lift the client's page PA above that of the competitor. This is not yet reflected in OSE currently however. Any ideas as to what may be the cause? Thx, Chris

    | ChrisCronimund
    0

  • We have a set of branded and unbranded keywords that we want our product site to rank very high for. Right now, our support site owns the first page of rankings for most of the keywords we care about. What is the most efficient way to give the rank currently enjoyed by our support site to our product site? Both have very high domain authority and tons of backlinks. Here are some factors that might apply: Support site has lots of copy including these keywords, while product site doesn't (yet) Support site doesn't currently include a lot of links to the product site (and vice versa) They're on the same domain -- support is at support.domain.com, product is on www.domain.com Support site has many more pages and their URLs are more semantically related to keywords I know there are lots of structural improvements implied by the above -- on the product site, increase the amount of copy (and landing pages) focused on keywords and significantly improve internal links, etc. But I'm wondering if the fact we control both sites gives us any options we wouldn't have in a competitive situation?

    | hoosteeno
    0

  • Dear Moz community, We have made a great mistake.  Looking at keyword search volumes somehow Moz showed volumes for two keywords which only differentiate by an  '**s (plural) as same. **Now we optimized our internal links (all links have the keyword) for the singular word. Now looking at other search volume estimations from competitors we see, that the plural has 5 times bigger volume. Our issue: If we change some of the category links now to another keyword, we will loose our ranking with the singular word. Correct? If we do not change any of our internal links, we will never rank in top 6 with the keyword. (currently singular is 6 and plural is 15) What would you reccomend?

    | advertisingcloud
    0

  • What's the difference between the Page Title and the H1 title? It seems like both summarize the page. Is it a wasted opportunity to make them the same? Should they be similar but slightly different?

    | amybethmegjo
    1

  • I am trying to avoid the duplicate content issue by creating new urls and redirecting them to the original url. Is this the proper way of going about it?

    | yagobi21
    0

  • Hi all, I just noticed a potential issue with our websites. We have two ecommerce websites, one is a very large one selling all sorts of products, while the microsite focuses on a small segment of products. All products sold on the microsite are also sold on the main website. In the beginning of September, we upgraded the microsite to the same script that the main website uses to make it mobile friendly and update the design. They now look very similar. Before, both websites used to rank on page 1 for a specific keyword. I have noticed that since we upgraded the microsite, the two websites have been taking turns ranking for the keyword. For a few weeks the microsite ranks and the main website doesn't rank for the keyword. Then for a few weeks only the main website ranks and the microsite doesn't. I think the reason this is happening is that Google understands that the content is the same and the websites are both owned by the same company. Fair enough. I remember reading an article about this phenomenon before but can't remember where. Does anyone know which article I'm talking about (it would have been on an SEO blog/website, e.g. Moz, SEJ, SE Roundtable etc)? I'm not even sure what this phenomenon is called. If we can only have one of the pages rank, we would prefer it to be the microsite at all times. Would a canonical tag on the main website referring to the URL on the microsite fix this? I think at the moment the product descriptions are either very similar or identical. Would it help to make them more different to get both to rank again if that is what we wanted to do? In the end it is still the same product being sold by the same company - after Google has already sort of merged the two, would they "un-merge" them if the content was more different? Thanks in advance!

    | ViviCa1
    0

  • Does Google recognise a link in the content if there is already a link in the menu? My understanding is that Google only counts the first link it finds.

    | bittristo
    0

  • Our education company website (hosted on wordpress) has evolved into having content on key topics distributed across both blog posts and pages. For example, "top-pharmaceutical-companies" lends itself to being published as a page. However other content "top-pharmaceutical-companies-usa-2016" lends itself to being published as a blog post as it's more temporal in nature. Now we'd like to establish topical domain relevance for the root keyword "pharmaceutical companies" and build a folder www./ourcompany/pharmaceutical-companies/ But when we look through our blog content, we notice we have "Blog Posts" that would be an excellent fit for certain folders within our "Page" url structure. So would it be OK to amend these blogs post urls addresses to place them within the folder structure of the pages.

    | GetReskilled
    0

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