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Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • Preface: I implemented Microformat aggregate review (http://data-vocabulary.org/Review-aggregate) for our e-commerce website and included only on the homepage. The vote and count are actually coming from real reviews we are getting from our customers, and in the homepage some reviews are shown prominently and a link points to the full list of all the reviews. Microformat markup is correct, validated in GWT. Have been online for a while (probably a couple of years). Our website: http://www.gomme-auto.it The star rating never showed up. When checking competitors I could see their microformats where not showing up either. But now things changed, if I check one competitor (the market leader www.gommadiretto.it) searching for it with their brand name “gommadiretto” no star rating is showing, but if I search for tires of a specific manufactured like “pneumatici barum” I can see their result in serp is showing the star rating for that specific internal page (the brand page) where they simply put the website overall aggregate review microformat mark up, they actually put it on every page. And that make me scratch my head and start asking myself some questions: is google showing their microformats because they manually awarded them somehow? no other competitor seems to have got the star rating in serp is google showing their microformats because they have so much more reviews than I have? I have around 1700, they have around 11000. is google showing their microformats because their reviews are certified by TrustPilot? is google showing their microformats because they put it in the product page? well of course since I am not putting it there (in the brand page) it's a factor, but isn't it recommended  to put the website aggregate reviews microformat only on one page? and shouldn't we show the brand reviews on the brand page? isn't it best practice/recommended to put the website aggregate review microformat only on one page? is google showing their microformats because of some other reasons I can't see? What the hell is google criteria for showing the star rating? Does anyone know?

    | max.favilli
    0

  • Could I get some recommendations please for tools that will help me find keyword rich domains in my space. Also I did try out the Go Daddy bulk domain checker (just copy and paste domains into box) but it doesn't let me bulk search .co.uk domains. Any ways around that one?

    | Clicksjim
    0

  • What's considered a safe number when it comes to making on-site seo changes/updates for pages of a website (refreshing copy, changing title tags, optimizing images, etc)? 1 a day? 5 a day? We need to make these changes but we don't want Google to freak out and have it have the opposite effect on our ranking.

    | SEOhughesm
    0

  • Hey Moz'ers, I'm looking start an online training website. I feel there is 3 options: Self hosted LMS (Moodle, Litmos etc), Sass solution (Academy of Mine, Pathwright etc) Or DIY with Chargify type payments/subscriptions. To get started it is easiest to use one of the software as a service options. I get to use my own domain but everything else is via the software provider. **What potential problems can you see if/when I decided to do my own self hosted option? Will I be able to redirect the pages to my new site and pass along my accumulated page rank with minimal disruption or am I missing something catastrophic?  ** Any advice would be helpful.

    | danlovesadobe
    0

  • I am using mod_pagespeed to increase page speed.However it changed image url. before: /cars.jpg after: /cars.jpg.pagespeed.ci.dfdfdfre.webg    with:mod_pagespeed This is issue for seo? How can i change it?

    | Netliste
    0

  • Dear Friends, My main wordpress install is at www.marketing91.com However, i want to expand the topic to include advertising as well. I was considering installing a sub domain but instead i have decided to install a sub folder. So, now the URL should read www.marketing91.com/advertising/ for the advertising blog. I have one question though. In the sub folder, can we use the same installation of wordpress as applicable on marketing91.com?? I have a wordpress installed at marketing91.com. I dont want another wordpress to be installed in marketing91.com/advertising/. Instead, i would like to manage both url from the same wordpress installation. So how do i do that? Help is appreciated in advance 🙂 Regards Hitesh Bhasin

    | marketing91
    0

  • How exact should my meta titles and H1 one be compare to the keyword you wish to rank on. Eksample. When I do a research with google AdWords the keyword tool shows me: 260 monthly searches for house for rent Hua Hin 140 monthly searches for Hua Hin house for rent 70 monthly searches for House for rent in Hua Hin The first two includes the exact same 5 words while the last one includes the stopword "in". That google have different search volumens for these very smilair search queries tells me that small differences matters. So how does that effect the way i shoulf write my: a)meta titles b)H1 I feel I get better sentences often by reordering the keywords etc. “Top tips on how to rent house in Hua Hin” Instead of “Top tips if you want a house for rent in Hua Hin” Do you use stop words like “in” hua hin. (only used in 25% of the searches queries)? Also would it matter if i write a plural form of a keyword instead of a singular etc propeties and sted of property? My goal is to write easy to read and unique content but i feel i can make exact matches if required with out compromising to much.

    | nm1977
    0

  • I have a client, heartlandplastic.com who uses a social SEO plugin which makes all of the URL's a bit wonky, for example, the homepage gets redirect to http://www.heartlandplastic.com/#sthash.Cyt22dM0.dpbs Do you think I should find an alternative social share plugin, or that this plugin is fine, as is? They seem to be ranking fine for their immediate area. Thank you!

    | Red_Spot_Interactive
    1

  • Hi All, One of my ecommerce site having more than 20,000 pages from that one of the categories having 2000 pages showing 404 and still taking time for developer to fix this issue and may be they will be able to fix after 2-3 days so is this okay with google or google will take any action during this period? Thanks! Dev

    | devdan
    0

  • Hi All, We have pages which has names of people which we have created a Alink when clicked it goes to the related persons name. Now Google has indexed it as a seperate page example www.xyz.com/person/name www.xyz.com/person/name?alinks Now the same page is seen in google 2 times. How can i handle this please

    | jomin74
    0

  • Hi! I'm wondering if not having a cookie warning message in a web may be a reason for google algorithm to penalize SEO. (we're talking about a european website) Does anybody know it it is so? Thanks!

    | Canexel
    0

  • Does it help your SEO if you have “Get it only at _______”. I know call to actions in general help when you search organically. Does it help to have your brand name/business name in the meta description?

    | sderuyter
    0

  • Recently I've heard a few people say now it's okay to be aggressive with internal linking. So a link from mydomain.com/news to mydomain/widgets can use spammy anchor text like "best green widgets in California" that are an obvious problem for links coming in from external site. Which is accurate?

    | corlin
    0

  • Hi I need a little help, A client of ours has 4 business addresses and want to know, should we have all 4 in the footer of their website or should we just keep the relevant address to the relevant area page? Thanks

    | Mays-Digital
    0

  • Hi, I am new to eCommerce. Traditionally I have run a couple of semi-successful websites relying largely on Adsense revenue and affiliate income. So I have a bit of experience with on page and off page SEO. This time around I am creating a membership site and also sell eBooks as bundles that non members can buy. My question is, should I SEO optimize the sales page for my eBook or use another content page that links to the sales page. For example, if I am selling an ebook on Dog Training and targeting the main KW "Dog Training Tips", should my sales page be optimized for "Dog Training Tips"? The reason I ask is because typically Sales pages do not provide a lot of useful information but are more geared around selling the product. The other option would be to create a helpful information page targeted for "Dog Training Tips" and lead users to my sales page through contextual links, banners, popups (I hate popups), etc. This would be the approach for the other LSI keywords anyways. Any thought would be appreciated.

    | dwautism
    0

  • Hey Moz Community, I have 3 Duplicate websites which more or less contain the same blog article ( they are copy & paste from the original website ). I am now in the process of changing my duplicate websites and I stumbled upon this problem: if I have to change the content for all the duplicate articles I have across my different domains it would be a very time consuming task and on the other hand I don't want to no index, follow the duplicate articles because I want to use them for SEO purposes. Should I only change the articles that brought significant traffic and no index, follow the rest ? What do you think ? Thanks, Anddrei

    | kiraftw
    0

  • I'm building a marketing site for a client that does stage lighting design. They also do commissioned artwork installations, interactive design for tradeshows, etc. Because their work spans multiple industries (concerts, performing arts, live television, television advertising), I'm trying to figure out if their content should be targeting the industry, or the actual services they offer. There seems to be enough search volume to target traffic for specific clusters of keywords, but I think it would be a better user experience to tailor pages towards audiences. Should I lean towards creating pages for services offered ,or potential audiences? (A page for lighting design and one for interactive video displays, vs a page for museum directors and one for agencies) Or both? Thanks for any help!!

    | bigwheeler
    0

  • I can't find any information on this anywhere. We have hundreds of configurable products, all with coloured variations. For example, one of our popular selling chairs comes in 8 different colours. Now, should all these coloured variations be visible individually (and have their own url) or only visible when selected from the dropdown? The problem is, when they have their own url it's going to cause duplicate content issues. It's merely impossible to write a different brief for the same product in 8 different colours. The second issue is, if they are visible individually, one colour is going to be shown TWICE to users, one being the simple product and one being the main configurable. I hope you kind people can help!

    | Jseddon92
    0

  • I just built this site for a client http://primedraftarchitecture.com.  It went live 3 weeks ago and the pages are getting indexed as per Webmaster Tools.  But I'm not seeing it rank for anything. We're adding blog articles regularly and used Moz Local for local links and have been building links in other local directories (probably about 15 so far). Usually I get some rankings, although very low, after just a week or two for new sites. Does anyone see anything glaring that may be causing a problem?

    | DonaldS
    1

  • There has been a lot of talk about improving “About” pages on websites as of late. Moz actually has a really interesting About page, which includes a timeline. Are there any recommended WordPress plugins that can achieve a similar timeline effect?

    | VicMarcusNWI
    0

  • One of our customers owns a stationary company, URL (http://www.costcuttersuk.com) which targets schools and education. In September my company launched a new website for our client with an external company providing SEO. Since the switch the customers feels they have completely dropped from the rankings and from looking at the Google Analytics reports it has become apparent that they have taken a huge hit on the amount of traffic coming into the site, almost 500 fewer visitors per day. What is interesting is that the average time spent on the website has increased as is the same with the bounce rate yet everything else has taken a drop. The platform it has been built on is Opencart , The only thing I can thing that is causing the issue’s is the page load times. They are 62% slower on the home page would this have such a huge impact? I look forward to hearing your feedback. cDDZswK 1sjBddV

    | chrissmithps
    0

  • Hi guys, I have a client who wants to use a hyphen to separate two words in the URL to make each work stand out. Is is good or bad practice to use a hyphen in a URL and will it affect rankings? Thanks!

    | StoryScout
    0

  • Hi! Some time ago we changed our domain from canexel.net to canexel.es. We spent some time "cleaning" the backlinks to the ".net" domain since we had been penalized by penguin. After some time we went ahead and did a 301 from .net to .es january 15. From that date on we've noticed that webmaster tools has been detecting a really big increase oon 404 detected on our site. All this 404 come from .net pages that have been cached by google but don't exist anymore. The problem is that the 301 has made google believe that they exist also on our .es site (where of course don't exist either), and 404 have appeared from this non existing pages pinting to other non existing pages. We want to to eliminate the urls from WMT but we don't know if we should eliminate them both from the .net and .es domains or just from the .net one. We also would like to know if this would penalize our SEO. Thanks

    | Canexel
    0

  • Hello,

    ​regarding #15 of the last moz friday I have a question: http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls What would you prefer if the lenght of the URL will be still under 60 characters and you have an example like this: Let's call it a specific page in a category. As I like the old shoe examples: You have a page about red shoes in your shoe category. Which URL would you prefer: a) www.mydomain.com/shoes/red-shoe b) www.mydomain.com/shoes/red Personally I would prefer a) or would you already consider this as spammy? My real example is not that trivial like the shoe example and the categories will be in plural and the specific pages always in singular (like in the example shoes vs shoe). c) would be to put it independently from the side structure on www.mydomain.com/red-shoe - but personally I have the experience that a) or b) will help the rankings of the category page if you have the specific pages in the same subfolder. What's your opinion on this?

    | _Heiko_
    1

  • Hi, I am running a blog for several English speaking websites ( e.g Australia, UK ) and I plan doing SEO for these websites. I want to know if it's a must changing all the blogs for these countries in order to avoid Duplicate Content ?

    | kiraftw
    0

  • We are an ecommerce site... In days gone by, having a bunch of footer links with your top products / categories was a good idea - as it created a ton of internal links to these products. Now, I am hearing that those links "dilute" the value of our other links on a page - and essentially, there is more harm than good from these. Does anyone know what I am talking about (the olds days) and should we still be doing this? Thanks

    | Ted_Cullen
    0

  • Is bounce rate itself an important factor? For example if my page which shows pricing for a service ranks high, people usually come to that page, then go to the contact page to see where I am. Most of them then realise I'm not close enough and exit. Now, I could give these people that info on the pricing page but that would drive my bounce rate up. Does it make a difference from Google POV?

    | Cooper1
    0

  • I work on a website that have listings across the country. Is it possible for us to geotarget the home page of the website to cater to the person based on location so we can show the geogargeting links, articles, videos on the home page and direct the user in the right direction. Forrent seem to be doing it: http://www.forrent.com/ Will this have any negative SEO impact or we can lose rankings ?

    | AdobeVAS
    0

  • I know duplicate content across multiple websites is not a good thing, however I've always wondered about minor duplicate content on your own website. I know its good practice to have unique content on each page but what about the little stuff. For example on our website certain related pages share the same content in a right sidebar. Such as links to pdf leaflets, or "you can read our blog etc" . Is there a minimum number of repeated words required before its flagged as duplicate content? Another example is a customer gave two testimonials for two of our employees - the testimonials were identical other than the employee names - if these were posted on separate pages is it a problem for the site as a whole or for both those individual pages? Thanks

    | Brabian
    0

  • We are looking to implement Google Analytics Enhanced Link Attribution on our site.  Our tech person says that this will cause SEO problems because of "duplicate URLS."  I am not technical, so I don't understand this at all and can't find any research on the topic. I would like to know if there are any known SEO problems caused by putting in Enhanced Link Attribution.

    | DGM
    0

  • We provide a single medical service in London. Our domain is "service"london.co.uk. Our home page consists of: Welcome message (40 words) Reasons why customers choose us (720 words) - as bullet points Benefits of the service (380 words - as 6 subheadings) Then a small sample of testimonials It currently looks word doc boring so that's definitely an area we are talking to our designer about. We currently rank second or third for our most popular keywords which are mostly variations of "service london" - these go straight to our home page. Our competitors do the same. The only other pages that rank are /pricing (for "service london price") and /reviews (for a tiny proportion of rarer keywords) The main variations in the services we provide is adult and children. We have /adults and /children pages for this where we describe the actual procedures (these are relatively new pages so perhaps they will rank for "adult/children service london" in the future, but right now, they still go to the home page). Now our SEO agency suggests we spread the content into more pages: Why us page, Benefits of service page etc., (also suggested we add more high quality content pages). Our home page will be similar to what moz suggested on whiteboard Friday - a few key points then directing them towards the sub-pages to read more. However I am unsure if this is suitable for us where the great majority of our organic traffic comes from "service london". These visitors should ideally still come to our home page and I'm not sure if Google will be thrilled that my home page is now poorer in terms of content despite the fact that the home page still links to these high quality pages on my site. Would really appreciate this beautiful community's insights on this. Thank you.

    | LondonAli
    0

  • "The URL http://seadwellers.com/ redirects to http://www.seadwellers.com/.  Do you want to crawl http://www.seadwellers.com/ instead?" I was given this when I tried to crawl my home page using MOZ software.  I was not aware of this, do not know if it could be a problem concerning any aspect of SEO, etc? :

    | sdwellers
    0

  • The wordpress blog causes problems with page titles. If you go to the second page of blog posts it there's a different URL but with the same page title. for example: page 1: site/blog page 2: site/blog/page/2 Each page gets flagged for duplicate page titles. Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

    | heymarshall
    1

  • We have an engineering website (chemengonline.com) that publishes regularly, including content from our print magazine. In the magazine we have a section called "Chementators" where we highlight new innovations in chemical engineering. These are typically briefs and are often unique from one another. Last year we would group these briefs on a page like this http://www.chemengonline.com/november-chementator-briefs-5/. We recently relaunched our website and in the process decided to break the briefs apart into their own articles like this http://www.chemengonline.com/metal-free-atrp/. Considering the short length of the briefs but technical nature of the content, would you advise keeping them separate or going back to the old way of grouping them together on the same page? And if we group them, could you offer some advice on page title... Ex. "Chementators for February 2015" vs "Chementators - Graphene, Clean Power, Large Scale CCS, Nanoparticles, etc"

    | accessintel
    0

  • Hi  im in the process of giving my site  a major update as its  only one page and not responsive . The the new site will have a homepage with a list of my services with a small description of each and each service  will link to its own page. My one page site at the moment ranks number one in my area for a  low competition keyword (moz keyword score of 13%) of course this sends me very little traffic. With my new site im also going  for  more keywords but these will be Moz KWD 30% and 40%. I know this will be quite hard and take some time but  i'm pretty sure I know what I need to do to get there. Now my question is what do i do with my current home page (only page)  that ranks for that low comp keyword?
    I dont want to lose my rank for that, so do i make a new page on my new site that is optimized for that keyword, but then I don't want to 301 my homepage to that so I guess as its such an easy word to rank for my new page would soon rank for that? What are your thoughts and advice please, thanks in advance.

    | juun
    1

  • Hi Guys, I know that  is not good having any kind of duplicate content on your site, but SEO is above all "competition", so I have to see what my competitor are doing to find the best way to outrank them. So this is my question: is it good or not having site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page? At the moment, I can see many - too many - of my client competitors having the "Why choose us" as site wide content above the footer. The funny thing they don't use a couple of sentences, they have placed  many words and 10/20 internal links, in other words, they have enough stuff to put down a stand alone page. What do you think: this is just a bad SEO practice or it may work, as I can see so many sites ranking well with this kind of piece of junk on each page. I am not going to recommend this to my client, but as am trying to detail every decision I make showing what the competitors are currently doing, my concern is that my client finds it and therefore will ask to have the same shiny piece of garbage above the footer. Thanks, Pierpaolo

    | madcow78
    0

  • There are forum posts about how to insert rel="canonical" tags in Wordpress, but I've read about lots of changes in this space recently (updates to Yoast, for example). I'm having a problem with duplicate content on one of my sites, and it seems to be coming from multiple indexes of the same pages.  I'll have a blog post show up under the posts, then the archives, then the tags. So, my question is, in early 2015, what are the current best practices for adding rel="canonical" tags in Wordpress? Thanks! Tim

    | TimLlew
    0

  • Hello, I recently transferred a website from Ruby on Rails to Wordpress in order to help with the site's responsiveness. I kept all of the URLs the exact same, but when I transferred it only the homepage and one other page kept their page ranks, all of the others have lost theirs completely. Almost every page on the site was at least a PR 2, and now their not ranked, and not ranking in the top of search engines like they were before. I am not quite sure what might have caused this, like I said, I kept the URLs all the exact same and its strange that 2 pages were not effected. I crawled the site with Screaming From and all of the pages that lost their page rank have a status as "Moved Permanently". They are the exact same URL, but they are listed without www. in front, could this have something to do with it? The website is www.goenergylink.com, and you will see that the homepage and "Residential" page still have their page rank, but none of the others do. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks

    | mcmckenna1
    0

  • Hi All I am trying to rank my site for many key phrases but the pretty much always contain the word "Sussex" The biggy with a lot of competition is "Caterers Sussex" and similar variations when I view source on their page I find that Gastro catering's code uses "sussex" 92 times in it code. My site www.SussexChef.com uses the word "Sussex" 590 times, the competitors site mentions the word less in its code and is dominant for all my desirable key words. Am I spamming my keyword by using Sussex too often when naming my image file? Is there anything in this or am I barking up the wrong tree? Thanks for your help Ben

    | SussexChef83
    0

  • Just wondering about creating links. 
    Is it ok to have very long links? 
    Like: http://www.robotnik.com/computer-hardware-ram/8gb-ddr3-1600-desktop Is the above too long, is it better for SEO to be more to the point? Also For better SEO, is it better to use hyphens in a domain name or not?

    | Robotnik
    0

  • Guitar Strings USA Guitar Strings USA Our Outlets Click here to purchase From the above example u can see that "Guitar Strings USA" appears in H1 and H2, is it okay? or should i remove it?

    | kevinbp
    0

  • Hello, I have a WordPress website in which the front page is built entirely with text widgets. How would I add key words and meta descriptions. Yoast does not give an option for this and it seems WordPress does not support meta descriptions. Anyone have  ideas? The website is championfitprogram.com

    | donsilvernail
    0

  • My site is currently in the mist of a redesign and I’d like us to compile some recommendations on the length of copy for a page to rank well but can't seem to find any up to date articles on this.Does anyone have any suggestions, comments, or feedback?Thank you.

    | PorshaAndrea
    0

  • Hi all, The search function on my site is pretty bad... it basically lists every single product for any search query. Has anyone got experience integrating a 3rd party tool such as Google Custom Search or Pardot and if so which would you recommend? Alternatively, any tips on improving/ creating rules for site search would be appreciated. https://www.boardwarehouse.co.uk/ Thanks, Alick

    | Alick300
    0

  • HI Folks I'm monitoring a small Australian site bluetea.com.au . Currently I have a SEO specialist who does month onsite maintenance work for this site. However each month I continue to see errors in webmaster tools... as an example, currently webmaster tools suggest we have 21 short meta dic and 26 duplicate title tags..... Examples given are Short Meta Discp ‎/cleaning-products-and-our-health/toxic-cleaners/‎ ‎/colour-consultant/fushia-door/‎ /portfolio/parisian-apartment-black-kitchen/parisian-apartment-black-kitchen/‎ Duplicate title tags <a id="zip_0-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>concrete-kitchen | Blue Tea Kitchen Designs /kitchen-trends-and-material-innovation/concrete-kitchen-2//kitchen-trends-for-2013/concrete-kitchen/<a id="zip_1-anchor" class="zippedsection_title"></a>Potts Point Kitchen | Blue Tea Kitchen Designs/portfolio/potts-point-kitchen//portfolio/potts-point-kitchen/pott-point-kitchen/My SEO tells me that he has solved all these issues but after one or two months they still remain in webmaster tools... can anybody help me understand why?Thank you

    | PHD
    0

  • We have received one requirement for this website. http://www.coldcasebeer.com/ We would like to rank in Google during domain name search. If we are going to search following search terms in Google then We are not able to see this domain on first page of Google search result. cold case beer coldcasebeer We have done quick research on this issue. And, We have decided to implement following tasks to make it happen.But, We are quite excited to read certain inputs on this question from experts! 1. Upload default Robots.txt file 2. Verify website on Google webmaster tools 3. Set up USA region on Google webmaster tools 4. Submit Google crawl request on Google webmaster tools 5. Title tag and Meta description optimization for all pages (There are 5 pages only on website) 6. Audit Google local listing 7. Develop quality links with domain name

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • Is it better to use a dash or an underscore in file names to improve SEO? EX memory_flash.jpg or memory-flash.jpg Or does it make no difference?

    | Robotnik
    0

  • Should archives get a no-follow? Should i optimize content on archive pages for seo purposes such as adding meta descriptions. Thank you

    | donsilvernail
    0

  • I was wondering if there is away to use Schema for stock market pages?

    | ciznerguy
    0

  • Would love the group's opinion on the Forbes.com welcome page (http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml) redirects to the actual home page after 20 seconds. SEO implications for this tactic? Does it impact the home page rankings? (Positive/Negative) Any input is appreciated.

    | SEO5Team
    1

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