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Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • We have been doing some optimization for a client. They were not ranked for many keywords before we started, and up until last week 10 were on page 1, with the the last few following closely behind. Everything was moving in the right direction. In this weeks ranking report every one has dropped significantly and some 30 places in one week. We have made no significant changes to the site in the last few weeks. The only issue we picked up on was the slow site speed on their current host 1&1. Any ideas what could have caused the site to have lost ground on all rankings so significantly?

    | FLDESIGN
    0

  • Hey mOz fans , I have a site that has 130 keywords. can ı target this amount just incoperate them as Ryan discussed Before.

    | atakala
    0

  • Hi With internal links, should I make sure to always use the same anchor text im trying to rank the page for? For example im having a tidy up and have realised im linking to the same page in multiple blog posts using different anchor text. Whats the rule of thumb here? Thanks Chris

    | mrcsleonard
    1

  • Hi Guys, I was wondering how should i tackle the url structure for the following scenario: Company provides several hypnotherapy services including 'stop smoking', 'cbt', 'weight loss' and more ... and have offices in 3 cities. Currently, the website has the following structure. www.website.com/stop-smoking-city1
    www.website.com/stop-smoking-city2
    www.website.com/stop-smoking-city3 and so on ... would it be better to have the following url structure ... www.website.com/city1/stop-smoking
    www.website.com/city1/weight-loss
    www.website.com/city1/cbt and so on ... Please advise!

    | Syed_Ozair
    0

  • I have a subdomain which has just started to be crawled by Moz, Previously this wasn't the case. The sub-domain had 16,000+ issues. Why has Moz started to count sub-domains as part  of the main domain, has Google started to do this aswell?

    | danwebman
    0

  • Hello So with reading a blog post by Bruce Clay - http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/seo-friendly-web-design/ It reads that it Is best for seo to use text links instead of drop down menus. So I just wanted to ask you opinion.

    | Berner
    0

  • I have a 9 year old WP website  with a WP blog which is still getting 300+ new visitors a day even though I have not written a blog for 5 years and have not updated content. Some posts have over 25,000 links. However the Moz analytics  is fraught with significant errors-404 redirects, page not found, dup content, no metatags, title too long etc. I was totally inexperienced 5 years ago and made many errors. However the basic content was sound and still is producing new visitors. I am starting a new ecommerce website using the same name but the URL and server will be different. I want to transfer my WP blog to the new site. I am concerned however that bringing the posts over can create the same errors on the new site. If I update all of the blogs on the old site using Yoast before transferring the blog to the new site will that help. I suppose I could check those flagged dup content and only transfer one of that category?

    | wianno168
    0

  • My title tags always get changed, i label them correctly, no too long or short and they always get changed, any ideas?

    | benjaminmarcinc
    1

  • Hi, so I am curious if Penguin has a time limit? Like say after 90 days it resets and looks to see if any penalties still exist? Thank you

    | Berner
    0

  • So I am curious about keyword placements etc. My main question is: So is whatever you search for in say Google must be the same in a website - to be found? So say you search for plumbers in Colorado Then you must have that exact, same phrase, in your website to be found? or does Google know based on title tags and such that a page is about plumbers and they service Colorado? I just want to make sure I am understanding how keywords work to be found. I mean you can have Colorado plumbers and plumbers in Colorado. So its hard to figure out how to use keywords. So a brief suggestion is greatly appreciated Chris

    | Berner
    0

  • I have a CMS based site and for that I am getting duplicate page title and description error message, for my all sub-category pages. What can I do for this because write Meta title and description for each page for CMS based website is not possible.

    | 1akal
    0

  • I'm working on a site that has lots of great content and ranks well but essentially the money is generated by affiliate links. I don't have a mobile version of the site but the company I'm affiliated with does offer a mobile redirect to their domain. Will redirecting mobile traffic to a different url hurt my SEO? I think the user will get a better experience by landing on a mobile page but I don't know if google will see it like that. Any thoughts?

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Moz reports are telling me that I have duplicate content on the home page because .com and .com/index.html are being seen as two pages. I have implemented 301 redirect  using various codes I found online, but nothing seems to work. Currently I'm using this code. RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^jacksonvilleacservice.com
    RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com/ [L,R=301] Nothing is changing. What am I doing wrong? I have given it several weeks but report stays the same.  Also according to webmasters tools they can't see this as duplicate content. What am I doing wrong?

    | omakad
    0

  • Hey Moz community, Really need help resolving duplicate content issues for an eCommerce utilizing Magento. We have duplicate content issues with category pagination and categories found in multiple locations. here's an example: "www.website.com/style/sequin-dresses" is also found at "www.website.com/features/sequin-dresses" *to resolve this issue do we just need to place a canonical tag on "www.website.com/features/sequin-dresses" pointing to "www.website.com/style/sequin-dresses"? In addition, the category "Sequin Dresses" also has pagination. to resolve duplicate content issues with pagination do we need to implement a rel=next/prev tag? (we do not have a view-all due to the amount of products featured) If anyone has experience with this or any insights on how to resolve these issues please let me know. Thanks!

    | LeapOfBelief
    0

  • Hello community, I have a general question: let's say you have some issues in deep pages, like duplicate pages without a canonical tag, or missing description or missing titles, etc.. Will these issues affect the chances of the homepage ranking if the homepage is optimized (no duplicates, canonical, good keywords volume, alt text, etc.) and has none of the issues present in deep pages within the site? Gracias.

    | EduardoRuiz
    0

  • Hello, The Moz on-page grader will give a grade of A if the keyword appears exactly in the content at least one time. If there are 500 words and a lot of it is about the main keyword, what have you found to be important to look for beyond the on-page grader - beyond the one exact instance of the keyword? I'm specifically talking just about keywords in the content. My guess is that it needs to occur 3 or 4 times in different forms and at least once exactly, but the on-page grader doesn't require it. What have you found?

    | BobGW
    0

  • One of my clients competitors launched a new site in January 2014 (totally new site on a domain that had previously never been used). The competitor has very few backlinks (only double digits), most of which are directory links (dofollow and nofollow). Their authority level is good but not as high as others who rank on top pages with them and their on-page optimization is lacking in a few areas. For all intents and purposes, the site should not be ranking where it is from what I can see. However, it is literally skyrocketing up the ranks faster than I would have ever imagined. The only thing I found that this domain has going for it is age (roughly 4 years). Does this carry more weight than I think it does? When compared to my clients site, we have more backlinks (similar mix), higher DA and PA and better on-page optimization for the same keywords. However, our domain age is only a little over 1 year.

    | mattylac
    0

  • Hey all, I discovered that the link from the public profile might not count. To my knowledge Google "counts" the first link to another page on any given page. The public profile has a nofollow link before your follow link:
    linktodomain.tld linktodomain.tld Doesn't this invalidates all the public profile links? What is your stance on this? Regards Sebastian

    | Sebes
    2

  • This is in regards to a previous post that was answered for me:
    http://moz.com/community/q/my-site-s-name-not-ranking-in-google I was talking to a friend and he suggested I try to type in an article in google with the exact name followed by my site's domain name without the .com For example, I have an article entitled: "MULTITASKING IS BAD FOR YOU, MKAY?" Obviously it's a title most would not word in that way. I typed it in and followed it up with my site's domain minus .com. So "MULTITASKING IS BAD FOR YOU, MKAY? ctrl-alt-success" But I'm not even getting listed in the search. There's got to be something I'm missing. I understand backlinks are important for ranking, but when I'm trying to find an exact match along with my site's url minus the .com? I just have this strong hunch that something is awry. NOTE: It seems this is only with google. If I use Bing or Yahoo, it comes up just fine.

    | Ctrl-Alt-Success
    0

  • My web is http://www.canexel.es, is supported by wordpress and I'm having some problems with the meta title. Google SERPS shows  “Canexel: Casas de madera canadienses“ when I config the snipped to show “Casas de Madera canadienses – Canexel” I use SEO yoast plugin. I dont know why it is showing the name of the company followed by a colon at the beginning. The home page is the only one that is having that problem. Thx!

    | Canexel
    0

  • Sorry if this is a daft question but... what is the difference between Rich snippets and Schema markup? Are they one and the same? They seem to be used interchaneably and I'm confused. If someone could give a brief sentence or two about the differences between them that would be great. Thanks

    | AL123al
    1

  • Is there a technique to optimising for multiple key phrases? In the "old days", we'd have written doorway pages targeted at different key phrases, or just written a landing page for each key phrase. Now we're told that more is better and having all the info about a topic in one place will get you better SEO outcomes. But that means pages must be optimised for multiple key phrases. For example, I currently have three pages that are related topically: Bangkok Skytrain (Guide to BTS and MRT Lines) - this page is a description of the metro train system in Bangkok and how to use it. Gets traffic from key phrases like "bangkok BTS line", "bangkok commuter trains", "BTS and MRT lines". Attractions near the Bangkok Skytrain - this page has a map for each major skytrain station and details of nearby attractions including hotels and restaurants. Gets traffic from phrases like "bangkok mrt and bts map", "bangkok rail link map", "how to get to siam on MRT" and "bangkok airport rail link map" (so mostly gets key phrases with "map" in them). Best shopping from the Bangkok Skytrain - this page talks about the shopping centres in easy walking distance of each skytrain station. Doesn't really get a lot of traffic and probably pulls that from the other two. Ideally, I probably should combine all of these into one page now. But how to optimise for all those key phrases? Should I just optimise within each Heading 2 as I would within a page? Does that risk confusing the overall page SEO?

    | Gavin.Atkinson
    0

  • We are currently running the "yellow pages". The problem is that Google Webmasters reports a lot of duplicate title tags. It's because we have three languages and the title consists of company name. for example: FCR Media Lietuva, UAB (The same in all languages). Of course we make different meta desriptions and so on. How should we solve this problem or should be just leave it as it is?

    | FCRMediaLietuva
    0

  • Hi Guys, I am trying to figure out why my page titles and meta d tags are getting cut off in Goofle SERPS. My page titles are 70 characters or under (including spaces) and my meta Dd's are 155 characters or under (including spaces) so I cannot work out why They are getting cut off. Is there something I have missed?! Thanks, Meaghan

    | StoryScout
    0

  • Hi All I am in stages of transferring a blog. We currently have partial manual penalty for unnatural links, and we received sample links of our own blog, which happened to be originally setup on another domain. e.g. example.co.uk and the blogs hosted on exampleblog.co.uk - the only way these were linked were through anchor text in each and every blog - so it's clear why this has been picked up. We are now going to transfer these across to our actual domain. Around 60% of the blogs had no meat, so we have pruned through these. What is the best solution; Redirecting ONLY the good blogs via 301 Redirect and 404 pages with no meat OR Redirecting ONLY the good blogs via 301 Redirect the others to Example.co.uk/Blogs Thanks Tom

    | TomPryor83
    0

  • The responsive website we created only shows the mobile view on the desktop. There is something we have overlooked, even after skimming the code between this website and another responsive website of ours that works perfectly. We appreciate anyone who can fix this for us. Here is a link to our home page: http://trimarkfunding.com/index-trimark-funding.html We find information on allowing desktop views on mobile devices, but no information on how to get a desktop view on a desktop. It was built in Dreamweaver, and the live views and the browser views all show desktop, but when upload pages and view in desktop the pages show up as a mobile view.

    | Manifestation
    0

  • Hi SEOs 🙂 We are a SEO and Web Agency based in Cholet, France. We have this client (Alpage Choaille : <cite class="_sd">www.alpage-choaille.fr/</cite>‎) for now 3 months, we have done all of the on-page optimization so far but can't get ANY progress on all of the 15 keywords tracked. This is not a competitive area, and we are looking at "local" rankings ( chalet beaufortain, gite beaufortain, gite en savoie, gite de charme, chalet de charme). We haven't done much OFFSITE, and we can't see any links on Open Site Explorer or Moz as this site is not part of their database. Many thanks in advance for your help. Best Regards, Benjamin

    | EnjinFrance
    0

  • Hi Mozzers! My employers homepage (www.swarovski.com) is - amongst other problems we're about to fix - very thin (not to say empty!) in text content. If we were to put relevant text on the next version of the page, would that be beneficial in terms of traffic to that page? Thanks and cheers, Chris

    | Diderino
    0

  • Hi There to everyone. I'm very new at SEO so I appreciate all the help I can get! Question: on my e-commerce website, one heading is "USB KEYS", then when you click on that, you get a page full of products with the word "USB KEYS" on the title, such as "4gig black USB KEY".. So then I do the MOZ Page grader and get a low score because on the product landing page it thinks I've used the word "USB KEYS" too much, like 72 times,.. But I have to use it- Cause it has to be in the product title! Is this ok!? thanks

    | cowhidesdirect
    0

  • Hey all, I've seen a few posts like this. But I wanted to start a new thread in hopes I may find the underlying issue. I've had my site: http://www.ctrl-alt-success.com for about 2 years. Recently I've started really adding a lot of content to it. (about 2-3 posts a week). I get zero organic views which is fine as I know it's still in the beginning. But here's my  main question. If I type "ctrl-alt-success" into google. I get some site that shows up. "ctrlaltsuccess.com" I've been looking at this issue forever. That site has been "coming soon" for nearly 2 years. lol My site doesn't even show up on the first 10 pages of google. However in Bing and Yahoo it ranks on the first page. What could my site be doing wrong that it's not even ranking for the exact domain name? Keep in mind, if I google "ctrl-alt-success.com" my site comes up fine. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

    | Ctrl-Alt-Success
    0

  • Hi Any eCommerce experts out there, please? I run a magento store and am looking to improve the performance of my category pages in the listings, to aid this I have created category descriptions - a hundred or so words about what, for example, a Maxi Dress is, an example can be seen here http:// yochic.co.uk/dress-267864/ maxi.html (I have broken the link as not sure on the linking policy of the forum). I have noticed, however, that this category description is appearing all on sub pages of the section, so it is on page 1,2,3,4 etc. Is this likely to lead to me receiving a penalty for internal duplicate content? The store uses rel="next" in all the category pages, so shouldn't that help limit any problems caused by the duplication of the page descriptions? I notice that when I search for a sub page, 2, 3, 4 etc in Google using the url of page two http://yochic.co.uk/dress-267864/maxi.html?p=2 it returns the first page, so am i right in thinking with the tags that Google sees all the sub pages as being page one. In which case, doesn't that limit my ability to rank for the products listed on pages 2+?  Long story short, the site cannot rank it's product pages because the vast majority of the product descriptions are 100% duplicate because the site is an affiliate fashion store. Many thanks Carl

    | carl_daedricdigital
    0

  • I'm in the middle of revamping a website for a restaurant that has multiple locations and am trying to decide what the best URL/internal link structure would be. Right now, each restaurant has a single location page, but we are going to add additional pages for catering. Sitewide-linked pages exist for /catering and /locationname. The way I see it, we have two basic options: Option #1: Catering page - /locationname/catering/ Option #2: Catering page - /catering/locationname/ In both cases, there would be links from the /locationname an  /catering pages to the location-specific catering pages. Is either option preferable to the other?

    | mblair
    0

  • Howdy Mozzers! What are your thoughts on short URL's vs Optimised URL's. For example if a website currently sells wood furniture and wants to target the keyword "Wood Furniture For Sale", which URL would be preferable: Short URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture Optimised URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture-for-sale The website also uses facet navigation and selected attributes are added in a fixed order sequence after the category. For example if Cane is selected as wood type: Short URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture/Cane Optimised URL: www.domain.com/wood-furniture-for-sale/Cane Which one do you prefer (between the short URL and optimised URL) and why? Cheers! MozAddict

    | MozAddict
    0

  • I have a new website. Did "on page grading". Although the page received a grade of A the only area that did not receive a check mark was key word stuffing. It recommended I not use keyword more that 15 times but I only counted 11 uses of the key phrase "breast augmentation." However the phrase is also used in alt tag of images which would take me over 15. Are alt tag on images counted and is this a concern? I tried to use "augmentation mammaplasty" to reduce the use of the phrase "breast augmentation" but will use of "augmentation" and "breast" alone also cause the count to increase for the phrase "breast augmentation"

    | wianno168
    0

  • I Have a print website www.print.dor2dor.com and we print 100's of products. I was wandering what is the best way to rank high for severall keywords as we dont want to just rank high for printing because when people are searching they normally type in the product they are looking for with printing at the end of it.

    | WillFrank
    0

  • Hey Mozzers! Something occurred to me the other day was that, while we can write title tags and meta descriptions to be within the character count and therefore appear nice and neatly in the SERPs, when Google et al decide to pull subpages out as further site links, it seems to still pull the normal meta description but with a far lower character count. As this looks untidy and could potentially impact CTR, is there a way I can amend the preferred text for the shortened version, via Webmaster Tools, for example? Thanks in advance for your help! Nick.

    | themegroup
    0

  • I've seen a lot of people saying that sidewide external links are a no-go.  Does this also apply to links of a vanity variety?  What I mean by this is "as seen on" links or links to awards given to the business?  This intellectually seems okay to me, but I want to make sure I'm not shooting myself in the foot.  Any evidence, case studies, anecdotal stories would be appreciated!

    | Oren.
    0

  • I have a page that I am working to rank.  Open Site Explorer shows that I have 69 internal links and a competitive site (ranked #4) has 822 internal links. The page I am looking to rank is on my main navigation menu so it should have an incoming link from every page on my site.  My site is 6 years old and has 497 pages indexed according to Google Webmaster Tools.  What do I need to do to improve the number of internal links that are being recognized?

    | CoachingToolbox
    0

  • Our e-commerce platform is in the process of changing to what we call app based stores (essentially running in a browser as single page web-app)  With these new stores they are being built in HTML 5 and using escaped fragments.
    Currently merchants are usually running 2 stores until we launch to app site at 100%.  My questions are really concerning the app stores which right now show on a subdomain but will essentially take over the primary domain.   Here is an example:
    app.tikimater.com and app.sportsworld.com Since I am not a developer, I'm really having a hard time understanding the escaped fragments. I'm using this but https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started I'm not sure what my actual urls should look like and what the canonical should be set to. Right now they have been removed but previously they had  http:app.tikimaster.com#!v=1  Also, and how I should be setting up my meta information for Google so 1) pages are indexed timely 2) pages are indexed with the correct information.  I am still setting the meta titles and descriptions but in some instances Google uses other info. With the new platform we are moving away from on page content (written paragraphs) but category pages would have related products embedded.  Should I still be pushing to have some type of intro text, since it would solely be for SEO and not the shoppers experience. All product pages have content (product description etc) Thank you for any advice

    | marketing_zoovy.com
    0

  • We rebuilt a site about a year ago on a new platform however Google is still indexing URL's from the old site that  we have no control over. We had hoped that time would have 'cleaned' these out but they are still being flagged in HTML improvements in GWT. Is there anything we can do to effect these 'external' dropping out of the indexing given that they are still being picked up after a year.

    | Switch_Digital
    0

  • I have a client who has a site live at example**.co.uk** and would like to rank for the term "example". But example**.com** is owned by another company who offers a different product and service and has been live since 2003. I know that I can make example**.co.uk** rank for keywords related to their service but I think it's going to be a struggle to get them to rank for the brand term "example" as the .com site already owns Page 1 with their domain name, Facebook page, Wiki page etc etc. The only variation is that example**.com** is a US based company and my client want to ranks in the UK only. What are the chances I can out rank example**.com** for the brand term on www.google.co.uk if example**.com** currently owns Page 1 on google**.co.uk**?

    | Marketing_Today
    0

  • Can ID and class be used in my H1 tag. I realize best case would be to change it, but it's going to require a change order from the ecommerce company to fix their sloppy code. Will this hurt seo? Example:

    | K-WINTER
    0

  • http://laleablack.com/ It's been around for a few months - I have other sites showing sitelinks in the search results. but when I search for "laleablack" "lalea and black" I don't see anything...anyone have any idea why? Links have proper anchortext etc

    | smlsml
    0

  • Hi everyone, I have a wordpress blog that is heavy on photos but short on text - most of my posts consist of a photo linking to a full gallery, and a short description of 1-4 sentences.  I've often read recommendations to noindex category pages, but in this case I'm wondering if it might be best to noindex the individual posts instead - I'm concerned that the short posts might seem like thin content to Google compared to the category pages which aggregate the posts.  Also, some of my categories reflect keywords that I'd like to rank well for.  I have about a dozen categories and close to 1000 posts.

    | matt_b
    0

  • When a page is made up of lots of individual wordpress posts, how should it be handled from an SEO perspective? Should the individual posts be hidden from the search engines and only the page url which contains all the posts collectivity be indexed? Page in question below: http://teammateworld.com/case-studies/ Thanks in advance.

    | Rich_H
    0

  • I have a WordPress site and my question is regarding one of the KW I am targeting. I have tagged some of my blog posts with this KW which has successfully placed me on page 1 of Google for the KW.   However the page displays all of the blog posts in the summarised format. The page appears as mysite.com/tag/KW This isn’t too bad as it brings the customer to my site however I have a much preferred page on my site that is optimized for this kw and I would rather them land on this.  This is a page as opposed to a post therefore there are no tags attached to it (i guess you knew that). It isn’t a very difficult keyword to rank for as it’s a service in a local area.  If I remove the blog tags is there a chance that Google will place my preferred optimised page higher? Is Google saying that the tag page is a better match for the browser therefore will not rank the preferred page? Hope I’m making sense. Thanks

    | cjkimber
    0

  • Hi I have designed my site with about 10 pages which focus on my main keywords. My question is what should I do about the homepage? Do I focus on a keyword on just my brand name? The homepage is a showcase of all my services and a bit about us. Thanks

    | TIG99
    0

  • What to use for geo.region for Dubai, for example for USA - content="US-IN"

    | marknorman
    0

  • This is the website http://www.gbzconsulting.com Not quite sure about the reason that my site is receiving almost 0 subdomain Moztrust. However, the on-page optimization tool show that the home page is ranked A. Any idea what I am missing or what I should do to improve?

    | Tel
    0

  • I am using the $20 / month CloudFlare service. My site is not running faster, so my question is: is this service adding real value? I do not have a lot of highly sensitive customer data (some email addresses and customer names and nothing more - no credit cards). I am already using Amazon Cloud Server and it appears to work fine. Any thoughts appreciated.

    | khi5
    0

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