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Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • Hi, I read through many of the forum questions dealing with the overly dynamic URLS  and I think I understand. Please let me know if I know what I am talking about: If SEO moz is saying I have 20 pages (mostly search and home/index pages) with overly dynamic urls, I would go to the that particular page and add the following code between the head tag: This code would cause Google to go to this page instead of the following duplicate index pages: 1. http://www.about-sports-collectibles.com/index.php?pcsid=0a83aa7119cf3d80a1d018634ec4ec94&p 2.  http://www.about-sports-collectibles.com/index.php?pcsid=18b220fc62628b013a51c6f26209df50&p There are a total of about 8 of these index pages. The problem is that I can't figure out where I would access each of these duplicate pages to add the canonical tag. There is only one home page with coding. As far as the search pages are concerned, I would not want Google to follow those pages would I? If that is the case, what would be the best code to add between the tags? For instance here are a couple of the overly-dynamic URL pages for the search pages: 1. http://www.about-sports-collectibles.com/index.php?p=catalog&mode=search&search_in=all&search_str= 2. http://www.about-sports-collectibles.com/index.php?pcsid=50354d5791e627dc2be6c86528154a5e&p=catalog&mode=search I hope I am not overwhelming anyone with my questions. I really am trying to get a handle on how Ll this stuff works. Thanks so much the help. Don

    | ge0173400
    1

  • Hi all, We sell musical equipment, and we have been debating about how to structure our website in terms of products and categories. These are our two options: Each category page lists sub-categories _and _all of the products contained within each of these sub-categories, so e.g. the "Guitars" category page would contain links to "Electric Guitars" and "Acoustic Guitars" as well as a big list of electric and acoustic guitars. Each category page lists only its sub-categories, unless it is a "leaf" node, in which case it lists all the products, so e.g. category "Guitars" just has two links - to "Electric Guitars" and "Acoustic Guitars" - and no products. Option 2 means customers don't see products until they've decided which category they want, which doesn't seem ideal to me, but SEO-wise, which is best? Thanks! Alex

    | reddogmusic
    0

  • I get an error of "**Issue:**Duplicate Page Content" for the following pages in the SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics.  But these pages are the same one!  Duhhhh....  Is there a way to hide this false error? http://www.stdtime.com/ http://www.stdtime.com/index.htm BTW, I also get "**Issue:**Duplicate Page Title" for this page.  Another false error...

    | raywhite
    0

  • Quality above the fold is often mentioned for SEO. Is there a good definition of what is above the fold?

    | casper434
    0

  • Besides enhancing the page and time on page, can youtube videos do anything for seo? Can we save the videos and rename them with keywords? Ty

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • Hello Everyone, The website I am working with offers service in two locations, lets say Service in City A and Service in City B. Those two cities, which are close by, are the main source of clients, so the owner asked me to concentrate on these terms. I did a decent job for a newbie and now we are on the first page of google  closer to the top for these 2 terms. The problem that I am facing right now is that a) it hard to get that extra bit from onsite optimization when you optimizing for 2 different cities b) Customers may get confused which cities we focus on A or B? We have locations in both. c) Owner wants to expand services to additional cities. So I looked at how our competitor handling these time of problem and most of them have a page with titles like "Cities we serve" with links to the individual locations that are optimized for the specific city. That page usually includes paragraph or two about local history and then re-span description of their services. Is it a good practice to structure one's website like that if you are trying to target multiple locations? Should I re-target my home page to something less geographically specific and create separate pages for Cities A , B and the new locations? Would I lose ranking for terms service in city A & service in city B because of that Or should I leave my home page optimized for Cities A & B  and just add new locations as separate pages? Thanks in advance for you insights.

    | SirMax
    0

  • I have a site that has about 20 footer links.  A main Category and 4-5 links under each. The site is very large, so I feel they do have some value for navigation, and they don't blend in with the background at all. I know penguin was cracking down on footer links, but I don't feel theses are "spammy" links. Will it hurt long-term to leave these links, or should we pull them?

    | netviper
    0

  • Hi All, Literally just signed up - and thought I might be able to dive straight into my pages using the On Site Optimiser to check page, make some changes, then check again and see it have immediate effect on the analysis. Not so? Each time I click on "Grade My On Page Optuimisation" with the expectation that a box formerly with no tick now gets one, nothing changes :o( Chris.

    | Chris1970
    0

  • Recently had sites homepage listing taken off first page for brand name search even though search term is not competitive. Does anyone have any ideas?

    | Luia
    0

  • I just wondering if using a lot of 301 redirects could hurt to my seo? We have site which have a lot  of content with such links: title: This Is Title page url: www.site.com/This-Is-Title-page.html  and we use for each page 301 redirect to remove capital letters in url: www.site.com/this-is-title-page.html Is this is good idea and not hurting to seo ? Thanks in advance

    | bele
    0

  • I have a scrabble based site where I function as a anagram solver, scrabble dictionary look up and tons of different word lists. In each of these word lists I link every word to my scrabble dictionary. This has caused Google to index 10018 pages total for my site and over 300 of them have well over 100 links. Many of them contain over 1000 links. I know Google's and SEOMOZ stance that anything over 100 will hurt me. I have always seen the warnings in my dashboard warning me of this but I have simply ignored it. I have posted on this Q and A that I have this issue, but IMO having these links benefit the users in the aspect that they don't have to worry about coping the text and putting it in the search box, they can simply click the link. Some have said if it helps the users then I am good, others have said opposite. I am thinking about removing these links from all these word lists to reduce the links per page. My questions are these. 1. If I remove the links from my page could this possible help me? No harm in trying it out so this is an easy question 2. If I remove the links then I will have over 9000 pages that are indexed with Google that no longer have a link pointing to them, except for the aspect that they are indexed with Google still. Is it going to hurt me if I remove these links and Google no longer sees them linked from my site or anywhere else?

    | cbielich
    0

  • I was wondering if you can give me some insight on how a keyword that I put on my campaign gets linked to a specific URL on my website by SEOMoz or Google. For example: updating a brick fireplace is my keyword. On the campaign when I am looking at my on page optimization, the URL assigned (or given) to it is my homepage. How is this determined and is there a way around it and or directing it to the correct page? Thanks

    | SammyT
    0

  • Hi guys, we have 41 links on our holiday(vacation) rental website, this seems too many when looking at best practice. 24 of these are links to community pages while 8 link to activities pages. The community and activity pages are also accessible from links on the top menu so they are not strictly necessary but do get 10% of site clickthroughs according to Google in-page analytics. I therefore do not want to remove the links if there is no good evidence that google will penalize us for this. What do you think would be best for our site? Thanks, John Tulley. footer.jpg

    | JohnTulley
    0

  • Is it recommended to include on the homepage of your site site? I would like Google to index and follow my site. I am using WordPress and noticed my homepage is not including this meta tag, therefore wondering if I should include it?

    | asc76
    0

  • A number of the client's we represent have seen drops in rankings.  The title tags on these sites are formatted old way of doing tilte: "Blue Widgets| Cheap Widgets | Metal Widgets". We are going to change them to the natural format: Acme Offers Blue, Metal Widgets for Any Budget." Just wondering if anyone has made similar changes post-penguin and if they've seen improved ranking from doing it.

    | TopFloor
    0

  • I recently added meta descriptions to several community-supplied pages for our open source website http://spree.tw/N53HuO Google Webmaster Tools is complaining/warning that the meta descriptions are too short.  The descriptions are being supplied by our users and they typically do not lend themselves to anything much longer than what is being entered already. I was thinking of adding some text to the end of the meta description.  Something like "This is one of many third party extensions for Spree supplied free of charge by our community" or something else like that. Is it acceptable practice to reuse a snippet in your meta description like this?  Do you suggest other alternatives?  Since meta description doesn't affect page rank can I use terms that I'm trying to rank for on my home page without cannibalizing my link juice? TIA, Sean

    | schof
    0

  • Hi there, Our company is selling airline tickets and more products within the travelling market like car rental, hotels and holidays. Now we are busy to improve our google ranking because the market of airplaine tickets is hard with many competitors. At this moment we are optimizing our offer pages. Our Strategy: 2 Keyword focus on that specific page
    1. Vliegtickets + Destination
    2. Vliegticket, ticket or tickets + Destination Both keywords will be in the title tag. Example: vliegtickets + destination - brandname - vliegticket, ticket or tickets + destination h1 = Vliegtickets + Destination
    h2 = Vliegticket, ticket or tickets + Destination Now we know that there is a big search volume on the keywords "goedkope vliegtickets" and we do not focus on these words on the offer pages of a destination. Goedkope vliegtickets could be translate like cheap airplane tickets. At the homepage of our offers we are focussing on goedkope vliegtickets, is it wise to continue doing that at the other pages also, instead of vliegticket, ticket, tickets + destination. Will goedkope vliegtickets + destination make the keyword combination vliegtickets + destination more strong and could it improve our google ranking? Or should we keep it like we do now, because vliegticket, ticket or tickets + destination is familiar to vliegtickets + destination? Hope to hear your opinion so we could decide what to do with our onpage strategy. Next thing to do than is linkbuilding. Thank you in advance.

    | vliegticketsnl
    0

  • My question is I noticed today that the snap shots of my main pages were outdated. About a month. Then I clicked on the "Learn More" link about cahced images and Google says "Google crawls the web and takes snapshots of each page. When you click Cached, you'll see the webpage as it looked when we last indexed it." I know this sounds really dumb, but does that really mean the last time Google indexed that page? So the changes I have made since then have not been taken yet?

    | cbielich
    0

  • Are the on-page optimisation reports still to be used? If we do check all factors we risk penalization because of latest Panda update?

    | MugurCosminFrunzetti
    0

  • Hi, I was wondering what is meant by canonical? I ran a test on my site and in the notices, SEOMOZ came back with a total of 90 canonicals. As far as I can tell, it refers to the preferred page (not really sure what that means though). I thought initially it was talking about duplicate content, but all the pages are totally different. There is no duplicate content on any of he pages that it lists. So I'm not sure how to fix this. Thanks for the help. Don

    | ge0173400
    0

  • Hi everyone Our industry has a particular keyword phrase that is very popular. We currently own this as a domain name. How can we make use of this to our main websites advantage?

    | LadyApollo
    0

  • I run a travel and culture blog which means that I write about a lot of upcoming events which recur each year. Usually I title (and slug) the page with the event name and date. When it comes to update the article the next year, sometimes it's as little as changing the date, other times more has changed and it needs to be substantially re-written. Until now, what I've done is update the title, content, and then re-posted (sometimes altering the slug where it's needed to be done). Sometimes it works fine and Google keeps me ranking well, but other times the changes dont get such a great response. I have these options (as far as I can see). Which do you think is best? 1. To create a new article each year and put a message at the start of the previous one to say, click here to read about the 2012 event 2. To continue what I'm doing updating, changing the slug, and re-posting (ie changing the date). 3. To write a new article and insert a 301 redirect. I need to make sure the article appears as a new article in my RSS feed and also on the homepage. Look forward to your ideas! Thanks

    | ben1000
    0

  • I have a client, and want to know the best way to add new, keyword specific landing pages to their site and link to it in a logical way that isn't spammy. Example: My homepage targets “Adelaide Cars” I also want to target “Melbourne Cars” which I would do via a targeted landing page. How then would I logically link to this landing page? As Google gets better at spotting un-natural content, I’d like to know how to introduce this new page to get the best traction. If I was to just create the page, it would not make sense to have it in the main navigation. Same goes from various industry type terms. Eg. pest control and exterminator. How do you target both and still have a logical sitemap and page structure that Google will like and make sense to users.

    | letgo345
    0

  • Hi everyone, I am new to SEOMOZ, but it looks like really good program. I ran a report last week, and SEOMOZ says that out of 10001 pages, I hve a total of 9995 warnings. When I take a look at the breakdown, it says I have too many on page links. I removed the links from the bottom of each page, but my on page links are still over 100. Does this mean that I will have to get rid of categories and sub-categories in the navigation bar? Thanks, Don

    | ge0173400
    0

  • This canonical thing is brand new to me and I'm trying to wrap my mind around it. Here is my situation:  I use Wordpress.  I am showing duplicate content with the following url's http://crosstrainingandfitness.com/online-workout-blog/ http://crosstrainingandfitness.com/online-workout-blog/page/2/ Would setting a canonical link solve this? If so, what do I put in the Canonical box for this category (online workout blog).  I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin. Any help is greatly appreciated.

    | carbbon
    0

  • Say you have a website url of a rather competitive keyword phrase, would it be beneficial for me to go ahead and name my site title the same as the url?  And also should my site title go through every page, or should i consider having slight variations throughout the pages? for example:  page title | site title  or page title| slight varation of title on sub page? **edit - to further expand on the question a bit also, if my google places has the company name on _there - would it be effective to go ahead and use the company name in my site title?  _ _Also if i have the main keyword in the breadcrumb as the home, does that effect my SEO credibility if it shows up on all the pages? _

    | tgr0ss
    0

  • Hello, On a E-commerce site with multiple buy buttons on the page (11 by Default).  Should I be blocking the alt. img on these? when I use the seomoz toolbar and view my page I see this Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • Buy Now • along with other alt imges on page, Thanks

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • I have two these tag pages: http://www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-fit-out-birmingham/ http://www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-refurbishment-birmingham/ Both targeted on key words respectively "office fit out birmingham" and "office refurbishment Birmingham" Now the weirdest thing has happened. I have being optimising the, "office refurbishment Birmingham"...with a little more content etc...and links etc...and havent got round to "optimising "office fit out birmingham" yet.... Which seems good, because weirdly the "office fit out birmingham" page is ranking HIGHER than the "office refurbishment Birmingham" page for the term office refurbishment Birmingham search?!?! So I must be doing something very wrong. What on earth has happened? Can anyone see these two pages and give me some insite into why making a page better has nuked it?! Many thanks. James

    | bizint
    0

  • Hi, My website has no footer area and I would like some advise on creating/optimising it for seo. Would it advise to keyword link to 10 of my key pages & Have my full company address and this will help with localising my website Company name address, Dublin, Ireland

    | Socialdude
    0

  • Does Google mobile have different signals? For some reason I seem to rank better with certain pages on the mobile site?

    | TP_Marketing
    0

  • I have a few pages on my site focused on key words...such as office design Birmingham. The contact page and a tag page. http:www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-design-birmingham/ Now I recently published an article about a big new office design in birmingham for a company....and I tagged it as office design birmingham naturally...put it in the category for Birmingham office news....and then also put office design Birmingham at key strategic seo points.... the result being this article now seems to rank higher than my office design Birmingham pages?! My question is this....how should I optimise posts? Lets say I put 3 or 4 posts on my webiste/blog about an "office design Birmingham"....I dont want to rank for "HSBC office design birmingham"....I want the article to lend weight to my office design Birmingham credentials ...so I focus on office design birmingham? I dont really want my posts to rank very high though...I want them to help my key pages "float". I'm very confused how to optimise my posts. If I do it too well, they out rank the "old" pages that I actually want people to visit?! Mmm, thanks for pointers!

    | bizint
    0

  • Hello Everyone, Google says they've implemented this change because they are answering the complaints of users who have to search for actual content after they've clicked on a result. They go on to say users want to see content right away. Now while most of this talk is about ads, I wonder if this will also apply to websites that are image and flash heavy above the fold with very little content. I am working on a few auto dealer sites where 99% of the content above the fold are flash banners and images. Below all of this noise you can find about 200 words of text talking about their dealerships. I'd love to know everyone's thoughts on this...Does the new page layout algorithm change apply to only ads or to images and flash as well? Thanks

    | wparlaman
    0

  • For the search phrase "office design birmingham" in the uk. I have mutiple pages ranking in position 7,8,11,12,13,14 & 15! This is all very well but are they somehow competing? Am i better off doing something different to get one or two into the top 3 rather than 7 in the top 15?! Many thanks for your opinion and advice. James

    | bizint
    0

  • I have a client who is a business broker. I have just begun working with them, and they are trying to determine the best domain name to use - they have several. business-broker-alabama.com vs businessbrokeralabama.com Which one of these has more value? I know that search engines have somewhat devalued keywords. The first one probably has a little more SEO value, but is going to be a drag in terms of marketing -- saying "business hyphen broker hyphen alabama" is going to get old for them. Thanks!

    | csmithal
    0

  • We are re-design our home page, one are of the current home page has a drop down window called "popular products" .  We wrote short articles for our keywords and have them linked to product page. In the past, it has helped us rank. However, with new Google rules, our feeling is that such practice is no good.  So, we lean towards to remove it.  Still, we'd like to hear some opinions and ask some questions too: www.butterflycraze.com is it clear to you that this is not good in Google's eyes? how do I determine if these links serving any SEO purpose now after Panda? depend on the answer to 2), what should we do about these pages?  shall be re-direct or shall we remove them from Google index?

    | ypl
    0

  • I'm look at the report under Crawl Diagnostics Summary/Too Many On-Page Links It says there are 124 links on this page. I don't see it?! do you? http://www.kisswedding.com/blog/category/garden-wedding-ideas/

    | annasusmiles
    0

  • I searched and couldn't find an answer, so I thought to ask. I use Weebly and it's all drag and drop features. Reading through all the information here, I see it stated over and over again that the use of frames makes it hard for search engines. Are Weebly's drag and drop boxes what is referred to as "frames"? Here is what I created. www.vermontapron.com

    | Gardengirl
    0

  • Hello, I’m doing SEO for one E-commerce website which name is Lily Ann Cabinets & I’ve around 300 different root domains which having same linking structures, same design & even same product database for all 300 websites, but currently I’m focusing only on Lily Ann Cabinets website & trying to get ranking on some targeted keywords, but website is not performing well in Google.com For Example: http://www.lilyanncabinets.com/ (Main Websites)
    http://www.orlandocabinets.com/
    http://www.chicagocabinets.org/
    http://www.miamicabinets.org/
    http://www.newyorkcabinets.org/
    http://www.renocabinets.org/ So please can anyone tell that Will it create duplicate issue in search engines or may be due to this reason website doesn’t have good ranking in search engines, then how can I fix this issue? Do I have to make different structures for Lily Ann Cabinets?

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • I've been doing SEO for awhile, but new to SEOMoz.  I'm surprised that SEOMoz does not recommend keyword meta tags. I didn't enter them for the longest time because I know Google doesn't care about them.  However, I did read that other search engines DO use them. And therefore that is why you should have them. I teach my customers about SEO, and I know it would be much easier for them not to enter or worry about the keyword meta tags. However, I would love to hear opinions here. And to Bing/Yahoo put any weight into them or is it only really small search engines? Thanks! Hilary

    | endlessrange
    0

  • I am working on an e-commerce website with Volusion. I have 1 main keyword that I am really trying to focus on for my home page. Last week I was in position #7 for this keyword, and I have never been off the first page of Google for it. Using Volusion you can Globally set a Title and meta description for any pages that do not already have a  title or description. I noticed my Global title had the same keyword as I was using for my home page and thought that, that might be taking away some importance from my keyword, so I changed the Global Title to a different keyword. When I looked at my SEO moz rankings today, which crawled last night it said My keyword was #24 on Google. I checked and as of now I am in position #11. Like I said before, I have never not been on the first page for this keyword. Does anyone think that changing the Global title may have been the cause for this??

    | DTOSI
    0

  • Hi Just wondering what people think of using mega menus for navigation? We have used them on our new site http://nicontrols.com/uk/ When I run the site through the excellent SEOMoz campaign tools I see that we have too many on page links. I now believe the menu is good for customers but maybe not for link juice. Anyone got an ideas? Do I remove the mega menu or just reduce the number of links? Many thanks David

    | DavidLenehan
    0

  • We noticed that our website is accessible on: http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com Both the versions have page rank of 4. Though on https version we have added canonical tag indicating http:// version as preferred. Is this fine or we need to use 301 redirect and let the site be accessible only on http:// version??

    | CyrilWilson
    1

  • How important is it to have a contact form on the homepage of a service-based business? I am trying to decide if having a form on front page will increase the number of people filling it out.

    | TheSEODR
    0

  • Hi, If I wanted to have multiple translations available on the following wordpress blog: Packageforwardingservice.com. What would be the best strategy? Use a plugin or use a subdomain such as spanish.packageforwardingservice.com? If the second option how would I add the translated content? install another version of wordpress on host? Thanks!

    | MasonInteractive
    0

  • Hi All, We have a site targeting Ireland, so all on-page SEO is completed and launched on the Irish site. We are now rolling out this site to the UK...how much of this content & SEO meta data has to be changed for Google to not recognise it as duplicate content? Site structure is as follows: http://www.domain.com/ie-en/ - Irish site http://www.domain.com/uk-en/ - UK site Or will it even be considered duplicate content as we have the uk and Irish signals in the subfolders, will be using geo targeting on webmasters, and will have UK specific addresses and phone numbers? We will be rolling this site out to may more countries so would be great to get this straight from the start so we don't waste time creating many versions of the meta data unnecessarily! Many thanks Emma

    | john_Digino
    0

  • Hi Guys, Has anyone noticed that the onpage rules seem to have changed in terms of what Google is looking for. I have just been optimizing a client site, I haven't worked on for a year and noticed that the pages I have worked on have dropped since lat week when I finished the onpage. Some of them aren't just 1 or 2 places but literally pages. It can't be links as I haven't even started link building yet. These are the same rules i have been playing with for six years and I don't cut corners with rogue text, or overly optimize for keywords. I am going to give it till the end of the month and then reverse the changes be interesting to see what happens. Kind Regards Neil

    | nezona
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I know that this has been asked a few times and answered as well, I would just like to know some more on the internal link count on a page. I ran the SEOmoz report and many of the pages on the website have more than 150+ internal links. Now, should I use the rel=nofollow tag on some pages that I feel are not important? I have a list of pages which are not important from the SEO point of view, but from the usability factors they need to be there so I cannot remove the links to them. So, would be OK to place the rel=nofollow tag on them. My whole purpose is to reduce the count of internal links on the page as seen by SE's. Now, some say that the rel=nofollow tag does not lower the link count, but it can definitely (I believe) prevent the bots time in getting to those pages, which SEOmoz report also quotes. (__When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. ) So, probably I can save their time. Does anyone have any views on this, Cheers,

    | RanjeetP
    0

  • i've been in the crawl diagnostics of my website. I only have 1 page crawled and no errors. Last Crawl Completed: Jul. 12th, 2012 Next Crawl Starts: Jul. 19th, 2012 Do you have an idea of how to fiw it? Thanks a lot

    | Ericc22
    0

  • Hey SEO's, I'm wondering if a bad product portfolio of a e-commerce website has an influence (direct) on the rankings because of less relevant content. To show you what I'm thinking about, look at these two situations: 1. E-Commerce website with 3.000 products from different brands (all top brands) but the products itself are not quite up to date 2. E-Comerce website with 3.000 products from differend brands (all top brands) but these products contain allways the top seller items. Is it possible, that Google has an index for "fresh content" or "highly demanded content" or something like this which has direct influence on the ranking? I ask this question besides the fact, that its of course allways better to have the top sellers in a portfolio than not have. But the big thing is: What to do if you don't know which products are best, or you just don't get them from your retailers or some other reason... For Google & Co. its harmfull (I guess) to put a e-commerce website without top-seller products into the top-rankings with high competition!? Any ideas on that?

    | videriconcept
    0

  • After updating areas highlighted in the On-Page Optimization report even after clicking the [Grade My On-page Optimization] the results don't refresh or reflect the changes eg The h1 tag does include the exact search term and there is bolded examples of the keyword phrase but report says not! Is there a way to force an update or is it a time related issue?

    | RobWillox
    0

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