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Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • Hi Moz peeps, google said that we should have two site maps... one for google and one for people. Now i know having a site map to submit to google for the first time is important for SEO, but is having a site map for people visitng the site help at all in terms of google's bots crawling your site? I know it might actually help human people navigate through your site, I just want to know if by not having it or having it affects on page SEO at all, thanks guys

    | david305
    1

  • We have just started doing SEO for a new client. Their web design agency has built a cms website for them and in the footer area of each page there is some global content which contains: a) the company's address b) a strapline, ie "family law specialists" I have 2 questions: I have understood from previous SEO classes I've been to, that putting the same keywords on each page of a site is a no-no as then Google won't know what page to bring up for that keyword.  However, is it ok to put an address on every page and can Google tell that it is just an address? What about the strapline?  Family law specialists isn't actually a keyword I'm currently tracking but I could add it to SEOMoz.  however is it a problem having on every page or is it ok because it's in the footer?

    | mfrgolfgti
    0

  • I'm getting a lot of Crawl Errors due to duplicate content and duplicate title because of category and tag posts in WordPress. I rebuilt the sitemap and said to exclude category and tags, should that clear up the issue? I've also went through and did NO INDEX and NO FOLLOW for all categories and posts. Any thoughts on this issue?

    | seantgreen
    0

  • Hi Guys! I have a question regarding the risk of **re-targeting **your homepage to another **keyword. ** To give a little background: I am working on a clients site that targets a keyword we initially thought during the keyword research phase, would be an appropriate target. What we found out is that it is not. Everything in analytics points to this keyword not performing well. We now want to re target the homepage to another keyword target. My questions are: How risky is it to do this given we have already done a fair amount of link building to the home page with anchor text from the initial keyword target? Will this look suspicious to google? What sort of things should we consider before moving forward with this change?

    | gravityseo
    0

  • I know WordPress is always a little messy with SEO but i have a main question regarding WordPress optimisation for a special keyword. Let's say i have a chocolade blog and have written about all the vendors of chocolade. Now i found a new keyword which i want to optimize my website for. Should i create a 'Page' within WordPress and optimize it for the new keyword + link to some of the post about a relative keyword within this page?
    OR Should i create a blog post and write about the new keyword and just links some of the other relative blog posts? I hope my question is clear.

    | Amosnet
    0

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

    | Amosnet
    0

  • howdy, I have a basic question about using content found on other websites for your own use. I have started a pick up lines website for guys to search for pickup lines to use on girls. Anyways, my website has many, if anything a lot, of the same exact pick up lines as all my competitors are using. If I use the same pick up lines found on their site could i be penalized for this as far as SEO? thanks and hope to hear back

    | david305
    0

  • So . . . I've written a beautiful blog (or video or podcast or whatever . . . just take my word for it that it will be nominated for an Oscar, Webby, or Pulitzer very soon). What's the best way to get the word out about it? Let me rephrase that.  I know I should tweet, post on Facebook, social networks etc cetera.  My real question is, should I link to the home page (which is where my blog is located . . . it would show up there) or should I link to the specific page of the full blog post? Seems to me, linking to the blog post directly gives me a better chance at tracking the success of the article in generating interest and traffic, but I was assuming linking to the home page helped pump up the importance of my overall site? I still consider myself an SEO Noob so be sure to speak slowly and not use big words.  Consider drawing pictures.

    | damon1212
    0

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

    | PHDAustralia68
    0

  • Hello, Quick question really, as far as the SERPs are concerned If I had a site with say 180 links on each page - 80 above suggested limit, would putting 'rel="nofollow"' on 80 of these be as good as only having 100 links per page? Currently I have removed the links, but wereally need these as they point to networked sites that we own and are relevant... But we dont want to look spammy... An example of one of the sites without the links can be seen here whereas a site with the links can be seen here You can see the links we are looking to keep (at the bottom) and why... Thanks

    | TwoPints
    0

  • the report shows duplicate content for a category page that has more than one page. how can we avoid this since i cannot make a different meta content for the second page of the category page: http://www.geographics.com/2-Cool-Colors-Poster-Board-14x22/c183_66_327_387/index.html http://www.geographics.com/2-Cool-Colors-Poster-Board-14x22/c183_66_327_387/index.html?page=2 thanks, Madlena

    | Madlena
    0

  • Hi, We have a product which is marketed by affiliates . Affiliates send referrals to our sale page by adding their affiliate IDs to our product page like http://www.mysite.com/products.php?ref= 12345. We want to avoid the content duplication impression to Google by using canonical tags but we are not clear about its use. Should we use it on http://www.mysite.com/products.php ( actual page) or we should create temporary pages for each referral id  i.e http://www.mysite.com/products.php?ref= 12345 and then add canonical tags to all those pages linking to proper page i.e http://www.mysite.com/products.php ? Thanks, shaz

    | shaz_lhr
    0

  • Why is on-page optimisation not showing all my keywords, it is reporting on only about 10 of the 40

    | yours2share
    0

  • I will begin creating custom landing pages optimized for long-tail keywords. Placing the keywords in the URL is obviously important -- Question: would it be detrimental to rankings to have extra characters extending past the keyword? I'm not able to use tracking code, but need to put an identifier in the URL (clp = custom landing page). For example, is "www.domain.com/silver-fish.html" going to perform meaningfully better than "www.domain.com/silver-fish-clp.html" for the kw phrase "silver fish"? There will obviously be a lot of on-page optimization in addition to just structuring the URLs. Thank you. SIMbiz

    | SIMbiz
    0

  • Hi Guys, We have an issue with duplicate content caused by dynamic URLs, so want to implement rel=canonical. However this isn't easy due to the way out CMS works. These were pulled from SEOMoz scan: http://www.transair.co.uk/pp+Aerobatics-Training+463
    http://www.transair.co.uk/pp+Aerobatics-Training+463?page=1&perpage=10&sales_group=NULL&filter_colour=&filter_size=&sortby=RELEV&inStock=NO&resfilter=
    and are obviously the same page. As far as I can see I have two options. 1.  To implement the canonical meta tag only on page 1. 2. To implement the canonical tag so that I add ?page=X so
    http://www.transair.co.uk/pp+Aerobatics-Training+463
    would be
    http://www.transair.co.uk/pp+Aerobatics-Training+463?page=1 Will this work? Thanks Rob

    | brightonseorob
    0

  • Our website is gaining traction and we are looking for an individual who is an expert at examining websites to see if the structure and on-page optimization is being optimized, and what. Please contact me if you are interested.  Thank you.

    | balboafinance
    0

  • Hi, Very new to seomoz but very impressed. First report has shown me that I have duplicate pages. Some seem to be duplicate titles and some were duplicates of pages i found on the server. however the main problem is it seems to be picking up pages with www and without it which I have a vague idea is a canonical issue. so it throws up pages like this: http://web-writer-articles.co.uk and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk I want it just to pick up pages with www Firstly should it be picking up both and if not how can I make amendments so that it is only picking up pages which include www ? thank you for your help, louandel15

    | louandel15
    0

  • My SEO Moz crawl today has highlighted for errors where page titles are empty missing. For example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/hire-wedding-entertainment/wedding-entertainment-kent This page clearly has a title as do the other 3. Is it a bug in the system or am I missing something?

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Hi, This is happening with a brand new site. We have created sitemaps and submitted them to Google Webmaster Tools. GWT says sitemaps are ok, "x" number of urls submitted, but no urls indexed. When I check in Google with site:domain.com I see that many of the urls are already indexed. Why this discrepancy between GWT and reality? Thanks for your time!

    | gerardoH
    0

  • hi there, we have a new ecommerce platform which has just been deployed, and I've been asked to tidy up the onpage SEO. we have employed canonicals across the category and product pages and we now have a nice set of unique product pages my question is - do we need to create the title tags in all of the duplicate non-canonical pages eg www.mysite.com/niceproduct.html    (canonical) www.mysite.com/acategory/niceproduct.html     (duplicate) Can we leave the duplicate title tag empty and not worry about it, or should we put in a duplicate of the canonical title tag hope the question makes sense! thanks in advance for all help

    | k3nn3dy3
    0

  • Most are all related to things like facebook like buttons and such. I'm using DOCTYPE 4.01 Traditional but no good. Any ideas? www.jaaron-wood-countertops.com

    | JAARON
    0

  • Hi, do I loose an opportunity to rank better if I use a navigation with Alt-tagged Pictures in comparison to a Text/ Link based main navigation? Thanks, Sebastian

    | Naturalmente
    0

  • Good morning from 13 degrees C wet an windy wetherby UK Ive noticed some CMS platforms do not mark up body copy correctly. In other words instead of marking up body copy within p tags its marking body content in the following ways: and Whilst my gutt feeling this is not good i wonder just how serious a problem it will cause for the Google bots ie will they have problems indexing the content as  its best to always wrap contnet in opening and closing p tags. So my question is please, am i worrying uneccesarily or is there a genuine penalty to pay SEO wise when body content is not mark up correctly. A live example of markup wriddled with break tags is here: http://www.langleys.com/ Thanks in advance 🙂

    | Nightwing
    0

  • Hi all, I have a matter i would like a discussion about, since I am looking for a good solution. First the case: I have a site with a large community based discussion board. We daily have 40 to 80 active forum threads with average of 200 posts. As it is right now each thread page shows, at the bottom of the thread, the 20 threads with latest activity. From a SEO point of view this is not the best solution, since all thread pages passes link juice to the latest 20 threads. However, the threads change daily so the juice is sprayed around all over the place. What I want to do is related forum threads, such that each thread at the bottom shows up to 10 threads which could be of interest to the reader. In this way one thread will have more or less the same threads at the bottom at all time, unless the relevancy is better for other threads, causing som minor changes to happen over time. The question is, how can one do this? In the backend, the forum has two tables. One holding threads and one holding posts relating to the threads. All in all the system has 66.500 threads, and in total 469.000 posts. Every thread has a title, and the posts are of varying length. The threads have categories, but they are not so distinct that a thread in one category can not be related to a thread in another category. So I would like to make the relevancy from the title of the thread and the content of the forum posts. As of yet I have not come up with a good solution, and i will look forward to reading any feedback for this. I will answer any questions as fast as possible, to get a good discussion goint here. Best regards, Rasmus

    | rasmusbang
    0

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

    | mevseo
    0

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

    | MarieA
    1

  • Hi all We are building, managing and marketing a Danish tourism site for VisitSweden. The site targets a Danish market-group with information and travel tips on going to Sweden. We have one page in particular that has always failed to rank well for some reason. http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/malmo This page targets the keyword "Malmø". Another page, with similar layout and content seems to rank alot better. http://www.meresverige.dk/rejser/goeteborg Keyword "Gøteborg" Any ideas? Smart tips? Have the best of days Fredrik

    | Resultify
    0

  • We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name.  So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links. Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link?  We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy.  It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.

    | AarcMediaGroup
    0

  • I am using text replace on a blog to automatically link keywords in posts and pages back to the homepage. Sometimes the same KEYWORD links back 2/3 times in one post, can this harm rankings or cause an anchor text filter? thanks,

    | babyjane
    0

  • Hi all, just had a quick question about google results. I help run a sports forum and currently all our topics as seen as "Forum Name • Topic Title". I think that links to topics would appear much more user friendly if I switched the naming to "Topic Title • Forum Name". My question is, would this change affect previous links in any negative way or will google simply update past topics with the new naming convention? Thank in advance.

    | Xee
    0

  • I'm working on an Ecom website and I was wondering - For breadcrumbs - is there an SEO and/or UEx preference when it comes to taking them back to the homepage? I have the option of going CATEGORY > SUB CATEGORY > SUB CATEGORY or HOME > CATEGORY > SUBCATEGORY > SUBCATEGORY Each example is hyperlinked except for the lowest level. Thanks

    | Blenny
    0

  • I redirected from my .co.uk site to my .com site (www.salesandinternetmarketing) and my Domain Authority has gone from 44 to 33!? Also SEO Moz states that it's crawled all my pages, yet isn't showing any on page reports, inculding keyword usage, meta descriptions, etc. I'm very confused and not receiving clear answers from the support team (they've said one of the reasons is that my keywords are not ranked in the top 50, well some are, nevertheless I should still be getting some report info shouldn't I)? Can someone please help, I'm rather fed up as this has been going on a for a couple of weeks now

    | lindsayjhopkins
    0

  • Hello, I use the Wordpress plataform in my blog. What I want to ask is, how important is the tag field in the posts area. Since I have the title tag and meta description how important is that field? Its really a question that was in my mind since I start doing SEO 😛 Tks in advance guys 🙂

    | PedroM
    0

  • Hi I'm considering using this pinging service http://www.pingler.com I would just like people opinions on this? They will ping 25urls for me each month on regular basis. I can choose either to get my urls pinged daily or every 10 days for only $3 a month. Does any have experience with pining services & will this benefit my seo, thanks.

    | Socialdude
    0

  • Still new to this SEO world, so please bear with me.  I have an eCommerce site so one of the issues is duplicate content and page titles. So what I was thinking was this...for each product that I sell I have 4 or 5 keywords that I have targeted.  For example for personalized iPhone cases I have decided on: iphone 4 case personalized, monogrammed iphone 4 case, personalized and monogrammed iphone case, preppy phone case, personalized iPhone case, monogrammed iPhone case For each of my products I was going to a product description (ie: trendy color block diagonal stripes) and a targeted keyword.  But I was going to rotate the keywords through so as to try to avoid the duplicate page title issue. Will that help? Thanks much, Shara

    | Confections
    0

  • Hi, I am working on a project with very few really important pages - its now about 20 pages and this number will not increase to more than 30 by the end of the year. Today the majority of these Pages is 2 clicks away from the Homepage for navigational reasons. Now I am wondering: 1. If I should set links from the Homepage directly to these Pages to pass more juice?
    2  If you would suggest so - how would you recommend me to do this in Terms of usability and SEO? thanks in advance for your help.

    | Naturalmente
    0

  • I'm analyzing my Hispanic site www.escolares.net, and I noticed that on-page optimization rank with an F pages using a tilde in target keywords. Does anybody know if  SeoMoz software can completely understand in their analysis special characters as tildes? Cristian Majluf

    | motorpod
    1

  • Dear all, We have a call for action on the bottom of all our 10K plus pages which has the words private jet charter in it. Here is what the sentence looks like: Call +1-877-727-2538 to hire private jet charter flights or get a private jet quote The "private jet charter" link goes to the homepage - the homepage has always ranked for the same keyword. Even though we have a separate page for private jet charter itself which may or may not be competing with homepage for the same keyword. The question is - does this help our efforts to rank higher for private jet charter or does it not. It used to be that the more links from all pages for specific keyword coming back to homepage was good - but now maybe algorithms may have changed and not sure.

    | Richard777
    0

  • Hi SeoZ 🙂 Quick question, is it a problem if the H2 Element comes after the H1 Element? Also does Google recoginise it if i make the h2 font bigger than the h1? For example: HTML: Awesome Headline bla bla bla Keyword1 Keyword 2 Css:
    h2 {font-size: 32px;}
    h1 {font-size: 28px;} Thank you, Alex

    | krseo
    0

  • Hi, We are running  a campaign for a website in SEOmoz. We get a dup content issue warning: http://www.oursite.com and http://www.oursite.com/ are being seen as 2 different urls. Only difference among 2 urls is the trailing slash at the end of the second url. Why is this happening? I was aware of www vs non www but never heard of an issue related to the slash. Thanks for your help!

    | gerardoH
    1

  • Hi there, I have recently joined a company to look after the e-marketing side of things, anyway the company I work for have been writing articles for a website that they own for over 2 years, probably about 200 or so unique articles on that website, however over the past year or so there has been no contribution to this site and was wondering if it would be worthwhile transferring these article over to our blog?, as this is where all the attention is in terms of marketing etc Kind Regards,

    | Paul78
    0

  • I'm trying to get on top of my on page stuff and I'm going through the SEO Moz on-page report cards and it says I'm scoring a fail on certain elements within the 'critical' and 'high importance' factors as my page title is '403 forbidden' but when I go on to my site, my sites CMS it's not '403 forbidden' it's the text I entered?

    | jamesj35mm
    0

  • If I use Apache Rewrite to remove my file extensions from my pages will Google view those pages as new? Do I have to also 301 redirect from the "page-name.htm" to "page-name"? I'd like to change my pages from html to php to make my life a little easier but I'm worried about losing link juice if I were to 301 on every page. Thanks -Brandon

    | TRICORSystems
    0

  • I have a site that I have built with dreamweaver (local service business not a lot of new content needing to be added) and I am curious how much of an advantage for me converting it to wordpresss would be.  I see that cs5 works with wordpress and that lynda.com has a tutorial on integrating the two.  I would like to integrate a blog into my site, but it is not totally critical that I do so.  I would just like to hear what some of you experienced users have to say about the advantages of wordpress vs dreamweaver from an SEO prospective.

    | ayetti
    0

  • We have redesigned a website. The old site used to have lots of urls, the new sites has far less. We have pointed all old urls to the new urls with 301 redirects. This happened a couple of weeks ago. But we are still getting many 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools. What's the reason for this? Thanks in advance.

    | gerardoH
    0

  • I've read in a few places now that if you absolutely have to use a key term several times in a piece of copy, then it is preferable to use li and ul tags, as google will not penalise excessive density of keywords found in these tags.  Does anyone know if there is any truth in this?

    | jdjamie
    0

  • Hi Guys,
    I'm thinking about images and SEO. What's the best way for naming and using images in HTML Code? For example: Image-Name: keyword-keyword2-keyword3.jpg or keywordkeyword2keyword3.jpg ?
    How many Keywords should I use max for a picture? And also do you use the alt tag as description of the image and the title tag or only the alt tag? If you use the title, what do you use it for? Maybe someone can copy a HTML-Code example for me 😉 Thank you 🙂
    Alex

    | krseo
    0

  • what is the point of having www. in my URL? does this help, hurt, or influence anything?

    | SEODinosaur
    0

  • A mixture of questions and discussion Question 1. can the following two pages be considered duplicate content http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/gardenbeet/product/deer-head-wall-art http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/1/1/219933-deer-head-wall-art-by-garden-beet.html both pages are indexed and both pages have different meta - aimed at different search combinations Discussion The search for 'deer head wall art  gardenbeet' is generated by my PR company - we have done loads of print advertising for this item yet the sheer mass and volume of noths.com stops my store http://www.gardenbeet.com/garden-wall-art/58-deer-head.html from obtaining the number one position. All is fair in the business world  I suppose BUT the original marketing machine for noths.com was claiming that they were assisting  the small business owner. I paid them over £600 to join and now they compete with me head on. Stupid me I suppose. Let this be a key learning for those toying with the idea of investing in their own SEO or a 3rd party selling platform. Ho hum

    | GardenBeet
    0

  • i have set up my local service site using my index page for my main city that I am targeting.  I have then created three more pages targeting three surrounding cities.  I am now link building using good anchor text to each of the appropriate pages.  I think I am doing right but i have read some stuff today that made me question my technique here is the site http://winecountrycarpet.com/ Thank you in advance for any advice I can get.

    | ayetti
    0

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