Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • A client of mine has provided an SEO report that states:- "The inclusion of comments by developers in the coe is common practice..... ....its is not positive to leave large blocks of code in the site as makes crawling difficult to crawl" Im thinking that this has no SEO import at all, any one come across this? Thanks z z1eEy

    | zabba
    0

  • Still trying to get a handle on all this...a lot to figure out!  My site is Drupal and a few weeks ago I had my developer install an SEO Module so I could add a meta description and keywords for my pages. I have done that for the majority of the landing pages and the product pages as well. Earlier I posted a question about the use of adding the meta description and keywords to each product.  The answers were mixed and pointed out the problem of the duplicate content which I am trying to figure out how to fix. BUT...when I went through my On Page Analysis grading for my campaigns one of the reasons my grades were low were because of the use of meta keywords tag.  That the search engines ignore them and competitors can use them against you. So now I am thoroughly confused.  I should optimize each product page with the meta description and keywords or i shouldn't? Keywords should show up in the title tag and the content....anywhere else? Help! Thanks much, Shara

    | Confections
    0

  • I would like to test my site, but its not launched yet and don;t want anybody to see it. But I can allow myself and other to view the site if I have there ip address. So does the seomoz crawler have a static one or range? James

    | BarefootJames
    0

  • We are planning on changing our domain next week. Everything has been covered including google change of domain procedure and redirects etc. I plan on dropping the www during this move as it is redundant and dilutes the keyword density of the domain. What do you guys think of this? Is it worth doing? Thanks, Gareth

    | SimpsonGareth
    0

  • Hi, We are going to be launching a US version of our UK E-commerce web store.  The US version will be a standalone site, separate URL/hosting etc. My question is that the US website will carry the same products as the UK site - will the product copy have to be written differently for the US website in order to avoid any SEO duplicate copy? Thanks

    | WalesDragon
    0

  • Here comes another one related to SEOmoz "On-Page Optimization" Tool. The tool says the following about one of our pages: Canonical URL Tag Usage Explanation: Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to
    use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future
    developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe
    the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic
    today. Recommendation: Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page. Let's say our page is http://www.example.com/brands/abc-brand and on its header we'll place the following tag: Is this correct? I thought the canonical tag was meant for duplicates of the original page, for example: http://www.example.com/brands/print/abc-brand href="http://www.example.com/brands/abc-brand**?SESSID=123** Thanks in advance.

    | gerardoH
    0

  • Hi everybody, I am thrown into a SEO project of a website  with a duplicate content problem  because of a version with and a version without 'www' . The strange thing is that the version with www. has got more than 10 times more Backlings but is not in the organic index. Here are my questions: 1. Should I go on using the "without www" version as the primary resource? 2. Which kind of redirect is best for passing most of the link juice? Thanks in advance, Sebastian

    | Naturalmente
    0

  • We ran SEOmoz's "On-Page Optimization" tool on a url which contains the character "_". According to the tool: "Characters which are less commonly used in URLs may cause problems with accessibility, interpretation and ranking in search engines. It is considered a best practice to stick to standard URL structures to avoid potential problems." "Rewrite the URL to contain only standard characters." Therefore we will rewrite the url, replacing "_" with "-". Will search engines consider the "-" url a different one? Do we need to 301 the old url to the new one? Thanks for your help!

    | gerardoH
    0

  • Hi Mozzers! If I have a website that has a separate office in each state that they wish to rank locally for eg: "service CityA" "service CityB" etc Would it be best to have a separate subdomain for each major city (unique content on each) with the office address specific to that city? Then there would be a separate Google places listing the subdomain as the website. Or should we just use subfolders? Would Google Places accept the subfolder as the web address? thanks!

    | Netboost
    1

  • I would like to ad a blog to a few different pages of my site, is this possible? I would prefer it to not be a stand alone blog, because I am pretty sure it would begin to outrank my landing pages in search results. I built my site using dreamweaver, but I have seen a reference somewhere to a utility for adding a word press blog to an existing site? This site seems to be doing what I had in mind? http://www.drynclean.com/

    | ayetti
    0

  • Yet another basic question....is it bad to try and optimize a page for numerous keywords that are all related?  My site is an eCommerce site.  So for and example: I am trying to optimize my homepage (www.shopconfections.com) for about 20 keywords that all directly describe my site. On product pages I am optimizing for about 15 keywords that all directly relate to my product. Many of my keywords are long tailed.  Can there be too many?  What are the consequences of that? Thanks!
    Shara

    | Confections
    0

  • Hi, We have a whole lot of articles on our site. In total 5232 actually. The web crawler tells me that in the articles we have a lot of duplicate content. Which is sort of nonsense, since each article is unique. Ah, some might have some common paragraphs because they are recurring news about a weekly competition. But, an example: http://www.betxpert.com/artikler/bookmakere/brandvarme-ailton-snupper-topscorerprisen AND http://www.betxpert.com/artikler/bookmakere/opdaterede-odds-pa-sportschef-situationen-pa-vestegnen These are "duplicate content", however the two article texts are not the same. The menu, and the widgets are all the same, but highly relevant to the article. So what should I do? How can i rid myself of these errors? -Rasmus

    | rasmusbang
    0

  • Hello, is there a difference between urls for targeting keyword "brazil tourist visa" fastbrazilvisas.com/tourist or fastbrazilvisas.com/brazil-tourist-visa ? ran the report In-Page Optimization it tells "no keyword usage in url". is there an idea behind that? thanks

    | Kotkov
    0

  • Many sites display a site map on the bottom of each page with a limited depth of around two deep. Has anyone done a A/B test on this, for selected search terms? Is this good practice?

    | russelljames
    0

  • As the title says: Do anchor links pointing to bottom/top of page count as link? This page: http://www.betxpert.com/forum/bookmakere/vis/ladbrokes-kommentar I has over 300 links, but I don't see that many links. Is it the "#15" and the top/bottom of page anchors that count? Is this harmful in terms of link juice? -Rasmus

    | rasmusbang
    0

  • Hi! I am relatively new to the world of SEO . . . let's say I'm still testing the waters. My role is at the company I work for is Local Search Specialist. I'm claiming/verifying/publishing listings for my employer's clients in attributing search directories. Yada yada yada. You guys are pros. Anyway, I have become apprehensive when listing a client's email in directories besides Google Places. I know that content matching between the client's website, Places, and attributing directories is a must; but spam is the worst. I'm trying to avoid spammers and sketchy directories contact the clients with sales pitches via email as much as possible. Should I create an additional email specifically for these directory listings and keep tabs to see if real people are using it as a means of contact? Not list the email at all? What should I do?!?!?!?!?!?!? Any insight/words of wisdom is appreciated!

    | CakeWebsites
    0

  • I am having an issue with duplicate content that I can't seem to figure out.  I got rid of the www.mydomain.com by modifying the htaccess file but I can't figure out how to fix theproblem of  mydomain.com/ and mydomain.com

    | ayetti
    0

  • Hi everybody, I wonder how to find and quickly correct 404 errors in my crawl reports : SeoMoz says me "http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead" is 404, but I can't figure out a source page where a link to that url appears. I tried a google link:http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead request, with no more luck. I imagine the trick is trivial, but I need it 🙂 Moreover, why do not show a list of pages referring to this 404 page on reports ? Thanks, Loïc

    | mandinga
    0

  • In general from what I have experienced a location specific extension such as .co.uk geo-targeted to the same location gives the best results when ranking BUT when I look at results from the US, page after page shows results of .com, surely if my above statement is true then a .us domain extension should rank better then a .com.

    | activitysuper
    0

  • I am in the process of drawing up content templates to guide my company's marketing team in creating SEO optimized content as we move over our retail website to a new platform. On each product page, we will have multiple tabs that are crawl-able, each one containing different chunks of information on the products. Within each tab, I was thinking of breaking up the content and adding SEO value by using headers (h2 or h3) that have a keyword included. So, for example: "How The PRODUCT NAME Works" and "User Manuals for your PRODUCT NAME." Between the multiple tabs, in headers alone, the main keyword for the product (which will usually be the product name) will be on the page 7 times. Between this and the keywords that are part of the actual content (ex: product description), is this too many keyword instances? I know headers are often skimmed or skipped when used to simply break up the content, so I don't think they will impact user experience too much. However, I would love some feedback on if you agree with that and if you think I should cut down on the number of keywords or if I am headed in the right direction. Thanks!

    | Marketing.SCG
    0

  • I have over 200 duplicate page titles on a site that I am working on.  Does putting a date at the end of some of them make it a unique enough title?

    | SavingSense
    0

  • Hi, I've been looking at some of the Google help centre pages for Geo-targeting and it says flat out if you use for example .co.uk and Geo-target in webmaster tools US then you will not rank as well as using .net, .com and a few others they list. So if you got a UK online business and want to expand into another country then staright away your in a negative situation if you want to rank in the SE for that location.

    | activitysuper
    0

  • What helps SEO.  I need a top ten list.

    | thine123
    0

  • Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
    Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
    Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
    The pages will have all of this info in it's content
    BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!

    | Ferguson
    0

  • Hi guys , my website www.starpluservices.com  on google first page for the past 2 years and we were page rank 4, 2 months ago we changed all page titles and Keewords after that the page rank droped to 1 and we are not anymore in page 1 in google, we have done all this changes to target another keyword Office Cleaning London, now after 2 months I had 3 quotes for SEO , and 2 SEO companies told me that I need a new website because my one was done with tables and the other company told me that if I still on first page with some keywords andon the 2 page with cleaning companies to dont make a new website just update my one!! Could anyone let me know what should I do? Regards Sergio

    | starplus
    0

  • I've been signed up for a week now and still nothing in there? Do I need to set something up? thanks in advance! Fraser

    | vipgambler
    0

  • We have search results pages on our site. They share the same page title, there is no real differentiator between the result pages, other than page 1, page 2 etc. How do we de-dup the titles? just add page 1/2/3 etc to the end of them?

    | lilibooz
    0

  • I would like to design a site map for my visitors so they can have a quick view on the whole content of the website. 2 questions : 1 - is this kind of site map can help in terms of SEO ? 2 - if so, what are the best practices to design it ? Thanks in advance.

    | betadvisor
    0

  • We are the single reseller in our country of a niche software, which has a quite general but non-competitive name. The name is already taken buy others in our country TLD, and in 1st rank. They are not related to our industry/business. Let's say our software is named blah, which could be the best country specific strategy we could have? Register a new country TLD domain with the blah in it? Something like blah-country.tdl. bl-ah.tdl? blah-software? Best Regards

    | wppseo
    0

  • Hello, SEOers~ Today I have a question about URL extensions. Which one is more search engine friendly between URL with extensions and without extensions? e.g. URL with extension : www.example.com/tv/lcd.jsp URL without extension : www.example.com/tv/lcd I heard that URL without extensions is in trend considering user experience. User experience is also important but I would like to know from SEO perspective. Please people~ Help me out with this~! Thanks.

    | Artience
    0

  • Hello SEOMoz, After reading a bunch of your Site Structure articles, I've decided to make ours more flat. There are numerous pages on our site which are linked to directly from our homepage, wasting mysterious amounts of Link Juice every day. I want to remove most of these links so that the Fewer, and now more heavily weighted, Homepage Links will be more powerful... but I am worried that the pages which I am knocking down to the 3rd tier level already have high rank and are distributing this Juice to other pages. The problem is that 3 of these 9 pages are great for assisting our sales team, so I cannot take those 2 links off of the homepage...so I will be forced to Nofollow them instead. I am worried this is cutting down the number of pages on the site, also cutting out content which was previously indexed. Is this whole thing a good idea at all? And should I just leave those 2 pages alone because I can't remove the link? I'm thinking maybe I should rel=canonical it back to the homepage? I am ultimately trying to rank the homepage for the keyword "POS Software" and this is my on-site strategy for it. Maybe adding a link from those 2 pages that say "POS Software" back to the homepage is the best bet in this scenario? I am trying to learn the absolute best thing to do instead of guessing. Thanks! Derek

    | DerekM88
    0

  • my client has a page on his site: www.revisitors.com/REF/TEST the page is for a free traffic offer...i have this page currently ranking 25th or so for "free traffic" - a great keyword to rank for to promote this offer with..... i want the url to be www.revisitors.com/free-traffic.html  and then change the title tags to free traffic | free targeted traffic or something along those lines....i have hardly put in any linkbuilding work at all to get to 25 - it was a surprise but now that we are there i want to tighten things up and optimize as well as possible.... how do i do this without losing previously built linkjuice and without having a duplicate content issue for having both pages exist with a 301 redirect.... if i am wrong about something please dont hesitate to set me straight...i am only masquerading as an seo expert these days anyway.....thanks.

    | Ezpro9
    0

  • Hello, I have an ecommerce site that sells personalized gifts.  I am wondering about the value of purchasing domain names for specific products and have them point to a landing page.  For example: the domain name personalizediphonecases.com would point to my page of that product.  Is that a good idea? Thank you!

    | Confections
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I have a client that wants to change the way the meta description for some of his pages is being displayed. I've tried using the NOOPD and NOYDIR tags and its not worked. This isn't the client but perform this search in Google.ie - "accommodation newry daft" you get this result - http://www.google.ie/#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=accommodation+newry+daft&pbx=1&oq=accommodation+newry+daft&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=11197l11712l2l12016l5l5l0l0l0l0l186l851l0.5l5l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=f5c640577bb5a285&biw=1600&bih=775 See how Daft.com (2nd results down) has the text "10+ items" in the description- my client has this as well as do many other competitors but its not present in the meta description tag. Anyone know how to get rid of this and get the good old meta descrition in the SERPs? Thanks BUsh

    | Bush_JSM
    0

  • I'm using wordpress and the all in one seo pack with the canonical option checked. As I understand it the rel="canonical" tag should be added to pages that are duplicate or similar to tell google that another page (one without the rel="canonical" tag) is the correct one as the url in the tag is pointing google towards it. Why then does the all in one seo pack add rel="canonical" to every page on my site including the home page? Isn't that confusing for google?

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Hello all, I am still rather new to SEO and learning a lot every day. I do have a question. On our product search result pages (example http://shop.ferguson.com/search/bathroom-lighting)
    It is currently set up so the image, text, price etc of a product is linking to that product page. Our question is, if we were to link the image and the product name - will this be seen as two links to the same page? Is this a bad thing having multiple links to the same page? I searched around to see how other ecommerce sites have similar pages setup and it seems they link the image and also the product name, and the description is not click-able, which allows a user to "Highlight" the text (this is not possible on ours) Which would be to correct approach for SEO as well as User Interface, the way we have it set up, or by going with the method of the question I asked, Thank you for any information on this! Nick

    | Ferguson
    0

  • firstly, apologies if this is a daft question, I am very new to this! We are about to launch a new website (very exciting) and our CEO is mad about incorprating a "tag cloud" because it looks good! Our web designer therefore has to convert all our web pages to "posts" in order for the tag cloud to pick up the "tagged" words associated with the specific pages (soon to be posts). Question: With regards to SEO, will the change from "web page" to "post" have any positive or negative effects? Thanks in advance

    | Joelfarrow
    0

  • I am searching from india. what is the way so that i can search as if i am searching from US ? OR UK ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • Apologies in advance if this has already been answered (it probably has) - I'm just not seeing it. Is there a guide on here for how to fix the issues brought up by the crawler - specifically, things like duplicate page content, or duplicate page titles?  A lot of these seem to have been created by wordpress.org combos that I didn't anticipate - i.e., category pages, author pages, etc.  The crawler brings up the problems, but I don' t know where to start to go about fixing them. Also, any guide on best SEO practices or fixing optimization problems, specifically for wordpress.org blogs, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | prospects
    1

  • Alright, I have a client that has 1 website and 14 locations. We want to create place pages for each of their locations but my question is which URL should I put in the place page and why? I can put in the root domain into each place page, or should I put in the URL that lands on the actual location on the root. example: domain.com/location1 Thanks!

    | tcseopro
    0

  • Hello mozers, I was wondering if it was too soon to use HTML5 and CSS3 to developp my customers' website? Which navigators and which version of them support HTML5 perfectly? Thank you for yours answers, Jonathan

    | JonathanLeplang
    0

  • Hi, I am using a Header template designed in jQuery, its having a small script. i woud like to know is there any bad impact on the website if I use Jquery. Thanks.

    | younus
    0

  • My site has over 80 canonical warnings. The report states the url is for example http://www.musicliveuk.com and the 'tag value' column says http://www.musicliveuk.com/ Is that a good thing? I'm new to seo and am running my site on wordpress with all in one seo pack. Does this mean the seo pack has automatically added canonical tags to my pages? If so why is it showing as an error? I am also getting lots of 301 permanent redirects and I haven't set any up manually. I'm getting them for every page on my site from the normal url to a url with a slash at the end.

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Hi there, I have a number of clients who have their telephone numbers on their sites (understandably of course!) and SEOmoz is classing them as links and therefore a 404 in the crawl software. The protocol is added in the code so if viewing the page on a mobile you can call the client. Should I be doing anything else? Webmaster does not pick these up as 404s so I am wondering if this is an SEOmoz bug or that I should be adding a no-follow? Thanks jT

    | Switch_Digital
    0

  • This question was asked before but I didn't see a clear answer to it.  If I've got a site that has as it's home page: http://www.mysite.com/, and there are many references within the site back to the home page that point to /index.php, should I include a canonical tag in the index.php page like this: to avoid a duplicate content issue, and to have all juice from both links combined into one?

    | wcksmith
    0

  • Does Too Many On-Page Links on a Page Really Matters? Especially if they are pointing to internal page?

    | AppleCapitalGroup
    1

  • Does anyone know of a good SEO Site planning tool? I see that SEOBOOK has something that looked interesting but they want $300/mo! Thanks in advance! Andy

    | MaxOtto
    0

  • For about a week, unable to access onsite explorer, anyone else having same issue?

    | PureStorageMarketing
    0

  • My crawl report for www.poker-coaching.net show a number of duplicate content warnings.
    First, it shows a warning for www.poker-coaching.net and www.poker-coaching.net/, although there is a redirect in place for this, and for non-www. to www. as well. So IMO there is no duplicate content here, so why the error message?
    Next, it shows a duplicate content warning for a number of pages, but when I click the number on the right, there is no info an which pages contain the duplicate content. Will this info be there later when the crawl is completed? My problem is that this is my oldest site, but since over one year it seems to have a penalty which I can't get rid of - I cannot identify the reason for the penalty. I already rebuilt the site from scratch once, but I still do not see results. If a membership at SEOMOZ would be able to help me bring this site back on track, that would already be worth one years membership fees, so I'd really be very thankful if someone could take a look at the site and give me an idea about what needs to be done here.

    | CatfishTPA
    0

  • Hi, does Mircofromats like schema.org improve my ranking? If so,  just because my products are listed in google/products? Regard

    | censeo
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.