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Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • I ran an independant SEO test that recommended I do the following: Missing Header: Cache-Control header missing, should be presentMissing Header: Content-Length header missing, should be presentMissing Header: Content-Encoding - why don't you try using gzip or deflate?Missing Header: Expires header missing, should be presentMissing Header: Last-Modified header missing, should be presentIs any of this necessary?

    | BradBorst
    0

  • www.massduitrialalwyers.com has a TON of duplicate content based on the way joomla 1.5 uses articles. Do you have a tried and true method to eliminate (automated would be preferred) the issues>? if not, might you suggest a plug in that takes care of the rel canonical?
    Cheers

    | Gaveltek-173238
    0

  • I'm working with a client that has an ecommerce site. He has e physical addresses where they work, however, neither would want customers to go to their office.  Is it inappropriate to create a Google Places listing in this situation? I'm working with another client who runs a blog for his PR agency.  Is it OK to create a Google Places listing for a blog? He would welcome people to visit his agency.

    | EricVallee34
    0

  • Hi Are there any SEO guidelines for "one page websites". I'm looking into the 'benefit' it might have in combination with exact match URLs. Many thanks in advance.

    | Partouter
    2

  • Hi there! We have been doing a great effort during the last year but our main competitor is still above us in search rankings. Basically, the main differente remains now in the number of internal links, specially in our homepage. We have more than 200 and they only have around 100, so I think we are wasting too much link power among some irrelevant pages. What could be the effect of this?

    | bodaclick
    0

  • I'm in the process of adding some new features to our site and have a question about our URLs. Most of our URLs consist of either sitename.com/contentname or sitename.com/content/contentid I'm in the process of building a directory to those pages. The directory has a number of filters which will ultimately point to the destination page. sitename.com/filter1/filter2/contentid or sitename.com/filter1/filter2/contentname The destinations will have references. From an SEO perspective, I would think I want the filter1/filter2 version of the link indexed since this will add keywords that someone might search for. However, since the filters are dynamic, if someone just searches for contentname I would want to have sitename.com/contentname returned in the search results. Do I get any SEO benefit out of building those filter links as described if they are not the canonical links?

    | JoeCotellese81
    0

  • Hi, We are in the process of improving our CMS upstream to resolve our duplicate content issues.  We were hit pretty hard by the Panda update.  One of the steps we have taken is implementation of the canonical link tag across all domains in our site. You see, we are a news release service with muliple channels and websites to represent each.  The problem is that a client will submit a release and in many cases the news item is relevant to multiple channels I.E. multiple websites under the same IP range. Site Examples:
    www.hotelnewsresource.com www.restaurantnewsresource.com
    www.travelindustrywire.com From a user perspective, it makes sense that they should be able to access the article from the site they are browsing without being redirected to the site we feel carries the most relevance.  We hope the canconical tag will resolve this issue for us. I have also read about the syndication tag and was looking for feedback or recommendations if we should implement that also, but it may be overkill as the two tags objectives seem to be similar. I guess my first question is if the syndication tag is only used by Google News. Secondly, and a little off topic is that we also offer an API and like many other sites, I have read, our content partners are now doing better in primary and long tail rankings even thought we are the original source.  My assumption is that we should modify the API to force using both caconical and syndication tags as well. Lastly, I´m curious if anyone has tested the original source tag and if we should implement that as well. Thanks everyone. Jarrett

    | jarrett.mackay
    0

  • Ahoy! I'm working with a publishing site that has a series of primary topics for free content using a fairly wide keyword, under which we have cluster of associated keywords used in posts. For usability/simplicity some of the neccesarily broader topics have keywords within their cluster that aren't that closely related. We've had success with keeping related keywords and content grouped like this, but I'm not sure how much value to put on this. The issue is that we're writing a new free report (download) that is about "Y". "Y" is in topic category "X". X and Y are loosely related (it made more sense to put Y in X than anywhere else, and adwords/wonderwheel back this up), but there is an obvious disconnect where not everyone searching for X is interested in Y and vice versa. Since the new free report is predominantly about Y, should I go to the effort of using X keyword as a primary keyword since we've got a substantial amount of content in X topic where the two are related and the report will be housed? Or should I just focus on optomizing for Y and not care that it's in the X topic. My feeling is that we'd be better off just focusing on Y, and our general X topic page can continue to be the page focused on ranking for X, even if we normally aim to get an associated free report ranking for other topics' primary keyword. (Blast, that's a rather long and confusing explanation.)

    | Alex.Conde
    0

  • I have seen many sites that include the "|" in page titles and was wondering if there is some SEO value in the practice. Example: Product Name | Company Name Instead of: Product Name by Company Name I have not seen any value in it myself other than a good way to avoid stop words.  I wanted to make sure.  Currently I have the "by" included in the page titles.

    | JedHenning
    0

  • If a site has a bunch of 404’s that are basically old URL’s that no longer work and point to pages or documents that don’t exist anymore -  Can someone clarify if it’s a problem when fixing a bunch of these 404’s to point them all to the home page? so if there is not really anywhere else that is applicable for the old broken URL, is it really a problem to 301 old pages to the site home page? I have read some different things on this recently on some different sites, so I just wondered what the latest thinking on this was….thanks...

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • Should I wait until my press release has been syndicated to post to my press page.  If I post it to my press page first, will it cause a duplication problem?

    | BradBorst
    0

  • I'm creating a website for my new web design company in Vancouver. I'm looking to target such keywords as "Web Design Vancouver", etc. I have another company with a hyphenated domain name which is terrible when I'm on the phone and my client asks me for my domain (hard to say, always spelling it out). Also I wanted to have a good snappy name for my new business so I found a 6 letter .com and matching .ca for my company. My question is: is it best to use a short domain name or is it better have my keywords in the domain name? eg. xyz.com vs xyzvancouverwebdesign.com Thanks

    | VebianWebandMobileDevelopment
    0

  • Say I have a site which sells widgets. Site structure is as follows: Home Widgets Blue Widgets Green Widgets Red Widgets About Us Contact Us I know the money term is "blue widgets".  Not "widgets" (as this is too generic, and blue/red/green widgets are only a subset of the whole 'widget' universe). How do I prevent the site from cannibalising this keyword?  Do I only try to make www.mywidgetsshop.com/blue-widgets the main page for blue widgets or do I try and make the home page rank for this phrase?

    | timhatton
    0

  • Yep as mentioned, I had some pages hit the top ten pretty quickly after ensuring they were A-grade for pretty uncompetitive keywords however, today, all bar 2 have just vanished from the top 50! All were ranking in Google.co.uk and I know we were predicting the Panda update to hit soon but WOW! My client is understandably a little upset, what on earch do I tell him and what should I do about it? Cheers! jT

    | Switch_Digital
    0

  • Hello there! Most of the websites have links to low-value pages in their main navigation (header or footer)... thus, available through every other pages. I especially think about "Conditions of Use" or "Privacy Notice" pages, which have no value for SEO. What I would like, is to prevent link juice to flow into those pages... but still keep the links for visitors. What is the best way to achieve this? Put a rel="nofollow" attribute on those links? Put a "robots" meta tag containing "noindex,nofollow" on those pages? Put a "Disallow" for those pages in a "robots.txt" file? Use efficient Javascript links? (that crawlers won't be able to follow)

    | jonigunneweg
    0

  • What are the characteristics of a Google penalty - i.e. how do you know by looking at the rankings for your keywords? Do all keywords that you had previously ranked for fall from say top 5 to nowhere? Do you disappear from SERP for a branded keyword? Or something else?? Basically how do you know if you have been penalized? Thanks

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • So for the past 3 or 4 weeks or so I’ve been making some on page tweaks for keywords that we should rank for, implementing all the keyword recommendations, and  getting “A’s” in the report card for page optimization in the Pro tool, and also doing things like fixing a bunch of 404’s that I found ….so I thought I was doing a bang up job… My rankings for some keywords were generally trending (slowly) in the right direction, but this morning I see that 2 important keywords that I had been working hard on, and which had trended from around 40 to in the high 20’s in rankings, has now dropped out of top 50 altogether…. I’m a little dispirited, and now wondering if I did something wrong?  Any thoughts or recommendations?   Is it normal just to drop out of top 50 when you were in the 20's or 30's? Thanks!

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • Think of our company as a real estate company, having hundreds of homes, each home has an optimized page and comes with a WP light box and 15 specific photos of a property. The code of the property would be unique, and so is the title tag (key phrase) for each property unique. Each property has a picture of the front, the living room, the master bedroom, a bathroom, the pool, the kitchen... Say the home code is HC007FE and the keyword is "greatest home example ever". How would you suggest naming the pictures and additionally the alt txt for these pictures? Thanks for your help!

    | Discountvc
    0

  • I a looking through the on-page SEO reports in SEOmoz for one of my sites.  It suggests that I change the url of a particular page to match the desired search term I want to rank for.  In this case it is a site for a local business and the url is example.com/testimonials. when it probabaly should have instead been example.com/city-business-reviews. I have just a couple links to this page and I'm stuck towards the bottom of page 1 in the SERPs currently.  Questions... 1. Should I change the url to include the exact keyword term I want the page to rank for? 2. If yes, what is the best method to ensure that any existing link juice to the current url is retained?  Would I change the url, then create a new page with the old url and apply a 301 redirect to point it to the new page? Thanks!

    | fastestmanalive
    0

  • Hi everyone, I would like to know your opinion on this. Do you feel like optimizing, especially pointing links to a subfolder, e.g. www.domain.com/en/ (english language), should be the same as doing that for the main URL (another language)? That said, do you think all the domain will benefit from anchors to subfolders? Thanks a lot!

    | SEOpt
    0

  • I'm seeing a lot of companies in my industry loading the homepage with text by using a scrolling text area.  Do the search engines see this as valid text or is it a cloaking method that carries less weight?

    | LabadieAuto
    0

  • I have about 500 products with multiple urls for the same product, but different versions. I sell wine and have a different page for each vintage. I've decided that is not the best way to go, and want to point the older vintage pages to the latest version page, and make that the only page for the  product as time goes on. Do I have to put a link in the text from each older page to the newer, or can I use a 301 to redirect them to the new page? I don't want google to think I'm pulling something funny.

    | JeanYates
    0

  • Our home page (and 1400 of our other pages) have well over 100 links, going beyond the recommend amount.  Our competitors have less on page links (to other pages on their site) and way more link popularity so we are trying to figure out the best solution for this without hurting our sites conversions and usbaility.

    | iAnalyst.com
    0

  • What do you think is the best solution for preventing duplicate content issues on printable versions of product pages?  The printable versions are identical in content. Disallow in Robots.txt? Meta Robots No Index, Follow? Meta Robots No Index No Follow? Rel Canonical?

    | BlinkWeb
    1

  • Hello, I am sure this newbie question has been sent millions of times, but I couldn't find it with the new Q&A forum search... So, how many characters should I use in my description meta tag ? Thanks for sharing Loïc

    | mandinga
    0

  • Anyone  know if its important that the target keyword is used AT THE START of the meta description, or is it enough that it is anywhere in the description...? I have a few big ones that are at the end of the description and I was wondering if I should move them up to the front... Thanks!

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • Hi I am in the process of writing meta titles and meta descriptions for a clients product portfolio.  I have the complete list exported from the cms system in to excel. I know I can add some clever logic to build the meta information but for this purpose I want to do this manually.  Does anyone have a editor online or an excel sheet that shows you the charactor limits when writing the titles and descriptions. This would be handy if someone has, otherwise it's a case of having to write the excel sheet to do this, not that hard to do but i thought i'd ask the question.

    | seohive-222720
    0

  • Has anyone tested social media buttons, to see which types, styles, and placements get the most clicks?  Should they go at the top of an article, or are they OK at the bottom?  Should the icons definitely have labels?  Display # of tweets and Likes?  How big should they be? My preference is for discrete buttons with a smallish, plain icon and a label.  I don't display tweets or Likes, unless it's a healthy number.  And I still think a "share by email" icon is important.  I put them at the bottom of the article, to keep the home page uncluttered and lead the eye into reading the article.  I'm also concerned about leaking rank from the homepage, especially for a site that's still establishing itself.  But if moving buttons to the top gets more shares, that's probably better. Is there a Wordpress plugin that you really like?  (I haven't found one yet - I'm still hardcoding my social media buttons.) Opinions are great, but test results are better!  Can anyone share?

    | mattotoole
    1

  • We purchased the existing domain www.LancasterPA.com two years ago to promote local businesses.  While individual pages within the site are ranking well, we can't get the home page to rank at all in Google.  Would there be anything in the history of the domain that could be standing in the way?  Or, what else could we check? Our other regional websites are ranking really well.  Thanks.

    | GordyH
    0

  • Hello everybody, first of all please excuse my bad english. I'm from Germany - I try my best. 😉 The case: I have a Wordpress SEO project which rankings very well. A this moment I have all "archive sites" like "archive", "category" und "tags" indexed. I use the more-Tag for every archive/category/tag site -  so duplicate content ist not really a problem, but in view of the Panda Update, which surely arrives in Germany soon, I wonder if all this Tag/Archive/Category Sites in the index maybe seen as low quality und can hurt the ranking of my whole site. Low quality because: With using the more-tag the site are just a list of internal links with content snippets. I have 500 articles und 700 Tag Site (all in the index). So my fear is when google (with Panda Update) looks at my site und sees all this (maybe) low quality tag-sites in the index I get penalised because there is not a good proportion between my normal (good quality) Articles und the archive/tag sites. I hope you guys can understand my thoughts. Do I have a legitimate fear that the mass of tag-site in the index could be problem? Are there any data from the USA, how blogs mit Tag-Site in the Index rank after the Panda Update or if sites which contains of internal Links mit content snippets - like these tag site - are low quality in Google eyes? Or I'm worring to much? Thank you very much! Oliver

    | channelplus
    0

  • I signed up to the 30 day trial last Saturday, however, as of yet, the crawl diagnostics page still says 'First crawl in progress'. Is this normal? Many thanks.

    | danzspas
    0

  • I've heard it said that Google may choose to stop following links after the first 100 on a page. The landing/category pages for my site's product catalog have earned quite a respectable PR and positioning in search results, and I'm currently paginating their product listings (about 200 products in a category) so that only a couple dozen products are shown on the first page, with links to "next page" and "previous page" being accomplished via query string (i.e. "?page=3"). An alternative option I have is to link to 100% of the contained products within the category's landing page (which would increase my on-page link count to ~300) and use CSS/Javascript to allow the user to simulate browsing between pages on the client side. My goal is to see as many of my product pages indexed as possible. Is this done better using my current scheme (where Googlebot would have to navigate to, say, Landing Page -> Page 6 -> Deeply Buried Product Page) or in the alternative method above, where all the links are in a single page? Since my landing pages are currently treated pretty well by search engines, would that "trust" cause them to follow more links than might normally be done? Thank you!

    | cadenzajon
    0

  • Google webmaster tools site performance is reading out at 2.8 and still raising (Going further into the slow pale area) this was in the green fast area for a while until now. Is this something to be worried about?

    | BobAnderson
    0

  • Hi There. I have a client in the real estate law services business. Which is better for long term search traffic? 1. A single domain ie. smith and smith law.com with pages focussing on each neighbourhood they operate in ie. .com/real estate law manhattan.php, .com/real estate law brooklyn.php etc or 2. multiple domains each focusing on one neighbourhood the business operates in ie: real estate law manhattan.com, real estate law brooklyn.com etc Thanks for the help, Josh

    | dreadmichael
    0

  • If I use the same image all over my site, do I need to change the file name to avoid duplicate? Different alt text will be use on those images

    | BigBlaze205
    0

  • Hi My client has a series of websies, one main website and several mini websites, articles are created and published daily and weekly, one will go on a the main website and the others on one, two, or three of the mini sites. To combat duplication, i only ever allow one article to be indexed (apply noindex to articles that i don't wanted indexed by google, so, if 3 sites have same article, 2 sites will have noindex tag added to head). I am not completely sure if this is ok, and whether there are any negative affects, apart from the articles tagged as noindex not being indexed. Are there any obvious issues? I am aware of the canonical link rel tag, and know that this can be used on the same domain, but can it be used cross domain, in place of the noindex tag? If so, is it exactly the same in structure as the 'same domain' canonical link rel tag? Thanks Matt

    | mattys
    0

  • I read/was told that it was a good idea to order your HTML to show the most important content first. So, on many sites I had put my global navigation div, for instance, below my main content div. Does this still apply? And does wise use of HTML 5 mean this is no longer necessary (eg use of "nav" section tag to indicate this section is about navigation). In the same vein, how does Google know that my sidebar nav is my sidebar nav (which your site seems to say is probably given less weight than top nav), and how does it know my topnav is my top nav? Maybe a daft question, but when someone asked me yesterday I realised I didn't know! (Phew - at last I have asked a short question!).

    | PeterMurray
    0

  • The on page optimization tool recommends a minimum word count of 50. Given the panda update, what word count would you recommend? Would that count vary if a photo appeared on the page, too?

    | thappe
    0

  • We're unhappy with the meta descriptions google is picking up for our links in SERPs so have started using AJAX to stream in the content google was previously picking up for meta descriptions. This worked and it doesn't seem to have impacted traffic coming to our site, however since the day of that change our bounce rates have gone up significantly, even for pages that we did not push this change to. Is it possible that doing this caused Google to treat our site differently site wide? Is there anything we should be cautious of when doing this? I know the bounce rates could be impacted by users being better prepared by the google meta descriptions, however it doesn't explain what's happening to parts of our site that we didn't do anything to. -Billy

    | RealSelf
    0

  • Could someone please tell how Google treats the use of anchor text from a single page when using different keywords that all point to the same URL. So for instance I am doing a blog post and use the following anchor text which all point to the same URL: Cool Widget >> www.domain.com/widget Awesome Widget >> www.domain.com/widget Mighty Widget >> www.domain.com/widget I have read that Google will only take noticeof the first one? Thanks

    | blagger
    0

  • Hi, there, does anyone can help to solve 'duplicate page title, duplicate page content' problem? it is a eCommerce site, each categories has hundreds of products, so there are more than 10 pages, but the report crawl the errors, i totally have no idea, can anyone help? Thanks a lot! Anna

    | anna-294451
    0

  • A client of mine wants to streamline the look of his web pages, taking some of the visible body copy and putting it into boxes that pop up when you hover the mouse over an icon. My understanding is that search engines will index this pop-up text. However, do they penalize pages that have text in pop-up boxes out of concern that those pages are spammy? In this case, the text and the page are perfectly legitimate e-commerce pages. Thanks for any insights you can offer.

    | jimmartin_zoho.com
    0

  • hi, I have a client who has an e-commerce business. My client does not want to fill the pages with too much content and has set up a www1 version with the same domain-name as the www. The plan is to create a lot of content and push www1 in ranking and then sending users (via links) to the www for ordering. Although there will be no duplicate content published on www and www1 this seems like an odd strategy, especially since the www already has a good page rank, and I'm not sure about how engines view a www.domain.com and www1domain.com situation even with unique content in each. Any thoughts?

    | vibelingo
    0

  • Assume a brand new blog being designed and all other things equal. What are the pros & cons between using the url structure /blog/content-title vs. /category/content-title? Note:
    Both scenarios would be using categorical archiving.

    | JasonJackson
    0

  • I've read that the Bots only count the first link on a page.  My navigation has 2 links to my homepage - 1 from the logo keyword.png alt txt=keyword & 1 text link 'keyword.'  Now in my content does it have any seo value to link relevant pieces of text back to the homepage? Thanks Jason Jackson

    | JasonJackson
    0

  • Hi, my new site http://www.ie-mac.com/ just dropped 33 places from place 7 to place 40 on goolge.com , for the two word combo: ie mac Did I screw up? How? Background Info: 1 Two weeks ago I moved my whole site from my old domain http://ie4mac.com/ to http://www.ie-mac.com/ with the goal of obtaining a good ranking for the keyword combo: ie mac. Apparantly tis worked- The site showed up on place 7. 2. I changed the design of the site and put the video on the front page. Good so far, still place 7, but: The text that google was showing was half the ALT-Tag of the Video first-slide image and the other half was our trademark disclaimer. 3. I changed the ALT tag and the disclaimer to give users a more inviting text on google. THis worked, google now shows the text as intended, but: For the desired combo: ie mac the site dropped to palce 40!! My best guesses at this point: 1. I'm using wordpress as a CMS and the all-in-one-seo-pack plugin to set custom titles etc., and the google XML sitemap plugin to buid an XML sitemap and notify google. During the couple of days, I made a lot of chnages to the site. Could be that the plugin pinged google a lot of times. Could this be part of the problem? 2. The site is hosted at http://www.ixwebhosting.com/ , because they give users dedicated IPs and a good price. However, the loadlevel on the server I'm on is always very high (10 - 20). I'm using a CDN for images and a caching plugin so the site loads in less than 2 seconds according to http://tools.pingdom.com/ . Unless the cache is empty, then it's 9 seconds. This is not great, but it's also no new, so: What could have caused the sudden drop from 7 to 40?? Thank you and kind regards

    | ie4mac
    0

  • According to google 'On average, pages in your site take 4.6 seconds to load (updated on Apr 3, 2011). This is slower than 71% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.' My website: http://ablemagazine.co.uk I've installed Cache plugins, Minify plugins, reduce the amount of posts on my main page. But my website is still taking too long to load and I'm afraid I'm being penalised for it. Any tips?

    | craven22
    0

  • The majority of our images are not optimized for search. Specifically, the alt text and image title are blank. The image filenames are also not using descriptive keywords. We publish content quite frequently and this issue will be addressed within the production work flow for all images moving forward. As for the images currently existing on our site, what are some ways to scale the optimization for thousands of images that need to be optimized for alt text, title and filename? We're thinking about mechanical turk, but the problem is that we are a business magazine and have a lot of head shots of entrepreneurs that the mainstream might not recognize. Any insights would be appreciated.

    | inc.com
    0

  • we do eCommerce on BigCommerce platform, I'm using the top navigation menu for: home about policy faq and other standard informations all my products are list in the left navigation Categories menu. What is your advise about this? Should we have the products at the top? The top menu are web pages, not categories. Also, if you have a better ideas about our site archetecture, you are welcome to comment. domaine is: http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ Thank you, BigBlaze

    | BigBlaze205
    0

  • Hello All, A client's site was recently redesigned and since the redesign the ® is not displaying as such in the search engines when created using Option+R on a Mac. If it is created using ® it works fine. I suspect it has something to do with the programming or the CMS. Other sites on this CMS seem to not have this problem from what I have seen so far. http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cliff+stevenson#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=cliff stevenson calgary realtor&aq=0&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=23c2bd992ac36d9d&pf=p&pdl=3000 As more time goes on, title tags and descriptions that are months or years old are also digressing to the 0. I have cued up a few tests and once crawled will have narrowed down whether it is a CMS issue or not. Won't have completely done so, but much closer. The CMS says they have made no changes that would have caused this. The programming gang on my end says they did nothing different on this site then on others so it can't be on us. The classic 'no way it can by us, it  has to be them' from all angles. I am stuck in the middle trying to find the solution. Has anyone else ever come across this problem? Thoughts?

    | kyegrace
    0

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