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Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • SEO moz is showing me that the robot.txt is blocking content on my site

    | CGR-Creative
    0

  • We have a page that is optimized for the keyword "job scheduling". A search on the keyword "job scheduling" results in this page not ranking at all, while our home page (uc4.com) ranks third. Could you provide some ideas/suggestions as to why this would be the case and how to make our job scheduling page rank higher? Thanks, claudia

    | claudmar
    0

  • Take a look at this page and tell me what would you change from SEO perspective. It's always to easy to criticise so here is your chance. Good Luck. http://www.traxnyc.com/mens_jewelry.html

    | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    0

  • Short, Sweet and easy for you guys!! How important is keyword density??? Cheers

    | wazza1985
    0

  • I have navigation that allows for multiple levels of filtering. What is the best way to prevent the search engine from seeing this duplicate content? Is it a big deal nowadays? I've read many articles and I'm not entirely clear on the solution. For example. You have a page that lists 12 products out of 100: companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm And then you filter these products: companyname.com/productcategory/filters/page1.htm The filtered page may or may not contain items from the original page, but does contain items that are in the unfiltered navigation pages. How do you help the search engine determine where it should crawl and index the page that contains these products? I can't use rel=canonical, because the exact set of products on the filtered page may not be on any other unfiltered pages. What about robots.txt to block all the filtered pages? Will that also stop pagerank from flowing? What about the meta noindex tag on the filitered pages? I have also considered removing filters entirely, but I'm not sure if sacrificing usability is worth it in order to remove duplicate content. I've read a bunch of blogs and articles, seen the whiteboard special on faceted navigation, but I'm still not clear on how to deal with this issue.

    | 13375auc3
    0

  • Has anyone typed in a phrase in Google and seen their listing on the SERP, but the page title on the Google SERP  is not what the CMS is set to ? Ie the page title in the SERP is not what is expected?  Something related to the company, but not what is set on the CMS… Very odd – has anyone seen something like this before?  What could be causing it?  Is there a way to change it?

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • For a classifieds web site with medium/high turnover for the various listings: How would you deal with pages of removed listings? a) would you be "honest" and return a 404 since the listing is not available anymore? b) would you maintain historical data about deleted listings so that you can try and 301 redirect to a relevant search results page? c) would you keep the page alive (maybe add a noindex meta tag?) and show links to multiple relevant search results pages in an effort to strengthen internal linking?

    | seo-cat
    0

  • What is the lag time for changes to a site to be reflected in Google webmaster tools Diagnostics section? They pointed out some duplicate titles which I fixed a week ago and yet they still show up as an HTML Suggestion. What has your experience been with making changes and then seeing them reflected in the HTML Suggestions section? My site is crawled every day, including the pages I have updated with new titles. Seems like it takes a while for the data to trickle into Webmaster tools, no?

    | scanlin
    0

  • Hi, For those who have followed my previous question, I have a similar one regarding dynamically generated urls. From this page http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html the user can make a selection according to various criteria. 6 results are presented and then the user can go to the next page. I know I should probably rewrite url's such as these: http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html?pageNo=1&selType=&selCity=&selPrice=&selBeds=&selTrad=&selMod=&selOcean= but since all the results presented are basically generated on the fly for the convenience of the user, I am afraid google my consider this as an attempt to generate more pages as there are pages for each individual listing. What is my solution for this? Nofollow these pages? Block them thru robots txt?

    | multilang
    0

  • I am using MODx as a CMS on a site and trying to eliminate duplicate page titles. url.com/ url.com/[~897~] which is really {~897~} its a resource number. url.com/home/ How can I resolve this issue when its all one page in the CMS? thanks

    | tjsherrill
    0

  • Hello All Nice easy question! I've made some on page changes to page titles, content, H1s etc but wanted to know if there was a way to check if Google has reindexed the page since the changes were made? I appreciate the different factors that will help improve your crawl rate like new content, external links, domain authority etc. I made these changes around 2 weeks ago. Google has cached the pages since I made the changes but not picked up on the new page titles in the search results. Cheers Todd

    | todd7585
    0

  • Working on reducing page load time, since that is one of the ranking factors that Google uses. I've been using Page Speed FireFox plugin (requires FireBug), which is free. Pretty happy with it but wondering if others have pointers to good tools for this task. Thanks...

    | scanlin
    0

  • Hi, I'm conducting an on-page review for someone and have noticed something I've not seen before. Some of the major internal links from the home page are marked as no follow. For example: <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>/customer-services" rel="nofollow">Customer Services This is on the top navigation bar and the content in this and all other sections are marked as no-follow but they should all be crawled. Is this an error or am I missing something? Any ideas guys? Thanks Bush

    | Bush_JSM
    1

  • On the home page of my site I have a read more link that takes you to a different URL with basically the same content, just more of it. Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/ Read More Link on Home Page: http://www.opwdecks.com/deckmaintain.htm I think this may be affecting my seo. Any suggestions on what I should do about this? Should I add a canonical to the home page and/or on the other page? Both pages are indexed by google. Thanks for any help or tips.

    | opwdecks
    0

  • We have a potential client with a URL structure in this fashion: http://www.site-url.com//cpage/page.html pretty strange, right? my question is: How bad are the 2 forward slashes // for SEO? How bad is it to have that extra layer of /cpage in the URL? this doesn't appear to serve any other purpose than making the URL longer than necessary.

    | Motava
    0

  • I have a javascript dropdown menu on every page of my site. It lists all the wineries I write about and sell. About 300 links.  I've been told that google doesn't like so many links on a page, but that it doesn't spider javascrpt. Then I hear that it does. Am I being penalized by all the links? Or does the spider really not see them? I don't want to give up my javascript menus, unless I have to. Should I put a no follow on each link inside the code? And on the other hand, am I losing google juice by not letting it see all the pages on my site that I link to in the javascript menu? Thanks in advance for your help!

    | JeanYates
    0

  • Title says it all. Assuming that you're talking about similar content (let's say, widgets), which is better: using within-page links for variations or using separate pages? I.e., do we have a widget page and then do in-page links to describe green, blue, and red widgets, or separate pages for each type of widget? In-page pro: more content on a single page, thus more keywords, key phrases, and general appearance of real content. In-page con: Jakob Neilsen says they're confusing. Also, for SEO, you only get one page title, rather than a separate page title for each. My personal bias is for in-page, since I hate creating dozens of short pages for what could be on one page, but my suspicion is that separate pages are better for SEO.

    | maxkennerly
    0

  • Bit embarrassed to ask this question, but will ask it anyway! I have done some quite reasonable basic SEO for clients in the south of Spain with small sites and had reasonable success. My wife and I came to the Pyrenees in the south of France to take over and run bed and breakfast in a lovely old farm and some self-catering accommodation in one of the pastures (with my continuing to do a bit of work for clients too). We are running and developing the place for friends who are away 3-4 years. They had an abysmal site, so we designed one to together: http:www.loubetaspyrenees.com/ (I have given the French version because it's what I am most concerned with - there is an English version in case I can tempt you to a holiday here!) It's been very well received by users, so that's great. We have the place on about 12 agencies amd almost all link to our site, so it serves as a good showcase. Here's my issue (for the French site): It went online 11th Feb and is already doing well for more "long tail" searches, and for more local and specific searches, but is proving slow on our prime search terms. The prime market is French, and they key terms are "Gîtes" for the self-catering accommodation, and "Chambres d'Hôtes" for the Bed and Breakfast. Our key Geographical term for the French market is "Hautes Pyrenees" - it's a departmental area. In Google.fr We are around result 100 out of 600k results for "Chambres d'hôtes hautes pyrénées" and aren't in the first 200 for "Gîtes Hautes Pyrénées". This is a competitive market and we are competing with optimised and long-established agencies but still hope to do better. I know I am losing from poorly constructed title tags cannibablising the results, but cannot see how to solve this: Home Page Title tag: "Gîtes et Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées | les Baronnies" I have two main pages on the Gîtes: Gîte for 2-3 people Title tag "Gîte dans les Hautes Pyrénées pour 2-3 personnes en les Baronnies"
    Gîte for 3-9 people Title tag "Location Gîte dans les Baronnies Pyrénées pour groupe 3-9 personnes" ("Location" means rental) Google understood the above and put us no 1 out of over 1miillion results for a search for a gite for 9 people in the south west of France ("gite sud ouest 9 personne") And 2 pages for the Bed and Breakfast: B&B in the farm building: "Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées dans une ferme restaurée"
    B&B in gite apartments with sitting rooms: "Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées avec salon et terrasse" I am not sure how to handle the titles for the Home Page and for the 4 subpages - sounds silly, but have you any advice on how I might handle these titles better? I thought of using more general terms on the Home Page ("Holiday accommodation in the ..."), but on such a small site (18 pages in each language version) I feel that would be unwise. It seems I must try to find some way of differentiating the titles on the other 4 pages so that i am not cannibalising but where there are so few alternatives I am not sure how! Oh dear, sorry this was so long!

    | PeterMurray
    0

  • I am currently working redevloping my site, I have terribly long URL's according to SEOMoz, can someone cover the real benefit of my editing my URLs, and then putting in all of those redirects.  Should I edit old material?  My site has been in wordpressformat for a couple of years now.

    | copykatrecipes
    0

  • I have suggested to a client with limited content on their site (considering it's in a very competitive sector with oceans of content possibilities!) that they probably shouldn't name the XML sitemap featuring their "seo content pages" (I hate that terminology BTW!) - google_sitemap_seo.xml My reasoning is that if I was a Google engineer or Google bot, I would probably ignore and disregard those pages because they are most likely poor quality content/doorway pages/boiler plate pages/ "enter your descriptive phrase here" pages. The push back from tech is that it doesn't make a difference so we're not going to do it.

    | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0

  • Notice more sites have an "in the News" section on the home page, or something similar like press releases... Apart from providing users fresh content, is there an SEO value to this?  What is the explanation for this? Have a feeling the answer is obvious but just not too sure Thanks a lot.

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • We are set to relaunch our site on wordpress and will be creating a traditional blog section in the process. With doing so, we want to allow commenting on our blog; however, we are trying to find the best to accomplish our main goals of 1) increasing SEO and 2) creating a conversation hub that will refresh on page content I have looked toward the Facebook comment plugin; however, it doesnt add to the pages code (essentially seems that all comment posts are hidden in javascript). This does little to accomplish our goal of refreshing page content, but it does allow users an easy and seamless way to add to the conversation is a useful tool to get a mention on social channels. The thing we do like about more traditional plugins is 1) the ability to post the comment to the html so we can increase the refresh rate of page content and 2) ability to block IPs since we will likely allow comments to be open instead of requiring approval first (we want ppl to add to the conversation in real time to motivate more back and forth) so, with all that said, just looking to get opinions on the best comment plugins available to achieve our main goals of increasing our content SEO and refreshing page content by allowing seamless, user friendly commenting features.

    | GreenDot
    0

  • Hey all, I accidentally posted this as a private question and now want to post it publicly due to some updates (for the worse.) I'm a photographer and the site I'm talking about is my portfolio site. It is very image heavy and had basically no text. Those who have consistently beat me (positions 1,2, etc.) in SERPs for my key search phrases have a modest amount of text on their pages. I'd been doing OK in SERPs (top 3-5 for my key search phrases) over the past couple years and my site has decent age and domain authority (a good number of relevant inbound links from extremely reputable sources over the years, etc. etc.) [In case it matters, my root domain has a PageRank of 4 and I have a couple internal pages with PR5.] For years I resisted adding any text because I was trying to obey Google's rule to design "for people, not search engines." Over the past couple of months, though, I got some advice on the SEOMoz webinar about adding (relevant) alt text and body text, and also read Google's Webmaster Central article about giving images good titles and alt tags, so I decided to take the plunge about ten days ago. I went through the site and added modest amounts of relevant text to pages where it was appropriate and where it didn't detract (too much) from the design. I made sure my images had sensible human-readable alt tags that were descriptive and made sure not to do any keyword stuffing. Finally, I edited some of my page titles so that they were a little more descriptive. Again, nothing extreme or radical or spammy.  (But overall, esp. from Google's perspective, there were some fairly significant changes in a short period of time.) Well.. you're all already guessing what's next. As soon as Google saw these changes, I tanked pretty badly. I went from position 3-5 on my key phrases to positions like 16-25 and spent a few days in those positions. Now I'm just gone & buried somewhere in Google's boneyard. My latest ranking report for today shows me "not in top 50" for any of my key phrases on Google. I'm #1 for many of those same terms/phrases on Bing and Yahoo. (Always have fared very well with them.) Google's webmaster tools says my sitemap is OK and most of the URLs submitted are in the index. Please tell me this is temporary, while Google deals with my changes? (Actually don't, just tell me what you really think.) 🙂 Thank you all...

    | vdms
    0

  • Hi all, I'm starting to make changes to our websites this week.  I need to record every change made so I can compare the affect it had on the performance/ranking of the site. I'm curious to know what methods those with more experience are using to keep track of everything. Thanks in advance.

    | Technical_Contact
    0

  • Hi, For some reason every week or two I am changing the title tag of my main page. Each change takes place because I find new version better than the old one. Does this have any impact on my SEO results (I'm keeping the main keywords each time) ? If it has an impact is it positive or negative ? And should I stick to one title and not change it under any circumstances for long periods of time ? Thanks!

    | lolskizz
    0

  • Hello! Still very new to the SEO world and just trying to soak in as much information as I can. The site I work for took a substantial hit with the panda update, so we are looking into adding as much quality content as we can in the upcoming months. With our current site layout, space will quickly become an issue. Assuming the content is relevant and useful for the page, will putting the content into tabs be counter productive or devalue it at all?

    | davegtt
    0

  • I need an image optimization expert to tell me whether or not we are hosting images properly for SEO. Currently, we upload all images to Picasa and then call them out with a webpart in our content management system. See example here - http://www.tennisnow.com/Photos/2011-BNP-Paribas-Open-Day-5.aspx Here's an example of the url that is attached to each image - http://lh5.ggpht.com/_1Oyc-Zgkrpk/TX5H-Pfyd7I/AAAAAAAARbc/nG3Cw-G5tsY/s400/1215548409_FU9xA-L.jpg We have a lot of images, and we've hosted them on Picasa for speed purposes based on a recommendation from our developer (makes the pages load faster). I've read that Google can now factor page load time into its ranking parameters. We are not seeing the images from each photo gallery being indexed on images.google.com. We are torn. What should we do to rank for these images?

    | tennisexpress
    0

  • Once you do an optimise / make some (hopefully positive!) changes to pages re keywords etc - how long does it take for you to move up the rankings  - if indeed you do actually  move up... I made some changes last week and see some slight movement this monday - can I expect more of a movement over a period of a few weeks?  Or does it take longer? Maybe tricky question to answer  but hopefully you know what I mean...

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • Hi there, I have chosen a keyword for a bunch of my top pages based on relevance, traffic, competition etc, and am tracking in the Tool - so far so good. The issue I am having is with picking a keyword or phrase for the home page - all the suitable keywords I seem to have been allocated to 1 particular sub pages - basically product pages... Anyone come across this issue?  Basically any keyword or phrase that I think might be suitable for the home page, I find a more precise page beneath the home page.... Help gratefully accepted!

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • When building a blog to promote a particular affiliate offer, I usually like to use a static "page" homepage and then have my posts displayed on another part of my site. I've noticed that my wordpress pages almost always rank higher than wordpress posts and I can't explain it... Here are some possibilities I've thought of: XML Sitemap priority is set at 60% for pages and only 20% for posts My main navbar lists the pages which consequently means they get linked to on every page on my website. Some other phenomenon within the wordpress framework... If it helps, I use Thesis v1.8 on all my sites. I guess my ultimate question is: If pages do in fact rank higher than posts, is it worth it for me to go back and change the site structure on all my blogs which are using posts instead of pages. I know making major modifications like that can be disasterous but will it ultimately pay off? Thanks

    | drewhammond
    1

  • My on page report card gives me an "A" in every category but "link cannibalization". The key word is I am targeting is "home care". It says my links to "home care blog" and "in home care agency locator" are cannibalizing my home page. Am I indeed causing problems by using these modified versions of the keyword? Also is it okay to have the link "home care" for the home link in the main navigation bar? Thanks

    | mmaes
    0

  • ...and what is the SEO benefit of this? This video from Matt Cutts suggests using file extentions, except for a directory.

    | magicrob
    0

  • I noticed there is a limited in the number of pages crawled on galena.org?  Will this number increase over time?

    | nskislak24
    0

  • I am curious to know if adding a rel = "canonical" tag to the end of a link element will affect its purpose?

    | Sharecare
    0

  • Hi everyone. I realise this may appear to be a bit of an obtuse question, but that's only because it is an obtuse question. What I'm after is a cataloguing of opinion - what reasons have SEOs had to implement noindex or add pages to their robots.txt on the sites they manage?

    | digitalstream
    0

  • Greeting, Currently I have noticed that Google is starting to index our internal search page results.  Should I block those pages in our robot txt file or have you ever heard of any websites that actually gained traffic or rank by letting Google index those pages? Thanks

    | Tonyd23
    0

  • How many meta tags are appropriate? There is a page that ranks above me that has many more than I do. It has (I have removed the content of each to give a description of the type of content): I only use meta tags for keywords and description, robots. Should I have more? Thanks.

    | scanlin
    0

  • Hi, looking for some advice on the structure for a relatively small site (around 200 pages). I'd like a structure where we can talk about our services as well as write blog articles on topics that relate to our services. We'll have loads more content in the blog area than in the services area. I was thinking of this: option 1: /services /services/copywriting
    /services/social-media
    /services/press-releases etc. and categories for articles where we'd give tips, talk about trends etc. /copywriting
    /social-media
    /effective-press-releases
    etc. would it be better to have a different structure, say: option 2: /copywriting
    /copywriting/services
    /copywriting/articles OR option 3: /copywriting-services
    /copywriting-blog OR option 4: /services/copywriting
    /blog/copywriting OR is there another, better way perhaps? Of course the internal anchor text links to the services/blog articles pages will be tuned to try and make it clear what each section is about i.e. our services vs. industry trends/comments/tips for the blog.

    | JaspalX
    0

  • I noticed on a site that ranks above me for 'keyphrase" that they have two similar tags in their area: <title>keyphrase</title> I've used the first (<title>) on all my pages. I've not used the 2nd at all. Should I? I'm trying to optimize mostly for Google. I found this article http://www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/meta-title.html but looking for opinions from the experts here...</p> <p>Also, does it matter if the <title> tag is the 1st thing after the <head> tag or is anywhere withing <head> okay?</p> <p>Thanks.</p></title>

    | scanlin
    0

  • On an x-cart ecommerce website we have, seomoz has picked up a lot of duplicate content, based on URLs that are different, but are essentially the same page. These come from Fitlers, that allow a page to show only certain colours and styles, reordering page by price etc, and also the page 2, page 3 etc of a category: All the below are '4ft-bedding.html' http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?filter=1&value=Pink http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?page=2 http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?sort=price&view_all=Y I've now changed all these internal links to rel="nofollow" on the a tag. Is that the correct and best way to sort? I might be mistaken on when I did this update and when the last report was ran, but on the SEOmoz crawling report, it still has the above as problem pages. thanks!

    | rowleysit-259892
    0

  • How do others utilize keywords and preserve branding in the title tag for clients with a REALLY long name?  Two examples. Example 1:  Business name is 38 characters long in the following format: [Firstname] [initial] [Lastname] [Businesstype] Services 38 characters is workable, but  the keywords for what he offers and this industry in general are long too.  He abbreviates to his initials in the domain name  - I don't love doing that as the acronym has a meaning of its own. (We unintentionally acquired at least one very amusing if useless backlink thanks to that.)  Leaving off "Services" saves a few characters. Example 2:  Business name totals 58 characters and references their two related lines of business.  Similar to: Rogers Institute of Robotic Studies and RIRS Robot Repair
    or (saves a few characters)
    Rogers Institute of Robotic Studies and Robot Repair How would you handle that?  Use the appropriate half of the name on pages related to that particular LOB? Only use the brand on some pages?  Abbreviate more?  I've been using their full name on the more "general" pages of the site and omitting it in favor of keywords on the more specific pages . Suggestions?  Other ideas?

    | MaryAnneG
    1

  • I manualy counted the links on my website http://www.commensus.com which came to around 50, but SEO moz says I have over 100 and google isn't seeing them all.

    | jawl4463
    0

  • Hi, How does the number of pages indexed from a single website affect that websites ability to compete in the SERPS? Cheers

    | Jurnii
    0

  • I asked this before, but did not really get an answer, so checking again. Really grateful for any help... My question is: Based on the PRO crawl Diagnostics – if we don’t make a  recommended change on say 1 rather obscure page, does that just affect the SEO on that one page only, or does it potentially affect the SEO on all (more important) pages of the site? e.g. home page etc E.g. If we get a “Too many on page links” for a certain page that we don’t really want to rank for – does not fixing that particlaur page really affect the SEO for the site as a whole?  Or just that 1 page (that I don't really care too much about) Hope someone is able to answer, thanks so much...

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • Or should you just stick to 1 page, 1 keyword all the time? If you do 2, are there any things you should watch out for? Thanks

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • Hi there, That may be a bit of a silly question to ask, but we've setup a new domain for an existing site. While the site is in the making, the site owners wants to already start promoting the new URL on stationeries etc. Hence, we need to setup the new URL so that it forwards to the site, but so that Google doesn't give it the history of a secondary (less important) domain. What is the best way to do this? Currently we've put in a 301 redirect, but will that bear no future consequences on the SEO of the site, when the site is moved to this new domain, and the old domain is 301 redirected. Thanks, SEOeclipse

    | Bozboz
    0

  • Our website is a continuing education website that is linked to a large university, and our URL is a subdomain of that larger university domain. We offer degrees as well, but because of the modifications we'd like to make to the degree webpages, our content management system won't let them be a part of our website. Now we're trying to figure out if we should create a separate subdomain for all degrees, and put the individual degrees in separate folders (so, all degrees' URLs woudl be degrees.us.university.edu/degree-name/), or if we should give each its own URL, which would be completely separate from ours (degree urls would be degree-name.university.edu). So our question is, how well do subdomains carry the value of the domain? Is it better to have twenty websites that are all separate subdomains of a strong domain, or one subdomain in a subdomain that houses all twenty websites in folders? And, as a side note, will housing the degrees in degrees.us.university.edu pass value to us (us.university.edu)? Thanks!

    | UWPCE
    0

  • The rankings have been in a pending status for several day.  Is there a problem with the software?  We are in the middle of our test month and need to be able to evaluate the software to decide if we will continue.  Thank you

    | Barb123
    0

  • If you are browsing a site, what is the best way or programs to use to see if the page has been indexed and cached? Thanks

    | gregster1000
    0

  • Hi all, Ive be going through the pages in my site getting rid of errors so i can the work of a clean slate and get the best for my site. However, i have a large amount of pages which is flagged up by seo moz pro tool as too many on page links. How bad is this in terms of seo rankings? Thanks

    | wazza1985
    0

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