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Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • Hi, How much of an SEO issue is it to have relative links vs. fully written out links, like http://www.seolinkquestion.com/my-silly-question ? If I have a site that uses relative links, should I change them all? Thanks...Mike

    | 94501
    0

  • Edit I'll take the fall on this one, seems I could have asked my quesiton in a more clear manner. I was cruising other questions and finding a whole of answers that I suspect were not truly intended to help, but maybe help and earn Mozpoints. Wasn't fair of me to label those answering here with that. I will work better on the wording of my questions! 🙂 Edit Either I am asking my question poorly or I am learning there may be a rush to get points by throwing up any old answer...it very well may be the former which I am open to feedback on. Each page is to stand alone and hopefully rank well for the neighbourhood name and in conjunction with another relevant keyword phrase. There is no 'duplicate' version of any pages. * On a site there are numerous pages that provide real estate listings broken down by neighbourhood. Each containing similar content, a abbreviated version of the listings, often spanning 2 or 3 pages. These are 3rd level pages. Properties->Calgary Neighbourhoods->Evanston The title tags created are: Evanston Homes For Sale - NW Calgary Real Estate Panorama Hills Home For Sale - NW Calgary Real Estate Etc. for about 15 or so pages. Then they start again for another area of the city: Sagewood Homes For Sale - Airdrie Real Estate Woodside Homes For Sale - Airdrie Real Estate At this point there is no text on the actual page outside of the listings...an example of similar listings on another site - http://www.experiencerealtygroup.com/BaturynandDunluceHomes.ubr Do you think the SE's will see these as 'proper' use of the Title Tag or duplicate or other practices they tend to frown upon? It is a logical way of creating the title and obviously creating a unique version for each page would not only be tough to scale on some sites with 100's of these pages, they would become a little silly and not much use to the searcher in the SERPs Thanks for any help!

    | kyegrace
    1

  • Might sound like a bit of a daft question to you pro's but here it goes... I am been doing in house SEO for a company for a short while and since I have been managing it things have moved quickly in the right direction but I find myself limiting our SEO efforts to three key terms. Is this usual? The reason I am doing this is because I find that on page SEO is only really possible with those amount of terms (with regards to title, description, key word density, seo copy, on page links etc). I guess that what I trying to stay is: If I push on page opitimastion to more key terms will it be detrimantal to our current efforts? and Is SEO possible for additional key phrases which are not on page optimised?

    | RikkiD22
    0

  • Hi SEOs I have created a page on my website with a certain tutorial - let's say "How to change a tyre in your car". I have Grade  A from On-page report using SEOmoz tool. I have put a relevant alt description for each photo I have put in that tutorial and I have used relevant keyword as a name for each image. So for example this would look like that: changing-tyre-1.jpg changing-tyre-2.jpg My question is should I name these file differently according to their content ? For example if on my photo there is some tool I have to use to change the tyre should the file have the name relevant to the subject of the article/tutorial on the page or to the content of the image ? Is that a stupid question ? Or am I getting too fussy ? Thanks

    | lolskizz
    0

  • Hi all, If you were to have links that were randomly generated on each refresh, how would they be treated? I would imagine that they are treated normally and isolated to each crawl. So Google would just see the link structure changing from crawl to crawl and therefore give no long term value to these links. Any ideas? Thanks for your responses! Nick

    | NickPateman81
    0

  • I was just wondering if someone could point out to me any known differences between these three search engines.  I feel like i have been spending a lot of time optimizing for google, but don't have much of an idea of how to optimize for yahoo or bing.  Do you have any up-to date article links or tips/advice?

    | adriandg
    0

  • From an SEO and user perspective what structure do you recommend for page titles.  For example (given that they shouldn't ideally be more than 70 characters) :- Keywords (maybe two or three) | Company Name | more keywords I understood the best place for the company name was about second place.  Is this now the considered view taking into consideration 'branding' which has been flagged up as the way forward. Keywords are separated by the vertical bar    |     - any thoughts? For 'house keeping' pages such as Privacy Policy - should this be optmised or simply stated as 'privacy policy' Thanks

    | PH292
    0

  • I recently found a new SEO tool http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/ It is fast, and has found some site tweaks I need to make. There is a free demo version that crawls up to 500 URIs. I recommend you check it out (I'm not affiliated). One of the conditions it checks for is if your page <title>is exactly equal to your <h1> tag. The fact that they flag it makes me wonder if that's something I should avoid (?).</p> <p>When I googled it I found a variety of opinions. When I looked at Rand's excellent piece on the perfectly optimized page http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization I notice that the example Page Title and H1 are slightly different. By design, or a happy coincidence?</p> <p>Any opinions on whether I should make my Page Titles slightly different than my H1 tags to avoid the appearance of over optimization, or some other penalty?</p></title>

    | scanlin
    0

  • Hi all, Just a simple question. What's the disadvantages/advantages to using this URL structure for an ecommerce site: **Category structure: **/category **Subcategory structure: **/subcategory **Product structure: **/product Compared to the standard: /category/subcategory/product Thanks, Nick

    | NickPateman81
    0

  • Based on the PRO crawl Diagnostics – if we don’t make a change on 1 page, does that just affect the SEO on that one page, or does it affect the SEO on all pages of the site? 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 affect the site as a whole? Hope I explained this ok..

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • Hi guys, the pro campaign thing you got going is wicked, love it. I'm recieving good results with my keywords and have noticed that categories that go beyond sub/sub/sub don't do to well. So I wanna move those that do one step up which makes it go from: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/scales/aeolian to here http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/aeolian The existing menu system that follow all these categories across the site will soon go so it won't be a user friendly problem, I will have other type of menus. But, and here is the question: Would I greatly benefit from taking the non existent menu away and just go for: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/aeolian while i'm at it? Or do I stick with my current structure? I guess my real question is; how much is there to flat URLs? Cheers -dan lundholm spytunes.com

    | spytunes
    0

  • Hi SEOmoz staff I'm doing on a French website that sells Wall Stickers. The main French keyword therefore is: stickers muraux (wall stickers) sticker mural (wall sticker) When you look at my homepage title; I've put the singular and plural in there. Do you think it hurts my website? Should I eliminate my least favorite one (= sticker mural)? Any other advice? Thank you! Jacob from Belgium X45qb.jpg

    | Jacobe
    0

  • It seems Google base and other Comparison Shopping Engines like to see the brand in the product name.   But, on my category page for that brand, website optimizer tells me including the brand name with each product  is cannabilizes links. For example; I have a page for jewelerABC with 20 pieces of jewelry listed as well as original content about jewelerABC.  I do not currently name these products as xyz by jewelerABC.  This page comes up nicely in the serps. But in Google base The top listings for jewelry by jewelerABC seem to have  every product named xyz by jewelerABC  or JewelerABC xyzs. What is the best way to optimize.for both? Stephen

    | stephenfishman
    0

  • Hi. I am new to this community, and new to SEO as well. A friend asked me to give them suggestions on onsite optimization for their Drupal website. I know page titles are very important, and usually they should be set to H1. (At least I think) This particular website has all their page titles set to H2 and they are using display:none in their stylesheet to hide them for graphic design reasons. What would be the most practical work around for this? We don't want this to appear sketchy in the eyes of the SE's, but putting page titles at the top of their pages really would take away from their graphical design. The second issue is that they use a module called Quicktabs for tabbed product specs on each page. Each tab is actually pulled from a post (called a node in Drupal), so each tab has it's own title that is an H2. So not only are they hiding the main page title, but they are hiding 5 others within the tabs, and their are 6 H2 elements showing up on each product page all set to display:none. Any creative suggestions? Hope that makes sense.... Thank you!

    | aprilm-189040
    0

  • I wonder if somebody had an experience with alexa's audit. What kind of information they provide? Is it completely useless?

    | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    0

  • I have a client who has a lot of information in PDF form. They think they should move some of it over into HTML pages so it indexes better.  Is there a benefit to converting these PDF's into HTML pages?  It seems to me that HTML pages would be good, IF they are relevant pages that could be used online.

    | lvstrickland
    0

  • What would you suggest is the best route for providing a website with extra traffic quickly?

    | wazza1985
    0

  • The majority of the products I sell require lengthy product titles, I have 600+ items that have titles over 70+ characters. In the interest of reducing the character count (Product Feeds) I'm trying to eliminate unnecessary "stop words" in the titles, such as "and", "with" etc.. I've listed an example of a current product listing below, followed by two different formats to reduce the character count. Which one if any is better for SEO or should I leave my titles alone and stick with my original format? Current Listing Example: DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses with Black Frame and Clear Anti-Fog Lens Suggested Listing Example: DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses-Black Frame-Clear Anti-Fog Lens DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses/Black Frame/Clear Anti-Fog Lens

    | MEldridge
    0

  • I have several pages on our website with low pr, that also themselves link to lots and lots of pages that are service/product specific. Since there are so many outbound links, I know that the small amount of PR will be spread thin as it is. My question is, if I were to supply fresh content to the top level pages, and change it often, would that influence whether or not google indexes the underlying pages? Also if I supply fresh content to the underlying pages, once google crawls them, would that guarantee that google considers them 'important' enough to be indexed" I guess my real question is, can freshness of content and frequency of update convince google that the underlying pages are 'worthy of being indexed', and can producing fresh content on those pages 'keep google's interest', so to speak, despite having little if any pagerank.

    | ilyaelbert
    0

  • Hello, we're working with a corporate client to make changes to their URL structure. We recommended that they use a structure like "domain.com/state/city/location". Their IT department is on board, but they just mentioned that all of the state and city info will be pulled from a database where it is all caps. So it would be like this "domain.com/STATE/CITY/location" I'm concerned that it may be spammy, but I can't find any definitive information online. We usually like to test issues like this on our own sites before advising clients, but we're working up against a quick deadline. Any help with this issue would be great, especially real world experience, not just theories. Thank you.

    | interactivek
    0

  • Would you bother using meta keywords?

    | wazza1985
    0

  • Hi there...  I´s always confused about which one should I focus, keywords in singular or plural. Some says: "look at Google Insight and look which one has more traffic", other says "go for the plural, because you´ll get both keywords at the same time (ex: dogs and _cat_s). Which one is the right way ?

    | e-Lustre
    1

  • We are running several special interest websites in the German speaking market, covering outdoor sports and vacation topics. We are trying to focus on one main landing page for events and keywords, this should be number one für search engines. Besides we are producing numerous content (news, pictures, videos), which are supposed to rank well and to be found on Google News, but not to rank higher for the specific keyword  than our designated landing page. It seems, that we fail with this attempt. Example one: The main page for the alpine Ski World Championships on our skiing portal www.skiinfo.de was supposed to be this one: http://magazin.skiinfo.de/3170--ski_wm_2011_garmisch-partenkirchen.html for the Keywords 'ski wm 2011' in Germany. We missed this goal. Many of our own news articles ranked higher. When searching for 'ski wm 2011' on skiinfo.de only directly after the World Championships, the main page was ranked on 33rd position - 32 of our own articles ranked higher. Why does the landing page rank worse than an article like this: http://magazin.skiinfo.de/3173-ski-wm-2011-tina-maze-gewinnt-riesenslalom-keine-deutschen-medaillen.html ? Another example: Our designated landing page for the Event 'International Mountain Summit' (a major mountaineering and climbing event in Bressanone/ITA) is this: http://www.bergleben.de/klettern/2148--international_mountain_summit.html (Keywords: international mountain summit, IMS). We are experiencing that our news articles rank higher, when they are 'fresh', this one still does: http://www.bergleben.de/klettern/2149-international-mountain-summit-4.html. Why? It would be perfect, if good content would strengthen the designated landing page. We are linking back to this landing page from each article in the breadcrumb, but this does not seem to be very successful. How can we achieve this?

    | Beatbuster
    0

  • Hi, All! We have a new potential client, that when looking at his site with a tool, we noticed that the previous SEO company they worked with filled the homepage copy with lots of keyword-rich anchor text links pointing to different pages on the site - many links going to the same page, just with different keywords.  These links are not indistinguishable in format from the other text, which is why we only noticed it with a tool. I certainly wouldn't recommend doing that to start with, but once all these links are there, would you recommend taking them down?  Is there any conceivable chance it could help the site? Is there a significant reason to think it will harm the site?  Or will it just be pretty neutral? In all that's been written (much by SEOMoz) about only the first link's anchor text counting, do subsequent links work like a no-follow in the sense that they are a waste of the link-juice of the page, or is it as if they aren't there at all?  (And is "only the first link counts" still the most widely held theory, or have there been new developments since?) Thanks, All!

    | debi_zyx
    0

  • Hello mozzers, I am currently designing an e-commerce system for various companies, my pilot being www.containerpadlocks.co.uk. I you look on the left in the navigation, you will see only the top level categories are visible (and in the html). Sub categories are only shown if viewing a parent category, or a product in that category/subcategory. My question would be, should I be listing all my subcategories in that navigation (hidden from the user) to allow Google to index my pages easily, and will this promote more PageRank and internal links for my site, or will this just dilute my page juice? Many Thanks,
    James

    | jcarter
    0

  • An example is in Google, we currently rank #1 & #2 for "yoga pants" for Athleta and Old Navy.  In Bing, I'm on page 2. Any thoughts here?

    | kpr
    0

  • Hi,
    do you think that the use of a single 1.8Mb background image sitewide could have a big negative impact and make a website disappear from SERPS? thank you

    | GianniCuccu
    0

  • If you have a site that offers a same day service, e.g. plumbing, electrical, computer support: do you think it would always be a good idea to stick the phone # in the meta description?

    | ilyaelbert
    1

  • Dear SEOs, I know these facts: a) not more than 70 chars b) relevant to the page subject - probably best keyword at the beginning My problem - should I rebuild the current structure of my titles which is: Main Page keywords (in my case 4) | domain name - Main Page Sub-page - one click from main page keywords (again same 4) | domain name - Sub Page Name (or as you like  Category Name) Specific page with an article / content keywords (again same 4 as on any other) | domain name - category name - title of article same as used in tag To be more precise, should this title be changed for following pages: Sub Page - where really it's page that let's you chose particular subjects (there will be few article for each subjects) so should the keywords be changed to - "chose your category" Specific page with an article - should the category name - title of article be completely removed and first part of title which at the moment contains same 4 keywords used on main page be replaced with keywords specific for the content ? To be honest I find those titles at the moment bit confusing and sort of illogical. But since I can't really change anything in the code I would like to know what's the right way before I keep pressing on the programmer 🙂 Thanks.

    | lolskizz
    0

  • Hi mozzers! How to optimize really a rich index.php of a page,with a keyword example: " mobile " what kind of things to include,video,comments,images,how many words,manually meta-descriptons or to leave it empty to take automatically the googlebot a snippet! Tell us more on this, because we forget sometimes the rich-content-optimized and only concentrated on the link-building. Thanks,

    | leadsprofi
    0

  • What is your take on site wide inernal links in the footer, e.g. for the most competitive keywords? Do you think those links are still useful or are those links of little value from your experience? It is an old school tactic but I still see many sites doing it.

    | Florakel
    0

  • Example: A page has 100 links, 90 internal links and 10 external links. The page has a Google internal PR of 1000. The question is: Is the pagerank that flows to the internal links being calculated taking into account all links on the page (internal + external) or only the 90 internal links? E.g. is the PR that flows to the internal links 1000/100 or 1000/90? Are links to external sites "votes" that do not affect the internal PR flow? Disclaimer: I understand that the maths behind the PR algo are more complex. This simplified example only serves to explain my question.

    | Florakel
    0

  • Hi there I have been working in / learning SEO for just over a year, coming from a non dev background, so there are still plenty of the finer points on-page points I am working on. Slowly building up confidence and knowledge with the great SEOMoz as a reference! We are working on this site http://www.preciseuk.co.uk (we are still tweaking the tags and content by the way- not finished yet!) Because a lot of the information is within accordians, a page is generated for each tab of the accordian expanded, for example: http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php is the main page but then you also have: http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=0 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=1 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=2 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=3 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=4 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=5 All of which are in the same file. According to the crawl test, these pages are not indexed. Because it is all in one file, should we add the canonical tag to it, so that this is replicated in all the tab pages that are generated? eg. Thanks in advance for your help! Liz OneResult
    liz@oneresult.co.uk

    | oneresult
    2

  • My site - http://www.guru99.com/quick-test-professional-qtp-tutorial.html Currently caters to an automation testing product from HP called Quick Test Professional popularly know and searched as QTP Recently HP changed the product name from QTP to HP Functional Test. Considering this , what do I do with exiting QTP pages and how do I optimize the site moving ahead...

    | krishrun
    0

  • I know that it is not a good practice to inlcude SEO content within JavaScript, but are there exceptions to what Google can spider or is it best to just avoid completely?

    | mjmorse
    0

  • We have a product that we currently rank number one for, but would like to capture the date modified variations of the term (such as event 2011 or product 2012). My question is - what would be the best way to optimize for a date senstive product/service? Would it be better to include the date variation of the term on the main page for the product? Or should we create a new page entirely to capture this variation? I lean towards optimizing the existing page because the intent is the same whether a user is searching for product or product 2012. I should mention that the previous year versions of the product are not available. Merci. Chris Thompson

    | GroupPublishing
    0

  • Hi Mozzers Ive read a little about your views on cannabilization and would like to run my situation by you. I have 2 pages lets say (a) and (b) that rank ok for a main keyword. However (a) desite being nice and old is not ageing well and is starting to slip a little - its getting harder to spread the link juice so Ive been thinking should I ditch page (a) and focus solely on page (b) for this keyword. Page (b) seems to be getting better serp value right now. What I find hard is that page (a) has been around a while (6 years) and I cant bring myself to 301 it assuming thats what you would normally do to avoid cannabilization. But at the end of the day its a business page and if its failing - yet could inject even more bounce into page (b) it must be worth considering. What is the best way forward here..? Im not sure how quick any transition of link juice would take ? Also what to do with the unique content on page (a)? Seems such a shame to just ditch it. Cheers fella's Morch

    | Morch
    0

  • With so many sites being based on a CMS, and with so many hundreds of different CMS out there, as SEO consultants how do you recommend dealing with on-page optimisation for a client where you discover their site is built with a CMS you have not previously used (or even heard of!)

    | bjalc2011
    0

  • Hello Guys, I have a small doubt in top ten rankings, i worked for one keyword "Domain Sales" in which my website was ranking in 5th position, but suddently i saw my website no rank in top 100 for the same keyword. Not able to track the what is the problem? Any help..

    | itajooba
    0

  • In the competitve domian analysis my domain root (gpscity.com) is showing up as a 404 not found.  My competition is showing up as 200.  My site is live, index and viewable, but I'm wondering if this has an effect on my rankings?  What can I do to test that it's not returning a 404 when the crawlers view my site?

    | tinyfactory
    0

  • We are probably all familiar with general and Google guidelines for writing title and description tags. But Amazon. com often create another structure where they put in a) amazon.com, b) product name or description and c) the Amazon category the product is featured in, like this: | Amazon.com: Mac Motion Chairs Model 2-Piece Recliner with Matching Ottoman Mocha Microfiber with Walnut Frame: Home & Garden Is this a well developed description tag? |
    |

    | KnutDSvendsen
    0

  • Hi, Are you still using XML sitemaps today? If yes, does it bring any benefit to your website like faster indexing of webpages or better rankings? Are you using special features like video sitemaps or sitemap index files? Best regards, Tobias

    | Tobiask-121573
    1

  • I'm relitavely new to SEO, and I just wondered how keyword dense the homepage to our businesses site should be? Is there any value in loading the frontpage at the potential expense of readibility, or should our content elsewhere be responsible for our yield in search engine results? Look forward to any responses. Thanks, Mark

    | RobertHill
    0

  • Hello, I am a complete newbie to the world of SEO and I have read few thing available on the net about things to begin with (so google seo guide and then seomoz beginers tutorial) and I just wanted to ask if I understand the process correctly: So I have my website lest call it abcd.com and there I might have a subpage about certain type of robots or specific parts that these robots are built from. I do my keyword search using adwords keyword search tool. Where I get 10 phrases (phrase1, phrase2, phrase3 so on..) that could be used by users to search information about certain type of robots I wrote on my website. Let's asume all 10 of those phrases have low competition so they can all be used. And they are from the long tail ofcourse so let's say I can get 10,000 searches from them per month. Some of them would have 200 searches, some 1500, some 5000 per month in that google adwords report. After reading those basic tutorials I understand it this way: I put one or two best phrases of those 10 in my <title></p> <p>2) I describe the website as accurately as possible to those keywords in <meta description> i.e. Those specific robots are built from those specific parts - we know all about them.</p> <p>3) I put all of them in <meta keywords> phrase1,2,3, etc.</p> <p>4) I use one or two phrases in <h1> on the page with article</p> <p>5) then I use those phrases in the text that's on that particular page of my website - text is about certain type of robots and parts etc.</p> <p>6) I put photos on that page with alt descriptions that may contain some of these phrases</p> <p>7) to be honest I don't know how am I suppose to build links from that page about certain type of robots to anywhere else on my website - but I undestand that's the part of SEO as well</p> <p>And that's pretty much how I understand the basics of SEO. I read about it and I just don't know if that's what I am suppose to do. Silly me!</p> <p> </p></title>

    | lolskizz
    1

  • Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy

    | MeghanPrudencio
    0

  • How do I find the link that is still refferring to a 404 error? Somewhere on my site there is a link pointing to an un-usable page and I cant find where that link is to fix the 404 error. I could just delete the page all together, but I would like to find the problematic link first.

    | AtoZion
    0

  • If i make, modifications in my paget title and sescription, it's possible to will decrase my page visits? If yes, when will increase my page visits? thanks

    | rejja
    0

  • I realy don't understand how Google could posibly devaluate a link because the site displays the same content with www and without www. I mean did somebody recently saw a devaluation of a domain because of this isue? I somehow can not belive this because it is the standard when geting a new webspace that the new website display the same content with and without www. Is a redirect realy necessary?

    | MichaelJanik
    0

  • New to this and I'm working on a title tag. I was wondering if any one had opinions/input on if this looks good/bad/ugly. I replaced the actual name of the client with "Ranch Name" Guest Ranch Dude Ranch Wyoming Jackson Hole Activities RANCH NAME Thanks!

    | dbaxa-261338
    0

  • Hi, I'm currently in the process of redesigning/rebuilding a well ranking but a dated looking and structured website. Using analytics info I'm trying to put togerther an optimied site map plan for the site based on keywords. Currently the site is structured like this (a few examples) for some of its best ranking keywords / landing pages www.companyname.co.uk/frames/software/companyname-software/keyword/overview.php www.companyname.co.uk/frames/software/companyname-software/keyword/keyword.php I'd like to simplfy this as part of the re build so url's look like this www.companyname.co.uk/companyname-software/softwarecatogry/keyword Obviously I would 201 the old urls. My question is : A. is this a good idea? (From what I've read it is?) B. is there any benifit from having the company name repeated in the url (ie www.companyname.co.uk/companyname-software). My thinking before this is that companyname-software currently ranks well and brings a good amount of traffic. Or should I just go with www.companyname.co.uk/software/softwarecatogry/keyword as opposed to www.companyname.co.uk/companyname-software/softwarecatogry/keyword? Many thanks in advance!

    | JamesJacobs
    0

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