Optimize Pages for Keywords Prior to Building Links?
-
Greetings MOZ Community:
According to site audit by a reputable SEO firm last November, my commercial real estate web site has a toxic link profile which is very weak (about 58% of links qualified as toxic).
The SEO firm suggests than we immediately start pruning the link profile, requesting removal of the toxic links and eventually filing a link disavow file with Google for links that web masters will not agree to remove.
While removing toxic links, the SEO firm proposes to simultaneously solicit very high quality links, to try to obtain 7-12 high quality links per month.
My question is the following: is it putting the cart before the horse to work on link building without optimizing pages (with Yoast) for specific keywords?
I would think that Google considers how each page is optimized for specific terms; which terms are used within the link structure, as well as terms within the meta tags. My site is partially optimized, but optimization has never been done thoroughly.
Should the pages of the site be optimized for the top 25-30 terms before link building begins. Or can that be done at a later stage. Note that my link profile is pretty atrocious. My site at the moment is receiving about 1,000 unique visitors a week from organic search. However 70% of the traffic is from terms that are not relevant. The firm that did my audit claims that removal of the toxic links while building some new links is imperative and that optimization for keywords can wait somewhat.
Any thoughts?/
Thanks for your assistance.
Alan
-
If the links are toxic, your firm is correct in that it's important to start the removal process. That said, I don't see any reason not to start optimizing pages for your terms. These aren't dependent tasks in any way. If the links were built by you and are toxic and your pages are not currently well optimized, you should definitely be working on both of those things.
If it's time that's the issue, think about what you can do on your own. There's no need to have a paid firm gathering contact info from the linking sites when you could easily be doing that yourself. Make sure you're communicating with one another so that they're helping with things you need help with
-
Hello,
Firstly, no submission of disavow file doesn't mean that you will get a manual review. it doesn't even mean that Google will indeed ignore those links. If you know what you are doing, filter the domains correctly and disavow low quality links you can only gain from this.The second part i want to refer to is to the good quality content. Good quality content is an amazing marketing tool but not a replacement for keyword rankings as most people think. For example an article about "5 easy tips to design the perfect email marketing campaign" will definitely drive few visitors per month on the site (lets say 100) but you wont substitute the 5000 you will get if you rank for "email marketing services" (this is just an example with random numbers). Keep always in mind at all times that Google doesnt want to make web sites popular, they want to rank popular sites.
Lastly you mention Yost SEO which means you use wordpress and also onpage optimisation. Yoast tells you that your onpage optimisation is top notch based on the content your write but doesnt take into account the fact that wordpress by default is an on-page nightmare. make sure you take care of tags, categories and always consider them in case you use your targeted keyword onpage.
-
Hi Brett:
The domain is about 9 years old and that has value. Organic search volume dropped from 6800/month to about 3100/month after the April 2012 Penguin update. It has climbed back in the last five months to about 4500/month. So the penalty has atleast been partially lifted.
I never received a notice of penalty from Google. However my SEO firm believes that so many of the links are toxic (per "LinkDetox") that that some sort of penalty exists on the site. Google Pagerank has decline to 2 from 4 and Cemper Trust has also declined significantly. Strangely enough search volume has increased significantly in the last 4 months despite the drop in PR and Cemper Trust. Being that the site still performs, I really hope it is not necessary to move to a new domain and start from scratch!!!
Are you saying that submitting a disavow will trigger a manual review of my site? If so, this may be very good, as the content on the site is useful and unique.
In the scenario above, where the site still ranks for keywords, search volume has increased but Cemper Trust and PR have declined, do you believe recovery and improvement is possible? Note, I have never received any penalty notice.
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi George, thanks for your response.
Actually, the content is high quality, unique content that is useful to the visitor. I have noticed that as new content is added search traffic increases.
Prior to the April 2012 Penguin update organic traffic was as high as 6800 visit per month, dropping to as low as 2800 per month. Search traffic is now about 4000/per month.
In 2010 and 2011 submissions were made to a few hundred low quality directories. As a result there are many toxic links pointing to the site, which I believe should be removed.
Content is useful, question is should that content be optimized with Yoast before we remove links?
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Alan,
Do you need this website? would it be better to ditch and rebuild a new site. Its very hard to get back from a penalty. I would advise ask yourself these questions first. The SEO company will advise it can fix these things of course for a fee. At the moments Google's spam robot has spotted your links and warned you by using disavow it may mean they take a manual look at your site. Sorry to be negative but all the time getting back from this it could be easier to build a new site and learn from mistakes.
-
Hello Alan,
You should Optimize pages First.. Well Optimized Pages with Good Quality backlinks Will get you Required Rankings.
As a Start, Optimize your Web pages in regards to your Keywords and then start building backlinks.
Thanks
-
A house built on sand? Low quality pages will not attract natural links. Without good content, there's no there, there.
Build a quality site with good content, and useful design, relevant to your prospects and clients needs, before you do anything else. Deliver value first.
Even with fewer links, a site with higher quality content can often outrank a site that has more links, and will also be more link-worthy.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will google be able to crawl all of the pages given that the pages displayed or the info on a page varies according to the city of a user?
So the website I am working for asks for a location before displaying the product pages. There are two cities with multiple warehouses. Based on the users' location, the product pages available in the warehouse serving only in that area are shown. If the user skips location, default warehouse-related product pages are shown. The APIs are all location-based.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Airlift0 -
SEO - Use pages on main site or set up outside keyword rich domains and websites
I have a client who is wanting to target searches for competitors products. His idea was to purchase domains related to the searches he's targeting (for example, people looking for another company's app) and to build out one page websites addressing the search query and why a customer would choose his app solution over a competitor. I know he'd have to build a handful of links to each site for any chance of success but I wanted to ask the following.. Would doing this be better than just building pages addressing the searches on his main website domain? Is there an SEO risk to doing this? Potential for a penalty? Anything we need to do to structure these in a way that won't violate Google's SEO guidelines? Any other thoughts on pros and cons of each strategy? Thank you! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Links from non-indexed pages
Whilst looking for link opportunities, I have noticed that the website has a few profiles from suppliers or accredited organisations. However, a search form is required to access these pages and when I type cache:"webpage.com" the page is showing up as non-indexed. These are good websites, not spammy directory sites, but is it worth trying to get Google to index the pages? If so, what is the best method to use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maxweb0 -
Internal Linking from Menu or body text or both with exact match keyword?
I used to have my menu link to every page with my exact match keywords. I am a Magician and have pages for each county / town so I had a link to /magician-hampshire with the anchor text Magician Hampshire in the menu. I recently had my website updated and the developer told me this was very spammy have a menu that said Magician Hampshire, Magician Surrey, Magician Berkshire He suggested that I should now have a menu structure that says Areas Covered>Hampshire - Surrey - Berkshire etc.Google will know my website is about a magician and relate the two together. Is this correct or should I revert my menu back to anchor text of Magician (County) I am running wordpress and he said the title attribute can say Magician Hampshire but the Visible text is for the user and not Google. I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text. When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu) Questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rnperki
Should I link to every main page from the Menu with the exact anchor text?
Does google only take into account the first link to a page it discovers?
Will it associate a link to a page with just the text of the county (Berkshire) to be related to Magicians in Berkshire as that is what the page is about? A few years ago I used to have at the bottom of each page Magician Hampshire | Magician Surrey | Magician Berkshire | Magician Sussex links - and to date a a lot of other Magicians employ this same technique. I was told google would slap them for it but so far it has not and it seems to be working for them. Many Thanks Roger http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk0 -
Link Building for E-Commerce
Hi, Our on page optimization, albeit for a few dupe content issues, is ok - We have good keyword rich URL's, Titles, H1's and unique product descriptions. So now I want to look at building links that will boost our DA and PA's. We have over 2000 products on the store and around 130 categories/subcategories -and I would appreciate any views on where to start - My initial view is to get backlinks from the relevant manufacturer websites to the "shop by brand" page on our site related to these manufacturers - What other strategies should I look at? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Website layout for a new website [Over 50 Pages & targeting Long Tail Keywords]
Hey everyone, We are designing a new website with over 50 pages and I have a question regarding the layout. Should I target my long tail keywords via blog pages? It will be easier to manage and list and link out to similar articles related to my long tail keywords using a word press blog. For this example - lets suppose the website is www.orange.com and we sells 'Oranges' Am I going about this in the right way? Main Section: Main Section 1 : Home Page - Keyword Targeted - Orange Main Section 2 : Important Conversion page - 'Buy oranges' Long Tail Keyword (LTK) 1: www.orange.com/blog/LTK1 Subsection(SS): www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS1 www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS1a www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS1b Long Tail Keyword (LTK) 2: www.orange.com/blog/LTK2 Long Tail Keyword (LTK) 3: www.orange.com/blog/LTK3 Subsection(SS): www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS3 www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS3a www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS3b All these long tail pages and sub sections under them are built specifically for hosting content that targets these specific long tail keywords. Most of my traffic will come initially via the sub section pages - and it is important for me to rank well for these terms initially. _E.g. if someone searches for the keyword 'SS3b' on Google - my corresponding page www.orange.com/blog/LTK1/SS3b should rank well on the results page. _ For ranking purposes - will using this blog/category structure hurt or benefit me? Instead do you think I should build static pages? Also, we are targeting more than 50 long tail keywords - and building quality content for each of these keywords - and I assume that we will be doing this continuously. So in the long term term which is more beneficial? Do you have any suggestions on if I am going about this the right way? Apologies for using these random terms - oranges, LKT, SS etc in this example. However, I hope that the question is clear. Looking forward to some interesting answers on this! Please feel free to share your thoughts.. Thank you! Natasha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Natashadogres0 -
Does a page on a site with high domain authority build page authority easier? i.e. less inbound links?
Is this also why people build backlinks to their BBB profiles, Yellowpages Profiles, etc. i.e. why do people build backlinks to other pages that link to them? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to just build that backlink directly to your target?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg0 -
How does one know where to insert the right strips of coding on the right pages for Canonical Links?
On my Website, I am the only SEO optimizer wizard person. I have to teach myself everything and I get overwhelmed a lot. I recently started using SEOMOZ and on my report it stated we had duplicate page titles and that it was bad and should be fixed quickly. So I did my research and found that I needed to use canonical links to reference one page to be indexed. However my problem lies in exactly how to add this coding to my site. I greatly appreciate any help or at least looking at this question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0