4 questions about a paragraph of SEO friendly text in my e-com websites header.
-
Hi guys,
I'm trying to understand the SEO behind our websites header.
As you can see we have a paragraph of relevant introductory text that is also SEO friendly in our header. What I would like some help with is understanding how google views and assigns 'juice' to information like this in the header or footer of a website.
Usually certain pages have content specific to a given topic, and google ranks these pages accordingly. But with a websites header / footer its content appears on every page as the header is always at the top and footer at the bottom.
1. In what way does my website benefit from the paragraph of text in the header? e.g at the domain level? Just the home page? etc etc
2. How does google assign 'juice' to the paragraph of text? (similiar to Q1).
3. How would my website be effected if I moved the text to the footer? (Aesthetic change)
4. When I 'inspect element' on the paragraph, it is labelled 'div id=site description.' Can someone please explain the relevance of a sites description to SEO for me.
This paragraph of text was in the websites header before I came onboard, and I've been too concerned to change / move it as I don't know enough about it.
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks team,
Jake
-
Thanks Chris.
Everything you've said makes complete sense!
Best,
Jake
-
thanks for your answers, they really helped me
-
Good catch Chris
Jacob I agree with what Chris has to say completely.
_ By the way I see you are using WordPress if you do rebuild the site my personal opinion is use Genesis framework found here._
http://www.studiopress.com/features
_ And_
Woocommerce found here
_ if you want to simply use just woothemes there's no harm in that._
-
Jacob,
All this is is just a block of keywords someone stuck on hoping help rankings back when the was redesigned around October of 2012. But since that paragraph is on every page, and because it's in the header, it's having little, if any impact on rankings. The value of headers and footers and blocks of text that repeat on all pages throughout the site are discounted in terms of the relevancy they provide to any one page. "Juice" comes from off-page back links so that's not at issue here.
Don't bother moving it to the footer. It's probably worth revising and using only on the homepage but don't expect that to do amazing things for your rankings.
-
-
Hi Jake,
I'm going to do my best to answer this let me know if I am missing what you're saying.
1. In what way does my website benefit from the paragraph of text in the header? e.g at the domain level? Just the home page? etc etc
** It does not benefit from having a paragraph of text in the header unless that text is being used to describe the site to people looking at it in search engines.**
2. How does google assign 'juice' to the paragraph of text? (similiar to Q1).
Google does not assign juice the term "juice" is often used for links URLs link juice comes from a authoritative and relevant website linking to your website. It can also come from your own website linking to another relevant page internally.
3. How would my website be effected if I moved the text to the footer? (Aesthetic change)
If the text you're talking about is visible it would simply look like the current text in your footer. I would not recommend putting things in your footer unless you know what they are and why you are going to do it. Most information in the footer is not given as much authority as things found higher up in the page.
4. When I 'inspect element' on the paragraph, it is labelled 'div id=site description.' Can someone please explain the relevance of a sites description to SEO for me.
the code you gave me
'div id=site description.'
Is this CSS? not a meta description something that is important to the end-user so they can see what you're site is about when they're looking at it in Google's SERPs please see
http://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description
For the code you gave it looks like the CSS code for a part of your website that is your paragraph description I'm assuming? see http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/css-basics/
This paragraph of text was in the websites header before I came onboard, and I've been too concerned to change / move it as I don't know enough about it.
Welcome to Mountain Jade, New Zealand’s premium source of jade jewellery and greenstone jade art for sale. We work with leading New Zealand jade carvers to bring you traditional and contemporary Jade Jewellery art carved from New Zealand Pounamu and greenstone from around the world.
<a name="navmenu"></a>
move the text above anywhere you like. Remember if it is relevant and customers should be seeing it you will want to keep it visible therefore not in the footer.
My advice to you is add more text to your homepage it's very hard to understand what your company does as well as learn about it so one can purchase from it if you do that I believe it will help you quite a bit.
I hope I have not confused you as I want to be clear the welcome to the mountain text is on page or content text not the same thing as a meta-description however it is important to have text on your page without out it it is like people and Google want to play Pac-Man without anything to eat a.k.a. the text it's very hard to do.
If you wish to make the site better you may want to use WordPress that is what I would do. You can also download some high-quality free code
please check out
&
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
I hope this is helpful,
Thomas
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
-
SSL for SEO?
To obtain an SEO benefit from an SSL is there any particular type or brand which is recommended or has a track history? It seems you can pay anything between $20 and $???? (For that matter whatever you want to pay!). Any experience gratefully accepted! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Duplicate Content / Canonical Conundrum on E-Commerce Website
Hi all, I’m looking for some expert advice on use of canonicals to resolve duplicate content for an e-Commerce site. I’ve used a generic example to explain the problem (I do not really run a candy shop). SCENARIO I run a candy shop website that sells candy dispensers and the candy that goes in them. I sell about 5,000 different models of candy dispensers and 10,000 different types of candy. Much of the candy fits in more than one candy dispenser, and some candy dispensers fit exactly the same types of candy as others. To make things easy for customers who need to fill up their candy dispensers, I provide a “candy finder” tool on my website which takes them through three steps: 1. Pick your candy dispenser brand (e.g. Haribo) 2. Pick your candy dispenser type (e.g. soft candy or hard candy) 3. Pick your candy dispenser model (e.g. S4000-A) RESULT: The customer is then presented with a list of candy products that they can buy. on a URL like this: Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A All of these steps are presented as HTML pages with followable/indexable links. PROBLEM: There is a duplicate content issue with the results pages. This is because a lot of the candy dispensers fit exactly the same candy (e.g. S4000-A, S4000-B and S4000-C). This means that the content on these pages are the basically same because the same candy products are listed. I’ll call these the “duplicate dispensers” E.g. Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-A Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-B Candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-C The page titles/headings change based on the dispenser model, but that’s not enough for the pages to be deemed unique by Moz. I want to drive organic traffic searches for the dispenser model candy keywords, but with duplicate content like this I’m guessing this is holding me back from any of these dispenser pages ranking. SOLUTIONS 1. Write unique content for each of the duplicate dispenser pages: Manufacturers add or discontinue about 500 dispenser models each quarter and I don’t have the resources to keep on top of this content. I would also question the real value of this content to a user when it’s pretty obvious what the products on the page are. 2. Pick one duplicate dispenser to act as a rel=canonical and point all its duplicates at it. This doesn’t work as dispensers get discontinued so I run the risk of randomly losing my canonicals or them changing as models become unavailable. 3. Create a single page with all of the duplicate dispensers on, and canonical all of the individual duplicate pages to that page. e.g. Canonical: candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series Duplicates (which all point to canonical): candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=A candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=B candy-shop.com/haribo/soft-candy/S4000-Series?model=C PROPOSED SOLUTION Option 3. Anyone agree/disagree or have any other thoughts on how to solve this problem? Thanks for reading.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webmethod0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
We're currently not using schemas on our website. How important is it? And are websites across the globe using it?
Schemas looks like an important thing when it comes to structuring your website and ensuring the crawl bots get all the details. I've been reading a lot of articles around the web and most of them are saying that schemas are important but very few websites are using it. Why so? Are the schemas on schema.org there to stay or am I wasting my time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shreyans920 -
Is Using a Question, Answer Format Appropriate for a Blog? Is a 300 Word Micro Blog An SEO Plus?
My PR agency has suggested a question answer format be incorporated in my blog. They suggest a microblog with a single sentence question and an answer of about 300 words. My blog currently has about 35 posts. I would like to ramp up blog entries to about one or two per week of these "mini blog" posts. The format of the new blog begins as a question with the responses being paragraphs that do not use headings. My concerns are as follows: 1. No headings in an answer of 300 words will fail to provide Google with context regarding the content's meaning. Everything I have read about SEO suggests text be broken up in short sections and that it be divided by headings (preferably H2s). I very much like my agency's concept for a question answer format blog. It provides very practical info for visitors. How can I use it in a manner that supports SEO best practices? 2. According to a reputable SEO firm that has been assisting me, Google does not consider a blog post of less than 600 words to be superior quality. They told me that blog posts of 300 words, from an SEO purpose will not be a great helpful, that the content will not be rich enough to generate incoming links. Is this really the case? What if this abbreviated content is very well written and engaging? If so, is 300 words sufficient? From the visitor's perspective I am not sure they would have the patience to read 600 words when 300 words is more than than enough to answer these basic questions. From a PR perspective I think the shorter content in a question answer format is superior at least for my line of business (commercial real estate brokerage). 3. If 500-600 words is the minimum word count, and headings are necessary, what is the best way to execute a question and answer blog format? The purpose of this blog is to provide very useful info to my visitors while generating incoming links to that will boast my rankings. Thanks in advance for your feedback!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Local Listing Question
We will be starting local SEO efforts on a medical practice that has 4 locations & 15 doctors each location (so 60 listings total). I will submit each doctor & each location to InfoGroup, LocalEze, Axciom & Factual. Also, I will only submit each location (not doctors) to Google. The problem I'm seeing is the fact that each listing would have the same exact phone number - it all goes to one main routing center. What kind of problems could come of this? Do we need a separate phone numbers for each of the four locations (at the very least)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnWeb120 -
Anchor text questions - What are your thoughts?
Hi, I want to talk about anchor text and the effect it has on search engines (Good & Bad). Here is a fictitious example we can talk about: www.supercoolrunningsneakers.com Title Tag: Running Sneakers - The Super Trendy Running Trainers Keywords targeted: Running Sneakers, Running Trainers How would you vary your anchor text to target these terms? If you had 50 unique articles to play with how would you vary the anchor text using the articles? Would you push 25 articles at 'Running Sneakers' and the other 25 at 'Running Trainers' or would you link some articles using the domain name anchor text? Q: I'm guessing running 50 articles using anchor text 'Running Sneakers' would benefit the SERP's moe for that term then mixing it up with say 'Running Sneakers', 'Running Trainers' & 'Domain Name Links'. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
SEO Provider
At the risk of opening the flood gates, I'm posting this in hopes of finding a SEO provider on this site. I'm currently a member, and have learned a lot through this site, but I'm still having issues ranking higher. Because of this, I have come to the conclusion that I need a dedicated SEO company/professional who can help our company reach the next level. I'm open to suggestions of companies that you have used, or please feel free to throw your hat into the ring. Thanks in advance! AW
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheCTC0