Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi John,

Agree - sounds very messy!

With regard to any 'ranking drop' I really wouldn't worry about this either. I had the same concerns a few weeks ago when I redirected my entire website (an old keyword loaded domain to acornseo.com).

I did a quick audit of the site using Screaming Frog to get all the links, then 301'd each one individually to the new location. The process was very easy, the time it takes depends on the number of pages your website has.

Looking at the Google results after I made the change, I could see my new links appearing in the results, just below the old ones. After a few days the old ones had disappeared and the new acornseo.com links replaced them completely - in effect I had zero ranking downtime, and haven't seen any loss of position since the change over.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi John,

Using the 'wordpress' name isn't ideal, and I would agree you could make it more user-friendly. Depending on what is actually in the subfolder, a standard 301 redirect from 'wordpress' to 'blog' should do the trick.

However, you could also consider moving the 'wordpress' folder to the root domain and getting rid of the javascript redirect. Then you have the website on the root. Moving Wordpress instances from one directory to another is relatively painless - get back to me if you need advice on that front.

Hope that helps,

Cheers

Andrew

Hi Shiva,

Google has said publicly that a less than perfect site from a SEO perspective doesn't mean you won't rank well. However I don't think onpage SEO is dead, certain elements have a lot less importance, but it isn't dead.

A technically sound foundation on which to build all your future marketing efforts is important in my opinion. On their own, individual onpage factors (such as bold tags you mention) will have very little measurable impact on your bottom line. You shouldn't be using your time to measure these points in isolation, you could knock up a 500 word article in that time

However, having pages with keyword researched content, relevant title tags, crawlable navigation elements, good internal linking and social integration shouldn't be ignored on a site wide level. Especially if you are working on large sites with people adding new content regularly, having this platform/education inplace for onpage SEO gives you a lot of 'easy wins' which often get missed by the competition.

Focus on good structured markup, loadtimes, and well written, keyword researched content aimed at your market.

Hope that helps,

Cheers

Andrew

HI Ankit,

Adding a S as you mentioned will produce different results and thus different competition for your SEO campaign. So, if you want to rank higher for 'custom case' create content about a 'custom case' and build links with that anchor text.

In your example, 'custom case' based on the Google Keyword Tool gets 720 searches, whereas 'custom cases' gets 1600.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi KS,

A few more comments for you below.

Does that mean I have got a backlink already?

Once the comment has been approved by the moderator you should have a live link. You can check if it is do follow by using a firexfox plugin such as SEOBook or SEOQuake.

Or do I need to do something else too to make sure Google recognizes that as a backlink?

Not normally. As you mentioned the blogs are already high PR, the search engines shouldn't have any problem finding your links. If the blog is Wordpress, then the webmaster may have already setup a list of pinging sites so the site should be crawled often. That said, if you are concerned that Google hasn't found the link, just follow my advice previously regarding pinging the blog you have commented on.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Just to add onto Casey's thoughts, personally, if the blog comments are informative and add value, they can be a great way to build relationships with the webmaster and readers of the blog. Generally the blog comments will have nofollow tags applied to them, but nofollow or not, focus on building the relationship and you will be rewarded in other ways than just a dofollow link.

Helping a small PR1 blog out now could bring you a lot of future benefit. The same applies to forums. Spend time adding comments and helping out where I can, and you will start to see a steady stream of traffic and increased brand awareness.

This is difficult for consultants to do for clients. Try to educate them into understanding although they are paying you for 'SEO', they know the business best and should be taking an active roll in contributing to sites within their niche. Give them pointers on what to say and how to say it. Get them into the routine of adding a forum/blog comment each day in the mornings after they check their email.

Chasing high PR blog comment links still work to some degree, but are the search algo techniques of the past.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi KS,

First thing to check - make sure you are using the 'exact match' option over on the left with the Adwords tool, a common oversight is leaving the default (broad) checked. That should help delivery a little more accuracy. However...

Which of these should I trust more?

Neither! You should take your keyword list and run a small paid Google Adword campaign to get a handle on the real search volume.

When you setup the campaign, ensure the content network is turned off under 'Network and Devices' and you use exact match options on your keywords.

Also, give a generous 'Max CPC' to ensure your ads display, and you link to a high quality landing page in the ad so it displays on the first page and you avoid harming your quality score.

Run the campaign for at least 48hours, and then view the number of impressions served. Impressions show how often the ad is displayed - and as you are using exact match keywords, this number is also the amount of times the phrase is searched.

A much more accurate method to get a handle on the search volume.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Not really a "Q&A", but here are a few more:

• Enter "Google Gravity" in the search bar and hit "I'm feeling lucky"
• Enter "askew" in the search bar

http://mashable.com/2011/11/03/google-easter-eggs-2/#33105Gravity

Hi propertyshark,

Local links, from relevant sources, will have a positive impact on your country specific rankings. For example the local chamber of commerce, local business directories and other citation sources are all good sources for country specific links.

The same goes for non English languages - a German website getting links from .de domains, hosted in Germany, is a good indicator to the search engines the website is a local authority.

Putting aside the direct SEO gains, the business benefits also shouldn't be ignored as you will receive more targeted traffic and potential leads to your website.

That said, it is always worth getting international links as part of your link building campaign. A diverse link portfolio is key to riding out future search engine algo changes. Diversify!

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi OT SEO,

Please provide the URL, it should be obvious from the code for one of us to see which CMS you are using.

Cheers

Andrew

Firstly, I don't know what 'pinging' is and why is it important.

Pinging will notify the search engines of a 'change' to the URL you are submitting.  A lot of the 'lower quality' links often struggle to get found and indexed, so pinging is often used to help get them noticed. If you have authoritative, genuine links, then you needn't ping - the chances are the search engines will find them.

Secondly, Should I go for it?

Pinging links manually one at a time is time consuming, and the time could be better spent elsewhere. That said, you can use a service like http://links2rss.com/ to paste 50 links into a single RSS feed, and then use your pinging service to ping the single RSS feed. This is bordering on the grey hat side of things - so I might get a few thumbs down, but its quite a common practice.

Lastly, what kind of links should I ping regularly?

Low quality links which the search engines might struggle to find - blog comments, forums, articles etc. Although you should be placing less emphasis on acquiring these links as they become less and less beneficial for rankings.

I researched on google and got a feeling that only blogs should be pinged because they are updated regularly. Is that so?

No. Although blog pinging is common (Wordpress has a section to paste a list of ping sites) and good practice, you can ping any website, link or blog.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Andrew

Hi Max,

It is difficult to comment without seeing your website.

However, if you are constantly loosing rankings with every search engine update you could have low quality content or have grey/black hat link building techniques happening offsite.

These types of techniques are short lived, the search engines smart, and will result in inconsistent rankings.

BTW - I'm not implying you have a junk site. Address your content (there are plenty of good articles in the SEOMoz Blog here) and secure some quality links to ride out future algo changes.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

HI Richard,

While it is commonly regarded that a keyword loaded URL is a ranking signal and beneficial to rankings, you would really want your full keyword target 'food truck franchise' in the URL to get the full benefit you are referring to.

That said, Google is placing stronger focus on 'brands', and the leading SEO's feel keyword loaded domains will hold less value over the coming months/years.

Looking at your website, 'Food truck' on its own is quite generic and will generate a lot of irrelevant traffic even if you did rank well with it. I would focus your efforts on 'offsite' SEO and link building related to people looking for franchise/new business opportunities via blogs, guest posting, local business forums, startup/entrepreneurial forums etc etc for your 'food truck/business franchise' related keywords.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Not really a "Q&A", but here are a few more:

• Enter "Google Gravity" in the search bar and hit "I'm feeling lucky"
• Enter "askew" in the search bar

http://mashable.com/2011/11/03/google-easter-eggs-2/#33105Gravity

Hi KS,

First thing to check - make sure you are using the 'exact match' option over on the left with the Adwords tool, a common oversight is leaving the default (broad) checked. That should help delivery a little more accuracy. However...

Which of these should I trust more?

Neither! You should take your keyword list and run a small paid Google Adword campaign to get a handle on the real search volume.

When you setup the campaign, ensure the content network is turned off under 'Network and Devices' and you use exact match options on your keywords.

Also, give a generous 'Max CPC' to ensure your ads display, and you link to a high quality landing page in the ad so it displays on the first page and you avoid harming your quality score.

Run the campaign for at least 48hours, and then view the number of impressions served. Impressions show how often the ad is displayed - and as you are using exact match keywords, this number is also the amount of times the phrase is searched.

A much more accurate method to get a handle on the search volume.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi again OT SEO,

FCK Editor isn't a CMS. However, 'CK Editor' looks like it incorporates editing functionality by dropping in a plugin of some sort.

I've just found this:
http://ckeditor.com/integrations

Which shows it supports Sharepoint, Joomla and Drupal CMS - so it would indicate you have one of these. If you can post your URL (PM if you wish) I will check for you.

Otherwise, here are links for each CMS listed on CKEditor explaining how to add Meta data, your original request:

Joomla:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ZcYDEjYbs

Drupal (looks like there are some workarounds until a new update):
http://drupal.org/node/1039440

Sharepoint:
http://sharepointyankee.com/2011/03/24/description-meta-tag-in-sharepoint-publishing-pages/

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

HI Ankit,

Adding a S as you mentioned will produce different results and thus different competition for your SEO campaign. So, if you want to rank higher for 'custom case' create content about a 'custom case' and build links with that anchor text.

In your example, 'custom case' based on the Google Keyword Tool gets 720 searches, whereas 'custom cases' gets 1600.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi John,

Agree - sounds very messy!

With regard to any 'ranking drop' I really wouldn't worry about this either. I had the same concerns a few weeks ago when I redirected my entire website (an old keyword loaded domain to acornseo.com).

I did a quick audit of the site using Screaming Frog to get all the links, then 301'd each one individually to the new location. The process was very easy, the time it takes depends on the number of pages your website has.

Looking at the Google results after I made the change, I could see my new links appearing in the results, just below the old ones. After a few days the old ones had disappeared and the new acornseo.com links replaced them completely - in effect I had zero ranking downtime, and haven't seen any loss of position since the change over.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew

Hi Shiva,

Google has said publicly that a less than perfect site from a SEO perspective doesn't mean you won't rank well. However I don't think onpage SEO is dead, certain elements have a lot less importance, but it isn't dead.

A technically sound foundation on which to build all your future marketing efforts is important in my opinion. On their own, individual onpage factors (such as bold tags you mention) will have very little measurable impact on your bottom line. You shouldn't be using your time to measure these points in isolation, you could knock up a 500 word article in that time

However, having pages with keyword researched content, relevant title tags, crawlable navigation elements, good internal linking and social integration shouldn't be ignored on a site wide level. Especially if you are working on large sites with people adding new content regularly, having this platform/education inplace for onpage SEO gives you a lot of 'easy wins' which often get missed by the competition.

Focus on good structured markup, loadtimes, and well written, keyword researched content aimed at your market.

Hope that helps,

Cheers

Andrew

Hi GreatFire,

Your competitor has a much stronger site in the following two main areas:

• More backlinks (resulting in a higher PR)
• More social mentions

Focus on building more backlinks by researching your competitors domain with Open Site Explorer and MajesticSEO. Keep up your activity in your social circles, and also get going with Google+ if you haven't already.

You should also fix your title tag to include the target keyword at the start - not at the end. So it would read something like 'Great firewall of china - bringing transparency from greatfire.org'

Looking through your site you don't appear to have that much content (this was also mentioned in your Google Support thread) so I would focus on building out the content on the homepage and also further developing your blog. For example your 'Wukan Blocked only on Weibo' blog post is not really long enough to generate you much referral traffic. Larger authority articles of 1000+ words plus with richer content (link references, pictures, Google+ author/social connections) etc will help you far more.

Conduct the relevant keyword research for your blog posts in the same way you did with your root domain. This will keep your website niche focused and generating lots of similar 'china firewall' terms.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Andrew