Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Not a dumb question.  I had a lot of issues trying to find my way around this site when it first opened.

To some extent, still do.

Chris, if you can rank for up to 7 keywords on a page in a competitive space I might try to hire you someday.

Thanks Jesse.

Wait a minute.

I just googled, "lumber" with https://www.google.com/search?q=lumber&pws=0 showing.

It returned local results.

However, when I ran the keyword "lumber" through page wash, it returned non-localized results.

The search string that you provided was copied cleanly when I created the search engine.

However, the string I provided is missing a few characters.

What does this mean?

The keyword field was hosing it up.

I put the letter "g" in there and it took.

Excellent tip. Thanks Jesse.

Ha!  This is great.

I found it in settings, but when I add the information in the field as you suggest it doesn't save it.

It just bounces me out.  Am I missing a step?

Jesse, can you set Chrome to add this automatically to searches?

How, cuz I'd love a shortcut.

Thanks Chris.

That link returned a 404. I'll check out Dr. Pete's post as I need to get on the same page as the rest of you.

What does it mean to, "In my case first page organic result has been disappeared and merged with Google local places."

I'm not sure what you are asking.

Google places is like a directory. You are submitting your physical business to Google and then are verified as the owner.

This helps people looking for a local product or service ie "keyword + city and or state" find your business.  Google really likes providing reliable local search results for people.

If you're asking if a geo-targeted keyword can rank page 1 nationally when the searcher does not enter a city and or state with a keyword, then the answer is yes it can.

Depending on the domain/page authority of your site/page and the competitve nature of your keyword you can but it is more difficult because you are competing with everybody outside of your city/region/state.

We have a physical presence and rank geo-targeted keywords for non-geo targeted searches but in my experience the competition for those keywords is not very strong.

It's hard to say.

They may show up in MOZ.  It seems like MOZ shows the more authoritative links ahead of the others.

If I was in your position, I would look at GWT and take the domains and run them through Google and see how MOZ rates their domain and page authorities.

OSE does not produce as a robust/in-depth list of linking sites.

When I want to know what sites are linking to me, I look at GWT.

When I want to know the anchor text, domain/page authority etc of the links, I look at OSE.

Have you also checked incoming links in GWT?

Well, the school of hard knocks has been testing me quite well.

I don't know that I'd add too much to your experiment, but thanks for the invite.

I'll add also that some of our geo-targeted keywords rank well nationally when the competition is not relatively strong compared to other keywords.

"Is it possible that by including geographic terms like NYC and New York, that we are actually HURTING our rankings in other cities like Los Angeles and Chicago?   If we removed these words, could we see rankings increases in other parts of the world?"

If someone in Chicago or Los Angeles types in a mobile app keyword without entering a city in the search then you most likely will be pigeonholing yourself because Google is seeing your pages as authoritative in your geo-targeted location.

For pages we want to rank nationally - we exclude geo-targeting and only geo-target keywords we want to win in our local/regional market.

I've wondered and posted the same question here myself.

Last year at the time, feedback from reliable forum users was that there was no conclusive data to suggest that geo-targeting hurts national serp results for non-geotargeted keywords.

There are a lot of brick and mortar stores serving local and regional that would be hurt by this.

How do your domain and page authorities compare to those who are ranking well nationally?

How do I exclude what I presume to be bots from Analytics data?

For example, Microsoft Corp is showing 632 visits during the last month.

Pages per visit: 1. Visit duration: 0:00. New Visits: 100%.  Bounce rate: 100%.

I'd block the IP address with a filter but how do I determine the proper IP address to block?

Compelling post.

This is a nice problem to have.

Think of the blog page as a landing page and as Robert suggested, link to the product so they can buy.

I'm curious how the keywords differ for each page. Whatever is being done on the blog pages successfully - can you do similar things to product pages that are not being blogged?

Yes.

Your categories are very broad/general so have some good long tail keywords in your products to convert.

Considering the amount of categories you've got, you have plenty of room to move all those categories up to the top nav.

I don't see a need to push them down to two clicks when you can reach them in one.

As the amount of content grows you'll need to re-evaluate but right now you've got plenty of room to grow.

If he's got a clause like that in his contract, it may be indicative of broader issues looming. You may want to reconsider developers.

Here's an oh-by-the-way.

One of our manufacturer's came out with a product via slow roll literally within the last 5 days.  They have not announced the release of it to the retailers.  I happened to stumble on it visiting their site while updating products.

I did a search of the term and found I wasn't the only one unaware of it so I scrambled to add the product to the site, promote it and submit it to the index late Tuesday.

It's Thursday and its showing in SERPs.

Would it have appeared that quickly if I didn't submit it via fetch?  I don't know for sure but I'm inclined to think not. Call me superstitious.

Someone debunk the myth if you can. One less thing for me to do.

I submit every product and category I add.

Do I have to? No. Is it necessary? No - we have an xml sitemap generator. Google is like Big Brother - he will find you. Fetch is a tool that you can use or not use.

Will Google find it faster and will you show up more quickly in search results if you submit it? I don't know.

I think GWT explains it very well.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/158587?hl=en

I typically use it to submit new pages to the index although its probably not necessary if you have an xml sitemap. Not certain on that one.

More tech savvy folks probably use it to also check the crawlability and "health" of pages.

Thanks Sarah. Good luck!

Dennis is giving you a good one and I can make a recommendation for your SEO services if you wanna pm me.

You may be in need of a second opinion.

Interesting. So you were ranking well on a hosted platform.

Also, is your developer and SEO the same?

Just curious if you were getting input from both angles or the same direction.

Were you ranking well prior to the move?

Do you believe your site requires complete access to the template?

Why are they giving you that suggestion?  What is their reasoning?

If you're trying to keep your business alive, Magento may be pricey for you.

Have you looked at 3dCart?

The avatars are getting caught in the cloud.

Some platforms have a built-in 301 tool and all you have to do is upload the xml file with the proper redirects like so:

/source-category.htm/target-category.htm

Hi Sarah,

It depends. Can you purchase each product from that one page?

How do the keywords differ from the summary page vs the "would be" product pages?

The usability and common sense of it may depend on the answers to the above questions.

It may make the best sense to land on a branded summary page and link to individual products. Or not.

Hi Rahul,

If your slider if 800px wide and 400px tall for example, make your images and art the exact same size.

Downsizing a 1000px wide image to 800px wide will maintain crispness.

Upsizing a 600px wide image to 800px wide will blur it.

If your images and art are typically smaller than your slider, reduce the size of your slider to accommodate your content.

Plan B with a left nav color filter if you have it or are capable of implementing it.

In the first and last name fields I thought of entering the first half of the company name in one field and the second half of the company name in the last.

But then it wanted a photo so I left.

Maybe I should've snapped a quick pic of the employee of the month and put it there.

Why do about half of the business directories on getlisted.org want a personal profile when creating/claiming a business listing?

Why would a medium to large business need personal profile content on the listing?

Anyone know of good photography sites set up on Wordpress with an eCommerce plugin used for selling photos or services?

Just looking for ideas. I've found good referrals in the Moz archives for Wordpress eCommerce plugins.

Now I'm looking for WP photography sites employing eCommerce.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to dig in the page and give me some actionable feedback.

I appreciate it!

Thanks Mike. I'm looking into the issue on our forums at Convergent 7.

I don't want you to go out of your way. Just thought I'd ask in case you knew off-hand.

I don't have the developer/tech acumen.

Thank you Mike.

I follow you on everything except the tables. I'm assuming our CMS eCommerce software generates these tables automatically (Volusion).

Is there any way to strip those tables or will that foul the page displays across the site?

Hi Mozzers,

I can't rank (the page is nowhere on the Google grid that I can find) and I've not been able to move the needle at all on it.

The page is http://www.lumber2.com/Western-Saddle-Pads-s/98.htm for keyword "western saddle pads."

I'm inclined to think I'm cannabalizing the category with the products so I removed the word saddle from the majority of the product names on page.

However, saddle pad or saddle pads is in the meta title for most if not all of the products.

Do you think I'm cannabalizing with the product titles or is there something else going on?

Thanks for any help.

I wondered the same thing and probably could have emphasized the landing pages better.

Hi Todd,

Since we've got a brick n mortar store we're big on winning local first and competing nationally second. In general, here's what works for us in local (no particular order):

1. One website.

2. Name, address and phone number in the footer.

3. Local directory submissions.

4. Always use city and state in page title (and additionally sometimes in meta description and category/product page content).

5. Beefed up content on landing pages for the very competitive local categories and products.

We have a retail store and ecommerce performance is judged by the month, quarter year etc.

I focus on local long tail first followed by the short tail with goals of winning the 1-3 spot (lots of 1's) for both.

Then I want to win long tail national followed by short tail national (national meaning nationwide outside of our state).

Shorter tail (category) type keywords are difficult for us to rank for but we are gaining on it over time as our domain authority improves.

Link building is high on our agenda for 2013.

I've not heard of an SSL certificate being used as a ranking factor by Google. If that's true, I'd like to know more.

Your intent here is disingenuous. Secure socket layers are meant to provide users a layer of protection for whatever services they are using on the site.

Displaying a SSL seal without actually doing so is deceitful to users and should not be condoned.

If your site does not need an SSL, your SEO efforts should be focused elsewhere.