Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jos. I've not heard of the less than 15 keyword rule. SEOmoz research tools puts the sweet spot at four. We've found 2-5 instances produce good results depending on the volume of content, competitiveness of the keyword and our domain authority. For perspective, if we have dense above the fold content we keep it to four or less. If our content goes below the fold we'll work in one or two more instances for even distribution.

Hi Tim,

It sounds like you're using CMS. Our site is a CMS. The software provides an automated functionality, but we prefer more control over the products displayed.

So we use the software's functionality that allows us to manually enter the product codes that we want displayed.

If we want ultimate control, we enter the links to the products we want displayed.

There may be an add on that complies with your software. I may be wrong (for your sake I hope I am), but I have a feeling that if you use a CMS and you've asked your provider if they know of a good solution for this and they can't provide it, you're probably stuck doing it manually.

I understand. Good reminder.

A. Is there a correlation between domain authority and crawl penetration?

B. Is there a correlation between domain authority and juice distribution?

If something is popular, would it be at the bottom?

Hi Will,

Personally, I approach this from two perspectives: Usability and SEO.

Usability: I don't think I've ever clicked on a footer sitemap myself when looking for things on a website. If organic search does not take me to what I want, I do a bit more browsing with a last ditch effort using the keyword search box. If that doesn't work, I bounce back to my organic search results and try another site or refine my search.

Therefore, I removed the footer sitemap from our ecommerce site and created a left nav link to additional categories. The link is above the fold and I call it "Additional Categories." I am shocked at the volume of visitors who go to that page - far more than every visited our footer sitemap.

SEO: In my opinion, a sitemap moves links up to the second tier click level because they are buried too deep and don't get the juice. These pages need to be moved up perhaps because the link structure and hierarchy are not sound or maybe it is just too big of a challenge to flatten out all portions of a site.

Therefore, I flatten out and improve the link structure (or as sound as you can get). If there are categories that warrant indexing, but are not best sellers, I put them on the additional categories page. If some of the categories are 3 clicks (sometimes 4) and difficult to flatten out or fix, I put them in the additional categories page so people can see them and spiders can crawl them. Our site currently does not have the authority to force the juice to deeper penetration.

Nobody said it would tank a site nor was it asked if it would tank a site. Until the H1 goes by way of meta keywords, the use of it will have some relevance and in my opinion should be used properly.

Of 200 plus algorithm elements, there are undoubtedly plenty of others that are "not a big deal" but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use them correctly.

Whew, there sure has been a lot of time spent on something that's "not a big deal."

No, Google just beat the value out of the H1 to the point its on life support.

Sorry Egol, but if the innocents had no regard for SEO they wouldn't be putting a tag on it.

Hi Luke,

As you can tell, it touched a nerve. I was looking for the moz link to a thread regarding this same issue and Alan (one of the Gurus) said multiple H1's can affect engines differently and if I remember correctly he made reference to a negative response from Bing.

Until H1's achieve the lofty status of meta keywords, I will continue to treat them with some importance and approach them with best practice.

I'll listen for the rumbling coming from your direction.

Good luck.

Hi Bryan,

When keywords look similar as you indicate, use phrase and exact match with specific attention given to exact match.

I use broad match when I'm having trouble drumming up keywords.

Once I get a semblance of keywords as you've indicated, I resort to exact match to tell me what specific phrases generate the traffic.

A quick look at local exact matches tells me [piano movers atlanta] generates the most at 140 searches, followed by [atlanta piano movers] at 58 and [piano movers in atlanta] generating 0. However, [piano movers atlanta ga] brings back 22 results.

Ditto those who say use it. In addition, if you're a local retailer with some name recognition, you'll benefit from having your name back-branded in the title.

Remember world famous brands were not always world famous.

Hi Jennifer, If you're going to weigh in, you've got to bring more substance than a regurgitation of Rand's posts on the value of H1 and how SEO time is best spent. When my staff runs an SEOmoz on page optimization report and gets flagged for having 2 H1's on the page (which happened several times today), I didn't say, "Worrying about the H1's on the page is not that big of a deal." Nor did I say, "Make sure the site is crawlable and all those other high priority things." I described a bit of history of the H1, its purpose and best practice considering its value in optimization which is to say 1 is best, 2 is acceptable and more than 2 is not necessary nor is is best practice. I also added that if it wasn't of some importance, Rand certainly wouldn't have it as an element in his research tools. Having 18 H1's on a page doesn't seem excessive. It is what it is, which is asinine. That rumbling coming from down the hall is not thunder from above, but me having a visit with a developer and anyone else who thinks 18 H1's is acceptable or seemingly excessive.

I was doing real well until I read this: "Ive noticed the developer's used about 18 per page" Multiple H1's are one thing, but excessive, spammy, abusive, irrelevant H1's are another.

Why in the world is he even bothering with an H1 tag if he's got 18 of them? Ask him, "What are you telling the bots with your H1's - 18 different things or the same thing 18 different times?" No wonder the value of the tag has declined so much since its inception. That volume of H1's is what Cutt's is referring to in his 2009 video.

Our CMS site auto-generates a header H1 tag when enabling optimization for mCommerce. So, when I put an H1 on the page for categories and products, the page has multiple H1's. I'd like to have one but will live with 2.

Hi Brendan,

Our Google shopping feed has a higher than normal bounce rate (as compared to our general site traffic) as well.

I think a contributing factor is customer intent which in my opinion is largely price comparison/bargain hunting.

If the shopper knows what they are looking for they will check the price, make sure it is what they are looking for and either buy or bounce.

I'm doing two things to manage the bounce rate from the feed:

1. Identify the products that get a lot of traffic and but produce a high bounce rate and take it out of the feed. We have a large number of products on our site that are not shippable by conventional means so that factor contributes to bounce rate for us.

2. Put closely related and/or compelling product links or promotions on product pages to snag more click throughs.

The result of doing number 1 has had a positive affect in reducing bounce rate. I'm still working on number 2

Hi Josh,

Keeping in mind I don't know anything about wood counters and kitchen islands, I would make this observation about your title:

<title>walnut kitchen island with undermount sink and tung-oil wood seal(65)er | J. Aaron</title>

1. Too long. You've only got about 65 spaces for a title, then Google clips off the rest. I limit titles to 60 spaces or less.

2. You've got what appears to be 2 related keywords (which you could probably rank for on one page) and a 3rd unrelated keyword in "tung oil wood seal."

3. "Walnut Kitchen Island" looks like a good long tail keyword to me (kitchen island would be short while adding the walnut is a longer tail qualifier).

4. The longer the tail, the more you qualify the buyer.

5. I tighter title would be: "Walnut Kitchen Island with Undermount Sink by J. Aaron"

6. Depending on your site structure you might have a page with a variety of Walnut Kitchen Islands on it with a link to a separate page with an undermount sink (which is what this revised title would suggest).

6. "Tongue Oil Wood Seal" seems like it should be on a page about how to protect and maintain your countertops.

7. Putting your store's name or your name on the page title is fine and standard practice when brand building. Some put it on the back as you do, some on the front and some not at all. If there is room, I put our store's name on the title, if not I leave it off.

8. If you're optimizing for local business, its fine to put your city, state or combination in the title.

9. I've got our store name and street address in the footer so it shows on every page. For pages I really want to kick butt locally on, I put the city, state in the title, otherwise I leave it off and let the footer do the work.

Hi Joshua,

I would second the preceding replies and offer this: before you implement your page titles I would recommend three things:

1. Develop a better understanding of keyword research and the difference between broad, phrase and exact match as they relate to long vs short tail keywords.

2. Develop a better understanding of structuring your title with keywords. For example,"<title>Wood Countertops - Butcher Block Counters | by J. Aaron</title>" looks to me more like a breadcrumb than a homepage title. At face value, I would think that title would link to a page about Butcher Block Counters (which is a specific type of wood counter that would have its own page).

3. Wood countertops is a very broad short-tail term - probably very early in the buying cycle and very difficult to hit page 1. If you're a local wood countertop shop, I would optimize locally for immediate results while you build your domain authority so you can rank for these shorter tail terms.

Hi Guy. In terms of no-follow for page rank sculpting purposes, I've read the pros and cons of both and for me I've concluded I'd rather direct the juice where I want it to go rather than to block or prevent it from flowing where I don't want it to flow. No-follow can have unintended results, so I prefer the alternative.

Volume of categories and how to structure them is a challenge for a lot of ecommerce folks (me included). I've recently started flattening my site. While development of useful and intuitive sub-categories helps people find what they want on the 3rd or 4th click, crawl penetration suffers due to the depth. By flattening my site I mean reducing the number of sub-categories that can only be reached by other sub-categories - which is basically moving 3rd or 4th level categories up to the second level or top level (left nav).

A large and top ranking Toy Store I visit often to see how they structure their links has a top nav with categories, a left nav with categories and a sitemap in the footer. Each navigation entry has either different links in it or some different anchor text linking to the same pages. After much reading and apparent consensus among veteran users in this forum, I nixed the sitemap as unnecessary if I use good linking practice throughout the site. One Guru even suggested a sitemap can hurt your rankings if every page is linked to every other page with juice diminishing returns.

In my case, I created a left nav link to additional categories and put categories or sub-categories in them that were either: 1. Removed from the left nav because they were not important enough to be on the left nav 2. Removed from the left nav because on-page analytics suggested they didn't warrant being on the homepage. 3. Were a 3rd or 4th level category that on-page analytics showed there was enough demand to move its link to a second level or top level.

I hope this works for me and could of some help to you. Good luck.

Thanks Clint. I suppose subscribe was a poor word choice. We don't feed the products ourselves, we have a 3rd party handle it for us. We're currently feeding to Google and Bing. Even though we don't pay for those leads I don't want a bump in bounce rate. You confirmed my thoughts. I appreciate the input.

We subscribe to a product feed and have been very pleased with the results.

However, one of the unanticipated results is a trending increase in our site bounce rate. Should we be concerned about this 3-10% increase in bounce rate trend. It may go higher.

Of all the factors that can contribute to bounce rate, one of the factors is that we have a lot of products on the site that cannot be shipped out of state or shipped at all. These products can only be delivered in-state or picked up at our store.

The Analytics data suggests that feed products typically have a higher bounce rate, lower ctr, lower time on page, lower time on site etc. than products found by other means. However, the product feed generates sales.

Should I take these products off the feed that have a high bounce rate and are not "shipable"? Although they may land on feed product, they may click through to a shipable product.

Our feed provider says of the bounce rate is typically not something a lot of other merchants worry about. I'm not certain, but I'm inclined to disagree. What are your thoughts and experiences with this?

Thanks for the help.

Are your keywords not high volume because they are not necessarily optimum keywords for your site or are they long tail keywords that are more specific and therefore do not generate as much traffic as short tail keywords?

I don't mind generating less traffic if I'm getting good conversion rates.

Also, are you missing out on traffic because you've not optimized for local search?

If there's only 1,000 searches a month because your keywords suck, then you need to do better keyword research.

However, if your keywords are longer tail relevant keywords, then stick with them, just generate more of them.

I'd also consider the purpose of analyzing links. When I look at a competitors links, I look at the volume of linking domains, then I look at the kind and quality of the domains.

If I'm wondering why a competitor is kicking my butt, I don't care about the quantity of links as much as the quality of links.  I'll look through the links in the profile and pick out the links I think I can benefit from and pursue a link acquisition.

If you're only interested in face value information, the number of linking domains is most important.

If you're a manufacturer that sells products, I'm not going to link to you no matter how good your content and how many bells and whistles you've got for promotions. However, if you don't sell products and you've got better content than I can provide on my site, I will link to you. I link to manufacturer sites when they have authoritative information that is beyond the scope of information I provide. For example, flame resistant clothing or fire rating information. If I want to cover my bases (ass) and make sure the customer has access to deep level information that is beyond the scope of what is necessary for a purchase I will link to it on a case by case basis.

You've heard from two of the most knowledgeable and good men in Pro. One of the things I like most about this membership is not only the knowledge shared, but the character of the people who share.

My takeaway is this: keep doing what is best practice. Keep doing what is best in principle.

Along my journey I spent 11 years in the television news business. One evening during a news meeting one of the senior anchors said we need to spend less time worrying about what the other guy is doing and spend more time worrying about  what we are doing.

Do your research. Do your competitive analysis. Do best practice. Do what is best in principle and you'll have success.

Hi Cody. I just got in on the tail end of this. I'd also put keywords in the file name. Check out a previous thread on this.

Sure. Here's a great link.

For local and some national products I like to back brand on the title tag:

Best Green Widgets - Widget Company XYZ

Greatness is in the eye of the beholder, but I'd start with an SEOmoz site search with the term branding.

Hi Marisa. That's good news. Keep in mind that it is not uncommon that you get an initial bounce with optimization. Keep an eye on the ranking as it may fluctuate and eventually settle after a few crawls to consistent rank.

Agreed on the silo groupings (neighborhoods). I've got some retooling to do. Thanks for that.

Its interesting on the sitemap deal. Some pro's recommend it always. Some don't like them at all. Now you're commonly seeing product indexes and category indexes.

I'm inclined to get rid of it (I'm just afraid my site was not set up optimally so I'm retooling there as well).

Thanks Brent. Here's a product page and here is our sitemap in the footer.

What's worse is paying a lot and getting nothing.

Here's a good quick reference for understanding the difference between broad, phrase and exact matches.

We've got about 1,700 products and 6,600 pages on our site. I recently finished up adding similar product links and popular category links to our product and category pages in an effort to juice up the pages that sell and make us money.

I also added a category html sitemap in the footer.

A couple of the targeted category rankings are moving down.

Am I possible accruing a penalty for overusing anchor text?

Is this internal linking strategy poor form?

Thanks.

I'll add one more thing that I forgot to mention.  How low do you go on competitive keywords? It's a rather arbitrary number, but I've heard it recommended that you should look for longer tail phrases that return a minimum of 500 searches a month and maximum of 10,000. If you have a lot of products that don't generate more than 500 exact phrase searches a month, you can only go with the best returns available.

Good morning Shara. Here's some observations and final thoughts:

I did a quick comparison look at both variations of keywords. The broadmatch of the terms is the same at 1,000 local searches a month each with a cpc average of .84 and .85 respectively. This data is not very helpful in that the broadmatch results suggests Google is seeing the phrase similarly (semantically) and does not help you make a wise decision.

"Preppy Monogrammed Gifts" phrase match returns 880 monthly results a month with an average cost off .88 a click. Better information for you, but better yet lets look at exact match results.

Finally, the exact match results for Preppy Monogrammed Gifts come back with 720 results a month with an average .92 a click. Exact match for Monogrammed Preppy Gifts returns only 12 results a month at .54 a click.

You could also put this information in the AdWords traffic estimator for more cost/benefit analysis but for the sake of time we'll go with results from Keywords.

I would interpret this data and optimize for the Preppy Monogrammed Gifts as it has a sizable (but more competitive) reach. The competition drops off so much for monogrammed preppy gifts, you have to ask if it is worth the time and effort considering your ROI could be so low because of the low volume. Once you optimize for Preppy Monogrammed Gifts you will probably rank well for the alternate phrase anyway because they are so close semantically and Google recognizes that.

Finally, when looking at Keyword results, I make decisions based on "phrase" and [exact match] with exact match having the most influence driving my decisions.

Wow, Shara. WAY TOO MANY keywords for any page. I'm concerned for you as it violates the most basic principles of SEO. You might consider this:

1. Spend time in Google Webmaster tools and glean all you can from its SEO instruction.

2. Spend time in the learning center here at SEOmoz.

3. Narrow optimization to the most relevent keywords by user intent, traffic volume and cost/benefit.

4. Understand principle of keyword cannabilization.

5. Understand principle of duplicate content.

6. Title tags are limited to 60-70 characters. Its a challenge for all of us to use that space as wisely as possible in conjunction with our on-page optimization. You've only got space in the title tag to optimize for 1-2 maybe three keywords depending on how long the phrase.

7. Typically, organic search results for an ecommerce site will land on category and product pages.

8. Category pages are typically made up of shorter tail 1-2 keyword phrases (preppy gifts or monogrammed preppy gifts).

9. Product pages are typically longer tail 3-4 (personalized dry erase board).

10. Good luck!

Here's a dated thread (2009) from Rand.

And another from a daily blog a few days ago.

Rand's blog #2 is what concerns me.

Take this page for example (Alan, hold your breath this is a CMS site). The intent is to channel the juice to those pages.

Every page on our site has a similar link strategy. I've tried to link according to the product "neighborhood" or to similar/related pages. The only exception is the link to our western horse tack page. I've tried to link to the western tack page from just about every other product and category page.

The result is a sizable increase in page authority, but just recently the page rank has dropped significantly.

My understanding from other threads is that a person can "stuff" anchor text and accrue a penalty for it.

Alan, is your article suggesting an html sitemap is not necessary if I'm conducting targeted linking on product and category pages?

I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site.

Per Rand and other training, we added related product links and popular category links to our product and category pages. At the time, we did not have an html sitemap in the footer.

We're a small to medium sized site with 1,700+ products. We have since added an html sitemap of our categories to our footer.

Now we have category links in the sitemap and category pages and product pages with targeted anchor text.

I'm beginning to see downward movement on some of those targeted categories.

If I have an html sitemap in the footer (category index) should I get rid of the popular category links throughout the rest of the site?

Also, with more frequency, I'm seeing a "product index" and "category index" in footers. Is this a best practice?

Thanks.

Thanks Dr. M. We are like a Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Target and Feed Store rolled into one and we rank well locally across the categories.

I'm inclined to believe you are correct in that signalling city keywords would not automatically or significantly diminish ranking outside the city.

However, considering the input from others, specifically the volume of search as found in Google Insights/AdWords etc. and the length of the title and how it affects the other keywords, I'm inclined to think I should take the local tag off of those products that don't need to be sold locally - and we can identify those pretty easily.

Would others agree? Thumbs up if I should take it off or thumbs down if I should leave it as it could only help and not hurt.

This thread still says answered and now its buried in the forum. I think we're done.

I'm still very curious about something more definitive on this before removing the local tags from national products.

Same thing happened to Zuckerberg.....

Thanks to the both of you for the excellent feedback. There's a lot of strong suggestions here to dig into. Off I go!

P.S. Robert, if there's an app or something for texting address and phone numbers with a click, please share.

See ya on the threads.

Will do. Thanks Miriam.

Is there any way to quantify how an eCommerce site affects its respective brick and mortar store? I can show the owner of a brick and mortar store how much sales we did last week, month and year. However, I can't show him what it did for his brick and mortar store. What do I do? I want to claim credit for as much gravy as I can! Thanks.

Hi Miriam,

Is there any way to make this thread active again? Somehow it got answered - perhaps when you put a staff approval on Nick's response? I didn't tag it as answered as I'd like more input from others if possible.

As to your question(s):

We sell a lot  of products such as barn kits, lumber, timbers, fencing, hay, etc. that customers can pick up at the store or we can deliver within our state with our own delivery trucks. These products are primarily for in city/state customers that cannot be shipped via traditional carriers such as UPS.

When we got the site off the ground, I optimized those in-state "non-shippable" products with an Oklahoma City, Oklahoma tag in the title for a couple of reasons:

1. so local customers within the state will find it and buy it and

2. in order to get money rolling in rather quickly and it did (local optimization will do that).

As the site grew, I only put local tags on those products that were not shippable and took the local tag off the products we could ship out of state via commercial carriers (UPS, Post Office etc.).

Suggestions were made I should optimize locally for even more products (our horse tack for example). We live in a state called the "Quarter Horse Capital of the World" with lots of equine events, rodeos, Cowboy Hall of Fame etc. So I put local tags on all of our horse tack.

Thinking it wouldn't hurt anything, I put local tags on all of our products so anyone in Oklahoma looking for our products will find them. Whether there are 100 searches a month in Oklahoma for our term, or only 1- at least we'll rank for it.

Again, we rank very well locally for the vast majority of our terms. I'm just now beginning to wonder if this approach could backfire in any way regarding reach outside of our state.

We sell to people all over the US, so I'm inclined to think we're okay, but I'm not certain.

As we grow in authority and can rank for more keywords, I thought we could rein in the local tags and remove them as we won't need the localization as much since we'll rank better nationally with a more authoritative domain.

Is this a flawed approach?

Is localized optimization compromising our reach?

Does Google attribute less relevance to our titles for keyword queries that do not contain our city and state and therefor move others ahead of us?

Thank you.

Miriam, this is going to take some time so I will have to pick this up at home. In the meantime, feel free visit our store.

Thanks.

I'm a bit confused now. My question is: if "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state?

If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours?"

Nakul, what are you saying?

Hi Nakul,

Yes - the whole address is in the footer

Roughly 1,700 products (not sure how many pages that is)

The majority (probably not all) have the city/state target in the title

As far as Geo data is concerned, if I understand you correctly, Analytics Sources organic search and search engine optimization  queries show keywords with and without the city and or state. The overwhelming majority of keywords shown with city or state include the store's name. This store has been here 20 years.

I submitted to Dmoz but I can't find us on it.

Thanks Nicholas. Sorry, I'm not familiar with the x-pack. What is that - the top 7 or so local listings that appear before the organic search results?

Also, when doing keyword research, should I include the city/state in the keyword?

Should this keyword search be done in AdWords or somewhere else such as Google Insights?

Sorry for the barrage of questions.

I use our city/state in the majority of our title tags and consequently we do very well locallly for the majority of terms on our ecommerce site.

I'm wondering however, if this "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state?

If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours?

The city/state is last in the string on the title:

Blue Widgets - Our Company in City, State

Thanks for any insight.