Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Keeping in line with EGOL's linking building apologetics, we are trying to beef up our content to add relevant benefit to our ecommerce products. Specifically, we are adding new textual content where we can and videos to categories and product pages. How many Rand videos, white board videos and  Matt Cutts videos have you watched? In the preceding Matt Cutts article, Joe Brockmeier writes: "So if you're planning that 2012 site budget, you might want to think twice about hiring that SEO expert and find a content expert instead." Videos can be a valuable content tool.

Ecommerce lends itself to selling a lot of the the same products as other folks on the web with the same product information from the manufacturers. So, where do you come up with fresh and unique content?

Informative videos may help with that, so we are going to give it a try and see how it goes with attracting beneficial links.

Hi Johann. Excellent question and a source of dispute for some people. I've not done it, but many people who want to no-index a large volume of pages will create a directory and put those files in the directory and then put a robots.txt on the directory.

Some people would argue why you would want to put a bunch pages (product pages on an ecommerce site) in a no-index file as they will not be seen/shared/sold etc. Well, my response to that would be to prevent juice dillution on pages of little SEO value and help keep the juice directed at the 20-30% of the products that are making you the most money.

I'm curious what others have to say about this and hope people weigh in on it.

Hi Diane. This is timely, we just finished up rendering a bunch of our images to improve page speed.

I'll also throw this in there. Sometimes you won't be able to reduce a file size sufficiently by "save for web devices." When this happens, you can open Bridge in Photoshop and use Photoshop's image processor to render it to a smaller size and then save it for the web.

From Bridge, select the file (or files - you can do it in bulk). Go to tools>photoshop>image processor. From there you can select three ways to save it (jpeg, psd or tiff). If jpeg is acceptable for your situation, select jpeg and choose to render it to low, medium or high.

We were able to render them to 1 or 2 (low) without the image becoming too lossy. Then you can open up the image and "save as web devices" and reduce the file size to a more acceptable size.

Keep an eye on the quality of the image as you go through the steps. I'll trade off some speed for quality appearance.

Be careful when processing files in bulk. You may have ten images and 3 of them won't be able to be rendered down as low as the others and you'll spend time re-doing things.

Good luck!

How about creating some content that is unique, informative, relevant, timely and worthy of linking to.

I go with whatever format provides the cleanest appearance in the smallest file size.

If you shoot the image - shoot the image in the best quality at the lowest file size. I shoot with a professional grade Canon camera in a medium file size which produces a 2mb file. I can render it down from there.

If you have no control over the original file, create a new file in Photoshop at 72 to 100dpi. You won't need to go over 100 dpi on the file as you prepare it. If the image you are working with is poor keep the file at 100dpi while you work with it. If it is a clean and crisp image you can work with it in 72dpi.

Once you have your image ready to save for the web, click "save for web devices". Then, you can choose how you want to save it. For instance, JPEG will allow you to save it at maximum to very high to low. You can watch the file size change as you move from jpeg to gif to png in the lower left corner of the page. We try to keep all of our images at about 10k to 15k. Watch the quality of your image as you render it to different sizes. If your website allows users to enlarge an image for details, you will not want to render the file so small that it compromises the crispness and clarity of the image.

Keep in mind that naming your file is important for SEO purposes. Don't just give your image a generic combination of letters and numbers, but work your keyword into the name of the file. For example, don't load the file to your site as ABC Blue, but rather Carhartt S209 Blue.

I may have overlooked something - but wasn't the experiment referring to external anchor text?

Hi Erica. I checked that out as well as Cyrus' video. I'm curious if exact match for internal and partial match for external is best practice for an ecommerce site.

Thanks EGOL. Your thoughts on partial match for external links to ecommerce sites?

Do you have a link or two you'd like to share for these outfits so others can do some snooping?

When linking internally on an ecommerce site between pages and from a sitemap, is partial or exact match on the anchor text a significant factor?

If it matters to Google, which is a better practice to use? I found plenty of info on external links, but precious little on internal links (which suggests it doesn't matter enough to worry about).

Hi Activity. Your question is interesting in that the two search terms you presented suggest two different types of business - or perhaps one business offering two types of service.

"Flowers delivered" suggests search results would produce florists specializing in delivery (who knows some of these businesses may not even take walk-in business). "Flowers by post" obviously suggests this business would mail them to you before they wilt and turn brown.

Alan's keyword "florist London" suggests to me I would find a florist in London that I could walk or drive to and buy some flowers on the way home from work.

Perhaps the first question is not whether you can conquer the giants, but what is the business model you or your client intend to pursue?

Once you've identified what kind of business you intend to run, do your keyword research for your niche/approach and build it from there. Giants were babies once too.

Unless a person has a boatload of cash to spend on PPC, then felling the giants or taking some of their business will be challenging in the timeframe you suggest.

Include in your research a little work in Google Insights after you've identified your business model. You may get some good keyword ideas for localizing your SEO at startup.

Finally, check out this thread on creating the perfect website: http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-list-for-creating-the-perfect-website.

Yes Jesse, please keep us posted on significant rank changes. To my (and others) chagrin, I use a CMS that produces some pollution. Don't know if I could do house cleaning on it even if I wanted to, but I'm definitely interested in the measurable impact.

Interesting Ressler. I'll use the AdWords Ad preview and diagnosis tool to check rankings. Does that approach not provide "clean" results?

Not everyone codes for different reasons. Dummies use html editors for dummies, so put me in that group. We use a CMS and have plenty of page 1 ranks. Sorry, but me and my kids don't live in an ideal world.

If it is a local ecommerce site (doing primary business in metro/state), local SEO is critical at startup. It is a good way to generate sales quickly while you build links/page authority/domain authority for broader more competitive keywords.

Relevant or not, its the first time I've heard of putting an H1 tag in the footer. Perhaps calling it an F1 tag would be more appropriate. Seriously, some would argue the H1 tag has little to no relevance (Rand would probably fall into this category) and therefore some do not use it at all. Todd Malicoat would suggest the H1 tag has some relevance and is a good practice for page structure and keyword instance.

A recent thread among these posts and one I ascribe to is that failing to use an H1 tag is probably not going to hurt you, but using one is certainly not going to hurt you. If it is going to be of benefit to the user in terms of readability and navigation (with an arguable smidgeon of G benefit) go ahead and use it.

That being said, strong keyword copy in the lower block level is good block level distribution. Putting an H1 tag would be irrelevant in my opinion and unorthodox as H1 tags historically have been in the top block.

I'm listing categories and sub-categories in it. If I wanted to create another page, what is the best practice for doing that?

That portion of the blog looks fishier than Rock's avatar. Just the idea of word limitations smacks of inviting SEO's to pad content with irrelevant hooey. I am curious to see if the author can come up with some legit attribution.

I'm working on an html sitemap for our ecommerce site and want to limit the links on each page to less than 100. I've created an article for the initial page, but what is the proper way to go to the next page?

Do I create another article page (and so on and so on) until I have the sitemap completed? If so, how do I link from one page to the next?

Would my on page text read: "sitemap continued" with anchor text on the link "sitemap page 2.."?

It seems like all the sitemaps I've seen just fill one page with links and very little regard for "link saturation" and continuous pages.

Thanks!

Thanks again Back Burner. Have a great holiday season!

Hi Back Burner,

Thank you for the feedback. Excellent! I have a couple of questions. I understand the deep links that did not get crawled, but what do you mean when speaking of "not as much domain diversity among smaller sites?"

Also, do you think the disparity between linking domains and the number of links is affecting the rank?

Unfortunately, our page 1 competition typically have a minimum DA rank of 30 points at a minimum, so using this barometer suggests I'm not doing something well at the domain level correct?

Thanks again for the help! I need it!

Greetings,

I am new to the community and am checking out Pro. The domain authority for two of our sites www.lumber2.com and www.americasworkclothes.com has dropped 10 points each respectively.

I've worked on getting our lumber 2 site on registries from getlisted.org (i think there are 5 or 6 of them).

Our page authority has improved significantly along with mosrank and moztrust. However, at the same time our domain authorities just tanked 10 points each. Since each site dropped 10 points, I'm wondering if its the ros links affecting them. Here's the domain data:

Lumber 2 site: DA 21: 50,489 links from 12 domains
America's Work Clothes: DA 20: 33,839 links from 5 domains

We have left nav run of site links between our two sites and have had them in place for a couple of years with steady domain authority progression. Suddenly DA tanked. Is there a chance there is too much run of site linking? I already removed a few links, so you won't see all of them.

Can anyone help?

Thank you. Steve