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I hope this one isn't too obvious a question to ask, as I'm sure it's been asked before. However -
I'm considering a new site which would be focussed entirely on a UK market. US and other world traffic would be effectively useless.
Using social media and standard linkbuilding techniques, how do I focus my efforts on the UK market? Getting links from .co.uk, I guess - what else? Or is it just "SEO generally and some of it'll be for the UK"?
Thanks, that's very interesting.
One question - if most of the incoming searches use the version number in the search term ("blue widget guide 3.0") would you still advise just changing the title? Obviously the URL will still have the old version number in it.
Hm. Right, I think I have another suggested solution of sorts - it's tricksy and you'd need an expert to set it up, but it'd solve your problems.
In short, if you run a reverse proxy serving your site itself on a server which ISN'T your BigCommerce server, you can tell it to fetch your main site for your www.yourdomain.com URL, and your blog (live, not cached) for www.yourdomain.com/blog. Probably your best option would be to use a reverse proxy like Varnish or Nginx, both of which are normally used for performance reasons - however, they can also be used to effectively "combine" two servers into one.
So, you'd move your DNS record to point to the reverse proxy, then set the proxy up to fetch content from your ecommerce site and your blog site.
Issues:
You'd need another server, and you'd need root access and an expert sysadmin to set it all up.
I don't know how well BigCommerce would handle a reverse proxy - but frankly, they SHOULD be able to handle it OK if you talk to their sysadmins.
Advantages:
It's complex, but I can see it working! Just another suggestion.
More info on reverse proxies - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy
Hm. It seems to me that you've just got a routing issue - there MUST be a way to fix this.
Can you run a mod_rewrite .htaccess or similar on the server?
The problem with this idea, it occurs to me on second thoughts, will be comments. Having dynamically user-generated content will be tricky with this workaround.
Aside from that, rsync and W3TC are both enterprise-level stable solutions, so it SHOULD work - but I agree, it's doing something new, and new's always a bit risky.
Would you be able to go into any detail as to why you can't host WP? Is it a hosting company issue, a platform language issue, or something else?
I'd recommend reading the book "Fascinate" by Sally Hogshead. It's all about the kind of issues you're discussing here, and is pretty much vital reading for most marketers these days, IMO.
http://www.amazon.com/Fascinate-Your-Triggers-Persuasion-Captivation/dp/0061714704
Having done some food blogging, I'd say that in the donut niche, readers are either going to want their mouths to water, or to be reassured. There's a reason the largest food communities on both Livejournal and Reddit are called "Food Porn". You need great pictures of donuts. Interesting donuts. Donuts that people haven't eaten, but want to - and info on where to get them. Mouthwatering donut videos.
At the same time, people are also likely to be Googling for the health value of donuts. They're worried their donut will kill them, make them fat, or give them cellulite. Reassure your customers, and they'll buy your donuts.
Can you rsync or otherwise automatically copy content onto your primary web server? If so, there may be a way to combine the best of all worlds.
Set up your Wordpress platform somewhere else - doesn't matter where. Make sure Google isn't crawling it to avoid duplicate content penalties.Install a caching solution like W3 Total Cache which writes the entire blog as static HTML to the disk.
Now, have a frequently-updating automatic synchronisation tool copy those files from the location on your blog server to the local directory on your web server corresponding to yourdomain.com/blog . Set up the same rewrite rules on your main server as W3TC uses on your blog server.
You should now have an automatically-updated static copy of your blog hosted under yourdomain.com/blog . As a bonus, it'll be fast as hell and stable as a large room full of horses.
The actual setup's a bit of a faff, but my (non-pro SEO) intuition is that it'll be the best solution SEO-wise.
Heya!
I write a guide for a specific piece of Internet-based software which is about to undergo a major patch release. No-one's going to be using the old version, so my old-version articles are essentially going to be useless, as are keywords related to the old version number.
Given that, I'm intending to update all my guides to be current with the new version. However, obviously I want to keep the Google juice for the old guides, as they rank pretty well.
The three options I'm considering:
Simply retitle the old guides to the latest version number - "How to use Blue Widget 2.0" becomes "How to use Blue Widget 3.0". Disadvantage - my URLs still include the old version number, 2.0.
Write updated guides as seperate articles and 301 redirect the old articles to them. I've done this before with some success. So, I'd 301 the URL for "How to use Blue Widget 2.0" to the url for "How to use Blue Widget 3.0", my new article. Disadvantages - possible loss of link juice? Also, I believe redirects can be kinda tricksy.
Just leave both the old and new versions up there, with a link from the old version saying "outdated, check the new version". My belief is that this would be the worst idea.
Should I do one of them, or something else? And why?
I've been digging through SEOMoz and couldn't find a straight answer to this, so I thought I'd ask here.
How important is page load time to Google and your SERPS position?
If you're answering, I'd also love to know 1) how you know that your answer is correct and 2) if you've personally seen a webmaster improve his page load time and subsequently his position in the SERPS.
All done. I added the redirects to the .htaccess directly, and it's now working as it should.
Bonza.
In answer to your question - about 15 pages, so not un-doable by hand.
Heya!
I'm currently engaged in what appears to be a slightly unusual SEO task. I run a large, reasonably well-respected (but not global-standard, yet) site that I'm currently monetising through individual articles targetted at addressing specific search engine queries that I know have decent traffic.
It's the EHow / Demand Media model, except with a focus on a single specific (video games) niche, and much, much better quality articles (sufficiently good that they attract a fair amount of praise - all the writers on the site are published authors and the quality's damn high).
Most of our articles end up ranking with essentially no backup, but they don't rank high - usually 2nd or 3rd page of Google. I'm trying to determine what the most effective strategy would be for us to boost our article rankings with the least possible expense / effort (we don't have a huge budget).
Our long-tail articles are mostly being trumped by articles with either a couple of external links to them or by other articles with no links but from a site with significantly higher Domain Authority (70+ to our 48).I'm working to improve our on-page optimisation, but it's already pretty good (an "A" report from the SEOMoz tools on most or all pages).
So, I'm wondering what the best use of our time would be to increase traffic globally across the site. Strategies I'm considering:
I'm wondering what the big SEO brains here would suggest?
Happy to provide additional details if it would help!
Thanks!
I'm already doing most of this, I must admit. I'm using the Keyword Strategy plugin to do internal linking using exact keyword phrases, although I could probably optimise the number of places I'm doing that on the site a bit more.
Titles and headers are fairly optimised already - although from reading the SEOMoz reports, I understand header tags have a very small SEO effect anyway?
We've already got a Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, and Tumblr presence, so I think we're reasonably covered there!
Things I'm not doing, and will probably start - thanks for the suggestions -
There's a related articles plugin I should be installing - thanks for recommending that, I'd forgotten I meant to do it.
First link anchor text I must admit I'm not optimising - can you explain a bit more or suggest a resource I could check?
Thanks again for these suggestions!
Hm. Right, I think I have another suggested solution of sorts - it's tricksy and you'd need an expert to set it up, but it'd solve your problems.
In short, if you run a reverse proxy serving your site itself on a server which ISN'T your BigCommerce server, you can tell it to fetch your main site for your www.yourdomain.com URL, and your blog (live, not cached) for www.yourdomain.com/blog. Probably your best option would be to use a reverse proxy like Varnish or Nginx, both of which are normally used for performance reasons - however, they can also be used to effectively "combine" two servers into one.
So, you'd move your DNS record to point to the reverse proxy, then set the proxy up to fetch content from your ecommerce site and your blog site.
Issues:
You'd need another server, and you'd need root access and an expert sysadmin to set it all up.
I don't know how well BigCommerce would handle a reverse proxy - but frankly, they SHOULD be able to handle it OK if you talk to their sysadmins.
Advantages:
It's complex, but I can see it working! Just another suggestion.
More info on reverse proxies - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy