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I would be interested to see whats going on with your "long tail game". Long tell keyword for me = money, So... I wouldn't jeopardize ranking for "Red Polo t-shirts" just to rank better for Polo t-shirts.  I would suggest maybe boosting up the unique content on your Product pages to make them rank better for specific long tails. I like the fact that all of my product pages are indexed individually just for the simple fact that I have a customer base that google's Part numbers. Those product pages show up every-time and almost every-time it rings the cash register.  This just might be something to think about... but if all of your product pages are duplicates then they are not helping with the long tail so I would say canonicalze them and redirect them to get rid of the dups and see if it helps with those head terms.

Hope this helps
Chad

Anything that has transparent text I would avoid because I think it looks spammy to Google. (they might not notice it now but someday they will catch it so its a bad long term strategy) If you want to set your logo as your H1 for the site I would just suggest loading an image with alt text, but I would question if it would be worth.

Really, I would work towards putting a unique text H1 on every page of your site. Every page on your website should have a unique purpose and therefor should have a unique Heading. If you think about it like a newspaper who wants to read a newspaper where every story has the exact same title?  I would suggest working toward this rather than trying to short cut with putting your logo as the H1.

One last tip: Remember each page should only have one H1. I have seen lots of sites that put there logo in the H1 and then go back with text H1s later on, but they forget to remove the H1 from the logo.

Hope this helps.

Count me in - I would love to play with a new content tool! I am an In-House Online Marketing Specialist that plays with SEO, PPC, Social and Content... With so much on my plate great tools make all the difference for me.  Thanks!!

Yep that should work as far as Google is concerned!

I am not familiar with Joomla or limitstart, but if all the dups use that  parameter, adding it to your Robot.txt will get rid of the duplicate content. The problem is that then you don't get SEO credit for links that contain that parameter.

I would suggest adding the limitstart parameters to your URL parameters in Google Webmaster tools. That way you let Google know to just ignore the parameter when it sees it.
URL Parameters are  located in Webmaster Tools under Crawl. Hope this helps!

Are these "Blogs" going to be under the same TLD? I would suggest doing one property that focuses on everything about the product: reviews, information, application stories, etc. that way you can create one giant ball of authority on everything that has to do with that product.  -  If tracking in google analytic there are ways to split out and see what type of content is contributing the most to the bottom line.

With in Google Analytics you can use Google Experiments to set up a test. (It is located under the Behavior list option on the left hand side.) The interface will walk you thorough setting up your test. It will ask you the % of your traffic you want to include in your test, what goal you are measuring, what confidence level you want to achieve, how long you want to run the test, and it will also ask for your control page URL and your Experiment Page URLs. It will then provide some code for you to add to your page. This code will split your traffic although it's not necessarily going to be a 50/50 split. Google periodically analyze which page is reaching your Goal and will adjust the percentage of traffic that is being sent in order to favor the page that is winning. Once the Experiment runs its course you should have some good data to help optimize your pages.   This link will walk you through everything. Good Luck!!

We are a USA based company and we only sell direct to the US and Canada. However, we have partnered with other companies that are now distributing our products in other places like Australia and Mexico for example. These partners have scrapped our site and have used large chunks of our content to create a website for themselves on their intentional domains (ex.. .au and .mx). How concerned should I be about this? Should I reach out to them and require that they use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or request the to stop?  I have never had to deal with international SEO issues before, so any advice and direction would be appreciated!

Official Google does truncate at around 160 so i usually shoot for that. I mean after all if our goal is to always do things that are useful for the web, I have to question how useful it is to go beyond what Google will use in search,  but there is no penalty for going over 160 characters.

Yes. Think of it like another page on your website, and optimize it in the same way. Make sure that it is a useful page, and that it has all the on page elements in place. The biggest issues is going to be duplicate content so, use some programming magic to make sure that you are not creating duplicate content. Then build some internal and external links to it. Just keep taking steps to optimize it in the right way and someday it might rank for you!

Yes,if you flag it in webmaster tools Google will consider ignoring it, but I would also flag it in Bing as well.

You might also want to consider if you could make it easier on yourself by doing something like nav=banner1, nave=banner2, and nav=footer1 and then you only have to put in nav into the parameter handling tool. As appose to using banner=1, banner=2 and footer=1 and then having to put both banner and footer into the your parameter handling tools. There are reasons to use the different parameters, but as a general rule I try to keep the number of parameters as small as possible. I find it easier to scale my site and tracking that way. Good Luck!

Remember that a parameter should have two parts: a parameter and a value.

ex. www.example.com/product/?nav=banner

in this example nav would be the parameter and banner would be the value. This is important when using the Google webmasters parameter handling tool. With your current method you are only using a value and so you will need to declare every single value as a parameter. But if you use a parameter correctly, then you would just need to declare the parameter (in this example nav) and the search engines would then automatically ignore the value. The cost of not using a parameter correctly can compound really quick in an organization that is trying to track a lot of different things.

Also note that most analytics packages already utilize pre-determined parameters for tracking. If you are using Google analytic then I would suggest justinvestigating using  there URL builder (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en) for off site tracking. Then to track internal traffic Google Analytic wants you to use Goals and Events. With Omniture you actually can set what your parameters will be during set up. I would suggest setting one up for internal campaign tracking and one for external campaign tracking.  Anyways, all this just to say you might what to double check your options on tracking.  Hope this helps!

I just did this and this guide was a big help for me. Hopefully it will help you out too! http://www.ericmobley.net/guide-to-tracking-multiple-subdomains-in-google-analytics/

Good Luck!

I think that the bigger question you should be asking is.. "is our site making us more money now or not". With out a open door to your data I would guess that even though your rankings raised for your targeted keywords, you might have dropped in ranking for some less relevant keywords (Hints why your bounce rate improved). Has your conversion rate gone up? A lose in traffic is not always a bad thing, if you are losing irrelevant traffic. I would say that if your quality indicators have improved than I wouldn't be to concerned about the lose in traffic. I would just start focusing on how to move forward with identifying the next set of relevant keywords that you want to rank for. Hope this helps!

My company has a WordPress site (URL is learn.automationdirect.com) It is a very simple site and is currently under utilized. I would like to make some SEO improvements to it by activating comments and installing an SEO plugin like Yoast but, I am being help back by concerns about the sites security. Is there some sort of suggestion/advice you guys can point me to that will help get the site to a place where we are confident in it's security level, and I can move forward with optimizing it?

First off, don't use the Keywords meta tag it carries no wait in search anymore. Currently the only thing it is good for is telling your competitors what searches you are trying to rank for.  As far as, what keywords to use on your pages and where to use them, Moz has a good web page dedicated to explaining that. Check it out - http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors

As for picking what keyword to use. I would suggest using your PPC data (TIP: Run a search Query Report and get the actual words that are being searched) Start using the keywords that are bringing you a positive PPC outcome. But don't go keyword crazy on your webpages... Remember everything in moderation and always with an eye toward the user experience.

I would start marking anything and everything you can, that makes since to. I mean the Big three have all said that it is the future of the web, so why not start now. I would say top priorities would be marking up things that are already showing in the SERPS... products, prices, reviews, ETC. I think that breadcrumb makes a lot of since to mark up since it could be easily used by a Crawler to understand site structure.

If I am understanding the question right?... 301 Redirects should save the Juice, as far as your Webmaster tools I think the only thing you can do is re-verify it using one of their acceptable methods and let Google update the info on its own. With a re-verify Google won't lose information from the past they will just add the new info going forward.

YAY!  Chirs hit the nail on the head. Also we as Online Marketing people forget sometimes that we are not the only channel in a marketing portfolio. PR done right is a big win all by its self, even if it doesn't help with your rankings. (But do remember the nofollow that way we can make sure it doesn't hurt your rankings.)

Google does still show organic keywords from other search engines. Google Analytic's also shows some keyword data that they get from webmaster tools in their Search Engine Optimization section.

To my knowledge these site links are links Google's algorithm has decided to display. To directly answer you question there is no magic bullet to get them to display, but here is a list of things that might influence Google's decision to display them. Hope this helps

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy that Google's crawler can easily navigate
• Offer a sitemap to your users with links that point to the important parts of your website
• Create a useful, information-rich, quality content
• Use text instead of images to display links
• Make sure that your title tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate
• Check for broken links
• Use anchor text and alt text that is informative and relevant on internal links
• Include your most important pages in main menus
• Use a breadcrumb's and mark them up with Schema.org

Additionally once you have site links showing you can manage them (tell Google to ignore ones you don't want)  through Webmaster tools. Good Luck!

I got the email that Moz crawled my site for the week of February 8. I expected to log in and find some shinny new data, but new stats are not showing in my dashboard yet. Is there a delay? Is there something wrong?

Yes, Abe was right. I assumed that the non www. version was already 301.(I mean come on who doesn't do that) but it wasn't. Lesson learned... Don't make assumptions!

I am trying to set up a new campaign for a website, but I keep getting this error message... campaign.crawl-seed.bad-response   I have no idea what the problem is. Can you tell me what I am suppose to do to fix this?

The URL I am trying to set up is www.aboutplcs.com