Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Jarno. I really appreciate that. Yes, I had it selected to just scan for images (as prompted when I attempted to create an image sitemap). Let me know what you see? I am wondering if it is going around in circles?

Dana

Hi again Jarno,

Is it normal for A1's sitemap generator's "Scan website"  function for images to take over two hours? Our site is about 3,500 URLs. So far it has under "Internal 'sitemap' URLs"  Listed found: 82076 (and climbing every few seconds).

I am wondering if there isn't something wrong? (I don't have any frame of reference since I've never used it before). Thanks!

Dana

Thanks Christopher,

Your answer took a noment to sink in, but I think I get it (I think I am coffee deprived this morning).

So, if I am using the A1 Sitemap generator that Jarno suggested, this sitemap index should automatically be generated based on the size of my generated sitemap. Is that correct?

Thanks Jarno,

I have downloaded and am trying the 30-day free trial of the A1 Sitemap Generator right now. Thanks for the tip. Can you comment on Christopher's remark below concerning sitemap indexes for larger sitemaps?

Can either you or Christopher give me more clarification on that. Is this what our IT director has attempted to do with the sitemap in our robots.txt file? If so, has it been done correctly?

Thanks!

Hi all,

This is a Webmaster/SEO question. This is the sitemap URL currently in our robots.txt file:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/sitemap.xml

As you can see it leads to a page with two URLs on it. Is this a problem? Wouldn't it be better to list both of those XML files as separate line items in the robots.txt file?

Thanks!

Dana

Hi Paul, I think you do get it, and quite well. I think the other thing you are discovering is that SEO is a very long process. Last summer at MozCon, Rand shared some stats from his blog in the early days. He had post after post where it seemed like no one was reading, and certainly no one was commenting. It's hard work. It takes time. One of my favorite quotes is from a great master French flutist, Marcel Moyse. He would always say that becoming a great musician was a matter of "time, patience and intelligent work." I think you are doing the "intelligent work" part. Just keep at it. The "time and patience" part is hard, especially online because everyone expects the Internet to abound and placate us with instant gratification. You are doing all the right things. Trust in the force You'll get there. Just persist.

Dana

Volusion is a big e-commerce platform and they do this on every Website they build. If customers want it removed they have to pay to have that done. I think it's a brilliant tactic if you design Websites and no, it's not bad for your SEO. You might consider offering your clients the option of removing "Powered by XYZ" for a set fee. Volusiong considers customers who remove their link to be in violation of their TOS, unless they've paid to have it removed of course.

I don't see this as a problem for your SEO, quite the contrary. I think it's a good thing.

Dana

I'm happy to help Marie. Yes, when I first saw it I was looking at a competitor and I yelled "yes!!!" and then I looked up my own sites and I yelled "nooo!!!" And then I realized something else was going on, LOL. Have a great weekend!

You are very welcome!

Hi Kasy,

IMHO the second one is better for a large ecommerce site. The first one is fine for a smaller site. For SEO purposes , I think either way is fine, although shorter URLs are generally better (especially for your visitors). The only reason I recommend using the second choice for your situation is that it will make it much easier for you to manage content and any possible future 301 redirects in the event that you ever change platforms. Imagine if thousands and thousands of products are all visually in one directory. Yuck. Sorting that out during a replatform would be a real headache!

I'm interested to know what others have to say. That blog post at Distilled that you mentioned is one of my favorites. Good luck,

Dana

Hi Marie,

I saw the same thing yesterday and it seemed odd that the drop was consistent across three totally unrelated websites. I dug a little deaper and discovered in the Ahrefs blog that they have recently updated their algorithm. They did put the text "Old Index" in the background of the chart, but that really didn't mean anything to me until I read their blog post here: http://ahrefs.com/news/

Hope that helps! I hope their new index is really better and not just different

Dana

SpeakerText is awesome. You will be in good hands. I wish we had the volume of videos to go enterprise with them because their Caption Box is wicked cool.

Hi Scott. I have never used Raven Tools and am just at the end of their 30 day free trial. I have always used SEOMoz rankings reports and SEO reports to give to my CEO (I am in-house). Honestly, he rarely looks at the rankings and is far more interested in the trend and sources of organic traffic and revenue. I appreciate where he's coming from because if the rankings look great but revenue stinks, then the rankings aren't really worth a hill of beans. I think it's much more valuable for me to identify opportunities and threats more than anything else.

Now that Raven Tools isn't going to have the Rank Tracker or SEMRush info (I was more disappointed about that part actually), are you reconsidering your Raven Tools subscription? Do you think it's still worth the money? The reason I ask is that my free trial ends on December 9th and I've already got approval to upgrade, but am not sure if I want to now. Thoughts?

Great question Scott. I was wondering the same thing when I read the notice from Raven Tools this morning. My guess is that this isn't an issue for SEOMoz because they aren't pulling Adwords data in as part of their SEOMoz pro tools reports.

Hi runnerkik,

Wow, when I read your question all I could think was "I'm not alone!" Seriously, I am with you sister. I was hired as an in-house SEO in September 2011 for a medium-sized audio-video equipment retailer. After building an unrelated niche site for them (which has kick butt rankings and almost no technical SEO problems) I transistioned over to begin working on the main site.

At every turn, it's a technical SEO nightmare. I spent a couple of months building links and traffic started to increase, and increase. Great right? No. Our organic traffic is up 45% year over year. I had a choice. I could approach it with the attitude of "great, organic traffic is up, I'm doing a great job." On the other hand, our conversion rate is plummeting, due largely to sever technical issues that no one is willing to acknowledge as serious, or even worth fixing.  Our organic traffic is up 45% but our conversion rate is down 50%. All that means to me is that all this link-building is me spinning my wheels. Why bust my butt delivering traffic if it's not converting?

I have literally gotten to the point where I am considering paying for the technical audit and remedies out of my own pocket. (Not that I'm recommending that by any means).

My suggestion, is gather as much serious data as you possibly can. Include point by point, the problem, the remedy, the cost for the remedy, how long the remedy will take, and the potential/estimated ROI from the remedy. This is exactly how I'm going to have to approach this. I don't just have to sell it to the CEO, I have to sell it to five owners of the business, all of which have their own agendas.

Money talks. You have to put the technical problems of the website into money terms and your presentation of that has to be 100% believable (i.e. supported by real data, not just emotion).

I think your situation (and mine) are an example of current and future SEO and what we as SEOs must all be able to present and improve upon at the companies we are trying to help.

I'd love to know hoe this goes. Please let me know how you proceed. I have basically just had to learn technical SEO in order to convince my company where the real problems are and how and why those are undermining any link building activities I do.

Good luck!

Dana

Yes. It is definitely worth doing. IMHO, there are absolutely no "cons" to adding transcriptions, especially good ones. You are right, the Google machine transcriptions are just plain horrible.

I wouldn't load the transcription into the description area on YouTube, because that's not really what that space is intended for. I would create a transcript, upload it to YouTube and then disable the machine transcription. There is one very compelling reason to do this. YouTube displays a "CC" for all videos that have been closed-captioned. People wanting to watch videos with captions (and that's not just hearing-impaired people, it can be people on mobile devices without headphones, or people at work without speakers on their computers), can search and sort by this parameter. This means if they are looking for a video on a particular topic and they need it to be closed-captioned and they sort by that, your videos will come up on the list. If you transcription is just in the description area, then your video wouldn't come up as having captions available.

I use http://www.dotsub.com to create timed captions for all of my company's videos. They provide a wonderful, easy-to-use and free tool that does a splendid job. Exporting your transcript and uploading them to YouTube is a piece of cake.

There are of course services that you can pay to do it for you too, and they tend to be fairly inexpensive.

Once uploaded, your close-caption file content is 100% indexable content to search engines. It isn't hidden in a iframe or anything like that. The only downside is the same downside you face interms of SEO by hosting your videos on YouTube instead of a 3rd party like Wistia. YouTube will always outrank you for your own content. When your videos get ranked in Google, they will link back 99% of the time to YouTUbe and not to your Website, no matter what you do...transcription or no transcription.

Bottom line is those transcriptions can only help you. They cannot hurt you.

I hope that's helpful!

Dana

Thanks very much Phil. I've gotten so much out of your blog posts and I recommend them to everyone who asks me about video SEO. Yes, flat on the page is working pretty well for us right now. The only times it's impractical is when the video is really long. In those instances we are either including the content via a tab, or even by creating a blog post with the video+transcript (much like what SEOMoz does for WBF videos).

I appreciate you and all the others here responding to this question.

You are very welcome Paul and thanks for the compliment. I am working on another post, but am torn where to post it, my own blog or YouMoz. In YouMoz they get more exposure, but my own blog is desperate for new content, lol...We'll see I guess.

Let me know what you decide, 3rd part vs. YouTube. I'm interested to know what you experience.

Yes Wisam, I would expand that list of specific keywords. Do you monitor your on-site search? Do you look at your keywords in Adwords (if you are doing PPC) for the keywords that actually trigger your ads (versus terms that you are bidding on)? Both of those places are great places to get ideas for keywords permutations you may haven't yet considered.

In addition to the larger e-commerce site that I do in-house SEO I also do SEO for a very tight niche site. It is a product line with which I am extremely familiar. For that site alone Itrack about 250 keywords in SEOMoz...so by all means, yes, expand your targeted keyword list and track them all. I can guarantee you'll find some gems that you've probably never considered.

Also, here's another way to find "high opportunity" keywords. Use Avinash Kaushik's custom reports for tracking keywords based on length of keywords string. You can find more about that here http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-downloadable-custom-web-analytics-reports/

Pay attention especially to the performance of long tail versus short tail keywords. Here's a link to a blog post that will, I hope, not only blow your mind, but change your life! Okay a little extreme I know, but my God Avinash Kaushik isuch a freaking genius!

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/advanced-analytics-visitor-segments-engagement-social-media-search-long-tail/

Hi Paul,

Video SEO totally fascinates me so I did a boat load of research and compiled it here: http://www.danatanseo.com/2012/09/creating-video-seo-strategy-is-hard-but.html  Also, one of the best and brightest experts in Video SEO just posted a brand new post to SEOMoz just 2-3 days ago. I make reference to Phil's earlier blog post in my article, but here's a link to his post too: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

Everything you need to know about video SEO is there. I highly recommend Phil Nottingham and Paddy Moogan's posts.

Good luck!

Dana

Hi RealW,

Well, as an in-house SEO I am very familiar with this scenario. I might have more questions (meant to be provocative) for you than answers. I guess we'll call it "the Socratic method of SEO"

Okay, so here we go:

Why do you want to target the term "clark forklift?"  Do you sell Clark forklifts, or just Clark forklift parts?

If you don't sell Clark forklifts, and that's what people are looking to shop for, what are they going to find at your site that gives them what they searched for?

Are you just plain after more traffic (and not necessarily conversions)?"

When you are targeting keywords for your SEO, you have to (I stress HAVE to) check your ego at the door. This isn't necessarily hard for SEOs but it can be next to impossible for business owners and CEOs who feel like they should rank for every keyword under the sun.

Here's an example straight from my work today. I got a message from the CEO (I am the in-house SEO) stating his dissatisfaction that we weren't ranking for this term: "mackie th-12a/" I researched the term and discovered that nearly every competitor outranking us had higher page authority, domain authority, more links and a more recent cache date. Not only that but the niche the product seems to appeal to is the DJ market, while we primarily sell to churches. I sent him all the data comparing domains, together with my evaluation that it was the wrong niche and said point blank "we don't rank for this term because we aren't very relevant for this term."

Given that your current site structure and keyword choices are converting well, I wouldn't mess with that. If you go broader at terms that you aren't particularly relevant for then all you are doing is getting traffic, throwing it at the wall and hoping something sticks. That takes a heck of a lot of work and effort for precious little return.

Make a list of productive, relevant keywords and stick to them like glue. If you find you can't make a business out of that because the niche you created was to tight, then you need to broaden your business model before you broaden your keyword list. Going at it the other way around is...well "===" backwards.

Just my two cents! I wish you good luck and hope something here helps!

Dana

Thanks Oleg. Yes, I totally agree with you and CMC-SD about some users preferring to read the transcript instead of watching the video. We are already including the full transcript on the page with the video itself.

Given that we are already including the text visible on the page, would you still recommend including it in a hidden div? Or is that unnecessarily redundant?

I have been using the tools at DotSub.com to transcribe our YouTube videos. They are free, work really great and I highly recommend them. Today I received an email from DotSub with recommendations for SEO on video. I have a question about #5 on their list. Here it is:

"Step 5: Embed the video transcript into the non-visible meta-data of the page"

"Always embed the video transcript in the page meta-data This is done by placing
the content of the transcription within a non-visible HTML element (a hidden
div). While most search engines do not weight non-visible content as high as
visible content, this will still provide additional SEO for your page.  Do
this whether you include the full transcript visibly on your page or not."

This is something I have never heard before. And, like many of you, I have always heard that putting anything "hidden" in the HTML is a very bad idea. Is this different? Do any of you do this? Is it really a recommended technique?

Thanks all!

Dana

Hi Haviv,

I think you are asking this question in the right place. I am sure there will be different responses than mine that are equally as good but here are my favorites (and totally trusted) favorites:

http://www.raventools.com

http://www.majesticseo.com

http://www.distilled.net/u/

http://www.ahrefs.com

http://www.semrush.com

http://www.screamingfrog.com

http://www.seobook.com  (especially for the Firefox Rank Tracker Add On)

I am not an affiliate of any of these sites and these are not affiliate links. I just use all of these on a regular basis.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Alice,

Just so I'm clear, is this a free trial of SEOMoz Pro?

Dana

Hi Tanveer,

Thanks! Here's what I saw: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.aa-rental.com&comparisons%5B0%5D=www.meetingtomorrow.com&comparisons%5B1%5D=www.rentex.com

MeetingTomorrow.com clearly has you both beat in terms of link profile and social media presence. My guess is that your company and Rentex.com each are able to rank for some terms, but that for some you do better and for some they do better. Are you SPAM? No. I can say that. Do you maybe have some inbound links causing you problems, maybe, but you have so few inbound links I really don't think that's the problem.

One thing I did see that concerned me was a count of "0" for Internal Links. I ran your site through several tools and it seems all of your internal navigation links are "do follow." To me, this means there could be a redirection issues (although I checked that too and didn't see anything) or a technical SEO issue that's causing search engines not to see your internal links.

I would start my pursuing that. Try to find out why you have "0" internal followed links. That's not helping your link profile and could mean that search engines are having a problem crawling your site.

I hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Tanveer,

Have you compared your site and your competitor in Open Site Explorer? If not, I would do that first. You might be ale to see right away what or if there are major differences between your site and their's. If you've already done that, can you share that info via link here? Then I might be able to comment in more detail.

Dana

Yes, I will share. Please know that I do not subscribe to or agree with the content that is there (it is okay to open at work or around kids - it's not anything adult oriented). It's just got a lot of angry political language tied with ultra-conservative Christian views (if you are a FOX News fan you might really like it). I am also not recommending their design (on either site).

http://kingdominsight.ning.com  is a subsidiary of http://www.kingdom.com (this is the e-commerce site).

Kingdom.com, despite horrible design and black hat SEO continues to rank very well for some highly competitive terms.- They have had their Ning site for about 5 years.

I would check out VIMEO Pro - http://vimeo.com/pro  I'm not sure if it will do exactly what you are needing, but I do believe they have the option for monetization. Good luck!

Hi Paul,

You ask interesting questions, the answers of which are all subjective really. Yes, a wide variety of anchor text is a good thing. As your site gains history, it will also naturally gain a link profile. Every site's link profile is a little different. Some sites, like "Apple" for instance, probably have much heaviier percentage of branded anchor text than your local family-owned computer store. If you are chugging along and all of a sudden something drastically changes your link profile, this might or might not cause problems with rankings in the SERPs. Some wild fluctuations, even in smaller businesses, can be quite normal, particularly if there was a big news event surrounding their business (perhaps they were acquired by a much larger company) or something of that sort.

You are correct in how you are defining briand names (IMHO). Yes, it absolutely could end up being your name. In fact, I encourage everyone who works and writes online to consider themselves, personally, a "brand" in addition to whatever other businesses they are involved with. This is one thing that makes Google+ so perplexing to me because it totally confuses personal and professional brands (hopefully they'll sort that out soon).

Yes, you absolutely could turn your name into a brand name. It doesn't even take putting it on your site anywhere. I an an in-house SEO for several websites, and one of them, one I built, has "Dana Tan" as it's next most often used anchor text next to its brand "Celebrate Communion." The site is young and tiny, so I assume this will change over time. This came about as a results of my blog commenting where I actually sign with my real name instead of trying to stuff in keywords and be all spammy

That being said, when I'm analyzing reports, I do not consider "Dana Tan" to be a "branded search term" for the site "Celebrate Communion." I do however consider it a branded search term for my SEO blog.

All that being said, yes, it's a very good thing to have branded search. That traffic converts at a higher rate and a much lower cost per conversion (if you are using any paid campaigns) than other traffic because they are predisposed to you. In most cases, branded terms will be the majority of your anchor text, with, hopefully, a wide range of other terms filling in the rest.

Hope that helps, and I apologize for the spacing issues in my response. My Mac doesn't like to double space in SEOMoz.

Dana

I do know of a Ning site that is related to a larger e-commerce site which successfullt ranks #1 for many competitive terms. However, their Ning site is still hosted and is a subdomain of Ning.

Yes. This is primarily done to reinforce branding. For that purpose, it's a very good idea. However, there are times when the brand name could or should be omitted, like if the site has a blog on the same domain. It would maybe be weird to put the brand name after the blog post title (and it would probably end up truncated anyway).

Sometimes we have products that have really long titles because the brand name of the product is really long. For example: "Audio-Technica Wireless Head Worn Microphone"  - Now at that point we are already running out of space, but we still want to fit in how the microphone is terminated. We either have room to put our brand name "CCI Solutions" or the information on termination "Shure Terminated" - In this instance we opt to leave the brand "CCI Solutions" out and include the "Shure Terminated."

That's an isolated case though. Most the time we go for the branding.

Good explanation Matt.

Yes it is Sean. However, I thought I saw that SEOMoz included it in a blog post somewhere. Perhaps if you email them they can tell you where? I just tried to find it and the only "Free" one I can seem to find is Wil Reynolds' presentation. I'll look around a little more and if I can find the link I'll send it.

You will especially enjoy the way the audience giggleswhen Fabio says "spreadsheet." He was a very engaging speaker with some great ideas!

Hi Sean,

This is a pretty common scenario for e-commerce. I am in-house SEO for a large e-commerce site specializing in profession audio video equipment. It's highly competitive and also highly technical. You often see resellers copying and pasting manufacturer descriptions. While it's not optimal, and unique, robust description are obviously better, there are times when just getting a mass number of products up on the website quickly makes it necessary to copy and paste some descriptions. While Google most likely isn't going to penalize you (unless you copy verbatim a manufacturer's page, HTML and all), your content probably will never rank as high as it might with really great, well-written descriptions that speak to your specific audience.

As far as your question concerning re-writing the descriptions, if you simply change some words around or slip in some synonyms instead of doing a complete re-write, I'd consider not doing that. The reason being that you are going to end up with content that is still substantially similar to the original. According to Google's Matt Cutts, content that is "substantially similar" is the same as duplicate content. Here's his interview with Eric Enge regarding that issue: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

IMHO, most manufacturer descriptions are pretty horrible anyway. They aren't written for your customers, they are written for their customers (which in this case is you). Generally those descriptions tend to be highly technical in nature and not compelling from a marketing viewpoint. You'd be far better off writing one by one unique descriptions that really speak to your customer personas. I know on a big site how huge a task that can be. But, even on a large site it can be tackled over several months with some concentrated dedication. Fabio Riccotta gave a great 15-minute presentation on how he accomplished this on a very large e-commerce site over the course of several months: http://www.seomoz.org/videos/e-commerse-seo-tips-and-tricks

All that being said, I can totally relate to the daunting task it is to churn out high-quality and unique product descriptions. It's something we struggle to do every day!  Hope this is helpful

Dana

Since I am an in-house SEO I'm a little slower to adopt some of the paid tools out there, but I am thinking of jumping in and opting for the paid version of Raven Tools.

Can anyone who's currently using Raven Tools suggest how and where is the best place to export backlinks info for import into the Link Manager? I want something that will give me as much of the data as possible already filled in (i.e. PR, domain authority, anchor text, follow/no follow information etc.). I don't mind if I have to rearrange it, I just don't want to have to be inputting things like PR and anchor text one at a time by hand.

I do have SEOMoz pro and I see that I can pull a CSV of backlinks and do two separate reports, one for followed and one for not followed links, etc.

I'm just wondering if anyone has any additional suggestions. How about Ahrefs.com? Is anyone using the paid version of that tool in conjunction with Raven Tools for Link Management?

Is there a better tool out there for Link Management than Raven Tools? (I just found this link in a Q & A thread for an open source SEO panel to try...http://www.seopanel.in/ - anyone using that one?)  Thanks all!

Hi Adam. The answer to your question is "yes" and "no."  Let me explain. What you are referring to is something Google calls "Sitelinks." Here's information on how sitelinks work, directly from Google Webmaster Tools:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

Unfortunately Adam, Google sitelinks are displayed (or not) automatically by Google. The only thing you can rtry to control, is to monitor your site's SERP results and "demote" sitelinks you feel Google is displaying that aren't particularly important or helpful to visitors. Even then, Google retains the option of ignoring your request and continuing to display whatever sitelinnks it chooses to show with your site.

I hope that helps explain it a little!

If you want more robust search results I would suggest investigating schema.org and markup of your site for rich snippets.

Good luck!

Dana

By far the best tool I have found to harvest "high possibility" keyword phrases is custom reports in Google Analytics that show you search volume and conversion data on long-tail keywords. Here's an absolutely brilliant post from Avinash Kaushik that not only walk you through the set up, he actually gives you the custom report links, so all you have to do is be logged in to your Google Analytics and click the link and KAPOW! You will be a longtail keyword ninja!

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-downloadable-custom-web-analytics-reports/

Hope that inspires you and is helpful too!

Dana

Hi Jean,

I've always dreamed of doing SEO for a wine site! Okay, first, there's an awesome tool that you should know about at http://www.optimizely.com  I believe you can get a free trial for 30 days with full access to everything they have to offer. They have really good customer support. After that you pay by how much traffic your site gets and believe me, considering what you discover, it's a bargain (We are a large e-commerce site and it runs us $79 a month).

Now I have a few questions. When you refer to "conversion rate" are referring to your site-wide conversion rate or the conversion rate of the home page specifically? The reason I ask is because maybe it's not your homepage that's the conversion problem.

Do you have a goal funnel set up in Google ANalytics? If not, I'd do that first thing. Not only is it free, but it's going to show you exactly where people are falling out in the conversion process. Perhaps the problem is in your shopping cart and not on your homepage...it's a possibility. It would be a shame spending a lot of time and effort optimizing the homepage when it's not the main source of the problem. That being said, let's assume for argument's sake that your homepage is part of the problem. I'd begin by tagging different links in different sections and perhaps even looking at your heat map and site performance in Google analytics to determine what people are paying attaching to and what they are ignoring.

Above all, don't change too much of anything all at once. You'll never be able to identify what worked and why that way. Make changes to one thing at a time and track the results. Check your ego at the door (I'm not saying you have one, I've just seen it too many times where a split test result came back that the CEO didn't like so the results were ignored and changes never implemented), Let the data drive your actions.

Meclabs (via Marketing SHerpa), Wider Funnel and Steve Krug's Book "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" and his older book "Don't make me think"  are all great resources for optimization webinars, ideas and advice.

Good luck. I'm sure I'm not the only SEO in here who would be happy to work for wine

Dana

For the most part Alan, I'm with you. I like the "homey" low-tech nature of the site. The only thing I would say you could improve would be making it easier to read (maybe larger fonts on a white background as opposed to light blue)....maybe keep your layout but improve the quality of your header image, fix some spacing issues in your CSS. These are all just little "housekeeping" details that really wouldn't change the overall look and feel, but would just tidy it up a bit.

You might also want to consider an update because a lot of platforms like WP include some nice built-in functionality that make your website easier to read and navigate on mobile devices.

I'd address the housekeeping issues first (for example, you have the Google+ like button twice at the bottom of this page http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/endeavour-cottage.html). You might find that alone produces more bookings, simply because it's easier for your visitors to read your information and they'll be more inclined to trust the site if it appears to be well cared for.

Hope that's helpful! The cottages look really cute!

Dana

I agree with both Andrea and Miriam in that the best-case scenario would be one site that provides links and information to different locations, provided the branding and business model support that of course.

You're welcome Tyler. I think Andrea has a good suggestion below too.

Thanks Stremline. Yes, it was clear from this report from Pingdom.com that our SSL validation icon was the biggest culprit bogging down our pagespeed. We are moving the JS to an interior page and then linking to that page via the .gif image icon to see if this helps.

After that, is seems our next biggest culprits could be images. Some of them are association images that could easily be combined into one optimized image.

The two "problem child" javscripts seem to be  "iaf.js" and "CCI-utils.js"  - Although I don't code javascript I believe these pertain to site functions like the popout navigation menus.

Awesome tool. Thank you. Do you have any developer tools that can help determine when javascripts load (pre versus post), etc. Thoughts?

Thanks again!

Dana

Hi Tyler,

Here's a partial answer. I am not a specialist in local SEO so you might get some more detailed ideas if some of those folks chime in on  this one.

It seems to me you only have two options. One is to create unique content for each hospital. The other, doing as you suggest an using content created oin one site and re-using it on another is only going to work if you use canonicalization properly. The downside for that is the site with the canonical tag is going to get credit for that content and the site without the canonical tag isn't. You could be fragmenting good content in ways you may never have envisioned when you began. The result could be that one hospital site does way better than another in the SERPs.

I would encourage your clients (I am assuming these hospitals are clients and that you aren't directly employed by them), encourage them to express to you what is special about each of those hospitals. What differentiates them from other hospitals in the same area, and perhaps even from each other. This is the harder, but better route I think.

I hope that helps a little!

Dana

Hi James,

Yes mine were missing until just this morning, so they came in about 4 days late. I know SEOMoz was having some issues late last week and worked over the weekend to try to get them resolved. I am seeing some data coming through now, but not everything has completely updated in one of my accounts yet, which is normally done on Thursdays of every week.

Hang in there. I'm sure they'll have it fixed soon.

Dana

This is a follow up question to an earlier thread located here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/we-just-fixed-a-meta-refresh-unified-our-link-profile-and-now-our-rankings-are-going-crazy

In that thread, Dr. Pete Meyers said "You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files."

Our IT Director is willing to spend time working on this, but he believes it is a complicated process because each script must be evaluated to determine which ones are needed "pre" page load and which ones can be loaded "post."

Our IT Director went on to say that he believes the quickest "win" we could get would be to move our SSL javascript for our SSL icon (in our site footer) to an internal page, and just link to that page from an image of the icon in the footer. He says this javascript, more than any other, slows our page down.

My question is two parts:

1. How can I verify that this javascript is indeed, a major culprit of our page load speed?

2. Is it possible that it is slow because so many styles have been applied to the surrounding area? In other words, if I stripped out the "Secured by" text and all the syles associated with that, could that effect the efficiency of the script?

3. Are there any negatives to moving that javascript to an interior landing page, leaving the icon as an image in the footer and linking to the new page?

Any thoughts, suggestions, comments, etc. are greatly appreciated!

Dana

Thanks Marko, and I am so with you on the impatience part. I have two sites I manage still being outranked by a competitor using black hat tachniques. I know, not only because their backlink profile makes it obvious, but also because I used to work for them.

I have been tempted, and even mildly pressured by my current CEO to do what they are doing. I keep saying "Stay the course. Do what's right. Time will take care of this problem."

But in the business world, one only has so much time (and patience). I mean, if your competitor can hold on with the black hat tachniques long enough, and still enough of your traffic to adversely effect your business...to the point of not having a business...what would you do?

So yousee, I totally understand your impatience. I think you are doing the right thing now. Consolidating those sites is probably your best shot at getting back on track.

While the blog post might be very interesting, I sincerely hope you don't have to write it!

Cheers,

Dana

Hi again Navinan,

I was just going through my email box cleaning up some old emails and I ran across this blog post from Distilled that might be helpful to your specific situation:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-university-websites

Hope that's a good one!

Dana

EGOL is quite correct regarding the profitability of Adwords campaigns particularly in highly competitive spaces. I think it's really important to have a clear idea of what the Lifetime value is for customers acquired through this channel, so you know when to hold and know when to gold int terms of ad and keyword bids.