Nice response Anthony...
The obsession to optimise often over looks usability and conversion elements of a page/site.
Dan
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Nice response Anthony...
The obsession to optimise often over looks usability and conversion elements of a page/site.
Dan
Hey Daniel,
Most footers are simply a series of horizontal lists of ancillary pages or popular pages, along with the odd copyrighted brand name a year and possibly a link to the Web designer/developer or SEO company. Therefore I see heading tags as overkill.
That said, I have seen more elaborate footers that contain a lot of useful information where adding headings to group the information could be useful.
Dan
Hey Daniel,
I would say they offer a neutral benefit for the following reasons...
My preference would be to use lower Heading tags (say H4,5,6) as not to dilute the use of the primary heading tags, but ultimate this duplicated sidebar is going to offer little SEO benefit from a content perspective. Sidebars can promote other SEO benefits though such as internal linking and usability.
This can apply to the footer area as well, although I would be less inclined to use heading tags (I am sure there are exceptions)
Hope this helps,
Dan
Hey Juana,
First start with your company name, then any uniquely branded item OR service you sell
EG/ Apple would add Apple, iPad, iPhone, iPod etc
EG/ SEOMoz would add SEOMoz, Open Site Explorer, maybe PRO Dashboard (although this is getting to be too broad) etc
I would also add things like Models numbers if this is a defining part of you business (EG/ a TV OR car manufacturer) and home page URL's (EG/ www.apple.com) as it is part of your brand...
Hope this helps,
Dan
KBB,
When you implement a mobile site you will need to detect what device is being used to request the Page. This is typically done by checking the USER-AGENT. Google has changed their view point on how to best serve up a mobile site over the past couple of years opting for a responsive design over a separate site (m.site.com). A responsive design can also be done by working to the dimensions of the browser. Although all these options are acceptable, if the site serves up from the same urls but is styled differently depending on the USER-AGENT or dimensions there is no need to block pages from the m. site with robots.txt or run a separate code base.
Google with only crawl the site with a preset USER-AGENT, therefore only viewing the content one way.
Good this helps,
Dan
Hi Chris,
Internal linking is an important but not over beneficial part of optimising your site.
Typically a good navigation, possibly a meaningful footer (with links) and breadcrumbs can be helpful for a users navigation. These approaches account for most of the internal linking on a site.
When running with these approaches, I would always recommend text links (avoid images where possible) and ensure above all it gives the user the best experience.
For your example above, writing Pink widgets | Blue widgets | Green widgets in the nav might take up to much real estate and look a little sloppy, try a drop down with the main category 'widgets' and run the colours as sub categories. Having a site structure www.example.com/widgets/blue will help to define widgets are an important concept on your site while also highlighting that you have Pink widgets | Blue widgets | Green widgets. It will be assumed that for the product pages in this example, engaging unique content is available.
That said, if you see the need I would also encourage you to have internal link within your content, WHERE RELEVANT. I have seen to many sites, simply go through their content and pick out the popular keywords linking all over the place. If it helps the user (possibly by defining an unusual term OR refering to a service OR product described on a different page) it's worth doing.
One of my pet hates is finding a keyword on page that links to itself (same URL) because it is a keyword that is being targeted. As a user it's frustrating and personally I immediately leave sites running this practice.
You don't have to continually link to your desired page with the same keywords, in fact it's discouraged. Google are becoming increasingly better at understanding intent, therefore do what is best for your visitors and you will ensure that your site enjoys longevity in search rankings...
Best of success,
Dan
Hi Colin,
Sorry for the spelling mistake the first response was off my phone. I have fixed the error (removed the s) in the above answer.
I added the same line to htaccess and you can try the redirection for yourself.
and attached my htaccess as a file for reference.
If you are still struggling I would do the following. Comment out all other code in htaccess temporarily if there is anything (comment by adding # at start of line) to isolate the issue. Ensure that there is no additional white space in the line. EG/ no additional spaces at end of line etc
If you still have no joy, consult your hosting company as they may block htaccess from functioning correctly.
Dan
Hey Brian,
If you tear everything away what are you left with? A company that would like to rank better and a search engine that wants people to do the right thing and naturally build their online business. Therefore, who is the best person to write content for Blogs and other backlinks? The Client.
The simply reality is they almost never have the time to. This is where your skills as an SEO really get tested. Work out which backlinks require an experts response. Directories you can do yourself. Feed a constant stream of blogs (already posted on the Web) for the client to comment, if their time poor, get them to voice record an answer (most OS have a voice recorder). Writting blogs... If you have to write a blog for your client, I can tell already, your looking to post it on the wrong site. FACT. Any site willing to publish an article by someone completely outside their skill set, is the wrong site.
I think about it this way, you should always aim to get more value out of the interest of an article or blog post via natural traffic than the value of the backlink itself. If it's the other way round, generally it's not worth it.
Dan
Hi Laura,
I would suggest setting up Google webmasters and checking the crawl errors. Google will already be monitoring this so once you have set it up, the errors will already be listed. My feelings are that the urls may have changed in a subtle way eg. Www now non-www or html files now php... Webmasters will give clues. Also while your there I recommend submitting a sitemap.
Best of luck,
Dan
Hey Colin,
Highly recommend redirecting the index.cfm Page to /
The easiest way would be;
Redirect 301 /index.cfm http://www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/
Check out www.sitepoint.com/htaccess-for-all/ for more details on htaccess.
Redirection like this prevents duplicate content, but also improves usability.
NOTE: This has been edited to fix the issue highlighted below.
Cheers Dan
Hi Rob,
1. One link (keyword in anchor text) in comment, and one as a link to the clients site as part of a signature.
2. I would always recommend answering in the third person for a client (get their approval first), therefore their name and company or url
3. general terms EG/ click here, site, follow the link, read more and branded terms EG/ company name, company URL, branded products etc... The suggestion is 30% for each roughly...
Hope you find this useful.
Dan
Hi Rob,
Absolutely. The key is, like Agents of Value suggest, an honest and valuable response on the right types of sites are the way to go.
I stick to the 50-50 rule when it comes to commenting on blogs. Firstly, I would never run more than 2 links per comment. I would respond to a blog with some prior knowledge (if you are working for a client, get them to offer an answer) and in the response, I would pick on one keyphrase to link from, maximum. Then at the end of the comment, sign off with your name and site/company... EG/ Dan from f4240.com (see what I did there, one no-follow link for me
Although the current understanding is targeted keywords should be less than 40% of your backlinking profile, this will head you in the right direction.
I think the way to approach it is a well worded comment will give you three things, the acknowledgement that you a vocal and experienced person in your field, it will also give you natural traffic to your site as the person reading will want to know more and finally, the SEO benefit. If you focus on nailing the first two benefits the SEO benefits is a bonus.
Best of success
Dan
Hi,
Using WordPress I would recommend WordFence. If the DDOS attack is simply an attempt to overload your server with bogus requests there is not a huge amount that can be done as it act sin a similar manner to gaining a lot of traffic from say a marketing exercise.
But if the DDOS is attempting to hack into your site, there are a number of preventative measures that the plugin does to ensure it is not an easy task.
Firstly ensure all your plugins are up to date along with the WordPress build. Disable any plugins that you are not 100% sure of.
Upon installation of the WordFence plugin, I would highly recommend going to options -> Login Security Options and changing
Lock out after how many login failures & Lock out after how many forgot password attempts TO 5 attempts max
AND
Amount of time a user is locked out TO 2hrs minimum
Also by adding your email at the top of the options you will be alerted when anything occurs on your site (including legitimate logins) so that you can make informed decisions.
Oh, and unless you are actually serving the site up from you Mac OR are concerned that the attacks you have experienced are coming from your machine (with a DDOS, I would find it unlikely), Malware software will not be helpful in this scenario.
Dan
Hi Dana,
Not that I'm aware of. The only way to respond to an action via the browser is using javascript in some way.
Dan
Hey,
Microsites were typically set up to take advantage of an EMD, Exact Match Domain. Since the softening of EMD relevance in search, microsites have lost their efficacy.
Although there still may be a need for microsites, I don't think they should be considered if it's simply to rank a keyphrase/s.
Dan
Hi,
Depending on the nature of the blog and size of your site, I would consider creating the blog as a folder within your site. Having a blog that refers to your business quite a bit is best found under your domain as it provides a great deal of long tail keywords, will provide a lot of internal linking which done right improves usability and most importantly it gives your site breadth and depth, giving it an air of authority.
As for mass uploads and reduced man hours. Firstly, in my mind the only blogging platform that excels at optimised layout is wordpress.
Although you can copy paste content from editors (like word), I would highly recommend you give the relevant parties their own author logins, teach them all the editing options and style requirements and have them draft everything in wordpress. For added consistency, have an editor (a nominated person) look over it to ensure each article has the same look and feel before publishing. If it is simply pre written documents, I would suggest copy/pasting them into a plain text editor eg. Notepad and copy/paying them to wordpress. This will remove the formatting. To save on the man hours, employ someone of oDesk to do the grunt work.
Articles uploaded from Word and other word processing applications often paste poorly as they have a number of hidden tags that leave a mess of styles.
Dan
Hi David, In my experience no... Although a screen shot would help to see the layout of what you have described, having a title at the top of the Page and a subheading below the folder giving additional information to the product is perfectly acceptable. As longer as the layout and information support the usability of the Page I would be confident that you would not be penalised. Dan
Hey,
I would most definitely run the blog in the folder (mydomain.com.au/blog) over the sub-domain...
Sub-domains are considered a separate site, and therefore offer little SEO benefit between sub-domain variations. That said, it is great for branding and breaking up very distinct elements of a business.
Hope this helps.
Dan
Hi,
I assuming you are talking about the keyword tool found incorporated in Google Adwords, https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool
This, although an estimate, is the most accurate source of data of keyword search volumes. I have compared these values to impressions given for consistently ranking keywords in webmasters and they match up.
Make sure when you run these searches in adwords, you have your desired country selected, and I would suggest selecting "exact match" instead of broad. The other thing to consider when examining this data is that the search results can be seasonal. The data provided is simply in the last month, so a trending topic (Oscar Pistorius) OR a seasonal one (Christmas Shopping) may not give the results you might think. Google Trends can help you realise this...
Dan