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Hi Peter,
That is true, it appears however the question is if it is okay to use relative paths.
In which Google says:
"...Avoid errors: use absolute paths rather than relative paths with the
rel="canonical"link element.Use this structure:
https://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendresss.html
Not this structure:/dresses/green/greendress.html).."REF: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
I always side on the better to be safe side of things.
Cheers,
Don
Hello,
To answer your question, yes it is possible to rank sub-domains. In general they tend not to rank as well as root domains but they can and do rank. Depending on the difficulty of keywords, you'll have different results.
I think your going to have more challenges using Wix in general than other CMS sites. While I don't have any personal experience with Wix, I have seen many post here about problems with ranking, and more often with reporting.Google "Moz SEO Wix" to see some of the other questions and concerns raised on these forums.
Wix uses Javascript to load data to your webpages. The problem with this is that Javascript is client side script which basically means the page is loaded after you get to a page, while crawlers expect the content to load from the server (server side). This is basically a way to say "most" crawlers / spiders will not be able to read your site. Which makes reporting, and SEO particularly difficult. That is not saying your site will not rank, Google has one of the most sophisticated crawlers and likely can read through it, but trying to tweek anything will prove challenging without the help of many of the SEO tools out there.
I will also add, "free sub-domain" sets off an alarm for me. In general sub-domains are inherently free. Wix may mean that you may use their tools to design the domain, but it just sounds funny. Kinda like saying free water with every car wash.
Anyway hope that answers your questions and gives you some help,
Don
Hi Kerry,
My advice is 301. Canonical was originally designed for people who didn't have access to the server to create the 301 rules. Since we have used it for that purpose but also to deal with dynamic urls and url variations like (www.mysite.com/home vs www.mysite.com/home/)
If you are in fact using a new page as better version of the old, then you should 301 it to the old to the new. This will pass all the link juice your previous page has accumulated and your new page will be the one to appear in the index upon Google's next index pass of your site.
Hope that helps,
Don
Hello,
Laura and EGOL really nailed it as usually they both do!
By using Canonical you have basically told the search engines hey this content all belongs to X.
What I would suggest is use the manufacturers description in conjunction with the sites or owners own description. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using a manufactures description but you have to own it, which means unique content for every client for every product. Amazon for example uses manufacturers descriptions but they also usually add a slew of other things to a page to make it theirs, Manufacture Description / Amazon Description / Technical Information / User Reviews / User Questions / User Images / Shipping Information.
And here is the crux of the matter, people don't want to buy things from companies who know nothing about what they are selling. If a site can't add some sort of information or opinion about what the product is and why it is worth buying, they honestly have no business trying to sell such a product.
Just my thoughts along with the other 2 great answers,
Don
Hello ypl,
You asked:
how would you factor in their page rank, visitors, page view and social media info?
if they don't have much traffic, with PR3 (we are PR4), which means we can't count on too much traffic from them, but, will backlink from such places deemed as quality link by Google? I do understand the higher number in PR and traffic is better, but, in our case, they don't come by often. Is it still worthwhile to do the lower sites?
The 3 things I am conscience of when getting a backlink from any source are as follows:
1. Is the site or the particular content on their site being discussed relevant to your site? Meaning you don't want to ask a blog site that specifically talks about politics linking to your site if you sell bicycles. If the site blogs about a wide range of topics it certainly would be acceptable to get a link from a post that is discussing bicycles. There is a caveat to this, and that is it is perfectly acceptable for a few links from non-relevant sites or articles to link to you. I mention this so folks may understand links that are coming from non-related sites or topics can negatively impact your site if they are in the majority.
2. What is their pagerank and how many other external links are on the page where you will appear? If your site is have a PR4 page they want to link to and they are PR 0/1 I would be a little standoffish. However PR 2 or 3, certainly appropriate. All things equal it would take about 600 PR3 links to push you from 4 to 5. Throw a couple 4's or 5's in there and that number goes down. (ref:: http://curiouslittleperson.com/backlinks-for-google-pagerank/) .
The second part is how many other external links are you looking at. If you are offered a spot on a wall of links even if the PR is 4 or 5, the juice passed to each one is watered down. I find it most appropriate to be on a page where there are at most 5 other external links. This really depends on the amount of content on the page, for example http://www.instructables.com/ writers often articulate very well on how to build a gizmo from scratch, these articles can be quite long and sometimes are paginated. If you sell a product they use and purchase from you, you may end up on a list detailing the parts needed on page 1 of the article along with 10 other companies, or they may link to you in article with anchor text. The latter is better of course.
3. Does the site look like a site that you would appreciate a link from? What I'm really getting at here is does look to spammy, allow in-appropriate ads (xxx), look like a dynamic smattering of content, or hasn't updated content since Clinton's first term? I will go on to finish answering your second question in that, even if the site doesn't see a lot of traffic, if you get 2 or 3 visits from them and they turn into customers the link was well worth it for that alone. There is something to said about quality rather then quantity.
The short answer is yes a pr3 link to pr4 is great and actually about what you should expect. Don't get caught up to much with traffic, while it is important it isn't the end all of the value of the link. In general if the site is well laid out, not spammy and will offer you anchor text rich backlink and the site or article is relevant to your page or domain then certainly take it.
Hello Ravi,
The simple answer is PR (Public Relations).
Hope this helps,
Don
From my personal experience, link building is never done.
That said, if you reached #1 / #2 then you can probably ease back shifting focus to other aspects, but never stop. My thinking is it is very easy to follow the leader. Take a few extra steps now you're in front.
If you stop.. catching up to you is that much easier.
Hi Rebecca,
I can see this happening in the future for sure, if not already. The new Google reCaptcha already kind of does this, "Select the pictures with tacos", which is kind of like Google saying hey we already know which of these pictures have tacos lets see if you do. They could of course expand the reCaptcha to help identify more pictures if they wanted to.Though that may diverge from the original purpose of captcha which was designed to tackle 2 problems. OCR readers having trouble with certain words / scripts in books, and spammers.
Nice thoughts,
Don
There was a good YoMoz post on this subject today.. here:http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/build-relationships-not-links
The truth is if you outsource this aspect you are taking a risk. I understand that you already prefaced your question with time. So, perhaps I may suggest that you hire somebody in house to help with SEO, in this case they would have access to you and your industry knowledge which would help build reliable relationships with communities, forums and blogs.
If the website is your baby or bread and butter, then outsourcing something as important as link relationships is very risky. There have been hundereds of post about people getting smashed by Google's penguin and panda updates which directly crushed the way 90% of the SEO companies used to build links for SEO reasons.
I am not trying to be harsh on you, I just don't' want you to end up in a Panda situation 6 months from now.
Hard to say at this point, since our traffic is always crap on the weekends and U.S. holidays.
Maybe in a week or so I'll have a better understanding of the changes. Historically, being strictly white hat and link building cautious I have only seen sites I work on benefit from Google algorithm updates.
Hi Hilary, Dana gave some great advice. Thumbs up for her.
Great content will generate links, but there is nothing wrong with taking extra steps to get them. You may find that including a little closing statement at the end of your blog post will go a long way in the amount of links you get. In fact I do this regularly when helping people on the forums to entice them for a thumbs up (I want a t-shirt).
Hope this helps,
Don
You could go see cattle.
See Cattle, Seattle .. okay sorry bad joke but it was stuck in my head and had to be said.
I really hope you have fun, wish I could be there.
Hi Activitysuper,
I can speak to this matter in some degree. All directories are not bad, paid or otherwise.
Quick history, before panda, penguin updates a link was a link was a link, the ones that passed the most juice were high page rank, with the least amount of other outgoing links. If for any reason a site was bad, the links it was linking to were simply ignored or passing no juice.This wasn't that long ago mind you.
What happened is what always happens when money is involved, people starting manipulating the hell out of this. Directory owners started artificially pumping up their page ranks by creating elaborate link rings and exchange programs, once they reached pagerank 4+ they could then sell you a paid listing for big bucks. And it was actually worth it (if you don't mind the grey area) because you would get the link juice and a bump in your page rank as well. On top of this any place that allowed for users to post links were getting spammed.
Google swept in with their swift hand of justice and deemed many of these directories as spam, and further punished sites that were spamming their links all over the place.
So today you look at directories and you do have to wonder should I list there. The answer is very easy. Look at the directory, does this look like a place you would visit for information about your industry? If the answer is no, you don't need to be there.
Some examples of good directories from my industry.
<cite>www.efunda.com/</cite>
www.globalspec.com/
www.saeglobalsuppliermarketplace.com
www.eng-tips.com/
www.thomasnet.com/
www.yahoo.com
www.dmoz.org
What is all comes down to is:
Does the directory offer something of value to the industry?
Does it look like a place where I would search for something in my industry?
Are my competitors there?
If you said yes, to any 2 of those then you probably should be there.
Hi ICEReed,
If you received a new IP, than I am fairly certain that is the issue. DNS has to propagate across the net before traffic returns to normal. I have had a few experiences with this, and have seen it take up to 3 months before traffic was returned to normal.
Hi,
There are a few services that help with this: Like, https://blog.monitorbacklinks.com
Here is a quote from the site above:
"What are the most common bad links
Social Bookmarking websites
Comments that are auto approved from sites that are not moderated
Links from pages with very little content
Backlinks from websites with duplicate content
Link directories
Links from irrelevant websites and content
REF:https://blog.monitorbacklinks.com/seo/identify-remove-backlinks-hurt-rankings/
The main thing to note is just because you get a link from a not so great or bad site is that it by itself won't hurt you. Being proactive and making note of these link just in case you incur a penalty can help in the long run.
The main point is you don't want to chase these types of links. If they happen on their own, that's okay, if they start sprouting like mad then you may have to take some action.
Hi Cyto,
Do you have the parameter blocked using robots.txt?
user-agent: *
disallow: /*returnto
That would seem like the easiest fix to me
HI Ashley,
It has been awhile since I have seen this question. Figured I'd jump in on this one.
In the early years of crawlers it was a pretty good rule of thumb to limit internal linking to 100 links, mostly because the crawler's didn't have the resources to crawl a ton of links. A lot has changed since this rule was introduced. Spiders have gotten smarter and are able to handle way more data than what they could back in the day.
But the spiders ability to deal with content should not be the only reason you evaluate how many links you should put on a page. The rule of a 100is still a good rule when you start thinking about things like how link juice is passed and what you "Really" want the search engines to know about. Dr. Pete wrote a blog post here on Moz about this, you can read here.
Once you get to the 100 link range the search engines don't really place much value on any of your links. Conversely if you limit your linking to 25 or so, the search engine is able to correlate X page to Y content very highly.
To address the question how can you limit the amount of links Google Or Moz sees, well the best way is to reduce the way your pages are internally linked. If you have a super large navigation in your header or footer it may make sense to change the way the navigation is built. But, if you REALLY feel that having all those links in the navigation is helpful to your viewers then you can use things like Ajax calls to load links on hover or click. Most crawlers won't be able to load action scripts but they are getting smarter.
In summary the rule of 100 is really an old rule but still important just not in the way it was originally introduced. Today you probably can expect most cralwers to do 150-300 links before giving up. If you have a high page and domain authority you may find just ignoring the warning is the best course of action. However, if you're still working to get those rankings up it may likely be worth the time to create a better navigation that logically points to the most important section from each page.
I hope this helps,
Don
Hi Eslam,
I'm glad you found help while you were here. As your site continues to grow you'll find the Moz tools more and more helpful as well as other site's tools.
I have also always felt one of the best part of Moz is the community. I had questions when I first arrived here 4 years ago and found the help I need from both the members and the staff. It is only fair that I share my knowledge with new members.
Good luck to you,
Don
Hi Noob,
I can imagine how frustrating that could be. What you have is a site that offers a service, and that service itself will generate a ton of links. So the question is how do you attract both buyers and sellers (listers and lookers) right?
In cases like this it may not be the best to focus mainly on building backlinks, rather focus your efforts on other marketing avenues. This could be email marketing, community type engagement (Local Area Websites, Industry Specific Websites, Charities), print (Newspapers, Magazines), Radio, Online Advertisement (Facebook, Twitters, Google, Yahoo).
Without knowing exactly what type of classifieds you plan on running I can't be very specific. However, I will say the "classified" type website is nothing new and as I'm sure you're aware you're up against some pretty big names (Craigslist, Ebay, Angieslist, LocalAreaNewspaper/classifieds.com) Which means if you're going to fight in this arena you should be doing something they aren't doing, or whatever they are doing better.
This type of website is one that is very good at generating its own links as many "sellers" will post links to their items on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and so on. You could take advantage of this to get a main link to your domain by offering new posters a quick code grab which includes a link to the specific product they just posted along with a link to the site itself.
Of course if you're talking personals that is a different animal in where you approach people but the theories are still the same.
The things you can do in either case is to focus on making sure the site is as easy as possible to use for both listers and lookers. They both should have a great experience. Make sure they are completely informed about fees and how the service works. Along with that offer lots of back end features that allow both sides to ease of use, in the areas of tracking and searching.
In all cases how these sites stay around by being relative. Ebay is still around because people still buy stuff from there, despite the ridiculous fees and issues sellers have dealt with over the many years. If eBay were to lose sellers that would have a direct impact on lookers and vice versa. Keep both sides happy, you need them both.
Hope this helps in some way,
Don
I agree with Michael here.
I will add that is also important to know if you have the ability to maintain a blog. If you're in a low value market then the effort maybe wasted. Making a industry leading blog, and maintaining it at levels above the competition may be challenging; depending on who you are up against.
Alternatively, simply achieving top ranking pages for these low volume keywords maybe adequate. Again as Michael points out it is all relative to the market you are in. A low volume keyword that drives a $100,000 sale may be worth extra effort to achieve, while a $1.00 sale wouldn't.
Hope it helps and good luck
Hello,
Moz has a Fresh Link Explorer. However, no site including Google will catch them all. Using multiple tools is really the only method I know to find most of them...
Hope it helps,
Don
I will add to what Tom said and say you should familiarize yourself with the basics of SEO to help you choose the right company / person to hire, even if you don't have the willingness or time to become an expert yourself.
In short it is hard to judge the value of a person or company if don't know what to look for.
Good luck
Also what is your primary target region? France ?
I can find you in Google.fr pretty easily, but Google.com not so much. Some of the English pages could use a little better translation.
If you're targeting 2 countries / languages you should also use specific titles
FR Title Tag: Jet-lag-trip, le magazine lifestyle du voyage: hotels, restaurants
EN Title Tag: Jet-lag-trip, le magazine lifestyle du voyage: hotels, restaurants
This is an example of a challenge. When you target two languages you need to clearly define the keywords for each language and incorporate them appropriately on every page. It is twice the work, but also twice the potential.
I am sure others will have some input as well. I don't speak French (wish I did).
Keyword cannibalization.
http://www.ccisolutions.com/blog/roland-m-200i-digital-mixer-review-part-1/
Title: Roland M-200i Digital Mixer Review - Part 1 | CCI Solutions Blog
H1: Roland M-200i Digital Mixer Review (Part 1)
http://www.ccisolutions.com/blog/roland-m-200i-digital-mixer-review-part-2/
Title: Roland M-200i Digital Mixer Review - Part 2 | CCI Solutions Blog
H1: Roland M-200i Digital Mixer Review (Part 2)
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/roland-m-200i-digital-mixer
Title: Roland M-200i | 32 Channel Digital Mixer
H1: **Roland M-200i **32 Channel Digital Mixer
The blog appears to be wordpress which I assume you know has some tendency to archive post and cause SEO headaches. However, this scenario is likely just confusing the bots.
That is my thoughts, I didn't dig too deep but it was the very first thing I noticed.
let me know if I win the cookies 
Hi Jon,
It looks like it is because that "tag" is being explicitly blocked by your Robots.txt file.
REF: http://www.balihaiphoto.com/robots.txt
See Rule(s)
Disallow:/?tag=
Disallow:/&tag=
Removing those rules should allow Moz access.
Hope this helps,
Don
Absolutely. I should have linked the thought to a couple post.. see
EGOL's thoughts here; There is also an associate response to some more post on the subject.
Hope that helps Dana, and I don't want people to think I solved the issue, but it if nothing more is certainly a contributing factor.
Hi Nick,
To expand on what Ryan has stated. Google does use IP addresses to serve results. If somebody in Chelsea types in "Plumber" Google will decide what it thinks the person is looking for. If in case it is happens to be a local plumber than in all likely-hood, a site ranking for Chelsea plumber would be a top result. To specifically answer the question we would have to know what Google thinks a person means when they just type the broad keyword "plumber" and the answer may actually differ from region to region.
Hope this helps,
Don
Hi Nik,
I do wish you the best of luck. I think the reason you get #1 results for "adding city name" is your website likely uses the city name in the description, making it a new keyword "outdoor mirrors Perth" for example. That keyword itself generates different results then the broad keyword "outdoor mirrors" and again since Google treats intent differently based on location, you get different results. Furthermore since your business is located in Sydney, Google can easily draw a high correlation between outdoor mirrors and Sydney for anybody in that area.
Good luck once again,
Don
I know in robots.txt any URL's are case sensitive, I am not sure about user agents (bots/crawlers) but you do have RogerBot spelled with a capitol "B", changing it to lower case (Rogerbot) may fix the issue.
Another thing to test would be to simply remove the mass exclusion just to see if Rogerbot somehow is being blocked by it. Let me know how it goes.
User-agent: * Disallow: /
I was looking at this issue to see if I could find anything specifically wrong, also kinda hoping somebody would chime in to help.
At any rate, I found this topic on Moz:
Though I been using Moz for a couple years I didn't realize how picky RoberBot can be. I did notice that your banner / slider is taking a fairly long time to load (10+secs here in the US). Perhaps Roger is not liking that?
That figure from Open Site Explorer does seem odd.
I used to be a mod for IGN / Vault Network so I'm very familar with TTH.
I am new to the tool, but the site is a top 30k global site and according to google has 181,000 in links. I can't imagine only 220 root domains generating that.
Hello,
You should be able to see results if you use a proxy server located in the city (area) you are researching. But I imagine there is an easier way nowadays.
This post may help over on SearchEngineLand
Good luck,
Don
It would also make sense if you're home page generates something like
www. A Site.com
www. A Site.com/
www. A Site.com/index.php
www. A Site.com/index.php/
This prevents duplicate page content issues as those pages while the exact same, are different URL's. The canonical tag should point to a single page whichever one is the real url for your site.
Hope that helps,
Don
Hello, and welcome to Moz!
Using rel canonical on each page to itself is okay and sometimes even advised. Moz tells you about it, but it is nothing to be alarmed at. I know that is a bit confusing, as I have seen this question a few times. Just treat it as a notice nothing more.
Hope this helps,
Don
Hello Motava,
So first lets understand what the www[number] actually means. It is not a technically a different sub-domain www is actually the sub-domain. The [number] is a way for content to be shared / mirrored on the www sub-domain usually for load balancing purposes. You can learn a little more about this by one of my favorite Mozzer's (Dr. Pete) with his article about the anatomy of a URL.
With that I have to question why your site would actually imbed the mirror into the link? I would want to examine this behavior as I have not seen it before the [10] should not be present in the link because it has nothing to do with the link other then where the content for www is delivered from. By specifically saying use mirror [10] it defeats the purpose of load balancing.
^^ Perhaps another Mozzer can shed some light on this
As to you question about whether www10 and www have different rankings the answer should be no. They are the same link for all intents and purposes. The way these links are being delivered are confusing to me, perhaps Rogerbot (Moz) is having the same confusion.
H1 tags are very important.Your sites is buried at the bottom of the page, with the keyword NLP towards the end of the actual tag.
Additionally I noticed that you repeat NLP in your title tag way too many times, it maybe getting marked as spam or at least penalized.
NLP California | NLP Training | NLP Certification | NLP Courses
Have you considered something like:
NPL Courses, Training, Certification | NLP Institute of California
Your site is very nice and appears to be an authority in our industry so a few simple fixes may go a long way for you.
Certainly run a On-Page Report Card to get all possible suggestions and evaluate them accordingly.
Hope it helps,
Don
tailoring-london.com/suits-tailoring-london/
There is nothing wrong with this. Nor would I consider is stuffing.
Example www.Server-Hosting.com/hosting/dedicated-servers
Example www.Board-Games-Shop.com/shop/classic-board-games
This is somewhat normal, just remember when using a keyword based domain you do get the benefit of keywords but you do lose some ability for diversification.
Like this example,tailoring-london.com you may rank great in London but surrounding areas not well, which maybe okay if that is the desired effect.
Hi Mark,
My understanding is having Nofollow links will dilute the juice this passed to the dofollow links.
You can read more on that on from Rand.. here
I will veer off a little from what Mark said in that having the navigation in the footer as well as the top header area, maybe okay if the site warrants it. Most all cases I would follow Mark's advice, but in a case where the navigation in the bottom can be perceived has "helpful" to the user, then it would be okay to use it there as well.
In the end you can't always do everything that is considered "Good SEO Practices" simply because it helps your SEO, you must also follow good site design and useability practices. If having the navigation in the footer helps the user, and is aesthetically pleasing then I would say it is okay. The real trick of course is to merge Good SEO with both aesthetics and useability.
Hope that helps,
Don
Hi Falk,
What I am seeing from your response is you want to target a keyword which includes a location. Do you feel that the only way to accomplish this is by getting that exact domain name, or a partial domain like this keyword?
I believe. if you concede the domain name to the brand and target the keyword on the homepage you'll have the same results. With the benefit of not sounding like a fly by night joint.
HI Adam,
Do you have rogerbot blocked in your robots.txt? If the site is http://www.partydomain.co.uk I am having trouble connecting to it from my workplace, do you have any IP ranges blocked? I can get to it through a proxy but not directly.
It looks like it may not just be me, see this ping test
https://www.site24x7.com/public/t/results-1424178131080.html
Ryan out of curiosity did this just happen, or have they maintained this position for awhile (weeks+)?
As you may already know, Google randomly ranks or serves sites which have no business being in the top pages. This is more of a Google test on how people perceive a site, and typically only last a couple days.
We recently had a new site come out of the blue ranking #1 for a keyword we have dominated for many years, within 3 days they were gone out of the top 50.
I personally would only be alarmed if this positioned had been maintained for extended periods of time.
Hope that helps
Hi Peter, nice work there.
I'll run some formulas on this today and post a new link.
Hi Scott,
I'm not an expert on Panda but from what I personally have gathered is most of the sites hit were ones involved in some form or another with link exchanges, or "bad" paid seo services. The paid services usually used some severally black hat tricks to get immediate results, get their money and run. Duplicate content is something to worry about but using a template is not going to cause any problem unless you are dynamically creating content based on every possible keyword, resulting in millions of pages with very little differences.
As far gathering the long tail keywords.. I have used Google Ad Words, keyword suggestion tool. Type in some broad keywords, and let them suggest some keywords play with the filtering settings and see what keywords are the most appropriate for your market that also have the best traffic, then optimize for those.
The keyword suggestion tool is located in Google Ad Words > Tools & Analysis > Keyword Tool
Hope this helps
Don
Good question, I do see this one a lot. I have built a "few" ecommerce sites and can tell you that following SEO basics is a must. From there it is all about the product's page content. This can be a huge challenge because often times you have very similar products.
In a case of multiple colors, you want one product page with color option selection. Multiple sizes can be tricky, for clothing Amazon is a good example they list a drop down. But that may not apply to somethings like screws, piping, and in our case O-rings.
My last project I had many different sized o-rings, in many different materials, some of the different materials had the same sized o-ring. The first thing I had to do is familiarize myself with the industry. Learn why there are so many different materials, durometers (hardness), certifications and sizes. After I ingested it all and got a firm grip I moved on to a basic overview. I took a hierarchical approach. Broke the o-rings out in to material type,durometer then finally listed each size individually.
The next challenge was how to I make unique content for a same material same durometer o-ring with out risking duplicate content penalties? This is where Excel saved me. I listed out some standard information and broke out size information, everywhere possible. Then populated cells with unique information and finally in the last column did a concatenate to produce the final description. You can see an example on our site here:
By listing the sizes in metric, inch, and fractional and referencing the part number, model number as many times appropriately I was able to avoid duplicate content problems even though this o-ring description is fairly similar to the next size.
I will admit with about 8000 different o-rings this was a very long and tedious task. But thus far has proven to be a nice feather in my cap.
Another tip that I am a fan of is user reviews. Not only can you integrate a microdata schema that search engines can pick up on, but it also gives the site the ability for customers to create content for you. On the referenced site we don't use reviews but in future sites it is something I am definitely going to be implementing.
Hope this helps and if you have any follow ups on what I showed you I'd be happy to respond.
good luck,
Don
An engineer at work told me about this. Its like Amazon Echo with kung fu grip.
Hi Krackle,
I have found after numerous site launches and re-works it is always a good idea to have the targeted keywords in mind. As well as have a firm understanding of SEO basics. (see itpseo #3).
When I first start a page analysis I look at the products or services I have to offer, the competitors sites and the best keywords. Thinking logically I decide if I was looking for X how would I do it? Then I ask others how would you find X; what would you type into the search engine? Then compare what I think and what I was told with what Google shows as the highest volume keywords. In some cases you'll find that Google's "best" keywords are not applicable to your industry. This is usually broad stroke keywords that can potentially have many meanings.
For example my company makes customer rubber caps. Broad stroke caps is not going to lead you to our site or any of our competitors site because caps has many meanings and Google has since figured out when somebody types caps they are likely looking for sports team hats.
At this point I would refine my keyword to be a little more industry specific, rubber caps. Still pretty good search volume and now I am seeing rubber companies coming up in the search results. Now I ask my self do I want to be listed among these companies, do they do what we do? The answer here would be no. These companies offer standard lines of rubber caps in many sizes shapes and colors, we do not. We only make custom parts and don't have any standard lines of rubber caps.
Once again I refine my search to be precise with what I am trying to achieve page 1 ranking (hopefully #1) . My keyword now becomes custom rubber caps. When I search I find some of our competitors offering our types of services. This is exactly where we want to be!
Now I have my main keyword. I will then research longer-tail keywords and variations to find the most applicable again following my process laid out as before. Once I have my best 3 keywords I start work on the design.
Incorporate best keywords in Title, H1,H2, H3 tags. Use (
So in short:
*** Find Best Match Keywords
I hope this helps you,
Don**
I noticed MozPoint rank was pretty close to the aggregated rank for everybody in the Top 50 list. But when you look at all 4291 users there is some big differences. I think maybe in June I'll do just a top 1000 or have a minimum point requirement.
Hi James,
you in fact come up with the answer I would have suggested.
One thing to think about is the purpose of why these pages come into existence and why it was a tactic 10+ years ago...
The reason I would think is.. keywords.
Croydon Lift Repair
Essex Lift Repair
London Lift Repair
....
Depending on the clients website and using my example service, if they happened to have a very strong presence for the keyword lift repair, then you probably could easily incorporate those longer keywords London Lift Repair onto the main lift repair page and simply canonical the subpages.
If they don't have a strong presence on the root keyword (lift repair) but do show good results for the longer keyword results (London Lift Repair), then all you have to really worry about is 14 pages of content. Which in the scheme of a website is not that much.
I would think that it would be a good idea to include, content, physical address's phone numbers, map results on this page. Also if possible, contact some of the clients and ask them if it is okay get their opinion and thoughts on the service that was provided and use that as "What Others Are Saying". section on these pages. If they are hesitant maybe offer their business a free follow link, which could sway them in the right direction. From there you could talk about the unique things about each branch, could be employees, service equipment, local community involvements, clients, high profile contracts etc...)
The short is you're on the right track and I hope my thoughts helped you get on.
Don
Hi Christel,
This one is tough to answer with out more information. I am sure some of us Mozers would be happy to look at the site and offer some pointers to get you started.
Don
Hi Glenn,
Good question there, I'm not sure where exactly the service is launched from Moz. I had always assumed that Moz buys some sort of package from Google to run these request from one of their servers. Though I actually don't know for sure, perhaps somebody could enlighten us both about how that process actually works.
Even without knowing the actual answer I do think it is irrelevant. A service like this that gave any bias to results based on the location of the request would be near worthless. What is likely happening is your 1 of 2 things.
1. Your client is not familiar with private browsing. If you really want to check your own rankings manually you need to take some precautions. First you would enable private browsing (FireFox CTRL+SHIFT+P), Chrome (CTRL+SHIFT+N), Safari (tools -> Private Browsing). Second you would make sure you use the "right" Google website. In the case where your client may be in a different country you could end up on google.co.uk or wherever simply based on your browser language preference. You can switch browser languages to ensure this doesn't happen or try to go directly to the right "Google" using direct links like google.us. Third, device type. Google delivers different results based on device type, a mobile device may not see the same results as a laptop or pc.
2. Normal fluctuations in rankings. Google rankings do fluctuate for a lot of reasons and this is normal. I've seen rank 6 and rank 15 on the same day. What really matters is the average. Obviously #1 is the desired spot for any organic keyword ranking, but on the first page (1-10) is a noble pursuit for most companies, with the ultimate goal of being in the butter zone (1-3).
When I'm doing my normal SEO stuff here, I used to do a lot of manual checks with my own searches and using plugins like RankChecker from SEObook. Now I simply look at the rankings from week to week and only act after I consistently see a pattern to the rankings over a 3-6 week span.
Hope this helps,
Don