So, I agree, but that does not really answer my question. Are links like AVVO and Super lawyers actually helpful to lawyer websites? They seem to produce for my other clients. What say you?

FenixBazaar,

When you are searching for your website on google, are you logged in to google? If you are logged in google will show you personally results you want to see. Like rich snippets for your articles. When you log out and do the same searches you rankings will all disappear.

Try using a private web browser when testing search results.

A search for your domain at SEMrush shows very healthy traffic since Novemeber. How are you testing your articles rank?

Hi AnnabelH

You could use Open Site Explorer OSE

Just insert your domain or url and see what links come up that are pointed back at your site. You could also use it on the suspected domain as well.

You could also utilize SEMRush

Thanks,

Don

I use list items for footer links in a menu. h tags are better used when organizing information on a page.

Hi Tiedemann,

I have done SEO large ECommerce markets who sell many different products from a number of distributors and wholesalers. I found the writing unique descriptions for each product ranked my client higher then the wholesalers who were selling the same products.

Unfortunately competing with wholesalers makes your life miserable. They usually command more attentions from search engines due to the number of backlinks from retailers and others who sell the products.

I found the best situation for ecommerce retailers is to sell only products directly distributed from the manufacturer or have an agreement with the wholesaler that they cannot sell the product outside of retail space. Most wholesalers do not sell to the public, however this does depend on the industry and agreements in place.

Yeah exactly,

But with headings and such you could probably test and tweak. Run it with hyphen see how traffic is then change to no hyphen see if it drops or increases. It really is going to be based on the specifics of the hyphenated word and may require some testing. Can you run an a/b title test on your blog?

My experience is that most of the time the hyphen does not matter so much, but i tend to leave them out in the main technical seo.

Thanks,

Hi Sandra,

So, this is a tough question because there is no other content on the page. If i was in your shoes i would use an H2 for the sub categories, especially if they are keyword based. This would show that the sub headings are important. Don't forget to use the alt tags for the images on these sub heading pages as well.

Your focus keywords I think are right on! I was stuck on the path of what type of design i did technically and not thought about breaking it up into genres. Duh! why was that not on the top of my list

I have read Yoast's guide and bought their two e-books as well. Problem is they leave out specifics regarding their plugin. Try to find a tutorial written by yoast about best practices to set up and utilize their plugin. They will not give you this as they want to sell their personalized service and set the plugin up for you. I don't blame them however it would be nice to see how they set up title tags and not spend $600 bucks for it

What do you think about testimonial post types?

There is no set word count that will help rank. It is the quality and depth of the content you are providing. Keep the searches intent in mind when developing content. Be engaging and educational, answering the searchers query. i have pages on my website that rank with as little as 300 words and as much as a1000. so as you see its not the word count. its the quality.

Thanks,

Don Silvernail

This one is for the WordPress optimization crowd!

Portfolios are used to display work. I have a question about best seo optimization techniques.

1. Portfolios can be used to display many different types of work, for me it either original web designs from scratch, WordPress redesigns, or importing a current website into WordPress. What is the best practice for keywords for  multiple portfolios that are in one category. for instance WordPress Redesign. If I have 5 WordPress redesign portfolio posts is it good practice to use WordPress redesign for all 5 portfolios or should they use variations? Yoast gets angry when the same focus keyword is used multiple times.

2. Should portfolios even be indexed? Since this is how I attract new customers I would think yes but am I giving too much exposure to my client and not enough to my business. I guess this will depend on titles and meta descriptions.

A discussion on best practices here is what I am really looking for. What is your advice and opinion on the matter.

What you need to consider is search intent. Can you inform or educate the potential customers with bullet points? Do the bullet points answer all questions. If not then use full sentences. Shortened page may see a dip in SEO if the content no longer answers the users search intent. Be very careful when changing content or shortening content. Make sure you express all the reasons why the searcher landed on the page to begin within the shortened content. Are you shortening to remove fluff?

Thanks,

Don Silvernail

Hi Dan,

Good question, I will keep it simple, Yoast creates a file with your Social Profile Urls and shares them with the google crawlers. This links your social profiles with your website.

If you have sub-sites in multiple languages then I would add those social profiles too if you prefer.

Have a nice day!

H1 tags are usually reserved for the title of the page, or important stand out headings. It is possible for this heading to be halfway down the page but very unusual. The h tags do not necessarily need to be in order. They are used to organize headings by their importance. For instance you could have an h2 heading and have an h3 and an h4 heading in the same copy block and then start a new topic paragraph with another h2 heading and once again use the h3 and h4 headings within the next block of copy.

So no they do not need to go in order but their contents, relevance or organization is dictated by the heading used.