Welcome to the Q&A Forum

In a nutshell, it's the number of other sites that link to your page/site. You can find more info here:

https://moz.com/help/guides/moz-pro-overview/links/competitive-metrics

Number of linking root domains (# of linking root domains) includes only the number of unique root domains linking. Two links from the same website would only be counted as one linking root domain.

Engineers at SEOmoz have found that "# of linking root domains" is much more highly correlated to real rankings than "# of links".

Generally the more "connected" your page is to the the greater the authority the search engines will consider your site to have.  Not all links are equal though, and there are other factors involved...

Hope this helps.

Do you want to rely on google picking the most compelling piece on content from your page and hope that this will be more attractive than the carefully crafted meta-descriptions that your competition have produced.

Your entry in the SERPS result is probably the first thing that someone will see about your website. Think of your title and description as a kind of small-ad and make it as compelling as possible. A well crafted description can really make a difference.

With a well crafted description and title you can get more traffic than the #1 ranking site.

Hi Lee.

I don't think you need to be setting goals to chase one metric like this. Domain authority doesn't directly make you money!

Increasing your DA by 10 doesn't = 100,000 extra sales.

What are the goals of your site? With these identified work backwards trying to establish the things that you need to do to achieve these goals. As you work backwards make sure your goals are realistic with the time-scales, effort/cost constraints you have and whether they are truly achievable.

(It's all very well setting a goal to get 100,000 sales/month when you know that there are maybe only 150 prospects in the niche!)

Also consider the ROI you get from the effort you spend building/promoting your site. Consider the opportunity cost of the various tactics. (If I spend x hours building links it won't make much difference to my DA, but if I create another relevant piece of content instead....)

The reason for trying to increase your domain authority is that it's a reasonable measure of the competitive strength of your site. It only really means anything when you compare it against your competition.

Then remember to take into account the value and relevance of your content...

Remember you only need to be better than the next guy!

If you buy the domain and re-direct then remember to think of your competitors customers - not just the potential ranking boost!

Ideally you want their customers to become your customers, so think about how you might redirect specific pages from their domain to landing pages designed to reassure people looking for you competitors products/services and position yourself as a viable alternative.

The last thing you want if for them to think they're in the wrong place and bounce straight away, never to return!

Before buying the domain, can you get any supporting stats / analytics? How many direct visitors, how many via search etc.You're likely to have a small window of opportunity, but it's definitely worth thinking about how you can get some of those customers that you might not be able to replace just from search.

Hi Aron,

It's quite usual for your Domain Authority to fluctuate a little with each index. It completely depends on what (and how many) sites get crawled and what changes on the web.

A small drop of a couple of points on its own probably isn't anything to worry about. Keep an eye on the trend though.

What you need to do is compare any changes relative to those of your competitors. If you see your domain authority continue to drop while your competitors rise then you know that maybe you've got a problem. Looking at my Moz Analytics I can see that the domain authority for all of the competitors and my own site have all dropped between 1-3 points.

To increase your domain authority your site needs to earn some links, and good authority links if possible. Look to build "linkable assets" and develop relationships with other sites in your niche and complementary niches.

The number of linking root domains is normally more important.

(From the Open Site Explorer about): "Engineers at SEOmoz have found that "# of linking root domains" is much more highly correlated to real rankings than "# of links"."

Think about the extremes, you could have a page that has hundreds of links from one other website vs. a page that has 1 links for hundreds of websites. Which one do you think is more likely to be more valuable?

Think of it like 20 votes from one person vs. 1 vote from 20 people!

Of course this is taking a very simplistic view. Remember also that not every other site has the same authority, So you need to look at the domain authority of the linking root domains too!

Would you trust a page that a bunch of sites you've not heard of link to vs a page that the likes of wikipedia, cnn, BBC News all link to?

Hope this helps!

Good stuff! Before you leap into generating lots of great content - have you considered...

1. What are you business goals. (It's not getting hits to a website!) How is your website going to support these goals. Try and think a little longer term than just "selling our service." How are you going to build a relationship with your customers and retain them...

2. What are you customers needs/goals. What motivates them. Do you have a clear understanding of your customers. (Beyond the broad categories like "students" or "home based businesses". Can you break this down further to build personas?

3. What is a customer worth? How much is a customer likely to be worth? Not only in their first purchase, but during their whole life as a customer. How much is the business prepared to invest to get a customer? How many customers does the website need to deliver in order to make it a success.

Once you understand these, you can start to think about the content you need to do some research. You need to to work out how you can connect your services with your target market by developing suitable/compelling offerings. (How do you know there is a market out there?)

This is where keyword research comes in. But don't limit it to just using the google keywords tool. If you can, talk to your target audience then do! I know you've already done some keyword research, but I've often been surprised at how differently prospects search for solutions about their problems! It amazing what people will tell you if you're prepared to listen!

Look at Google Insights for some of your keywords to look for seasonality. Understand why this happens and how you might run different campaigns/need different content at different times of the year. Look at the geography can you identify specific target markets there? It'll also show you some top searches and rising searches.

Can you talk to your potential customers? If your can, don't talk about your service, but listen to what their problems are, what pain can your relieve? What are their concerns. Why wouldn't they use your service (what do you need to do to reassure them?) What are your competitors doing?

Undertake competitive research to fully understand your competitors. Take a look at their websites. What markets are they focusing on. How are they appealing to their customers.

Using Open Site Explorer, take a look at their Top Pages and the Anchor Text of inbound links to see if you can identify the search terms that they are optimising for. (You can tell how much SEO activity they are engaged in too!)

Once you've got all this info, think about: What makes you unique/remarkable. Why should people come to you rather than your competitors. What's the promise your going to make to the world. What are you going to stand for? How are you going to stand apart from the herd.

How do your services solve the problems your potential audience has? What are the benefits of your service (flip "features" into benefits by asking why is this important to your customers) What content do you need to target a specific market niche.

Once you know this, you can start to build your initial content. Instead of building a page hierarchy. Think about building your sales funnel. Think about your landing pages (your offers), The supporting content to address concerns/build credibility (Testimonials, guarantees, samples etc), And the Goal pages (sign-ups, contact pages and purchase pages)

Be wary of "Services" pages. Nobody sits down with the intent to find/browse some services. Always think about the "What's in it for me" angle from their perspective. Why should they be interested in your services. Instead of a Services section for instance, you might want to have different sections for your main market niches: "Small Businesses", "Students", "Legal" etc.. Try to keep an external perspective. This isn't about you. It's about THEM!

Think about the purpose/goal of each and every page, it's position in your sales funnel and how it's going to move people on to the next step. Why does the page exist. What does it have to do? If you know how your sales funnel is meant to work, you can measure the flow of customers through your funnel and identify content/pages that aren't working and fix the leaks. If you don't know how people are going to move through your site it makes it much harder to do this.

Once you've got your core up and running, then you can continue to add further offers (specific to different market niches). This widens your funnel, but you need to watch how these new leads convert and identify any content you need to support this process that's missing.

Clearly identifying your target audience and their needs will also help you write/target your blog content . You want to be investing in content that's relevant to your audience.

Hope this helps, and hope that it's not just telling you stuff that you're already aware of!

I first question that springs to my mind is why you want to create a separate site for a specific type of case?

Would it not be better to have this as a page/section on your current site? This would mean that this new content would benefit from the authority of your current site and you'll avoid the duplicate content problems as you can just refer to the canonical version.

What's the problem you're trying to address by creating the separate site? And what do you want that site to achieve?

If you go ahead, then Issa's suggestion of using a canonical tag tell Google that the bio page on the new site is a copy of the bio on the old site is a good one.

Looking at which products have the highest value to you (margin) is a good place to start, but you also need to consider which products matter most to your customers.

Take a look at which of your products are getting the highest search volume. Can you see why? Is it the uniqueness of the product, the great product descriptions capturing long tail traffic or a lack of competition in the market place?

Which of your product pages are are actually generating sales? Can you establish why? Are there opportunities to up sell your higher margin items rather than just a random related items list produced by your ecommerce platform.

The key for me though is understanding your customers. It's a lot easier to build a strategy to reach and attract more customers - once you've established who your customers really are. I've seen many people fall into the trap of thinking that "the internet is their customer".

What are their needs, their motivations? What language does you customer use when talking about your products? A great place to look is at any customer feedback, testimonials and comments etc.

What information do they need when they consider buying your products. Why problems do your products solve. Would how-to guides, frequently asked questions content help attract people who know they have a problem or a need, but don't know what the solution to that problem is?

Even if your products pages face strong competition from other sites, you can still win by becoming the prospects trusted guide/authority earlier on in the buying cycle.

Absolutely agree with EGOLs advice. Don't use manufacturer supplied product descriptions or generic, bland copy uninspiring copy.

Remember you're writing your product descriptions for people and not search engines. As well as attracting the traffic, the descriptions have to sell the product's value/benefits. Don't just list features, tell people why these features matter - what are the benefits to them. Eg: 5 point locking mechanism to ensure the safety of your valuables.

You can get this from your SEOMoz crawl report! No need to run your site through another tool (although your might wish to out of preference)

From the Crawl Diagnostics, you can download your crawl report by exporting it as a CSV file.  There's a little drop down and an "Export" button on the top right corner of the page.

Once you've downloaded and opened the CSV file you can filter on the 4XX (Client Error) column and then look all the way over to the right hand side to the "referrer" column which will show you the page that had the bad link.

If you've got a whole bunch of 404s to work through you can use the CSV file to mark them off as you go!

Hope this helps!

Don't think the space makes any difference. Take a look at this old article from google:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html

"If you have multiple content values, you must place a comma between them, but it doesn't matter if you also include spaces. So the following meta tags are interpreted the same way:

"

On the topic of whether to put all your blog content under a /blog folder or not. I'd normally recommend it just so that you can easily segment the blog section of your site in Analytics. If you don't it's tough to see how your blog is performing separately from the main site and it's not always obvious what is a blog post and what is a service/resource/support page. Visitors who enter the site via blog posts usually have less commercial intent.

Moz will crawl the site every week so you'll need to wait a few days for that to happen.

In the meantime you could try using the Moz Crawl tool to do a manual crawl. Depending on the size of your site this can take a few days so you might find it's just worth waiting for the weekly crawl. You can find the crawl tool here:

https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test

If you site isn't included in Google's index because it was inaccessible due to the robots,txt, then you'll want to go into Google Webmaster Tools and use the Crawl -> Fetch as Googlebot to kickstart Google crawling/indexing your site.

The comments you highlighted are actually Internet Explorer conditionals used to give different versions of IE different style sheets. I don't think there's any SEO problem here. (Although I recognise this isn't your site)

Removing them may cause you problems with the layout/style of your site.

Tried to crawl your site with Screaming Frog and noticed that your http response header contains a  x-robots-tag which is being set to noindex, nofollow.

You can check your http headers on this site: http://web-sniffer.net/

I'd also add some research upfront...

You and your business - What are your business goals and how are you going to measure the success of your campaign. It's not just about the #1 rankings or even the traffic, you'll want to be looking at sales or business leads etc. Once you know what you're trying to achieve you can start to work on a strategic plan to achieve them!

The greatest template in the world isn't going to tell you what your goals are or how to achieve them!

You mention brand, so you'll need to figure out how you'll measure brand influence (searches for your brand and/or direct traffic can be one indicator, as well as mentions of your brand in social) but look at how this branded traffic is converting.

You need to understand the market your operating in and watch out for any seasonal variations or any external factors (economy, competition, policy/law) that may influence your business.

What's your budget and what resources (esp. people) do you have available. Are you going to do this internally, with help from a consultant or with the involvement of an agency.

And you can't forget your customers...

Your Customers - Who are your customers, what are their needs/problems and motivations. What are they trying to do (their intent) when they visit your site. How does this affect their choice of keywords when searching (and remember that the same people with the same problem may use different keywords when they have a different level of awareness of their problem and the solutions that exist. Don't be afraid to talk to existing customers. Discovering the language they use can be enlightening and will help you avoid industry jargon etc.

Your Competitors - You need to take a good look at your competitors, and not just their link metrics. Look at their websites, social, customer services from a customers point of view. Be realistic about their strengths and weaknesses. What are they doing wrong, what are they doing right and how can you beat them!

Your content - What assets / content do you already have that you can exploit. Once you know what your customers goals are, and how they are searching how can you build content that helps them achieve their goals. How can you optimise your content so that you're not covering too many topics on a single page - keep your content specific and relevant.

Make sure you've got your analytics and reporting set up. Make sure you've got your goals set up correctly. You'll need to know how your website is performing today before you start working on your strategic plan. Make sure you're happy segmenting your audience to reveal the different behaviours of these segments and specific opportunities.

Audit your website - Carry out a full audit of your website.There may be some quick fixes/wins that you can easily make straight away. It's important to know if you have any technical problems or limitations that your campaign is going to have to work with.

Here's a good site audit article: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

There's no point optimising your titles if your pages aren't being indexed!

Planning - When you start looking at the tactical actions you can take, make sure you understand their cost and commitment, the difficulty and likely impact. You'll need to prioritise. I don't know how big your team is, but trying to do everything at the same is likely to be a nightmare, especially if you've got some of the more challenging things to do such as changing the culture of the business to provide more/richer content and increase customer engagement on social platforms etc.

Also make sure you understand any risks. Make sure you're aware of search engines policies and any governance/guidelines you're going to need when you start doing your social outreach. One badly written email,tweet or a poor customer review can undermine months of effort. For the risks you can anticipate, plan a suitable response.

Review - Make sure you set up regular reviews to look at the results of your campaign and evaluate how well your metrics and tactics continue to be relevant to your business goals. Don't be afraid to ditch metrics that don't provide actionable insight and avoid death by metrics! Don't fall into the trap of tracking too much!

Good luck!

Analysing your competitors backlinks is a great idea. I don't think you need to copy your competitors link structure exactly though.

As well as looking to identify immediate backlink opportunities, think a little broader...

Don't just focus on the specific sites that link back to your competitors. Look at how you might group and classify those sites to help identify other similar sites that even your competitor hasn't got backlinks from.

As well as looking at the sites that link to competitors, also look into why/how they are linking to your competition. You want to understand what reason they have to provide the link, what you can offer as an incentive (what content you need on your site) and how you can refine your request to be as compelling as possible. If you can offer something of value, and create a win-win scenario it may make things easier.

As far as directories go, if there are niche directories that your target audience would expect you to be present in, then it would be worth getting a listing. Getting links from low value directories can be easy, but the rewards are going to be less. I don't think I'd "work your way up from low ranking directories..."

Appearing in reputable directories along side your competition may help reinforce the perceived authority of the site. Prioritise your efforts on those backlinks that are likely to provide the greatest benefits.

Remember, it's not just about getting the backlinks to improve your rankings and as a result your organic search traffic. Good quality backlinks can provide highly qualified traffic.

Hope this helps, Good luck!

It sounds as if the guides are getting search traffic so I wouldn't advise that you remove these pages. The reason your guides are getting this traffic is that they are out ranking your product pages (which are more than likely a lot lighter on content). They're probably out ranking your competitors project pages too.

My advice would be to understand the intent of the searches that are arriving on your guides etc. What are the search queries being used.

Once you understand what people are looking for then think about how you can improve your guides to entice people into your product content. They should form part of your conversion funnel. Make it clear that these are products you offer and are only a click away!

Then you need to track the conversion rate of people landing on your supporting content.

Remember that many of these people won't be interesting in buying (not immediately) but may come return in the future once they've finished their research. By making your content more memorable / helpful you'll stand a better chance of getting some of this longer-term custom.

Don't just strip out these pages - you're likely just to lose traffic...

Hope this helps.

If your meta-description doesn't contain the search keywords then google may view a section of your page that does as more relevant and return that instead.

I don't think I'd bother with the type of directory you've used as an example. You'd be much better off getting the kind of high quality links that your competitors aren't going to be able to get near just by getting directory entries.

If your customers would expect to find you there, it would be a different matter.

See EGOL's response for the kind of things that would really make a difference.

If you're still climbing up the ranks then it's not time to give up and succumb to the dark side!

Here's an article I found about search snippets affecting click throughs. (In this case it was the presence of an article date that was causing a drop in CTR.)

Evidence of “SERP Snippet” Impact on Clickthrough Rates

And this article about boosting traffic by changing your snippets:

Easy Way To Boost Your Search Engine Traffic

I agree, that it would be to do some more testing of the impact of optimising the snippet for conversion.

I believe the best way to tackle this is by getting some good quality links and try to educate the client so that he knows how to spend his time effectively building links/relationships that are going to be beneficial.

Are you sure that the spammy links are the only reason the site has disappeared form the SERPS though?

Have there been any changes to the site that have affected the relevancy of pages for your target keywords? Has there been a change in the competition? As well as gaining the spammy links, have you lost any good links from good authoritative sites?

The ALT attribute is part of the HTML code used to include the image on your page. It should look something like this:

The ALT attribute is displayed when the browser can't display your image (and used by screen readers).

The reason this is important for SEO is that it can help provide search engines with a clue as to what the image is about (and if you can use keywords that you're tying to get your page to rank for it should also help overall page relevancy). The text surrounding the image will also be used by search engines to provide more information for what the image is about.

w3c page on the IMG html tag

Hope this helps.

The more links you have on a page, the more the value of any link-juice needs to be shared. You may be better off getting a larger slice of a small pie, than a minuscule amount of a large one.

The number of links aren't the only factor though. This article by Rand has a number of nice illustrations showing the value of different links:

All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines' Valuation of Links

Hope this helps.

Having a website deliver platform optimised pages from the same URL is better than some of the alternatives such as having different URLs or subdomain delivering mobile content. Responsive web design should avoid the problem of having duplicate content all over the place!

Assuming that everything else is equal (position on the page etc etc): The available "link-juice" will be split across all links. Both destination pages will benefit, but beware that the more links on the page, the smaller the individual share will be.

You might want to use the full legal name of the company on your home page title and then a snappier version on other pages (after all, for those other pages it's unlikely that the searching will be looking for your company)

As Mat and Kevin have said, it's probably not an issue unless you're trying to distinguish yourself from other similarly named companies - especially if you're got a broad/generic company name. "Bristol Plumbing" for example.

I'm wondering if adding Ltd against company names might add additional credibility - especially for local searches / tradesmen etc. If I'm looking for a local plumber should I go for "Doug's Plumbing Ltd" or just "Doug's Plumbing?" What would the effect on click-through from the SERPS be?

I suspect it depends on the business and it's niche. The nice thing about page titles is that they're easy to test!

Whatever you decide to do with the page title, if you're optimising for local search, make sure you're using a consistent NAP.

How much difference has all these blog comments made? What other link-buidling activity are you involved in? Blog / Forum comments are pretty low-value.

How about picking a handful of the more authoritative blogs, with the higher numbers of subscribers and seeing if you can get some guest posting opportunities.

Blog comments are a great first step when building a relationship with blog/blog author, but you need to get involved in the discussion and not push your own site.

Once you've got some engagement going then you can approach the blog for guest post opportunities...

I think if you've commented on 1500 blogs then it's probably time to move on to some higher value tactics!

I agree with Chris. It's really a case of educating and supporting your client as best you can. And making sure when you request these calls you do it in a coordinated fashion with the client.

I've had some absolute nightmares with companies that have a shared receptionist answering the calls.

The only thing I'd say, is that as you've probably found, what a client says will happen when they get these calls doesn't always happen. It's important to carry out a test by calling the contact number from an "unknown" phone and asking to speak to someone to verify a business listing and see what happens.

If this is the same number that they're using for sales enquires it can reveal some interesting things about their ability to convert leads.

Whenever I see one of these "100 best websites" lists, the cynical part of me (95%?) suspects that someone is link building and looking to get 100 relevant links to their site.

Take a good look at this list with a discerning eye. Are these really the best 100 sites? Do you or they really deserve to be listed? Does the person/site/business building the list have any authority to make the judgement in the first place?

If a reputable trade journal had an article on the top 5 businesses in your niche and you were one then it would be significantly more valuable than a small website that nobody has heard of trying to get some links!

From an SEO perspective, if you want to look at two was linking such as the 100 best listing, then also think about the value of the link. What's the page authority of the linking page and how many links is this being spread across (100+). Then think about the one link you're going to provide back - is that worth more?

Are you going to get any direct traffic from this list? Is it being promoted? Is it on a well known, high traffic site?

It's quite common for businesses/sites to have two-way links for example where a legitimate relationship between the sites (this can be many things, such as topic, industry, shared market demographic, business relationship for example supplier/customer) This is something the happens naturally (just look at the big SEO sites and how they link to each other in their blog posts etc...)

What you need to be cautious of are those link opportunities that require or ask for link just for the sake of getting the link.

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While you obviously want to get your keywords into your title, and the general wisdom is the nearer the front, the better but it's not the whole story.

As well as optimising your titles for keyword relevancy/rankings you should also consider optimising for click-through.

The page title and the description used in the snippet in the search results are likely to be the first thing your visitors/customers are likely to see and if nobody is clicking on your entry in the search results it doesn't matter where you rank.

Think of your snippet as a small-ad or adwords snippet. It's got to provide a compelling reason for someone to click on your link. Can you find a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors and stand out? Can you do anything to give people confidence that they're going to find what they are after if they click on your link.

A well written title can punch above it's weight in the search results. (Like wise, a bad , un-engaging or spammy looking title can undermine your efforts.)

Also remember that your page may also rank for keywords that you're not optimising for, these may be long tail keywords with higher intent than the more generic keywords so make sure you look at the keywords sending traffic to each landing page (even low volumes) and look for themes/topics/intent you can optimise your pages around.

If you're targeting multiple locations (Photographers miami and photographers orlando for instance) then you'll need to make sure you avoid duplicate/thin content. How can you make these pages relevant to that location...

Think about the intent and commerciality when considering your keywords. If I'm searching for "photographers in orlando" am I looking for camera equipment or am I more likely to be looking for a photographer to take my picture and if this is the case - why would I want to buy any camera equipment!

I'd be cautious about adding unnecessary links for the sole purpose of getting some anchor text relevancy.

Do make sure that if you are naturally linking to another page/product that you use clear relevant anchor text that makes sense to your visitors in the context of the page that you're linking from.

Do consider the user experience, and the goals of the page you're creating the links on. You don't, for example, want superflous links drawing your visitors away from your conversion goals, adding confusion and uncertainty. Unlike your main navigation, in-line links can disorient visitors to your site. (What works for a wiki type site isn't necessarily a good idea for an e-commerce one!)

If you have a blog, or ever-green content that's been around for a while, attracted some links, been shared then do remember to go back to some of the popular content and update it, linking to the latest products/services/articles. It's easy to remember to link back to older articles, but updating your old content to link to the latest material can really help, especially if you're old pages are ranking well, attracting visitors and are still relevant.

Doug.

Another option would be to set-up a redirect based on the referrer and point any traffic from their site to a specific page stating that there is no commercial relationship between the two businesses. Probably not worth the effort. I'd just document it and get on building my own business.

What about Moz's Google Algorithm Change History or Beginner's Guide to SEO?

Edit: Or what about Jon Cooper's link building list (pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies) which has 1517 links from 407 domains.

The overall objective of any SEO is to deliver relevant high quality traffic. Referral traffic can be better quality traffic that much of the search traffic you get.

From which page are they going to give you think link from? What is the best page for visitors from the brand's website to arrive on? What are they going to expect to see when they follow the link?

If they are looking to buy the brands products, then you're better off getting a link to the page on which you sell those products (especially if the link is something along the lines of "you can buy from these sellers..."

How well does your brand page differentiate your service and communicate your USP. Why should people looking to buy this brands products buy from you rather than your competition.

My best guess would be to see if you can get the link to your brand page.

(Besides, you'd brand page has a link to your home page right?)

Can't  see this being a good idea any more. We're not in an "every link helps" world any more and I can't see what's in it for the customer when you just ask them to give you a link.

I think you'd be better off using the space to either try and build the relationship with the customer and/or up sell other products or services.

That said, apart from quickly checking the details of the order confirmation I'm not sure how much attention people pay to the "boiler plate" content.

Google can/and will replace your titles if it thinks it can return a better title to searchers.

Try the following Google query and notice how a different title is being returned for the same URL just because we added the keyword "toilets":

site:http://www.goldcoast-plumbers.com/blocked-drains toilets

Google certainly has a preference for "Keyword - Brand Name" style titles and from experience, the more you diverge from that, adding additional keywords to your title tag, the more likely you are to see your title replaced.

It's not necessarily a problem, how are you ranking for your target terms? Just keep an eye on your click-throughs from search.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but I notice that the page at https://roadtrippers.com/ has the following meta tag in the header:

You campaign settings have an option to archive or delete a campaign. Once a campaign is archived (or deleted) it won't count as one of your 5 campaigns.

I'm not sure it's quite as black and white as that Bob.

It's not just about getting more search traffic, you want more traffic that converts, achieived the goals of the site. The last thing you want to do is to add more content to these pages, and find that your conversions/sales go down.

What's the engagement like on these pages? Do people read this content? What is the exit rate and bounce rate like on these pages? Segment the different types of traffic in your analytics to see how these pages may be affecting direct/referral traffic, new vs returning visitors etc.

What is the goal/purpose of the category pages. Does adding additional content help achieve the page and site goals? If the page's function is mainly navigational, to help people find what they are looking for, then you'll need to be careful that you don't compromise that. Make sure people can still find what they need to find!

You say you've got 40 different categories to play with. I'd look to conduct some tests so that you're not guessing. You can always look at increasing the amount of content on one or two of these and see how it affects things. You might want to carry out some split testing too to see what the impact is on your conversion goals.

It's really difficult to provide a answer here as there are just so many variables and I think it's important to be realistic when talking to the client. SEO doesn't work like a tap that you can just turn on to get more visitors.

As Alice mentions, for a new site I've seen the same thing with slow initial growth until you hit a tipping point and the site achieves some rankings that have some reasonable traffic. At this point there can be a surge of traffic followed by (hopefully) steady growth at a slower rate afterwards (but you're got to keep building the content etc) to avoid hitting a plateau.

It does of course depend on factors such as visitor demographics, size of the market niche you're operating in, competition etc.

I've worked on one site where the entire market for the service being offered is less than 1000 people in the UK. (Assuming we're working to get qualified traffic then you can see that we're never going to get high month on month growth)

Also watch out for other factors such as seasonality or weather. (I've had one site have record visits due to the wet summer in the UK. Now there's the first glimmer of sunshine I've got a traffic decline on my hands.) Are the number of people looking for jobs affected by external factors such as the economy and the time of year? When are companies likely to recruit? How do holidays, annual budget cycle etc play a part?

The key to making any prediction traffic wise is to understand the target audience. Knowing when you need to broaden your appeals or come up with other services/products in order to bring in new visitor and keep the traffic (and the business growing).

Taking your job portal as an example - how many people are looking for a job or looking to recruit and could use the services it provides? What competition is there? How much of the total market are you likely to appeal to?

Hope this helps!

Hi Barry.

In the Duplicate Page Content report you can click on the number in the "Other URLs" column. This then lists the pages that have been identified as duplicates. If you've got loads, you might want to think about exporting your Crawl Diagnostics as a CSV file.

Hope this helps.

In my experience, especially if you've got a content rich site (and I'm assuming you do as you mention a two tier bar), getting the information architecture right first is absolutely essential You should be fitting the navigation around the content - not the other way round.

I don't know if you're able to modify this architecture. If you can then you need to be a little bit cautious. Make sure that you test any changes with members of the target audience. Make sure that if there are any changes to URLs (renaming sections etc) then you create suitable redirects. Don't ignore testing your architecture!

Make sure that the words used for each item provide the visitor with a clear understanding of what they're going to get if they click on the link. Don't use generic words/phrases like "articles"

Can provide incentives/compelling reasons for people to want to explore sections on your site? This will depend on the nature of the site of course. Don't over-do it though.

The entire Navbar should provide the visitor with a clear overview of the scope of the site. It's probably the first thing they'll see once they arrive and you want them to be able to quickly scan it and know that they're going to find what they're looking for. (Information scent)

Make sure that the Nav bar clearly indicates the current page/section to help the visitor know exactly where he is.

Use words on the menu bar that are going to be meaningful to visitors. Avoid jargon and acronyms. Try to take an external perspective. This is where keyword research can also help! The words you use should tie in to your keyword strategy and audience.

Think about how your navigation can reflect your brand and credibility.

What were the particular issues you face with the current navigation. Can you provide more specific detail, examples or the name of the site?

What were the reasons for choosing a two-tier approach?

Hope this helps!

When you say 1200000 searches are you looking at exact match or broad match in adwords?

If your keyword is made up of a number of words then the broad match is going to be wildly unrealistic.

Once you've established a realistic search volume (and you can get a some of this info from Google Webmaster tools) you still may not be getting the share that you'd expect from a #1 ranking.

This is where you need to look at the google search results and take note of the competition there. Look at the adverts, rich snippets, image/video etc. All these could be more compelling for a searcher than your snippet.

Is there a well known name/brand that could be drawing your traffic away from your result?

Can you optimise your page title and meta descriptions to improve your click through from the SERPS. Can you add a compelling offer, benefits and a call to action?

Ben, it's search competition based on the Domain Authority and Page Authority for the top 20 search results on Google. The score doesn't come from adwords, that's used for the search volumes.

The links on this page explain how Domain and Page authority is defined:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo

Joel's link provides a full run-down of the keyword analysis tool.

I've got a client in a similar situation. They have a .com domain but they only offer services in Australia.

The good news is they rank just fine for the search terms that are relevant to their business (these are primarily queries with local intent).

In Webmaster Tools, you'll want to tell Google that your site is targeted to an AU audience. There's an option to set this under "Search Traffic" -> "International Targeting".  Click the "Country" tab and then you can choose to target users in a particular country.

We also made sure that it was very clear from the content on the site that the business was based in Australia paying particular attention to local search optimisation (See: http://moz.com/learn/local ) - getting local business listings in reputable, authoritative directories etc.

It's best to think of it from a visitors point of view - what are the on-page signals you need to provide to give them confidence that they are dealing with an Australian site. (Local address, Australian phone number, mentions of relevant places / people / events, associations/badges/certifications from relevant Australian bodies etc...)

Hope this helps - Good Luck!

Doug.

Market Samurai's keyword research is just a front-end to the google keyword tool. I must admit. I do like the ability in MS to keep the keyword research together, but find myself more often than not using Google's tool directly.

I don't find MS's way of assessing the competitiveness of keywords too useful. It's all very nice knowing how many pages are being displayed in the SERPS or have keywords in their title tag, but this doesn't tell you how easy it's going to be to get your page into a competitive position.

This is where I find SEOmoz's keyword difficulty tool incredibly valuable.

I prefer having SEOmoz collect my ranking/traffic data automatically over having to manually update MS.

SEOMoz give you a lot - on-page analysis, social reports, link analysis etc, but it really does depend on what you need and what your budget is,

My advice would be to try both and see which one helps you achieve your goals as quickly and easily as possible.

Based on the benefits I have directly experienced, and the added value I've been able to provide my customers, I would choose SEOMoz.

Hope this helps.

One solution would be to put this supporting information onto the product pages (and 301) but...

This might be more of an opportunity than a problem!

Not everyone searching for a product is actually looking to buy now. Recognising that different people will be in different stages of the buying cycle and creating content to support and more these people towards your sales pages.

Make sure that your blog posts also sell - both the products and also your offering/usp.

As well as just having a link - make sure it's an obvious call to action with a clear proposition too. if they want to go ahead any buy the product - give them a reason why they should buy from you.

Your blog posts might provide you with a great opportunity to communicate the added value, authority and trust in your brand to your prospective customer.

As well as having a link at the bottom - make sure that you've also got a clear and obvious "looking to buy now?" CTA above the fold for those competitive/impulsive people who do want to buy now!

What's happening when people arrive on your blog pages, how long so they spend on them, are they moving on to your product pages?

Is there a difference in the conversion rate for people entering via the blog and going on to your product page vs those that arrive directly on your product pages?

Got to agree with EGOL here. As soon as you start boiling articles down to numbers like this you're going to lose. There's no magic formula that will protect you from bad copy.

Ignore the links for a moment. Think about how your blog post is going to help promote you business/service. Is it being posted somewhere your target audience are going to read it? Is it useful/interesting to that audience. What's the one thing above all else that you want the reader to do once they've read the article...

There's no absolutely perfect way to prioritise the order to review/update the existing product pages. You've just got to determine which products matter the most to you.

As we've mentioned you want to think about prioritising the products with the most sales, products with the highest margin, new products, hot products (ones that have a social buzz about them!) etc.

You may want to rule out products that are near end of life and will be removed from your catalogue soon or products that have low sales and low margin (think about the ROI of your time/cost)

As for how many you do - you'll need to go with what you're comfortable with. The problem with trying to do too many is that it becomes increasingly hard to create great content the more you do. You're better off writing a few great ones than forcing yourself to churn through loads. You want to sound unique/fresh/natural. Hard to do when you're tired!

When it comes to writing the descriptions, comments/feedback is a good place to find out what really matters to people, the concerns people have, the suitability for a particular audience etc.  (Tip: You don't have to look at the comments on your own site.)

If you've got a great social following, then you may be able to think of an interesting/creative way to utilise that to help you out.

Of course, before you start working your way through the list, make sure you create a checklist/process for adding new products so that the problem doesn't get any worse while you're working your way through!