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I'd start by asking yourself why you want followers, and then think about the return on investment you're likely to get.

There's no quick way to buy a loyal following, you have to earn it.

You want "followers", not "zombies"...

I agree, I really don't think it matters that much.

It's nice to have a URL that you can easily say out loud, on the phone etc, and it's handy if you can keep it short enough to fit on your business card!

Hi Robert, That's my understanding too. (Google doesn't think hyphens = spam).

I do think that there's  a SERP CTR/searcher perception issue that you need to think about when choosing your exact match domain name.

I'm sure that the more words you have and the more hyphens between then will mean that you domain will appear less authorative and more "spammy" to searchers. (Those who actually notice the domain name!)

Sorry to hear you wasted 30 mins!

When was the landing page redirected? I take it if you click on the SERPS result  it takes you to the home page?

" reported a fault with one of there servers that they were using for links" - Eek!

You already know that it was your links that were keeping you at the #1 position, so I would suggest that you need to rebuild these links. I wouldn't put all of my eggs in one basket though. I would rebuild links in a more natural way, not just from a server hosted by your SEO company. (What happens if you terminate your relationship with them!?)

Is your keywords specific page still being redirected? I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do here.

Do your visitors need to land on your home page in order to get them engaged and converted? You don't need to worry that people aren't coming in through the front door as long as your landing pages are working as they should.

IS your home page the best page for your visitors searching for your keyword? What's going to provide the best experience for your visitors, and how can you best get them into your conversion funnel?

What is the user intent, what are their goals, their needs. Does the content on your keyword specific page answer their questions and lead them on to find out more about how you can help them achieve their goals? The page shouldn't be there just for the ranking!

It's difficult to be more specific without looking at your particular site. What I would say is that making a rash decision to change your domain and 301 your entire site is likely to make things worse in the short-term. Any change like this carries some risk!

Don't Panic!

Of course on-page SEO isn't dead!

As you quote in your question, on-page factors go a long way towards deterining the relevance part of the search engines algorithm.

On-page factors are relatively easy to control/manage and as such tend to be the starting point when it comes to optimising a page/site. I don't think anyone would think about trying to get a page to rank without making sure the on-page optimisation was up to scratch first.

For competitive keywords, you're likely to find that your page will be up against other pages that have the same strong on-page relevancy. Compeiting just based on on-page will be impossible. Tweaking very minor factors such as putting your keywords in bold isn't going to make too much of a difference.

I don't think on-page is dead. I just think that now there's more awareness of on-page best practice and as a result the battle ground is all happening off-page.

One final caveat - it does depend on the niche/market you're competing in. You can still get quick wins using just on-page in the more uninformed niches! I wouldn't want to bet that it would be enough to stay there though...

I don't think it's quite as simple as that.

You can take any of these metrics in isolation, you need to look at the relative strengths compared to your own site and make a judgement call. If all things are equal then if you can beat these scores, you should out-rank them, but in the real world it doesn't trend to be as simple as that, especially as you start competing for more and more competitive terms.

Looking at these four metrics can give you a quick feel for hoe strong your site/page has to be to get into the game, they can't predict the outcome.

This page might give you a feel for the relative importance of various ranking factors:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

As for your question, "how many of these factors do you normally need to get within top 5?" well it all depends!

Remember that these aren't the only factors that search engines use when ranking pages. It's perfectly possible to outrank a page that beats you in ALL of these factors by producing a page that's tightly targetted around the chosen keywords. You can beat the competition on relevancy (assuming that there the competing pages aren't so relevant!)

I would say that finding such keywords, where there's a ton of traffic and few relevant pages is rare and my guess is that this is only likely to happen for brand related keywords.

The only good reason I can think of for using hyphens is when you want to ensure that you're keywords don't get confused when placed next to each other.  penisland.com or expertsexchange.com are infamous examples domains that suffer from this problem!

It sounds as if you're providing additional value to visitors to your site, and that can only be a good thing!

As "SeattleOrganicSEO" says, as long as you're not duplicating the content from one page to another I don't see that having reviews of a product and product descriptions in the store should be a problem. Just make sure you're not copy-and-pasting the product description into the review! Make sure the reviews are great reviews!

I take it you're linking the products mentioned in your reviews to the the same products for sale in your store?

Put your visitors/customers first and build content that's of value to them and you can't go far wrong.

Great point Ann. Obviously a lot depends on the motive when it comes to link building and in the real world you can't just measure your return on investment by the number of links...

I suspect that building connections between your own guest posts also increases the chances that people will want to find out more about what you have to say than if they just read one post somewhere.

Pitty you can't see the path people have travelled to arrive on your site beyond the immediate referrer.

My recommendation would be to spend the time building more backlinks to your site, not someone else's.

Why only earn a small share of the link value when you could get the lot? You'll get better return on the time you invest link-building.

I'm my experience it's best to just move on and build the next link than worry about the one you've already got. Do your research first, check the domain authority and the page authority of articles that are currently in the same place on the site that you expect your article to be posted. (That way you can estimate the likely page authority).

Another thing to consider when guest-posting is direct traffic. Check the number of subscribes blogs have and see if you can get guest-posts on those. Look at the content that works on their blogs (the ones with the most tweets/comments) and the kind of headlines that seem to work. You can often see patterns!

Hope this helps!

If these are relatively new pages, then they may not yet be included in the linkscape index, SEOmoz won't have calculated these stats for the page. What's the Domain Authority?

I'm sorry, I don't have any evidence from the user experience point of view,. although I would also be interested to see the results of any studies.

I will say that from a site management/maintenance point of view it makes sense to try and keep the code as clean as possible. I've been involved in project were a considerable chunk of the cost was incurred due to the amount of time and effort that was required to unravel the mess even before any new changes were made!

Hi Simon. Your on-page optimisation is just one of many factors. Just sorting out the on-page optimisation isn't going to be enough.

I notice from doing a keyword difficulty report that your chosen keyword seems to be highly competitive. The ranking sites have many more inbound links than you.

I also note that your page and site overall has very few inbound links and as such a low authority.

If you're going to want to compete for this keyword you're going to have to build some good quality inbound links. A good place to start may be by analysing your competition to see where they are getting their links from. Looking them up in Open Site Explorer is a great way to do this.

Hope this helps.

You can find the SEOMoz helpdesk here:

http://seomoz.zendesk.com/home

There's a menu option to submit a request there too.

Full SERPS report give you the following for each of the top 10 entries in the SERPS:

Page Authority, mozRank, moxTrust, mT/mR, Total Links, External Links, Followed Links, No-Followed Links, Linking Root Domains, On-Page Analysis Grade, Broad Keyword Usage in Title, Broad Keyword Usage in Document, Keyword Used in URL, KW in Domain, KW Exact Match, Exact Anchor Text Links, % Links w/ Exact Anchor Text, %Linking Root Domains w/ Exact Anchor Text, Partial Anchor Text Links, % Links w/ Particl anchor Text, Partial Anchor Text Root Doms. % linking Root Domains w/ Partial Anchor Text, Domain Authority, Domain mozRank, Domain mozTrust, DmT/DmR, External Links to this domain, Linking Root Domains to this domain, Linking C-Blocks Domains to this doman, Tweets, FB Shares and Google Plus One Shares!

This will give you a much broader picture of the current state of play.

If you're looking to purchase this domain, then I'd ask questions about what you're planning to do with it? Changing the content / structure etc will potentially cause changes in the SERPS. I'd certainly want to have a better understanding of why the site is ranking in the position it is.

Why are you purchasing the domain?

I wouldn't purchase a domain just based on the ranking position. I'd want to know how much traffic (in total) the domain gets and how much traffic the core keywords get. I don't know if you're in a position to request this information.

Hi James. I think it might be worth taking a slightly broader view when assessing the competition. Remember that it's not just your link profile/authority that's causing your to rank at your current position, but also other factors such as the relevance and freshness of your content.

You've got PRO access, so I'd recommend starting with a FULL SERP report in the Keyword Analysis tool. It'll cost you one of your 50 monthly credits, but will give you a fuller view.

Given the backlinks / authority numbers you've stated I wouldn't be surprised if you slip down the rankings, but without knowing the full picture it's hard to say.

What I would say is that I wouldn't recommend that you stop link building because you're at the top of the rankings. A drop in your link acquisition rate could be seen as a signal that your content is less popular/relevant.

Can you give us details of the keywords and your site?

Hope this helps.

Hi Ally,

Looking at the picture that was attached the question, I think they are asking why SEOMoz isn't showing that they've updated the rankings report. (It says it updates every Tuesday, but is still showing Tuesday 17th as the last update)

I don't think he's talking about the movements of the individual ranking keywords.

There's a calendar that shows when the next linkscape updates are planned:

http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

My rankings update on Tuesdays too and have been updated - if yours are still not showing an update then I'd log a support ticket as it should be automatic.

I'm not sure I see much value to either users or search engines in content that is 60% the same as an existing product page. I would also be worried that such an article would undermine the product page and cannibalise your important keywords.

Is the article targeting any specific keywords or niche?

It's had to repond without seeing the product page or the article, but can the article be reworded to be less about the product and more about the prospects needs/problems and the benefits of your product and then link to the product page for all the nitty-gritty details.

I don't see much value just repeating the content. The article doesn't exist in isolation does it?

What's the purpose/goal of the article? Can it not be re-worded to feed people into the relevant product page and into your conversion funnel?

If you've got things like duplicate title and meta-description's going on then I'd certainly take a look at fixing those. Being able to manage these two tags is vital to managing the way your pages will appear in the search results. (And your title tag is an important ranking factor).

Normally, if your page doesn't validate then it's not a major problem and search engines won't penalise you for it. If however, your page is so badly crafted that the html errors, and general page structure makes it difficult for the search engines (and humans) to read your page then you're going to suffer.

The key is to make sure that your site/page content is accessible. How accessible is your page to someone with disabilities, using a screen reader etc.

You've got to make sure that the search engines can understand what your page is about or your page won't be seen as a relevant page for any search terms...

How bad is it? How does google render the page in it's instant previews (you can check this is Google Webmaster tools)

Interestingly Majestic SEO Site Explorer shows no data from it's historic index, but shows 2 referring domains, 85 Backlinks from it's "fresh" index.

Keep building the links!

HI Greg,

Your site isn't in the Linkscape index that the SEOmoz tools use, as a result there's no data for the tools to work with. If you look-up your site on Open Site Explorer you get the error "No Data Available for this URL"

If you've only got a small number of sites linking to your site you're going to limit the chances that your site will be found and included.

You mention you have a ton of links from a forum you visit. A bunch of  links from just one domain (especially forum posts) isn't going to make your site that visible out there on the net.

I would look at ways to promote your site more broadly. Can you get links from a number of other, preferably high authority sites?

A good place to start is looking at who's linking to sites similar to yours. Look up your competitors sites in Open Site Explorer and see where they are getting links from. Maybe you can get links from those sources too.

Hope this helps.

I don't think the URLs are an absolute disaster.

Before making any changes like this you need to understand the potential risks and clearly define what it is you are trying to achieve.

Look at how many links/linking domains each of your pages have. It's these deep links that are both the most valuable to the pages and also the ones most at risk.

How many pages do you have on your site, how much organic search traffic do you already attract? Where are you currently ranking for your chosen keywords?

If you've got lots of deep inbound links and the URLs aren't causing a significant problem then I don't think I'd take the risk. Even if it all goes well, you'll lost some "link juice" in the redirects.

What will be the return on investment of your time re-structuring your URLs and 301 redirecting all the content to the new pages vs the potential loss of rankings/traffic?

Hope this helps.

The mozrank on the SEOmoz tool bar is coming from SEOmoz's linkscape index.

Different services will use different methods to discover links so you'll find that Alexa, MajesticSEO, SEOmoz etc can show some significant differences in the data they collect.

I wouldn't worry so much about what your scores are, just what you can do to improve them. After all the only real thing that matters here is getting the right traffic and improving engagement once they get to your blog.

If you're commenting on blogs in order to get links then note that these links are usually no-follow links and may not be doing very much to improve your reputation - you don't want to be seen as a comment-spammer.

Your time may be better used by finding higher quality ways to get backlinks. See my previous comment about guest posting.

If you've not already done so I'd recommend reading the SEOmoz beginners guide to SEO and SEOmoz's Professional Link Buidling Guide

I'd go for the content at the top too normally as you want your keyword rich content to be as close to the top of the page so that it is treated as a little more relevant.

That said, there is quite a lot of text and in this case I can see that visitors might arrive on the page and only see the text above the fold. In which case I might look at a compromise of splitting the content with some above the items and some below.

Don't just think about the SEO value, but also about how your actual human visitors are going to experience the site.

I'd also surpress the text on the second+ pages on the navigation. People don't need to read it every time and there's a risk of duplicate content issues.

Of course the most important thing to a new blogger is getting some traffic. There's little point writing articles unless people are reading them.

Work on getting some backlinks to your blog. At the moment Open Site Explorer is only showing links from 4 domains and pretty much all of these links are no-follow (no-follow links are not seen as an endorsement and pass little authority to your site.)

I'd look at making some connections with other bloggers out there and see if you can do some guest posts. This is a great way to get backlinks and also get your content/name in front of people. You want to target blogs that cover related subject matter and have a good number of subscribers.

Hope this helps!

From a "pure SEO" point of view, whitepapers (like any rich content) can really help get some good long-tale content on the site, and may earn some links if they're good.

My personal view is that whitepaper are more useful when it comes to conversion.

Whitepapers can be used to support your offering/your proposition by providing evidence that you've understood the prospects needs, delivered a great solution to ther problem that delivers real benefits to the customer. (and explain the unique benefits of your solution that they wouldn't have received from your competitors)

Such whitepapers, like other good content may attract links too (unless they're hidden behind a subscription form)

Well presented solutions to problems that your target audience experience are of interest to people who, as Casey mentioned, may be willing to provide their email address, join a mailing list in order to receive the whitepapers. Think about the value of building such a mailing list for the business.

I'd take a step back and think about what you're trying to acheive and how you can use white papers to support these goals.

Hope this helps.

The instructions are near the bottom of the page:

In order to use Fetch as Googlebot, you'll need to have added and verified your site in Webmaster Tools. Then, follow these instructions:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the Dashboard, under Diagnostics, click Fetch as Googlebot.
3. In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
4. In the dropdown list, select the type of fetch you want. To see what our web crawler Googlebot sees, select Web. To see what our mobile crawler Googlebot-Mobile sees, select cHTML (this is used mainly for Japanese web sites) or Mobile XHTML/WML.
5. Click Fetch.

Once googlebot has fetched your page you'll have a "success" link that you can click on to see what Googlebot saw.

This will be the header, including the server response code and then the html that googlebot received.

What this doesn't tell you is how this was interpreted by Google, of course this is where SEOMoz's on-page reports and crawl stats can help detect errors and way your can improve your on-page optimisation.

What's to stop google from finding them? They're out there and available on the internet!

Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file

You can do this by putting:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

in the robots.txt file.

You might also want to stop humans from accessing the content too - can you put this content behind a password using htaccess or block access based on network address?

What are are you searching for? I notice that if you do a site:.capacitr.com you get the 1,950 results you mention above.

If you do a search for site:www.capacitr.com then you only get 29 results.

Its looks like there's a whole load of pages being indexed on other subdomains - fb.capacitr.com and lab.capacity.com. (Which has 1,860 pages!)

What are these used for, do you really want these in the index!

It's not just the search engines you need to consider. Is the speed of your site affecting user experience? Are people giving up because it's just too slow? How many abandoned sessions are you getting? Do you have any opportunity to get feedback from your users?

Agree with Kane. If you're going to be building a blog elsewhere then just setup a 301 redirect to that.

Hiya,

Without knowing a little more about your site and the blog here are some things I would consider:

I'm going to assume that you're trying to decide what to do with the blog while still retaining the maximum benefits for the overall seo of your site.

You say that the blog has thousands of URLs. What you need to do is determine how many sites are linking to your blog content. (You can do this using Open Site Explorer or look in Google webmaster tools or Google Analyrics to see who is reffering traffic.

The first question I would ask is whether you need to remove the content at all? Would it be possible just to put up a banner on top of the existing pages to say that the blog is no longer active.

How many search visitors does the blog get? If the blog posting are getting visitors, then you need to ask yourself if you're happy to give these up.

Would anyone else be interested in taking over the blog?

If you decide to remove you content:

Put 301 redirects to direct traffic to you main site. You'll preserve some of the value of your inbound links.

Do your blog pages relate to specific content on the main site that may be of interest to the visitor? If you can determine specific pages that are strongly related to the removed pages then link to those.

I wouldn't just remove the pages and respond with a 404 error. You'll lose any value from the links to those pages.

Hope this helps!

This might help: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/index.html

It's google's guide to making ajax applications crawlable!

Good luck!

A good place to start is to look at google's webmaster guidelines:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Copyblogger has some great advice on headlines/titles and copy-writing in general.

I'd recommend: How to write magnetic headlines

There's lots of advice out there, I've just not found a really nice single source for search snippet copy-writing and optimisation.

I'd be concerned that your javascript/ajax loader for the search results is going to hide the actual content from search engines. No point even worrying about the page navigation on these category pages if the content is invisible!

Use webmaster tools to take a look at how googlebot is going to see your site.

Just looking at the source of the page I can't see any mention of the content just the "

" placeholder.

I can't see the page navigation either.

Going forward I'd also try to get some more rich category specific content on the first page of each category...

I don't know how far I'd trust such third party sites. Take a look at Google Webmaster Tools. There's a Fetch as Googlebot tool under diagnostics.

Here's the Google help about it::

Fetch as Googlebot

Google certainly does read title and heading tags!

As far as the navigation bar goes - always think about humans first. Sometimes you can improve relevance by avoiding generic names. Avoid generic terms like "Articles" for instance and replace it with something that better describes the content behind the click "nutrition guide" or "food facts"...

The fact that your navigation is being read first isn't a problem - it's a convention that is hardly going to be penalised by a search engine.

I can't say i understand it either. If Dutch is the language you're targeting then I can see it's frustrating that this is the language search that seems to be coming up with the wrong page!

Are you setting the language correctly? A quick look at the source seems to show the language code wrapped in IE conditionals.

Don't know if this helps (it's a bit old):

How Search Engines Detect HTML Human Language

I've sent you a private message, but as I mentioned in the message I suspect that there are some language factors coming in to play.

You provided me with the keyword, your domain and the specific ranking page and told me that you were using google.be

I noted when using the keyword ranking tool on SEOmoz, the results were different depending on the language selected:

google.be (dutch) - homepage was ranking at #8

google.be (english) - optimised page was ranking at #7

google.be (french) - optimised page was ranking at #10.

My guess here is that the optimised page isn't looking particularly dutch!

I don't know if anyone else has any advice on this as I do not have any multi-lingual SEO experience!

Hope this helps.

Like the approach you take to smooth things out, and agree that client education is important.

I hope that my clients focus on KPI's that really matter to their business (conversions!) and not get bogged down chasing rankings! Although it is important for them to understand why ranking matter and how we track them.

If you see negative changes in keywords that were getting you good click-throughs/conversions then you need to do something about it.

If you're manually checking you need to remove personalisation other wise the SERPS you see will more than likely be different to the one that SEOmoz (or any other ranking tool sees).

Before you spend time buildling a widget, I'd do some research and find out if it's something that webmasters are likely to use (and how many of them would be interested!)

My advice would be to try and identity a "need" first and then come up with something that satisfies that need (and of course give you a backlink too)

What do you know about your visitors? What type of people are they and why are they visiting your site?

Who's currently linking to you and why?

On your website you say "created to help kids, parents, and teachers recall the words and lyrics to loved children songs"

Do you provide nice and easy ways these people can print the lyrics (with your branding and link of course). Getting traffic from off-line sources is still traffic!

Do you have a mailing list? You could offer the lyrics to a song every week. Might to sustain awareness of your site and increase returning visitors.

Testing is definitely the key here. You need to find out what's going to work best for your site and your visitors. Take advice, and make the best first guess you can but don't be afraid to test other ideas. It can be revealing!

Keep an eye on other factors too - you don't want to damage visitor engagement by making the ads too intrusive etc...

I think the obvious answer is that you need to build links. Can you think of any way you can give your visitors and incentive to link back to you? Getting your visitors to do your link building for you would be ideal!

Have you taken a look at not just the number of backlinks your competitor has, but where they are getting their backlinks from?

You can then try to get links from the same places (take a good look at why people are linking to your competitor though!)

Also try to get a feel for the kinds of sites, and the reasons why people are backlinking and then try to cast your net to capture all sites that match this profile.

Hope this helps.

Agree with the others. Don't worry too much about fluctuations - it's when you don't bounce back up again that you need to be concerned. Keep an eye on overall trends, and for competitive keywords keep a close eye on the competition.

Look out for new-comers in the SERPS, and look out for new content.  fresh page can out-rank older pages but may weaken over time.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the job's done once you achieve a high ranking. You need to stay ahead of the competition.

Good luck!

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.