Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Before you start building links again I recommend you invest in a 10 year old + domain, domain authority is a huge factor..

What kind of structure would you propose for a site with multiple languages, subdomains or subfolders?

I went to a really interesting conference last week and one of the speakers who has been working in the SEO industry for 15 years now said that it doesn't make a difference anymore ranking wise. I would like to see what the community thinks on this subject?

Thanks

Ari

Thanks Alan!

Do you think the top converting pages and the pages i potentially want to rank for should be included at the top of the sitemap?

Cheers

Hi There,

The main requirement is to make sure that you fill all the textboxes when optimizing your listing. You need to make sure you provide all the information that is required and fill in all the additional boxes.

Categories are really important - make sure you include the keywords you want to rank for here but dont keyword stuff- try adding the location. keep it readable. make it exciting and included some sort of "call to action"

And take advantage of the additional details section. This is where you can actually add in some of your keywords. But please be reminded – don’t keyword stuff, keep it useful and readable for users. Take one field and mention all your service areas. If your products or services can be grouped somehow, then split them up you can list your accreditations and awards, the reservations page on your website, the suburbs you service. Whatever, if your business does it, figure out a way to put it in the additional details section.

Encouraging Reviews. To increase localization visibility a customer review generation strategy is required. Client needs to encourage customers to write and submit reviews to the websites listed above either via facebook, mailers or by offering discounts and special offers in store.

• Send a message to your Facebook fans or email list and ask them to leave a review at your Google Place page

• If you send out follow up, or reminder, post cards (such as many dentists) incorporate a call to action to review your business

• Put a call to action (and link) asking for a review on your web site

• Display a sign by your cash register or hand them a flier with their receipt asking for a review

• Make sure to make the process as easy as possible, provide a link to your Places page and give detailed instructions on what they need to do leave a review.

Hope this helps

Thanks

Ari

If anyone optimised their sitemap recently and would like to share some tips it would be much appreciated:-)

Cheers

I agree with Alan! Focus on sending link change requests to the highly authoritative sites ( old domains with good link profiles)  that already link to you. Also it would be worth having some sort of social accelerator strategy in place in order to speed up the indexing process. Twitter is a good example!

Cheers

Ari

Try majestic SEO

I guess that's what SEO is all about..you need to test the water and find what works for you :-).

Think i'm going to go stick with subfolders for this one! Thanks for getting involved anyway Alan!

Cheers

Ari

Hello Conrad,

It's really hard to determine how long it takes for a certain page to rank..it depends on a lot of factors..Some of them are: domain age-root domain link profile - on page factors - links to that page with optimized anchor text etc etc/

I think you should try and get good quality links to the homepage and the category pages you want to rank for, diverse the anchor text..i.e. don't have 20.000 links pointing to one page with the same anchor text.

In order to speed up rankings you need social accelerators in place  i.e. tweeter campaign strategies that will enable you to target the pages you want and receive a lot of retweets which could help you rank high.

Hope this helps

Ari

Just spoke to Rand, here's what he said " unless you're specifically trying to segment content that you think Google might penalize because it's low quality/Panda-target, I'd stick with subfolders."

Before you start building links again I recommend you invest in a 10 year old + domain, domain authority is a huge factor..