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I disagree. I don't think blog commenting is a waste of time as long as your comment brings value to that blog. It is not the fact that you are commenting but the quality of it. If the link is on a authoritative site and you have something valuable to say, I think it will pass some good link juice and will not be seen as spam by search engines. Of course, this should not be used a a link building technique by itself.
When commenting on blogs and the only link you can have is your author name (Ex. Commented by Mike), what are you gonna have, a name, the name of your company or the keyword that you are trying to rank for?
Thanks!
2011, what are the best social bookmarking sites to use for getting backlinks and what are your strategies?
Thank for looking into this. The new site has been uploaded almost a month ago. Since then, Google crawled our website at least 4 times; nevertheless, the image snippet is still from the old template. Although, as you pointed out, there some minor issues, they are certainly not the reason why we dropped so bad.
As Rand pointed out to me about 2 weeks ago, sometimes Google works in mysterious ways that even the best in SEO cannot understand.
I'll wait for Google to show the snippet image of my Homepage, just to make sure he completely crawled it.
Thanks again for your help!
_(echo limousine dot com) _
_keywords - Chicago limo service, Chicago limousine service, _Chicago limo | Chicago car service
As we redesigned the website, we decided to focus more on the first 3 keywords to better achieve the positions desired. We decided to remove "car service" from the Title to better target the other ones. I was not sure if by keeping it there it will dilute the first part so I decided to remove it; we ranked on first page for this keyword and on page two at the very top for the first two; the third one is very competitive and there are a couple of very old website on the first page which have a partial match domain which seems to be working in their favor still and it will take longer to beat them based on those facts.
Thanks for your quick reply Ryan
“If you remove a group of pages then the PR flow of your site is greatly disrupted” – No important pages have been removed, just some low end pages that did not gain any external links and also did not play any role in the internal linking process.
"Before you can begin to troubleshoot any ranking issues your new site should be 100% indexed" - it is indexed 100%
_“_I know you shared the 301 redirects are properly set, but you may wish to check them again” - all ok
_“_robots.txt is blocking the page – all ok _“the page is tagged with noindex, all ok
the page is not properly linked to internally or externally -_ internal links are all in place as well the external ones the page does not have unique content – the content on the homepage has been written about a week after the website has been uploaded and it is 100% unique.
“Check your new site's log for 404 errors where links are broken” – there are 20 broken links (according to Xenu) which are coming from template’s CSS but those are related to some images which have not been published (some those images were part of some old presets from the original template). The user cannot access those broken links from inside our website and they have not been indexed anyway.
“Crawl the new site checking for issues” – in Seomoz campaign there are only 2 warnings and they are related to the Title element being too short for Contact page and Sitemap page.
“Perform a site: search for content that is in JS to see if it is indexed” – we did, every single page has been indexed and that shows in GWT as well.
Other issues:
In my opinion, it is an issue with our homepage. I’m not sure what to check anymore; the JavaScript slideshow on the Homepage shows a lot of code. We used a third party company to upload the new template and I am not sure if there is an issue with that; upon CCS validation there were 3 errors and 354 warnings and W3C returned 31 errors and 2 warnings. Now, they told us that these errors are somewhat normal because they are not pure html and they will never be validated. They might be right but at this moment I take everything into account. I verified everything I knew and I cannot find an answer.
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop?
I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... "
One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website.
All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website.
Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
We will open a new office at a new location and I would like to add it to our Google places. How do I do this? Per Google guidelines:
"Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts." - Website & Phone: Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location_._ Do I have to another contact page on my website for that location too? I will end up having to business listing with the same name but different locations. I want people to know that we have 2 separate offices because they serve different clients. I want to show up in Google places for the second location as well. Any thoughts?
Hey guys, thanks for your input! CafePress, I have to apologize but the example given above it was pure fictional, I did not expect anybody would research that.
This is the twist; the name of the company is Joe taxi? How is that going to affect anything? As it is now, we have keyword | company name. We decided to do it this way based on what Seomoz is recommending.
There is a huge difference between exact search and broad search. IMO, I think it's all be coming down to link building and anchor text. If I'm targeting Seattle taxi service (1900 exact searches) I will be definitely targeting Seattle limo (4400 exact searches) as well and, it will sound better too. On the other hand, I will probably be losing out if I would target taxi service Seattle because the Title will not be an exact match, I mean, I do have all the words but in different order which means somebody who is targeting the same keyword in its original order will probably rank better. I think I will go with Seattle taxi service but if you have more arguments for or against it I will be more than happy to hear them.
What would be the best Title of your Homepage if your top 3 keywords would be:
taxi service Seattle (5400 exact searches) Seatle taxi (4400 exact searches) Seattle taxi service (1900 exact searches)
Would you go for all of them or just the one with more searches? I guess you can target them all on one page being almost the same but what is the best strategy to apply in this case to get the most out of it? Do you take into account the broad numbers of searches which are different from the exact numbers?
Tools I used:Google sktool
Thanks for reading!
Thanks again for everything!
Thank you, that is the answer I was looking for!
We did make a couple of videos. I took your (Seomoz) advice and started shooting some short clips. They are already on Youtube for a few months know and we are working on several ideas to create a long term plan for releasing at least 1-2 videos per month. This is how it looks: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCiPV17s0Y&feature=feedlik).
About ranking in local search, I talk to Rand about it on a private question and my opinion is that unless I have an exact match domain and tens/hundreds of local reviews, I'm not going to be able to outrank my competitors. Google seems to rank companies based on their listing address without checking the facts and this is so frustrating. For example, I know for a fact that NONE of my competitors have an office downtown Chicago but they do on their Google listing and that counts a lot because the closer you are to Downtown Chicago the better you rank. Also, they use very strong keywords as their listing Title instead of the name of their company as per Google guidelines. It seems that not only they are not getting penalized for that but they are even being pushed at the top. When Google still puts so much weight on exact match domain, when business are taking advantage of the system by posting fake reviews and using other shady tactics to rank high in local search, there is not too much I can do. Everybody here is preaching a white hat approach and I fully supported but for smaller companies like mine is not that easy to put up with spammy websites because Google doesn't do enough about it. I don't want to lead this discussion somewhere else; I just had to say something about it.
Your thoughts are always greatly appreciated.
I kind of knew you gonna say that...when I see my competitors ranking so high up using spammy techniques, all my patience goes away and all I'm thinking about is is how to gain back my position in Google. The problem is that I need results fast, 70% of my company's revenue is coming from our online presence. We don't do ANY paid advertising which means that if we go down to page two in Google, the phones stop ringing. You see, it's not always what you should do but what you can do. I need time and money to find very good writers to create that kick-ass content that you talk about and when I do find them and have the articles ready it is very hard not to publish them online where the results will appear much faster.
Egol, I saw your response after I submitted my answer above. Although you gave good advice most of the time, I am not sure if your answer is wright more me. As I see it, you create awesome content most of the time, the websites that you put your content on are very strong or at least strong enough to rank for the keywords that you target on those articles. I understand that but if my website is not as strong as yours, shouldn't I have to use, even temporarily, other means to get the word out until my website grows stronger?
Sha, I like your response, a very professional approach. My press releases are going to be submitted to major online Release sites. It was just a question if I should put them on my website or not. It does make a lot of sense because the whole idea of a press release is to generate the attention of journalists who then use your contact information provided to call you and get a conference for information that they can write about. They want things that are of general usefulness for the public, not just simple promotion, that's what advertising pages are for.
The thing is, I have been doing SEO for about a year now and it seems to me that there is no wright answer. What works for you might not work for me and vice-versa. I am not going to have my press releases on my website. I read that the articles SHOULD be put on your website although even the best content guys on Seomoz have different opinions about this. What’s your take on this subject? Do you publish your articles on your website before or after you submit them online?
Although I agree with people like Egol or Ryan who supports the idea of having the articles published on your website first ("why give it away to somebody else if it's that good")__, this approach is not for everyone. For me, it makes sense to have them pushed through bigger article publishing websites because I get much more exposure. My site is not as powerful as I want it to be to get the most out of those articles.
Robert,
Your assumption is correct, I do have dedicated pages to those keywords. Our site has only a blog, would you recommend creating a new page "In the press" or build a new category on the blog with that name? I would have all my press releases hosted there, what do you think?
I am using some companies recommended by Seomoz.
I have started a long-term article marketing campaign and press release distribution. I will have about 4 articles and press releases in total every month. Although the press releases will not be self-promotional, sometimes they will be talking about a certain product that we unveil.
The question is, due to the high quality of these press releases, should I put them on my website as well as publish them on third party websites? If so, because they target a specific service/product which we already have a dedicated page on our website, wouldn't that put Google in the position of choosing between the two pages?
I was thinking to put them on my blog and link internally from there with the keywords that I target on those pages as anchor text. The same question for articles. Any suggestions?
I just discovered that the actual crawl date is Nov 16 and we change our template on the Nov 18. Google cache still shows the last template. I just don't know what to do anymore. There is no duplicate content, it must be something else.
Both websites were built in Joomla. We did not remove any url's especially because we were afraid of this drop. Anyway... we did not expect such a huge difference.
The content changed a little bit but not from seo point of view. The on-page optimization is pretty much the same, but the way the content is organized... this changed a lot. We did a crawl test when we were still working on the website and the way the content was read seemed to be fine.
To increase the usability of the site, we have also added a slideshow and a rate look-up form (table style).
Thank you!
We recently changed the template of our website but we kept the same url structure, most titles are the same, the content changed a little bit, the description is the same, and the same on-page SEO. Although we have been very careful and the actual template change took less than 5 minutes, we experienced a huge drop in rankings (even more than 10 positions in Google serp).
Does anyone have any idea what could have caused such a drop? The weird thing is that Google still has the old website in cash and not the new one. We resubmitted the sitemap, made a few more redirects... but anyway... what else can we do?
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
I haven't decided yet which one to use; do you have any experience with any of them?
More importantly, once the press release is out, you are just hoping that the page where it will be published on will have a high Page Rank? I have seen my competitors’ articles on other PR websites and the pages they are on have a high DA, above 60 but the PA is 1! I mean, if you spend a couple of hundreds of dollars, you expect at least a good backlink if this is what you are trying to get, right?
this is an example:
Can I use the same video (hosted on my website, static URL) for 2 completely unique press releases/articles)? Would this make it less unique although the subject on those to press releases would fall into the same category (travel) but will have different content?
I like your answer, I just don't have much time, I thought in my spare time to learn something by reading how others have become good content writers.
Does anybody recommend any book about content writing?
This is the template that we are going to use.
I don't want to put too much content in the slides, it will cover the pictures.
I agree. "Not too bad" is absolutely horrible. Your goal should be to build a world-class site. I know it is not easy to create great content because we cannot be great at every single thing we do. In real life, sometimes we have to pick and choose. In the beginning, I did not have enough time to spend on the website but I needed to start somewhere.
-We have no broken links, the site is W3C compliant, we do not have e mobile version (mainly due to the fact that we did not have time to look into it and GA shows only a couple of people accessed our website through mobile devices). It will flow much smoother than before once we are done with the re-design. I know my website is not great but we are getting there.
The niche that I’m in (limo service) does not require too much content; what it does require is great pictures of our cars, competitive prices and an easy to use booking system. That is where I concentrate my efforts. I do need great content to gain links and now that I reach the point where I can spend around 6 hours a day in front of the computer I need to know where to focus more, what would be a good plan to get the word out.
I recently watched Rand talking about how evil low quality article marketing has become and I agree with him, we need to create great content for our customers although having a couple of great articles published it doesn’t mean the job is done. There is so much more than that.
In a few words, this is what I gathered so far about article publishing:
Create great content, have it published on:
_- Your website (90% of the time)
My site has a PR3, DA 45 and PA 34 (Homepage), I did not write any article or press release yet and I want to do it the wright way. I do not have any spammy links (not added by me anyway). I think I have submitted to enough directories and made useless blog comments and it is time to build some quality links.
Time permitting, this would be my plan:
This is where I am at this point. I guess I need reassurance from somebody that spends more than 30 minutes on SEO per day that, what I am about to do is wright.
I am in a limo service industry where people are not looking for great content or product description, all they want is a nice Lincoln Town car and a competitive price. Because I need to get more pictures in front of my customers rather than more content I am not sure if by not having the content high up in the page will affect my rankings. We are transitioning to a new template where we have more control over the layout of the website but because of the slider that we have on the homepage the content needs to go further down. We could insert some content in each of the slides but the page would start looking too "busy". We want the customers to see very clearly what we offer. They see the picture, click for more info and book the service.
How important still is to have your keywords in the first hundred words on a certain webpage? Can we get away with having the content read by search engines after 3 - 4 slides and their description (about 20 words total) ?
Ryan, is there no downside for having AddThis button with 4 -5 outbound links especially if they are placed high up on the page? Did you apply the no-follow attribute?
I understand, we can format the pages on the blog as we want. That is the answer that I was looking for.
Thanks!
The $1000-$2000 was the budget for link building per month and I am the link builder. We are in the process of re-designing the website to make it more user friendly but as it is right now, I think is not to bad. As far as the content goes, we need to make improvements as well. The content was written mainly for SEO purposes and it needs to go. We are adding some widgets, better pictures, better content...better everything. I want to start fresh.
Link profile: I have started link building about a year and a half ago, mainly with directory submission, some blog commenting and forums post (just a few). I did not know much about SEO but after I start using the information on this website I have seen positive results in a matter of months. I pulled my competitors backlinks profile using OSE, tried to get their links, sometimes it worked sometimes it did not. I spend some money on some big paid directories recommended by SEOMOZ, found other ones on my own.
I had to work and do SEO for my company ((echolimousinedotcom)) in the same time. It was very hard but I thought that, in the long run, it will be better if I learn from the best in the SEO industry and apply that knowledge rather than using an SEO company that I did not know what they were doing; I needed it to understand the process.
I have seen the backlink profiles of my competitors and I knew I could beat them and, in some case I did, quite easily. Majority of them has exact match domains and it is very difficult to outrank them without a very solid link profile. Now, I have spent many hours reading blogs on Seomoz and I am ready to take the next step and invest some money any time into real link building. The goal is to rank for a few very competitive keywords; all I need from you guys is some direction, where to start. I think part of my problem is that different people here on Seomoz give different kind of advice on the same matter; I do not know anymore who is wright. Maybe nobody, maybe everybody …I start to think that there is no right or wrong in SEO just some general rules and lots of testing.
I know who Egol is, I followed his posts and I think he gives great advice every time. If I could hire him I would but I know I can’t. So I study more. There is a lot of information floating around and I know content is still king but if my website does not rank well to be found by others, would not be better to have an article/press release published on a larger, more trusted website where it could gain more links than having it on my website? I am talking short/medium term until I get my website to rank higher then I will put all articles on my website. What is the benefit of investing $1000 in a press release/article publishing if you get 1 or 2 very good links from high ranking websites but in a matter of weeks your article/PR gets archived and loses the ability to pass link juice? Is this all about the money? The more money you have the better results you get? I mean, you have the knowledge but can you really make it to the top without investing a considerable amount of money?
Now I have time to study, give me something to do.
Egol, I just want to make sure I understand this right. My blog is part of my website and is not a subdomain. I have "absolute control over formatting, optimization and appearance". Why would I create separate pages and not use the blog to publish my articles?
If you have only one SEO guy doing link building for you, 6-8 hours a day,with a budget of $1000 -$2000 what would be the best 5 things to concentrate on?
Based on personal experience, could anybody suggest a daily/weekly plan?
See example:
car rental - sedans - bmw car rental - sedans - audi car rental - sedans - ford
(internal links to sedans - audi, ford) or (internal links to suv - bmw)
car rental - suv - bmw car rental - suv - audi car rental - suv - ford
(internal links to suv- audi, ford) or (internal links to sedans- bmw...)
Should I cross link only between the product page under each category or can I link between different products under different categories? From a user point of view, I think it will give him more options if he wants to choose the same brand but a bigger vehicle although I have read numerous posts saying that we should be internally linking most of the time within the same category. User experience or SEO?
It would be interesting to see some answers from Seomoz; their Title says: SEO Software. Simplified. | SEOmoz. Why would they dilute the first part of their Title? I do not think that "simplified" is one of their key terms.
Is it true that the shorter the Title tag is the more powerful the keywords in it are?
I know that the main keywords have to be at the beginning of the title but, having more words in your Title could dilute the effectiveness of your main keywords?
Ex: Dallas limo service | Private car by SelectLimousine.
Could the fact that I have a second part of my title affect the first part by diluting its value? I would like to rank first for Dallas car service but also for Dallas car service and Dallas limousine service. Is this good practice?
Yes, I meant the paid directory listing. You see, one of my competitor is listed on Hotbot and Yahoo, apart from that he has only very low quality links. IMO, my link profile is much better than his and still he ranks better. The truth is, his domain is much older than mine but is that enough to pull ahead of me?
I completely agree with what you just said but I assume that snippet alone needs to be that....amazing, to be picked up by other, right? I mean there is not much you can share in a snippet, a few sentences maybe an image what about videos? Have you tried link building using any type of video?
Could you share your homepage metrics, just PR, PA and DA.
Indeed it does but, I remember you saying a while ago that it is better to post it first on your own website (speaking of high quality content). What would you do when your own website does not rank as high as you wish to use it for spreading the word about your own press releases? Use the ones above that you just mentioned? What about spending some money and push them through some high quality Press Release websites? What if, the articles are not high quality and you just want some backlinks...