Welcome to the Q&A Forum

No, a .com.

Between 500 and 5000 words, with 2 to 10 images, maybe a video, and maybe some data.

A few years ago I had a lot of pages with 30 words.  I improved them to 300 and the rankings went up... then improved them to 3000 with media and rankings went up again.

**For example, in my niche, there are super-high-ranked sites with just a title on a wordpress page, a short video and 20 words of content just in the caption (It happens to be a competitor so I'm trying to figure out what the "better" approach would be considering we have everything else at tip top shape) **

I'll bet that if you gave me an identical page and allowed me to edit those 20 words into a more complete story I would rank above them.

Great marketers can tell a story in a natural language in 800 words, but others can do it in 30 with a smart punch line and an image and perhaps an embedded video.

There's a difference between marketing and ranking a website.

Should you include Website Title in all page title tags?

Only if you lack imagination.

Or have a boss that lacks imagination... or an owner who needs it in there for his ego.

Sometimes the message is more important than the brand.

What's the recommended number of words (original of course) on page?

As many as it takes to cover the subject completely and in an interesting manner.

What should be the keyword % ?

As many as it takes to tell the story in natural language.

Anybody who gives you fixed numbers for this is full of BS.

I consider this to be the worst $3 grand we've ever spent!

Nah... I bet you are getting an education worth many times that around.   You will make the money back with better decisions down the road.

Some people sign $30,000 contracts and find out later.

...so you're not creating a hundred low quality links with the same anchor text and shooting yourself in the foot....

Is your anchor text Texas hold 'em?

5600 pages with local pages in almost every city across the US

If you find a smart person the first things that they will do are....

-- look at those 5600 pages to see if they are cookie cutter, duplicate content, or thin content

-- then they will check for adequate linkjuice to index 5600 pages, hold them in the index, make them competitive

You can check some of that yourself.

There are sitewide links to http://www.whitby-holiday-cottage.com/ and http://www.northyorkmoorscottages.co.uk/ in the left navigation.

I would not do that.  I would have a page on the site that received traffic from those links and then one link on that page to the other domain.

Yep.... they recorded ours too.

Before the first call they studied the site and came prepared to the call.

We discussed the site and the objectives, brainstormed potential changes then left the call.  We got a recording here.

We then made changes and ran them.  Shared changes with SiteTuners.

Then a second call to review what happened, discussed more tweaks.

We learned a lot.

Missing is a strong, short, clear and convincing statement at the top that communicates your value proposition.

Can you come up with a way to promote cottages on other domains without giving them sitewide links?

I don't have the money to go to one of those fancy companies who do a complete makeover and charge in the tens of thousands.

I've gotten a homepage and landing page evaluation from Tim and Rachel at SiteTuners for a couple thousand.

Well worth the time and money.

You can throw darts or pay a little for great advice.  We use what we learned now in so many places.

Get a loan from your uncle, sell your baseball cards, get a temporary job at McDs.   You will get your money back.  Do it now.  Opportunities are slipping through your site.

**My site's Domain Authority has decreased from 43 to 41 since last month.  I cannot figure out why. **

Have you ever used a voltage meter or a sound level meter?  You can see flux in the digits or a little jitter in the needle?

How about getting on a digital scale.  The number moves around if you shift your feet, move your arm or even fart.

DA has the same type of flux.

Nice additions. Thanks!

Where to begin (SEO-wise) with my Website?

Educate thyself....

I've been toying with the idea of just trying to accomplish some SEO myself

Do this even if you intend to hire someone else.  It is really important for you to have some basic understanding about what you are buying.... and what methods are safe vs too aggressive (risky).   Lots of people buy poison.  You want to avoid that.

** I'm a full-time military pilot, so this seems like it involves more time than I have to give.**

OK... consider this....

Online printing is highly competitive turf.

You have arrived late to the fight.  You competition occupied the high ground years ago, they are dug in, fortified and now have all of the approaching ground carefully sighted in with a doubleoverkill of weapons.  They have highly-trained reserves that they can call in at any time if you threaten and they might see you coming before you arrive.

What do you think your chances are to assault that part time and without skills?

Some people like that type of a challenge.   I do - but pick my fights very carefully.    Just saying what you are stepping into.

If I was in your shoes and was offering walk-in service to people in Phoenix my first line of attack getting onto the local search map and getting established in Google Places for Business.   I would be optimistic about doing this.

If you goal is to use a website to generate orders nationally then you are going to need a big investment and an SEO team, at least for the short term.   I would consider this to be a gamble.  I might pick another fight - at least for now or until I got dominant locally.

I agree with Dana.

If you are a reasonably smart person who understands  products, pricing, quality score, landing pages, google bidding/ranking methods, profit then you will probably get better results doing the bidding yourself.

Of, course, it is still possible to be an expert at all of the above and not be able to make a profit using adwords because the competition is cannibalistic.

Very good point, Alan.  Local search could be a very viable possibility.

I don't have a "local" biz and often forget about that.  Thanks for ringing that bell.

I usually am the one who says... "attack with content"... but weight loss is a niche that has been very very heavily written about by people who have outstanding reputations and by people who don't have a reputation but know how to hype.

Even if you create "amazing contents"  in this niche it is going to be like whispering under the din of an atomic blast.

So, if you are going to stand out in this niche you really gotta know an awful lot about this subject and know how to pitch it to people or you must hire someone with a name who can attract a following to your site.

I think the probability of one of those happening is low.... and the price of attacking with pedestrian content in this niche is failure.

So, I would set my sights on a different target (unless weight loss is a nascent niche in your target geography).

Does anyone have any ideas?

You can do the most important research yourself.

You lost traffic. So ask yourself....

What traffic sources are lower now?  What rankings are lower?

What specific information can you get yourself from analytics and watching your rankings?

We can only guess because we have no information about the history of your site nor do we have access to your data.

Hidden keywords - how many per page?

none

Michael,

These are very clear steps that could be applied by many people in various situations.

You are a great leader !

Nice work!

E

Ask to speak with the receptionist or the person who takes most of the incoming calls for the business.  This person hears the language used by people who ask for their services.  These people often know more about the keywords to target than management.

We have drafted some text for him - but the designer has fought back against this as he feels it will break the design.

I would not  be able to have this person as a designer for one of my sites.

This person is not "on board" and I don't have time to pull his teeth.

Nuf said.

This is what we have done with pdfs.   Assign rel="canonical" in .htaccess.

We did this with a few hundred files and it took google a LONG time to find and credit them.

Are there benifits to aquiring domain names with keywords of a niche site and redirecting them to the niche site?

I can't think of any benefits....

I think that this money would be better spent on beer.

See previous discussions on this... here and here

I write naturally and don't worry about how many times a keyword is used in an article.  In a long article that is thousands of words long the keyword can appear dozens of times.

If you are not stuffing keywords you should have nothing to worry about .

Don't take chances.  Put any text that you want search engines to see out there where visitors will see it - in text.

People who buy one type of paint likely buy other types of paint - and need brushes and dropcloths too.

If you have all of the products on one domain there can be lots of cross selling.

And if you have one big site instead of ten hotdog stands you will have greater credibility, a stronger brand and become the "GO-TO Place" for paints of all kinds as well as painting supplies.

This is a nobrainer.

Go to the "Learn SEO Page" on SEOmoz.

Use the links to learn a lot about SEO.

Then build a website that applies what you learn.

Fill the website with content that is better than your competitor's site.

Then apply the site promotion lessons.

Depending upon your competition you might be successful in a couple months or a much longer period of time - maybe never if you don't work hard or don't have the skills and resources to defeat the competitor.

That sounds like you have a site that people value.

I would use the rotators.  The number who return might move up.

The site where I use the most rotators has lots people who visit daily to get news.

I have a retail site with daily content rotation that has people who return a couple times per month.

For a while we were offering special price items that changed daily on one site.  That was bringing a nice number of people to the site to see "what is on sale today"... but we quit doing that because people were calling us wanting a special price from last week.

If you have a website that has a high percentage of return visitors, content rotators can be beneficial.

We have....

...two blocks of content on our homepage that change every hour.

...lists of recent blog posts that update hourly and appear (by category) on related pages

...blocks of links to related content that change hourly with the content that we want to promote weighted for more frequent display

If you have lots of return visitors this keeps your site looking fresh. Page views and time on site went up when these were installed.

Someone just told me that the Google doesn't read past the pipe symbol.

lol... you should put that person on your "nofollow" list.

Yelp Unfair and Unclean Practices?  I discovered that one of my competitors, a new and mysterious company with a business name that reeks of spamming...

If this is true, my bet is that the competition is not very tough.

I almost never see spammers holding rankings in Google for anything very competitive.

I don't want to jump to conclusions.

That's my bet.

You want to get listed in the local results.

When I search for "auto insurance" and change my location to quakertown pa I see the map with push pins showing me offices for....

Aaron Landis,  Bob Wimer, R&R, Reise, Jime Wiley

I would put my work into getting on the map.

Technically..... using 301s produces almost immediate results...  I used rel=canonical on a few hundred pages and that took months and months to take effect.  (and these were active pages with good PR and thousands of visitors per month)

What google thinks of cross-domain 301s vs. cross-domain canonicals is a whole different question.

Good luck!

I would suggest to to find out how visitors get to these pages...

That's Mark's comment.  I agree with him.

What are your best ways to reduce bounce rates?

Create lots of content about high interest topics and then make seductive links to those pages and place them where every visitor will see them.

Their pages also have very high bounce rates (70-98%)

Sounds like this might be image search visitors.

I really like this question...

I have two sites in a couple different niches and have had that situation for many years.   Based upon what I have seen I would answer this question in a lot of different ways depending upon my strength in the niche and other factors.

If I have the dominant site in the niche then I chuckle when I see my competitors building multiple sites to compete against me.   They can build all of the hotdog stands that they want.  I will enjoy it.  Their hotdog stand will probably not kick my ass.

Keep in mind that war between two websites is very different than a pack of dogs attacking a single dog.  War between dogs pits one dog against many and the one dog must fend off attacks on multiple fronts.   Really hard to do.

War between websites is like war between two battle ships.  The bigger, better gunned and better armored ship has an enormous advantage.  So instead of building two ships armed with potato guns it is better to build one ship and put everything that you have into it.  Even that might not be enough.

War between websites is a little more complex because the bigger, better gunned and better armored ships get a "trust" or "authority" advantage that is absolutely enormous.

===========================

Here is what I would tell clients.

If you are struggling to compete (meaning that you are not ranking in the top three positions for most of your important money terms then you should be putting everything that you got into building one site.

However, once you have a dominant position, then making a second site can be effective.  But if you do that it better be very different than your big site and you better not build it for the purpose of manufacturing links.

Adding more pages to a big, powerful site will allow those pages to rank higher in the SERPs than identical pages added to a hotdog stand site.  So, putting more work into a big site might be more effective.

So.... to get the most out of two sites you must not only have dominant position in the SERPs but you must also have already saturated the keyword terrain for everything that is important.

===========================

One of his competitors is doing it and getting away with it.

If client told me this I would probably reply.... "THOSE FOOLS!"  lol

===========================

** this is suspicion only **

I honestly believe that if google knows that you have two potent sites in the same niche.  And when they know that the second site gets a little throttling - meaning that it does not rank as well as deserved.

Anybody agree? Disagree?

I read a couple "SEO" related articles that sites built in Wordpress are going to be dinged by Google because Google sees Wordpress sites as simple to make and a higher potential to be "spammy".

Oh man.... that's really funny.

IMO..... Blogspot and bogger and sites.google.com have tons more crap sin that wordpress.

Combine the above with YouTube and Google is probably the largest host for crap, spin  and infringement on the entire planet.

I simply update the content of the post and change the date/time.

This works if you do not have date or time as part of the post URL.

OK... so you have a penguin problem too.

You may need a new site on a new domain.... or perhaps this one can be salvaged.  I don't know.  You need assistance from someone who can spend the time needed to understand your penguin problem and help you with the suggestions that I made above.

I don't think that you need an SEO who is going to put you on a program that will costs thousands of dollars per month.  You need a consultant who can make a decision about your penguin problem, get your blog set-up properly and coach you through fixing the other problems.

If I was in your situation I would visit  http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/ and consider hiring Marie Haynes for consultations.

This site has lots of problems.

I don't know what terms you are trying to rank for... but... if this was my site I would...

1. remove the links page from the navigation and would probably delete it from the site

2. decide what is important and focus my homepage title tag on that (it is currently way too long, suffers from keyword stuffing, repetition, does not elicit clicks)

3. rewrite the homepage, eliminating the bold and color text from the paragraph copy

4. fix homepage canonical problems ("home" goes to index.htm)

5. blog is on a subdomain but the link in main navigation goes to index.php in a folder

6. move the blog into a folder

7. get rid of the tags in the blog

8. create alt attributes that support your keyword targets

9. develop a persistent navigation that directs visitors to your essential pages and employ that navigation on the main site and the blog

10. develop article content for each of your business services

All of that is from a quick look, there is probably a lot more that a detailed study would find and which I am unable to offer.

If you are getting business from this website I think that it would be worth the investment to have a professional SEO spend the time needed to learn about your business, determine the keyword targets that will attract business, help you get it optimized, and develop a content strategy.  (I am not looking for a job, I only work on my own sites.)

The reason that I would hire someone is that it will get the job done right immediately and eliminate the loss of revenue that will occur while you are learning.  Or, you can find an SEO who is willing to consult and coach you while you do the work yourself.

Good luck.

- Would it be ok to use the same post, but just re-schedule it again to go out with the new updates?

This is what I do.... mine are usually recycled a few weeks later instead of hours later.

Does it make more SEO sense to create a series of pages (externalsite.com/123mainstreet) on a single site that already has good traction and relevance?

YES!

This is what I would do.  The more powerful site should toss them higher into the SERPs right away... and they will enrich the site with fresh content for search engines ... lots easier to manage and less costly.

gets ready to duck from all of the pies that will be thrown

If you want to hunt ducks you get the best results by going to the pond.

You can get great SEO advice here but if you are looking for best-on-the-web content generation your best source will be professionals in your industry niche.  Trade associations, professional societies and academic groups related to your industry can be fantastic sources of content ideas and authors.

Put up a sign.  Make the requirements really steep.

Something will appear in your email.

I am usually an advocate for "lots of links on a page".... however, in this case I think that 175 links is excessive.

I would reduce the 175 into a few categories and then make beautiful category pages with wonderful images that entice people to drill down.  These category pages might rank in the SERPs  for lots of diverse terms related to their content.

I would use this as an opportunity to expand my longtail keyword reach.

If the site is massive and the task daunting, testing will at least give you direction. But, at the end of the day, the more you differentiate your site and those duplicate products the better off you are.

I agree!

We write all  of our own product descriptions, take almost all of our own photos. Our product descriptions approach article length for some products.  This can be done to improve salesmanship, include important long-tail keywords and make your content superior to everything else that is out there.

When people call or write to ask questions about a product (or return a product) we often beef up our descriptions.

For important products we can have two additional articles of 500 to 1500 words, with several original photos plus a video.  The results are very worthwhile.

If you are not one of the dominant sites in your niche you might not be able to justify all of that work... but... doing all of that work might make you one of the dominant sites in your niche.

Take Robert's advice and test a few - and do a great job on them.  I am willing to bet that your rankings go up and your long-tail traffic skyrockets.

I don't know if that did it or not... but I would put 'em back, give it a couple of months, and see what happens.

If there were no other changes then the logic behind this being the culprit is strong.