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Hi

If you have not checked out these few resources, highly recommended for local;

Local Search Ranking Factors

Local SEO Guide

Advanced Local SEO Tricks

Your plan sounds pretty good, although I am not familiar with "Build My Rank".

The one thing I am curious about is, how is his website?  Is it technically sound (crawlable, indexable)?  Does the navigation/architecture (albeit small) make sense?  Is it optimized for on page keywords?  Does it have a great design, and is it full of useful information that's easily digestible?

That's just my general sense, that you have a good focus on off-site seo, but just don't forget about on-site, especially when it comes to users arriving at the page and taking that action; calling, emailing, sharing or whatever it may be.

Hope that helps! Its exciting, and good luck!

-Dan

This tool is a great extension for Chrome

Check My Links

Hi

You have to go by "phrase" or "exact" in the keyword tool, as broad could entail any search with the word "hire" even if it doesn't have "jet".

See image

-Dan

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Hi

Did you 301 Redirect the old pages to the matching new pages?  Anytime you change URLs you have to do this, it redirects your link juice as well as anyone trying to access an old page with a link or bookmark - they'll arrive at the new page instead of getting a 404 (page not found).

You do 301 redirects in your .htaccess file (insert them after the wordpress info) in this format;

Redirect 301 /oldpage/  http://www.mydomain.com/newpage/

One line for every page you're redirecting.  If you are using the new Yoast WP SEO plugin, you can edit your .htaccess file directly from WordPress, otherwise you have to edit it via FTP

BONUS: An easy way to get your old and new URLs so you do not have to type them all out, is run something like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Xenu Link Sleuth on your site, and export the URLs into excel.

-Dan

You should DEFINITELY use the info in Rand's recent post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-best-kept-secret-in-the-seomoz-toolset

It tells you how to put the search term in the keyword competitiveness tool, and do a detailed SERP analysis for all the ranking factors.  You might get some answers there.

-Dan

Hi

The difference to understand about pages vs posts has to do with how they are organized

• Pages are organized by nesting (into folders or levels)
• Posts are organized by categories, tags, date, authors, etc.

or another way to think of it...

• Pages are for when you want the content to be organized in a traditional format; root/sub-1/sub-2/ etc. which is more or less static or linear
• Posts are for when you want content to be organized in a dynamic format; in other words, you could access the same post multiple ways; through a tag, a category, a date, or the 'blog' page.

So, use pages when you have more or less static pages, organized in a folder type format like described above.  Use posts anytime you have content that you want organized dynamically; ie blogs, news, product catalogs.

Some of the themes you can get make this more confusing than it needs to be too.

Hope it helps!

-Dan

OSE is showing shares of your homepage (118 shares / 57 likes) - you need to enter each individual page URL to get shares/likes for that page. Running your first page "Post 1" URL in OSE shows 35 shares / 13 likes.

However, more importantly, its good to know what actually counts as a "share". To capture the most from the actual "share" buttons on your site, you need to install the facebook open graph meta tags on your site. This treats your site "like a facebook page" and will thus count of of the shares from people clicking the share button.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hey Derek

First, check this out to be sure of your understanding of broad, phrase and exact match: google documentation

I almost always use exact match to gauge search volume.  A search for "how to be a freelance" counts as a broad match.  Even "freelance" or "writer" counts as a broad match.  These aren't relevant at all, so thus a very bad assessment of search volume.

Even phrase match is misleading. "Hire a freelance writer" could count as a phrase search, totally not relevant and therefore shouldn't count.

It is therefore, I ONLY want to know how many people are searching, exactly for "how to become a freelance writer".  Its guarenteed to be that exact search, which guarentees relevance.

If you optimize and rank for "how to become a freelance writer" you may also rank for similar or related phrases, like "how to be a freelance writer" or "be a freelance writer".

Exact match is your best bet when judging search volume, because phrase and broad are way too unpredictable, as to whether the search variations are going to at all relevant.

So choose a good phrase with a decent amount of exact search volume, optimize for that, and you may also naturally rank for related long-tail more specific phrases as well - like "how to become a freelance writer from home", etc.

-Dan

Hi Maria

While I can't say I know of the best theme for SEO, here are some considerations;

I would purchase from a trusted vendor like woothemes or themeforest  If from themeforest, look for a theme with a 4-star rating or higher, a decent amount of purchases, and look to see that the developers actively provide support and respond to questions.

I'd say more importantly, is what you do with wordpress, no matter what theme you use.  I have been trying Yoat's seo plugin for wordpress and am very happy with it.

-Dan

Justin

I personally prefer lowercase because to me it looks better.  And I prefer hyphens for the same reason, and it seems like these days everyone from WordPress right to the SEOmoz site does it that way.

-Dan

Yes that is correct. And yes you already have "noindex subpages of archives".

Yes I have a very extensive article on Moz here: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

I did I Mozinar here about wordpress: http://moz.com/webinars/hands-on-answers-to-the-most-asked-wordpress-qestions

I have a comparison of Yoast vs All In One here: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2014/02/14/all-in-one-vs-yoast-seo-test-drive/

Hey Adam

The best place to start is really diagnose where and when the exact organic traffic loss is happening.

Is there an exact date in analytics you dropped off for organic traffic? Or is it gradual? If it's an exact date, you can match it up to the algo history and determine if it's panda or penguin related.

Then secondly I would look at your average position report in webmaster tools under queries to see if your rankings have dropped. Sometimes traffic loss can occur without ranking drop, so you'd want to see if that's in fact what it is. Or maybe you're tracking rankings.

If it is lost ranking then you may want to start segmenting organic traffic in analytics. Is the loss across all keywords? Can you pinpoint a few high volume keywords that were hit? Or were certain pages hit?

Let's walk through the site a little on video;

http://www.screenr.com/PDgH

(the first few seconds is a little jumpy, sorry!)

First time trying this in the Moz Q&A. Let me know what you think - helpful?

Lastly - your question about the crazy numbers for indexation in WMT. I see this a lot too. This tells me Google is not sure what pages on your site are important or not. There's probably a lot of extra pages which are not important being crawled. I would mitigate this with a great XML sitemap as well as noindexing of things like subpages and pages that present the same content but just filtered and/or sorted differently.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Jayson!

WordPress actually has a solution for this now - site redirect - the only requirement really is that the new site has the same permalink structure as the old site. And I think it costs $12 a year. But that's nothing really.

So, I would recommend combining the sites into one, using the WordPress site redirect to manage getting the old blog redirected over to the new one, which will sit probably in a subfolder http://pardons.org/blog/

To handle the transfer of the actual content, you can use WordPress Transfer

I would always advice utilizing existing content whenever possible, never get rid of it unless its just too difficult to move over or its low quality.

Hopefully that gets you in the right direction!

-Dan

You need to 301 redirect old URLs to the corresponding new ones. You typically do this with a few lines of code in the .htaccess file.

This article is the best for info on how to do this.

And see this article and the section on 301s for additional info.

-Dan

Hi David

Yes 2-3 weeks is fairly young for a site. Image indexation can lag behind a little bit from what I've seen. Unless you're super dependent on images for traffic (which is unlikely) I would give it 2-3 months honestly. I don't see any issues from what I can tell crawling etc. So I wouldn't take it as a sign of a problem, just probably Google's normal timeframe. Definitely write back or follow up if it's 3 months and there hasn't been much more indexed.

Hi There

You could generate one for the whole site, but this will be a pain because you'll have to update it very often. What I would recommend is;

• Let Yoast generate one for the blog area. This will sit under site.com/blog/sitemap_index.xml
• Create one for the static part of the site - you can use a sitemap generator (google search). Just don't include the blog in it.

Then you can submit each separate to Webmaster Tools. This way Yoast will update the blgo sitemap automatically, you'll just have to update the static one on your own.

-Dan

Hey Luke

Assume you mean XML Sitemap?

You should only include pages in your sitemap, which also are indexed. So then the question becomes, should you index tags or categories. I firmly believe, so long as the site is set up correctly, you should not index tags but it's OK to index categories. I also assume you're using WordPress.

So the steps become;

1. Noindex tag archives.

2. Then exclude tags from the XML sitemap.

You can refer to my WordPress SEO guide on Moz for more details.

Good luck!

-Dan

Google recently updated how they prefer AJAX is handled:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html

They now recommend using the PushState Method - I won't pretend to know all the intricacies of how it works for implementation, but that's the best method to go with. If you need any more help let us know, and I'll have another associate jump in and take a look.

-Dan

No problem

What you would want to do is learn a little about site architecture, and how different pages will target different thing. Think of a sire like Zappos:

• homepage - targets something broad like "shoes" and "shoes for sales" etc
• shoes categories - target things like "men's shoes, men's dress shoes" etc
• subcategories - "men's dress shoes black"
• finally products - "size 9 men's dress shoes black"
• even resources - "how to choose the most comfortable men's shoes"

So your homepage should target the broadest concept / keywords. Then you might have category pages targeting things slightly more specific. Then your posts would target informational searches of very specific things people are looking for.

Walter

Looks like you have a "rel=nofollow" in the <a>links for every image.  I would remove that, and your images should get indexed.</a>

<a>-Dan</a>

Hello! Roman's answers are really good, but thought I would add some info as well.

Article or BlogPosting Schema can help in some of the following ways (vs hentry)

• Give search engines backend / structured info about the contents of the page
• Google's reference on Article schema shows all the snippet and SERP features
• Using article schema is the only way to get into 'in depth' article spots on Google
• I've had luck with Google showing the 'Last Updated' date in search results, which shows a newer date when using it in conjunction with article schema

So even though you'd technically be doing a 'blog post' I would use the parent Article schema as it's more widely recognized.

Hi

Honestly, I don't think you should worry much about pagerank.  I'd be more concerned if your traffic or rankings dropped.  Check out this whiteboard Friday on pagerank.  There are many more important things to worry about!

-Dan

PS - In about a 5 second analysis of your backlinks, I'd say you might want to focus on improving that. Not sure if someone has been helping you with linkbuilding or anything, but your backlink profile is severely unnatural.  WAY too many exact match anchor text links from irrelevant sites.

Hi Diane

You might want to try some segmenting in analytics to see where the bounce rate is coming from. Is it 60% across the board?  Or can you find places where it is higher/lower than the average by more than 10%?

Some places to start looking for differences would be:

Organic vs direct vs reffering?

New vs return visits?

All keywords or just particular ones?

Then that way, you can determine if your getting poor quality traffic (ie people coming to your site looking for something other than what your site offers).

If the wrong people are finding your site, with the wrong intent, this could skew results.

Also, very important - remember a "bounce" doesn't tell you how long they were on the page.  They could land on the page, stay for 5 minutes and even call the phone number, and then leave the page, and this is all still a bounce. And this particular page seems to give all the information about the topic without necessarily having to navigate around much.

Are you measuring conversions some how on the other end?

-Dan

Rand had a FANTASTIC flowchart to answer this question: Splitting Keyword Targeting

It was from this post.

-Dan

This might not be the entire picture but they could be using YouTube's high authority plus link building to their profile page and/or individual videos. Moz/Majestic etc might not have picked up on everything, but you can see a bunch of EMDs and microsites linking to their YouTube profile page;

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.youtube.com%2Fuser%2F1800FIGHTIT&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0

Thank you Streamline and Roque for answering!

In most standard cases, noindexing tags is what I advise. You can refer to two documents;

My SEO for WordPress post on Moz

My post about safely de-indexing tags in WordPress

-Dan

Hi

I hate to use the "it depends on your situation" answer, but it really does. It depends what your link profile already looks like (an off-site audit would tell you), it depends what industry you're in and how the competition is, and it depends on your goals.

Maybe you've got a good idea of your existing backlink portfolio? And the competition?

I would highly suggest having a look at this resource on seomoz.  Eric Enge gives a fantastic overview of the entire linkbuilding process.

If you can give us some more info, perhaps we can give you a more customized answer.

-Dan

PS - At your hours vs pay, is this $1,000-2,000 per MONTH?  At 140 hours a month (35 hours a week), for $1,500 that's about $11 an hour.  I would highly suggest thinking about paying more per hour but finding someone who can do a quality job in less time. Unless I've assumed the math wrong

Hey There

Just seeing if you still need help with this? Just to clarify, having a "nofollow" meta tag on the post does not prevent it from being indexed, that would be a "nopindex" tag - perhaps we're using the two terms interchangeably here?

To get the posts indexed again, you want three things to be true;

1. There is no "noindex" present in the html meta tags
2. There is nothing blocking the content in robots.txt
3. You are linking to the posts from the block so they are crawled.

If those three things are all true, Google does need to crawl the page again to then reindex it. Thomas is correct in that you can "fetch as Googlebot" in webmaster tools to speed up this process and you can then submit that page, or even the whole site to the index.

Let us know if you still need help!

-Dan

Use knowem to find and claim 100s of social profiles, especially on social sites within a niche you might not have been aware of.  The social profiles aren't link building per se (because many aren't followed links) but Alan has listed this #2 and I would agree.  It creates a social web around your site and strengthens trust in the brand.

-Dan

PS - all of Alan's tips are spot on, as always

Hi July

This is really three separate things here, so I see why it's giving you trouble.

1. Changing permalinks
2. Changing what category a post belongs to
3. Redirects

When you do one of the above, it does not do the others automatically - for example, changing a permalink will not change the category or add a 301 redirect (by default - although some systems might add the 301 automatically).

So let me explain each one step by step. Realize they are three separate things normally.

1. Changing The Permalink

This is changing the URL. If you wanted to change for example

• domain.com/first-url-dont-like-it ... to
• domain.com/love-this-url

That's one step. Now. Some plugins may add a redirect for you. So. When you change your permalink

• try visiting the old permalink
• if it redirects - you're all set - you don't need to do a redirect yourself.
• if it does not redirect, you either need to use the redirection plugin or write the redirect in the .htaccess file.

2. Changing What Category The Post Belong To

Note, this is entirely different from just changing a permalink. You need to go to edit that post itself and select your preferred category for that post. This is assuming your not creating any new categories or deleting old categories. You're just moving posts around to different categories.

Then, when you move a post into a different category and remove it from the old one, it will show up under the new category archive.

3. Redirects

As mentioned - these may or may not happen automatically when you change a permalink. I usually prefer them to NOT happen automatically.

This is why it's best of course to decide the final permalink for a post before you hit publish as it's much easier to not have to go back and edit it.

Please let us know if you're still having trouble - thanks!

-Dan

Atul

I believe you have two options in this case.

1. Like Daniel said, only the href is going to look long and ugly, you can keep the anchor text nice and clean.

2. But if you still want to make the href its self look nicer, just set up a 301, like

Redirect 301 /newsletter2109/    http://www.example.com/ ?utm_source=newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newletter2109

Users will see the link as http://www.example.com/newsletter2109/ but the 301 redirect will send the appropriate info into analytics.

-Dan

This answer comes right from Rand himself (and a few other answers), as I just stumbled upon it in Quora yesterday:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-permalink-structure-for-SEO

And to add my two cents, as far as rankings, I don't think you can credit the URL alone for a #1 page ranking. I would construct your URL as Rand suggests and focus your on-page optimization efforts in a holistic manner.

This webmaster help video with Matt Cutts should help answer your question. And this blog post from SEOmoz should either help with the mod_rewrite or there are some links at the bottom that should get you in the right direction... hope it helps!

-Dan

Hi

The Open Site Explorer while exhaustive does not have all the links on the web, plus it won't have the most recent links.

You could also try www.majesticseo.com.

You could use a variety of advanced operators to find some more links;

• -site:www.mydomain.com "mydomain.com"
• -site:www.mydomain.com inanchor:"my site name"

That might catch some more of them.  You can try adjusting the time range to get recent ones.

-Dan

Yes it is, what you want is called "event tracking" to track clicks or other events, which can now also be set up as a goal in Google Analytics.

This is their guide to the setup.

Hi

This on-page site optimization tool has been a huge help as well.  http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

I think you can run it free 3 times if you're not pro.

-Dan

I'm sure someone on the staff could answer this better, but I believe the last update to the index was a week or two ago. So you're looking at probably 2-3 weeks for the next update. Your trust and DA may increase, if the links are followed and depending what pages on your site the links point at (home page vs inner pages).

But you can use - cache:www.sitelinkingtoyou.com/page - as a Google search to see if Google has crawled and indexed the page with links pointing to you. This is what matters in there actually being a ranking improvement to your site.

-Dan

Nice Doug, you bring up a good point and that is to not assume the spammy links are the (only) cause.  I would:

1. Ask your client to stop doing that

2. Comb through Google Webmaster Tools for errors - 80% of the time you'll find what need in there.

3. Do what Doug suggests which is run a check on the site to be sure its not some sort of on page factor - dont forget the often overlooked things; robtos.txt meta robots, xml sitemap etc.

4. And finally what Doug suggests: building quality links to balance out the negative ones is essential.

-Dan

Tom

Looks like a crazy combination of things;

1. Search [site:benetton.com] and it reveals their Italian page it.benetton.com as their intended 'home' page.

2. The Italian page does not have a robots meta tag, therefore it is indexed but only in google.it

3. Go to google.it and search [benetton]... annnd... you get the Italian site, no tracking URLs - site-links etc, per normal.

4. So the 'robots noindex/nofollow' on the www page must be because they're trying to index the Italian site but not the US site?  I'm honestly not an expert on the correct way to handle these international issues. They have basically two identical sites on separate sub-domains, the only difference being the language. Doesn't seem like the right way to handle this to me...

5. www.benetton.com does not redirect properly for /index.html or /index.htm

6. Because of all of this, Google USA is not given a homepage on the www subdomain to index.

7. BUT, there is an internal link (at least one I can identify) pointing to http://www.benetton.com/?utm_source=centrum.sk&utm_medium=listing on this page on the blog - so the robots noindex/nofollow is ineffective because Google likely sees the presence of the tracking parameters and thinks its a different page? Or this is one of the few times where Google can choose to ignore the canonical tag (as they have said its a strong directive).

(As a side note, many of their other www US pages have noindex/nofollow, but there are still about 2,500 pages in the index from the US site.)

Conclusion

• Benetton is attempting to have their Italian version of the site be the main website, they are incorrectly attempting to not index the US site.
• Links internally and externally with that tracking parameter are the only indication to Google US for the homepage.
• Because of incomplete homepage redirection (and perhaps one of the few instances where Google ignores the canonical), they have indexed the page with the tracking parameters.

Thoughts? Does all that makes sense?

You may want to "niche" down with your target keywords (go a little more long-tail). Neither "wordpress" or "magento development" rank you in the top 200 results, and "small business web design" you're on the 11th page. One option of getting more targeted, would be to target businesses in your area - "Small Business Web Design in Atlanta, GA"

An XML sitemap is not a super critical point (especially for a small site), but certainly highly recommended.

Yes, run a site search (site:treelifedesigns.com) in google, and pick out all the pages you don't want indexed.  Add them to your robot.txt file.

I didn't look at off-page, but there's always link building and social sharing that can boost things a lot as well.

Usually don't post my own stuff here, but I think this resource is pretty useful. I put together a giant list of rank checkers with the help of the SEO community. There's more in the comments too, with a basic list of pricing and features for all of them. I have honestly still not settled on a more robust one yet for the type of volume you're asking about, but I hope this helps!

http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/01/24/the-ultimate-list-of-rank-checkers/

Hi Brigitte

To echo some of the other answer here, simply having www vs. non-www does not affect rankings at all directly. What matters is choosing one and keeping it consistent. This would mean consistent across;

• Internal links
• Always redirect from the non-preferred to the preferred
• Don't switch if you don't have to
• Try to get back links pointing at the preferred version

By the way, you need to register a separate google webmaster tools account for non-www (it is treated as a different website in terms of some of the data).

I would choose the version with the most backlinks pointing at it, honestly, and then keep it that way forever.

-Dan

Hi

You can use the Plugin for Chrome - hopefully that's what you were looking for!

-Dan

Thanks for chiming in! Just want to clarify, canonical tags would be the last resort. In this case, especially for WordPress, noindexing tag archves and noindexing subpages is the way to go first.

-Dan

Hi Lehia

Given that your site has relatively low domain authority right now of 17 and to eliminate user (and your) confusion, I would 301 redirect every individual blog URL to the corresponding new URL on the new domain. It's possible you may lose some ranking - but let me ask:

• how much traffic do you get from the blog right now?
• I bet there's a typical 80/20 pattern where maybe a small handful of blog URLs are getting more of the traffic?

Point being, I would really do what's best in the long-term and to consolidate your brands/domains. I've performed and seen many migrations perfectly fine.

One last thing!

1. Crawl your old site or somehow gather up the old URLs from the old domain
2. Throw them in Screaming Frog in List mode
3. Export the "Redirect Chain" report
4. And undo any redirect chains

I talk about that a little here.

Also, make sure you continue to allow Google to crawl the old domain (don't block it with robots.txt).

Hi Lee

By percentage do you mean when it says for example "57% highly competitive"?  And not sure what you mean by "wording moderate" could you elaborate?

I generally look at the percentage to get a basic feel for how hard it might be to rank well for that keyword. I use this is a general guide as you have to dig into the metrics to get a real sense of how hard it is to rank. And it depends on your situation.

In other words if it says "70%" but the site I'm trying to rank is already IN spots 1-10 somewhere this is much different than trying to pick keywords for a brand new site and getting it to rank from scratch.

Or if all the top sites are ranking more because of on-page factors than off page (links and social) I know there's a good chance you can beat them, because on-site is easier to fix.

Hope that helps

-Dan

It is to control the flow of link juice. Since they can not control the questions coming in (order, frequency, topic etc), they chose to only follow the links that are static which appear in the menu on the left. This focuses link juice exactly where they want it. Also, the links within the Q&A's coming in get doubled or tripled up, and this is unnecessary link juice as well. Hope that makes sense and helps!

-Dan

Yes, you can try Screaming Frog. Free up to 500 page crawl, or you can buy the pro version.