Can you implement on a section or on a % of your pages first? then you can test the effect without risking your whole catalogue
Posts made by firstconversion
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RE: Title tag solution for a med sized site
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RE: Any ideas about using research tools data to create client interest in dedicating marketing spend on SEO services vs their other current antiquated marketing methods?
dentistry is a tough area, and actually making them money will require more than just seo (web dev, converison optimisation etc) so be careful what you sell.
However i find a spreadsheet with keywords against search volume, current position, volume at various rankings mapped back to $ terms per position is a good way to go
S
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RE: Missing Tool!!
Not exactly the tool, but close http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2010/regions/uk.html
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RE: Site: Query Question
Yup. get rid of parameter laden urls and its easy enough. If they hang around the index for a few months before disappearing thats no big deal, as long as you have done the right thing it will work out fine
Also your not interested in the chaff, just the bits you want to make sure are indexed. So make sure thise are in sensibly titled sitemaps and its fine (used this on sites with 50 million and 100 million product pages. It gets a bit more complex at that number, but the underlying principle is the same)
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RE: Is it Google's new interface for search result?
they are just doing some testing (as they always do). Hope that one doesnt win tho!
Check http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-url-above-search-results-snippet-78488
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RE: Link Building PR versus topic
I dont think there is a black and white answer here. Id persue everything topically relevant over a PR2.
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RE: Site: Query Question
Best bet is to make sure all your urls are in your sitemap and then you get an exact count.
Ive found it handy to use multiple sitempas for each subfolder i.e. /news/ or /profiles/ to be able to quickly see exactly what % of urls are indexed from each section of my site. This is super helpful in finding errors in a specific section or when you are working on indexing of a certain type of page
S
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RE: Need an SEO pro to build us a new fine art website
email frank@orchidbox.com and ask about his optimised seo template and cms
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RE: Hiring an SEO company
You're asking in the right place now. I would suggest SEOmoz's http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace but its also not really trustworthy. Personal recommendations here are your best bet. Give us an idea of the industry, where in the UK you are based and rough budget
I do SEO for http://www.iln.co.uk/work/ in Spitalfields
Not your typical SEO company, we are completely content lead as a result of 170 years as a magazine company Check out my bio and PM if your around London for a coffee
Cheers
S
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RE: Blogger or Wordpress?
An alternative response, just for the hell of it - I have recently seen examples of Google giving a massive boost to blogspot
http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=curly+hair+images
I trawled through a number of hair related queries and there is a massive over representation of blogspot sites appearing high in image search
If your doing images, Id give it a try
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RE: Ezine articles - worth it with a PA of 1?
DA does count, but its not worth the effort if you just post it and leave it - you still need to do the work to give that page PA, its not going to happen magically
Have a look at this suggestion from ViperChill - link to your other articles in each article you write to raise the PA of your distributed writings
Have a plan that has maybe 10 posts in it, pick 10 decent article directories and link between each. Then use open site explorer after a month to see if its picked any of the articles up
(or just write one really great post for a popular blog in your industry and get a ton more links, reads etc)
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RE: Mozpoints not updating
yup, im at the barrier too and it sucks
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RE: SEO for Korea - Naver & Daum
Id love to know myself maybe try http://seoforums.org/ they have a multilingual forum and you are more likely to get Korean SEOs there with some experience
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RE: Any one have a list of directories still good idea to submit too
not sure you mean empathic wish I had empathic clients
I keep this list semi up to date, altho no idea what effect Panda had on these sites.. http://seobestpractice.org/Linkbuilding
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RE: Is it worth to have a DNS manage service like easydns or ultradns in terms of seo ?
Put this on your list as the last thing to do after youve done everything else. Gains, if any, are likely to be very small
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RE: There seems to be something obvious stopping our product pages from being listed in organic results - help!
I think that navigation issues may well be what trip you up.
http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/buy/Food-and-Drink when I navigate through the product pages, I am not seeing the html changing to reflect the new contents, the html reflects the coffee content of the first page
However when I copy+paste the url directly to page 3 I get the correct html for the products on the page
Ajax isnt my strong point, but you need to aim to give engines access to your products via clear categorisation and pagination. Has your developer considered using a hashbang (#!)?
Here's a SEOmoz post that may help http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content
Let me know if this is the issue, interested to know
S
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RE: Which pieces of content in the online marketing/social media space were the very best of the best in the past 12 months?
EGOLS video has a good idea at its heart buts it fails for me because its about 10x too long - 15 seconds is all you need to show that concept
I bet it lost a ton of its potential reach due to its length before payoff - the client lost out due to the agency's ego
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RE: There seems to be something obvious stopping our product pages from being listed in organic results - help!
check your ajax and what happens to your html when your products load. will look more later
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RE: How much attention do you pay to hashtags in your tweets?
I rarely pay any attention to them
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RE: There seems to be something obvious stopping our product pages from being listed in organic results - help!
http://www.ethicalcommunity.com/eco-shop/coffee/papua-new-guinean-coffee-454g-10261
All these coffee pages look like crappy duplicate content - you have such a tiny percentage of actual content product description vs all the other stuff on the page - on product pages strip out all the extraneous crap and just focus on selling your product
Also the site is very slow for me, run yslow/google page speed optimiser and see what you can improve
Also check woopra-ns.com
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RE: Should there be a canonical tag on my 404 error page?
1 there is no point having canonical on a 404 page. I would say its a very confusing signal to bots
2 don't always 301. 404 exists for a reason. In most cases I will 301 old pages but there are cases where letting pages 404 is the correct way forward
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RE: URL rewriting with "-" or with a space ?
If your rewriting, chop off the .html bits for style
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RE: How do I figure out which keyword to optimize for?
"find a tennis partner" "tennis partner" "tennis court" "book tennis court" "tennis competition"
You are in the same position as many startups; there is not really any search volume for what you do as its so new and you need to build your audience from the ground up
You may rather wish to put your energy into social media and direct connections with tennis clubs (so make you twitter/facebook bigger with CTAs, and get rid of myspace ) Maybe Linkedin actually works well with this idea
I would suggest soft url hijacking of tennis club names. To that end, this url needs a hell of a lot more content http://www.tennisround.com/tennis-courts/tx/austin/lost-creek-country-club I would go out to the clubs or get them to send you images and video and any specials and competitions they may run
Also make your design higher quality and less spammy, then you will appear miles ahead of crap like this
http://www.letsplaytennis.com/
http://www.tennispartner.co.uk/
http://www.globaltennisnetwork.com/tennis-community/find-a-tennis-partner
From experience working with a startup, its easy enough to get traffic and signups, but getting actual engaged users is the real key to success. The 3 sites above may get organic traffic, but who comes back a second time?
S
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RE: Why should your title and H1 tag be different?
It is not that having H1 and Title the same is damaging, it is the overall quality and trust metrics of many websites that employ this methodology that is the cause of problems: simply, correlation vs causation
In EGOLs case its fine as the rest of the site is fine, in other cases it may seem bad, but thats just because the rest of the site is bad
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RE: What are the causes of pages desindexation?
There are lots of causes, you need to be more specific or provide urls
Stephen
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RE: Which would you chose? Link on PA56 with 88 OBL's and 80 IBL's or a link on a PA75 with 225 OBL's & 40 IBL (Same Domain)
Depends. How trustworthy vs spammy are we talking here? Need more info really - why not link the two pages or two similar pages on another domain so we can judge
If we assume the strength of the inbound links is measured by the PA, then I dont think the quanitity of IBLs by themselves are significant. (How many individual domains are linking, what anchor text etc?)
If the 75 is the homepage, id take that, as I think a 75 homepage can easily support 225 OBs without penalty. (altho both 80 and 225 could easily be spammy)
Otherwise Id take whichever is the closest to the content of your website and gives you a link from within a paragraph of text
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RE: What are the best tactics for SEO on a brand new site?
Other than have a great product? Decide what success looks like
You haven't given enough information really, but I start with Research, Information Architecture, Paper Dolls, UX, UI, goals and analytics.
Then SEO becomes easy
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RE: Combining web pages and it's affects on SEO?
Best if you give the urls but I would say its a "Good Thing TM" .
A rich page of content around a keyword topic with mulitple media types is the way im building my content now - even if it doesnt work for Search Engines, its nice for people (crazy, huh?)
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RE: Should I 301 redirect my country specific sites, or use them as linking root domains?
I would write a great single page of foreign language content on each of the country TLDs. The stick in a single english language paragraph with exact text links back to your site
You rank for your terms in the foreign language
You get exact text links back
You get 10 unique domain linksHeres one I made earlier http://www.mendeley.de/
Note the footer is in English, How Mendeley works is the exact text links I wanted to point back to deeper pages on mendeley.com
Also note that the language in the html is correctly changed to DE
But, they didnt change the title or description from the English. and they made up some German words instead of using the real ones (sigh)
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RE: Where to find high quality (affordable) web designers?
Probably best to say where you are based, then get personal recommendations from that area and meet the designer in person.
I can give you great designers in London and I know Luke Jones is a great UK based designer and also contributes to SEOmoz a lot, so maybe get hold of him via DM www.seomoz.org/users/profile/139920
You could try here as well http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/resumes/service/2 <- people who have tagged themselves with design (altho its a bit spammy)
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RE: Supplementary outsourced link building
Its not all that bad Thomas! Charles maybe re evaluate what you want here. Ive seen linkbuilding work but in many cases provide no value.
You can make external linkbuilders give a shit by incentivising them based on sales, but you often end up in a more complicated system than you wanted in the first place!
If I had the money for outsourced linkbuilding, I would be putting it directly into scalable linkbuilding like widgets and badges, or on Viral content.
That means your money goes to developers and designers, not spam and it means your money works for you 24-7
1 of these on your website http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online-dating/ will do more for you than years of outsourced linkbuilding ever will
S
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RE: What To Do For A Website That is Mainly Images
Go to the http://www.gumtree.com/ and create an ad for a house (or whatever), the in field help they give to get users to give indepth information is great without seeming forced.
If you incentivise your community via "likes" or rankings, then they will want to provide this information i.e. make it in their interest to provide you with information
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RE: Does anyone know why my Home page isn't visible in search terms?
Works for me: set each one's geography in webmaster tools and put a UK & US address on each footer. Then add a bit of geographic linkbuilding
Great idea this week from TNW conference: set html lang="en-US" on the US version
(maybe also check your English language usage in line with this)
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RE: Blogging competition - risky link acquiring method?
A suggestion: make a "blogging competition widget" that each blogger must embed. You get your link back and this sends traffic to all the other blogs who are taking part and further promotes the competition while looking less dodgy
ps, make sure every blogger wins a nice badge / honorable mention button
S
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RE: Analytics bounce rate change
Something accidental where you serve two pages? Or have your analytics twice on the page?
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RE: SEO for One Page Websites
I second the dont be scared of document size recommendation BUT you need to understand the audience you're trying to access and what you want them to do - you havent given us anything to go on really
If people are already pre-bought in and you just want to capture email addresses, then you just need somethign simple and use conversion optimisation to maximise capture
If its early in the buying cycle and you are trying to educate customers, then go to town - add maps, video, images etc as appropritae and make sure to tag them well.
I have also started to write my content with the SEOmoz LDA tool - its pretty fantastic for making sure you don't miss anything important out and end up with a rich, informative page
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RE: Press release site for posting article and get links, what do you think?
It depends. Neither look that wonderful to me. You need to measure it
Use a site that has a once off cost, where you can pay for a single press release and see the effect it has on your incoming links and keyword positions.
S
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RE: Ranking problems
Time for some link building - you need quality links.
By SEOmoz metrics DA, PA you look fine, but looking at the actual links you have coming in to the homepage is the key
Via Open Site Explorer you have only 33 linking domains, and they all look terribly low quality. I would bet on Google devaluing a number of them
Do some link analysis on your competitors and as step 1, try and duplicate the links they have that are working for them. Step 2 is to try find some unique ones they dont have
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RE: What press release distribution service do use for UK?
Ive recently done the same for the wedding, and used PRnewswire. They have number of packages from £300 up to £2000 for video hosting. They were pretty good at getting in touch, explaining what they offer and feeding back.
I used the online US distribution package to try get the most backlinks, however was disappointed with the results (I got large numbers of links but all spammy). I would do a UK release next time and see if thats better
Otherwise I have alist of free PR sites here http://seobestpractice.org/Linkbuilding ordered by Pagerank
Overall no PR distribution has done that well for me in actually moving keyword rankings, Id be interested to hear how you get on and who you choose
EDIT: If you do pay for PR, make sure they have submissions to Yahoo, Google news etc
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RE: Is this keyword cannibalization?
Common sense says cannibalisation, although G certainly doesnt always obey common sense.
More importantly, how were you planning to create 3 sets of rich, unique content there? I suggest one page and using the keywords in various combinations on the page, then linkbuilding with the exact texts you want rank for as well.
1 page of strong content here will do better than 3 duplicates
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RE: Should a crawl ever take more than 7 days?
I think SEOmoz have disable the intial fast crawl and only the full crawl is available. I think it says the initial crawl can take 4 - 7 days (altho it has not taken this long in my experience)
Email help@seomoz.org with your account details and ask them to look for you, they are really good at getting back
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RE: Getting links - the actual final approach to do so
Read Paddys blog about this - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-links-without-fancy-tools
I commented with an example of the email I send http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-links-without-fancy-tools#jtc138789
I just keep it as simple and honest as possible
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RE: How do you visualize website structure
I print it out and lay it out on a large table in the office. Just seeing it visually lets me get to grips with it a lot easier than scrolling through unconnected pages on a screen.
Print small and get a big table and you can fit a large sitemap there Get a lot of A4s and some scissors and tape and you will be surprised how much better your understanding is by the time you've finished