Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi all, I have read that a title tag and description tag length of 69 and 156 characters respectively, should be used as this is all that Google will show in the search results, but that search engine robots will read longer titles and descriptions and additional characters will have an effect on ranking algorithms. However, is there any SEO benefit in making title and description tags longer to include more keywords to aid ranking, even though the latter part won't be visible in the results. I have read elsewhere on this forum that there may be concerns with regards to keyword dilution, but what about keyword reinforcement, i.e. by a repetition of the main keyword at the end of the title/description (I mean in a readable manner here, not 'stuffed')? Thanks in advance, Gareth

Hi all, I am managing the SEO for my company. We operate in a small niche market in the UK, and so our online optimisation is proving fairly successful for our main key terms as there is not a vast amount of competition and our website is well established. However I am noticing a difference in ranking position (and quoted search volume - as per Google Adwords) depending on whether the optimised terms is in its singular or plural version. Now I can understand this where the difference in the plural or singular version may lead to a different search requirement by the user. E.g. as quoted by Rand elsewhere on this forum "Microsoft Office" and "Microsoft Offices" are quite different in what the user is looking for. However for our terms the users search requirements must be identical for the singular or plural. One example is "stainless steel shower tray" versus "stainless steel shower trays", we have optimised for both now, but still rank differently for each, by a couple of places. Why does Google treat these terms differently, when users entering the terms can only be looking for the same thing? Also, Google (in Adwords) seems to show different search volumes for the singular versus the plural. For most of the search terms, the singular seems to have more volume. Does anyone know how this is working in Adwords - i.e. is Google saying, for example, 150 searches per month for "stainless steel shower tray" and 100 separate searches for "stainless steel shower trays" (i.e. 250 in total), or 150 searches per month using a search terms that contains "stainless steel shower tray", of which 100 are "stainless steel shower trays" (i.e. 150 in total)? Thanks in advance, Gareth

My campaign in SEO Moz Campaign Manager has just ran it's weekly crawl, and all my keyword rankings are messed up. 18 keywords have apparently dropped by massive amounts, but when I do a physical search, they haven't moved. Also Keyword Tracker agrees with the physical search, so why is the Campaign Manager showing the wrong rankings all of a sudden??

Hi, I am just trying to get to the bottom of why I am seeing such wildly different figures in the SEOMOZ link analysis. The SEO company that we use is saying that we have around 331 external links to our website, when I check on Yahoo site explorer, it returns 264 external links, but in my SEOMOZ campaign manager, it says I have 4 external links? I fully appreciate that none of these methods are going to be wholly accurate, and are going to produce different results, but I can't understand why the SEOMOZ results are so vastly different. I also know for a fact there are a number of Followed links that I have added to a couple of websites, that Google has now indexed (as they appear in search results), but don't appear in the campaign manager results. If SEOMOZ use a different method to assess an external link, then no problem - my main concern here is that as a Newbie I am doing something wrong within the SEOMOZ tools, and don't want to take action based on results that may be incorrect because I have set things up incorrectly? Any help is greatly appreciated. Many thanks, Gareth

Hi all, I have a bit of a problem with duplicate content on our website. The CMS has been creating identical duplicate pages depending on which menu route a user takes to get to a product (i.e. via the side menu button or the top menu bar). Anyway, the web design company we use are sorting it out going forward, and creating 301 redirects on the duplicate pages. My question is, some of the duplicates take two different forms. E.g. for the home page: www.<my domain="">.co.uk
www..<my domain="">.co.uk/index.html
www.<my domain="">.co.uk/index.asp</my></my></my> Now I understand the 'index.html' page should be redirected, but does the 'index.asp' need to be directed also? What makes this more confusing is when I run the SEOMoz diagnostics report (which brought my attention to the duplicate content issue in the first place - thanks SEOMoz), not all the .asp pages are identified as duplicates. For example, the above 'index.asp' page is identified as a duplicate, but 'contact-us.asp' is not highlighted as a duplicate to 'contact-us.html'? I'm a bit new to all this (I'm not a IT specialist), so any clarification anyone can give would be appreciated. Thanks, Gareth

Hi all, I am new to SEO, and just getting up and running optimising our company's website. We have a lot of images of our products on the website, and I would like to optimise the alt-text. Is there a recommended maximum length for alt-text, as there is for title tags etc? Thanks in advance, Gareth