Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Greetings Doug, I echo Mike's request.  It would be wonderfully supportive of you or another staff member to give one (or more) examples on how "Domain Authority and Page Authority for the top 20 search results on Google".

I cannot simply present to my boss and say, "SEOMoz shows this keyword as 62% highly competitive."  My boss is wise enough to ask, "Explain what 62% means. Show me how this applies."

Fair question.

One  example from you in layperson terms would be highly appreciated.  Then, I may replicate myself and thereby explain the value and origin of the measure.

Please "teach a person to fish ..."

Cheers, Loren

Hello Brad and EGOL,

Site Tuners popped up several times as a recommendation. I've given them a call and chatted with Jay (sales).  I could not get a strong feel for the actual process.  I was led back to the site during the call (which I studied carefully before I contacted them) which did not offer more information than I already understood.

Maybe I was "off my game" during the call.

Brad, since you have used them before an were happy with Site Tuners, I'd like to ask you a few questions.  Please indulge me. 

• What were the best 2-3 things about the experience/process?

• What were the measurable results?

• What were things where they could improve (or rubbed you the wrong way) in the process?

And, I must ask because personal interaction sometimes makes/breaks the experience: **Were there specific people that really "wowed" you in the process? ** I'd love to know because in the call, the sales person referred to the "team" and wouldn't talk about individuals and strengths/availability.  While I understand that sales approach, it's very much about the person to whom I am assigned.

**Thanks for the details. ** Follow up wisdom would be wonderful.  Kindly, Loren

Great suggestion Brent.  I am somewhat familiar with http://www.optimizely.com/ -- who seems to be a competitor to http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ .

Do you have input on why one may be better than the other?  Kindly, Loren

Thanks Ryan.  I've queued up time to study some webinars.  I called them to chat about the research partnership.  I'm unsure it's their core business practice for one-on-one efforts.  Yet, I'll let you know what happens when their sales people reach me.

Hello!  I'm looking for specific recommendations of companies with whom you have been "Tickled pink at fantastic conversion improvement results!"

I'm the customer for this service. 

I seek a page-level review of a specific area of my site.  I'm looking for output of specific recommendations for improving conversion rates.  I want to avoid paying for a "generic best practices report" with one or two ideas for my site sprinkled in.

I realize that I will be called to complete proper input into the process.  I am ready to do my share with the level of detail required.

So, if you have an enthusiastic recommendation, please share.   Details are appreciated.  Most important, please tell me why this company made you very happy.

I sincerely look forward to SEOMozzer input.  Thank you kindly, Loren

I love that you're helping me dig deeper.

I crunched quality scores (export and into Excel) for two longer-running campaigns that get an acceptable number of leads/conversions for the cost.

Older campaign 1 : average quality score = 4.8

Older campaign 2 : average quality score = 4.2

So those aren't great either (imho) yet better than the current campaign.

More questions to help you noodle on my situation or do you have gems to share on how to raise the quality score?

Cheers, Loren

Hello David,

The whole account has been running for 2+ years.

This particular campaign was started yesterday -- alongside several campaigns that have been running for months.

CTR average = 0.63% (pretty lousy)

For today's data, 187 distinct keywords had clicks.

28% had CTR >= 50%

34% had CTR 10% - 49%

37% had CTR 0.07% - 0.09%

The median is 20% so that means a lot of the CTR are at the lower end.

We are in a loooooong tail business (with lots of part numbers) so the higher CTR are for 1 impression total, 1 click total, etc.

Lots of items with impressions and no clicks.

Search results are relevant given these are manufacturer part numbers.

**Great questions.  Did I answer what you sought? **

I'd love additional thoughts from you.  Kindly, Loren

Wow! 93% of our Adword keywords in our new campaign received a Quality Score of 4 or less.  That means most of the keywords aren't showing.

I received the quick answer from our Adwords advisor that, "Quality score is created from a variety of factors ... etc."  Yes, I know that by reading Google's documentation.

I dug deeper into the data.

When I looked at keywords dashboard for this campaign, what vexes me is that it's all about "Keyword relevance: poor". That is repeated time and again in the keywords hover, bubble pop-up in Adwords.

"Landing page quality: no problems".

"Landing page load time: no problems".

63% of keywords have quality score = 3

29% of keywords have quality score = 4

We have thousands of keywords that are electronic part numbers.  All keywords use phrase matching.  We use dynamic keyword matching in the ads.

I dug deeper.  I chose random keywords (and corresponding landing pages) from lower quality scores (1,2,3,4) and higher scores (5,6,7,8,9,10).  What is the difference?

Examples:

• Quality score 1 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/LM2901
• 2 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/BZX84-A20
• 3 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/MAX4796
• 4 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/TMP302A
• 5 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/LTC4267-3
• 6 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/CAT1161LI-28-G
• 7 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/DS1216C
• 8 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/R10S-E1Y1-J5.0K
• 9 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/208M822-19B11 145785-000
• 10 = http://www.usbid.com/parts/TP3-PNEU-0.250 243362-000

Notice URLs with score 9 and 10 have url-encoded space (%20) -- just pointing it out.

What is the difference between these pages that have such different quality score?

And, interestingly enough, the majority of example keywords in the Urls above (LM2901, BZX84-A20, etc) have zero impressions and zero clicks thus far.

Yes, the keywords have low traffic because this is exactly what people search for an purchase when making a B2B component buy.  It's all about the exact part number.

**I'd love specific suggestions of how to improve quality score of pages with a 3 or lower! ** Thanks kindly, Loren

Hi Slava,

I want to warmly thank you for the productive phone call, the links to social media reading, and the plethora of excellent ideas towards USBid's 90-day Social Media Plan.

It is awesome to connect and gain traction on efforts to engage with our customers.  It's this level of connection that makes SEOMoz community of great value to me.

Without taking away one iota of praise to you, I want to state that I hoped for more social media gurus to respond to this question.

So, I renew my call -- what could I have posted to better engage the interest of additional social media experts?

In closing, I am taking this task seriously.  I set up a Basecamp project (37Signals rocks!) for study and coordinate tasks to reach my SMM goals.  I know you'll be one of my collaborators on this journey.

Other takers to join in on this ride?

Hi Slava, I will definitely contact you.  It's all about finding a good fit to help my company implement best practices.  Thanks!

I have two thoughts:

1. What steps could occur to better optimize a page as soon as it is added?  Is there a better process flow so that you could start on page 2 or 1, rather than start at 4 and move up?  I'd think about optimizing earlier, if possible.
2. Out of stock.  What about spending some time to find additional third party, reputable suppliers for the same product?  If multiple suppliers have sufficient quantities, perhaps the life of your page (and profits) continues longer?

Why do you think an optimized page with a good SERP drops quickly simply when there is "no stock?"  Telling the community a bit more about the evidence you see before and after the drop may help generate responses.

Good luck to you!

What are early-stage (0-6 months) best practices for social media marketing in a business to business market?  Our customers are professional buyers of electronic components.

We are doing it backwards.

We registered Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and a few more.  +5 for initiative.

-5 for not having a social media marketing plan.  -5 for not having someone helping us who really knows how to engage with our audience.

This is also a humble request  to SMM gurus out there who have room for a new client.  I'm looking for our sherpa.

Thanks!

Whenever we add content to our site -- or update a page in a significant way -- we update the sitemap.xml file.  I suggest you publish content, add/update your sitemap and ping Google Webmaster Tools (and others) of the new page.  That should trigger a crawl in a short time (depending on how often site is currently crawled).

Keep an eye on your web logs to see if GoogleBot crawled to confirm.

Good for you Group16.  You posted just before me.  On the same wavelength.

I peeked at the data for your domain in ahref.com. That data set shows 22 domains linking to any page at your domain.  Here are the top 5 domains.  Dmoz was not in the domains.

Domain    Backlinks    RefPages
wrg.com.br    379    379
zone41.org    140    140
digitaldiscovery.eu    99    99
siteintel.net    14    14
acepi.pt    7    7

The subdomain choice is yours.  blog.[domain] is common.  If you are asking what hosting service to use, it depends on your requirements.  For example, shared, low-cost hosting at hostgator.com may be a fine place to start.

Let's say that site performance is important due to the visitor experience you desire to deliver and you have a lot of traffic. Shared hosting is probably a poor choice.  Pay more for a hosting plan that gives your blog dedicated resources.

You may require root access to tweak certain settings.  Some hosts offer at a good price, others do not.

If you are using specific software (Wordpress, etc) then maybe a host that has experience with the install and support of that platform?

Customer service is one of my highest considerations in hosting.  A low cost never outweighs down-time or slow/lousy/rude customer support practices.  Read customer reviews for positive/negative experiences.  Try out customer service line yourself.

Last, think about backup and recovery of your site.  Some hosts help really well with backups and ports of your blog elsewhere.  It's so hard when I hear stories of blogs created at cheaper hosts only to lose very valuable content because there was an implied (but never tested) backup and recovery plan.

Let us know what you choose and why.

Doug pointed out the pain we feel.  Waiting on Google development team.

In the meantime, if there are critical items that you need pushed to your attention, a lesser (temporary) solution may be to set up alerts to trigger you view the data when a goal is reached.

Google analytics > select profile > settings (cog icon) > profiles > assets > create new custom alert (button)

Choose a period (day, week, month).

Choose "<label>Send me an email when this alert triggers.</label>" and you can add additional emails too.

A stop-gap to know when thing happen?

Also, have you considered setting up a dashboard?  (or you may already have).  Home tab > dashboards.  It may not arrive in your inbox, but a link to the correct page is a quick method to get to key GA data you may be monitoring.

While you are there, peek at Real-Time (beta) link for interesting actions in [close to] real time at your site.

As a web application developer, I liberally use inline comments (code at the header and inline with code).  It's a key to maintaining the code over long periods of time (we forget what we did and why) and across teams (somebody else may need to update code I originally wrote).

That said, I use comments surrounded with tags that do not end up in the HTML code rendered to a visitor.  Most languages that "create" HTML code as output (ColdFusion, PHP, etc) usually have tags so comments can be used without being seen in the HTML.

In my opinion, this is the way to go.

Neil, you're probably concerned with the comments in HTML comment tags.  I cannot help you there.  For those of you who can suggest best practices to site owners and developers, ask that whenever possible inline comments are in tags that **do not show up in final HTML. **

Also, as a practice, I do not want the World seeing (or reverse-engineering) my code based on my comments.  Use them as a web developer yet hide comments in output so SEOs do not have headaches of wondering how it affects rankings/page performance.

I hope that helps.

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for the reply.  Yes, content for millions of part numbers is hard to come by for one's own use.  It's proprietary for most companies.

When we have more part information, such as a part we have sold, I have a plethora of good information on that part because we've inspected in (photos, detailed visual examination, etc).  Example: http://parts.usbid.com/SAA7115HL.html

Yet, there are millions of parts we can sell to people that we haven't actually sold yet.  We have hundreds of vendors. We can procure parts from other sources for our customers (as well as out of our own inventory). Since we offer hard-to-find parts, businesses come to us when they cannot find it via other channels.

How do they search?  They dump the number in Google and look for reputable sites that can provide a quote on that part (qty, manufacturer, etc).

So, many times all I have is the part number and a list of those on the page **is not great content.  So admitted. ** It's the best I have to generate a lead.

If you have strong thoughts on SEO attention and content for the arena in which we play, I'm all ears.  Like I mentioned to Cyrus, I am looking to work with talented people to improve content and SEO.  Whom do you recommend?

Kindly, Loren

Hi Cyrus,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.  On Rogerbot's challenge crawling our site and vice-versa, is there a data dump or other clues on what went wrong?  You got me halfway there identifying a crawl problem.   The next step is for me to understand/reproduce (and fix) the black box to which you refer.

Care to use your super powers to shine a bit more light in the box for me?

Title tags are too long.  I agree and will change.

Also, you are perceptive and spot-on for the scalability of this content.  When I have many more attributes than part number (such as manufacturer, data code, description, photos, etc) we have those on "single part pages."  Those pages are more descriptive and "content worthy."

The problem is that we have only so much content for part information.  If I could buy it, believe me, I'd purchase, enhance and publish that information.  (Manufacturer datasheets already exist and are for engineers more than our audience).

Our business is to provide hard-to-find parts.  So, we need to show up in searches when purchasers dump a manufacturer part number into a search engine (yep, when it's hard to find, that's what businesses do to search).

So, I need to scale the best I can with content of this type.  We experiment quite a bit.  If you have ideas for me or know of someone to engage for a thoughtful experiment, I am willing to engage talent to assist.

Again, thank you.  I hope you'll give me a bit more insight into an error dump (a few lines maybe) so I can see what's up.  I will validate and clean up HTML today.

Any follow-up thoughts?

Kindly, Loren

Greetings!  On Dec 1, 2011 in a SEOMoz campaign, two crawl metrics shot up from zero (Nov 17, Nov 24).

• "Title missing or empty" was 9,676.
• "Duplicate page content" was 9,678.

Whoa!  Content at site has not changed.

I checked a sample of web pages and each seems to have a proper TITLE tag.

Page content differs as well -- albeit we list electronic part numbers of hard-to-find parts, which look similar.

I found a similar post http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-crawl-error-title-missing-or-empty-when-there-is-already-title-and-meta-desciption-in-place .

In answer, Sha ran Screaming Frog crawler.  I ran Frog crawler on a few hundred pages.   Titles were found and hash codes were unique.  Hmmm.

Site with errors is http://electronics1.usbid.com

Small sample of pages with errors:

• electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_10.html
  electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_100.html
  electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_1000.html

I've tried to reproduce errors yet I cannot.

What am I missing please?

Thanks kindly, Loren