Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am moving my website to WordPress after years. I am curious to know what the best route to maintain as much SEO value as possible would be. We have a lot of 301 redirects currently, and we will maintain those, but what else should we do or know?

Thanks for any help.

Kevin,

As far as I know the domain and content are the same. The site went live March 19.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Holly

I have a client who's rankings dropped after switching to out site. We know that rankings can drop a little after switching, but we are concerned that hers are still low. Any suggestions? As far as I can tell, the links to her site remained the same.

Thanks

Holly

I have  a client that currently has a side navigation and wants to know how changing to a top nav will affect her SEO. We always recommend top nav for user experience but I am not sure if there is a direct effect on SEO. Would the change affect it? Thoughts?

I am trying to improve rankings for a national website going after keywords product + state/city. It is a very competitive space and I can't figure out why our competitors are ranking above us (the ever enigmatic Google). Any suggestions for improving ranking for these kind of keywords without going black hat?

Thanks!

Looking into Boostabilty as an option for doing SEO for our clients, will still keep SEOmoz and will still be doing SEO for our own company. Has anyone used it or heard things about it? I am very skeptical when it comes to outsourcing SEO and when it comes to any kind of automated SEO but thought I'd ask if anyone had thoughts on it.

Thanks,

Holly

I've used some social bookmarking sites but have found that it can be tricky to keep up on a lot of them. I know for a lot of people things like stumble upon, delicious, reddit, digg, etc. work well. It also depends on your industry. I would recommend whatever you do use, make sure you are getting involved in the site and not just quickly going there to get a link. Get involved and use it for what it's meant to be used for.

Good luck.

I would definitely take a look at the list given by SEOmoz (below) and stay away from places that will sell you hundreds of links for x amount of money. Buying a bunch of spammy links can work for a little while but will bite you in the end.

best of luck

Holly

In the end I don't think the physical location that your links come from matter as much as the website and its quality. Keri's response has some good suggestions. I would add in, are you a member of the Better Business Bureau? They will link to you and it's a high quality one. Also, when it comes to link buiding, do what makes sense. If there's a good reason that someone from another town or state should link to you, then that's great. You just want links that are high quality and not just a bunch of spammy links or links that have no reason to link to you. I also strongly recommend adding content whenever you can. Make sure it's good quality content that people care about. Perhaps give a deeper look into the properties you sell or talk about the town, etc. Great images or videos of the town would draw in people as well.

Best of luck.

Holly

Dr. Pete,

Thanks for responding to me. I appreciate the explanation. I had always thought that it could take a long time to get those high quality links (the ones worth going after), so I was confused when I misunderstood what you said. Anyway, thanks for clarifying. I am a big proponent of content as well. Luckily for me, I have a degree in English. Now I guess I just have to come up with something brilliant that everyone will love. No problem right. haha. anyway. Thanks.

Holly

Thanks for responding. I appreciate your thoughts and insight, I hadn't thought of Guest blogging. I know content is a biggie and I will certainly be putting a lot of effort into creating content to get links, whether it be on my own blog, website or wherever. I appreciate your time and help.

Holly

Hey everyone,

I have some questions about links. First off, I only do things that are very white hat, so I don't want to do any sort of spammy or paid links. I have been doing SEO for a year and a half and have been researching and following SEOmoz for that amount of time as well. I still am having a hard time getting links.

I have a low budget and am not sure what to do. I have two pro webinars in mind as some background for my questions. First of all, the webinar Rand did on link building during the summer was great and really motivated me - http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-of-link-building. I realized that there were things we could do to get links, but that they would just take time.

Secondly, in Dr.Pete's recent webinar on the future of SEO, (http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-proofing-your-seo-2012-edition) he threw out a number like 10 as far as referring to how many links someone could get per day. Maybe I misunderstood but this seems crazy to me. I've tried the tactic of emailing for links, no dice (they were personalized emails and done properly). I am now planning on moving towards producing great content to draw in links, but the kind that would work would take a lot more time and money than what I am allotted. I feel a little overwhelmed and concerned. I would appreciate any insights.

Thanks!

Holly

Rick,

First of all I want to say that I think what you're doing is great and Noah is adorable. I am a mother of twin boys that are 5 months old and have a good friend with a 3 year old that has down syndrome.

As far as choosing words to rank for - It looks like you have a good list, have you taken a look at Google's adword keyword tool? This can give you an idea of the competitiveness of these keywords. Also, look at the keyword difficulty tool on SEOmoz.

Once you decide that you know which keywords you want (it already looks like you have) I would recommend using those in your page title tags on pages that it makes sense for.  - I haven't looked, maybe you already did this.

For your homepage, I would be careful in making changes to the page title and description as it can hurt you if you are already doing well with the ones you have. I do recommend deleting your meta keywords as these aren't used anymore and there is discussion that they may even hurt you.

As far as ranking for the wrong spellings, I see where you're coming from and have tried to do it in the past. Now, I would recommend not doing it for a number of reasons. First of all, you don't want to decrease your site's trustworhiness with incorrect spellings. Also, because Google often does the "did you mean __" thing or showing results for the right spelling, I would stay away from trying to rank for the incorrect one. Google may also dock you for it.

As far as your category ideas, I think it's a great idea to put them into categories. Can you put them into categories and keep them in a timeline list too? If you can, you'll also want to make sure that the links in your category lists aren't different, or Google may see this as duplicate content. See - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Besides these things, I would recommend keep posting great content as you are, building links,  keep reading SEOmoz, and watch the prowebinars if you  have access. Rand did one on link building earlier this year that I recommend. Also, work on social marketing (I'm not sure how much you've done already)

Good luck! I'll wait for your response

Holly

Thanks everyone for your help. We can't host it on our server at the current time, sorry if I was unclear about that. I have been searching and have found that Pagemodo will probably work for us. I'm still deciding. Thanks again!

I appreciate your help. I'm not sure exactly what I need. Our company hosts our own websites so we are our own hosting service but we want to host our facebook iframe graphics somewhere else. I am still learning about the facebook iframes so I don't know exactly what I want. I think I would just like a place where I can upload a graphic and be done with it. Eventually I may want to expand and have more functionality in the iframe.

thanks again and let me know if there is more information that would be helpful

I just want a simple place that will host an image for the tab. I don't want it to look cheap or tacky (obviously) Any suggestions?

Will soon be starting to do SEO for a client in the UK and wondered if there was anything I should do differently for what I do in the United States?

I am working with some customers on SEO and wonder what to do about directories when they have an online store only. They do not want to list their home address (if they did would this be a good idea?). I know the big push now is for local directories so I'm wondering if anyone has tips for other types of directories to get into that aren't spammy. Or tips for doing SEO for sites that are online only? I know Rand talked a lot about the importance of being "real" with an about us page, contact us, etc. on his Future of Link Building Webinar and I'm wondering how to best make that work in this situation when they can't show themselves as real by being in local directories.