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Hi all,

we've not been link building for some time now as we are a small team and been concentrating on other things, such as getting our new look site built and implementing Magento etc. We've historically used external companies to help with link building & SEO... some experience has been good, some bad.

Does any one have any suggestions on how a small company can try to choose a decent external company that can help with SEO strategies? There are a lot of options, a LOT of rubbish and a lot of very expensive large agencies that are well out side of our budget (or for a "small" fee simply produce a standardised report on "how to improve your SEO" that can basically be read on the net). We've tried local, smaller companies in order to limit our options .... but that didn't go well either.

Any suggestions welcomed.

Next is where / how to weight our expenditure and / or our SEO time. Should it be 50% gaining external links (be it by what ever means such as social, checking out where competitiors have links and chasing those possibilities etc) and then 50% internal page SEO, blog content creation, internal linking etc?

Thanks again.

Hi,

thanks for your reply. Not worried about posting the URLs on here:

Nextbase Click 7 Lite here: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/nextbase-click-7-lite/

Nextbase Click 7 Lite duo: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/nextbase-click-7-lite-duo/

Nextbase click 7 lite duo deluxe here: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/nextbase-click-7-lite-duo-deluxe/

Any comments appreciated.

Hi all,

I'm looking for a tool that will look at a web page that you submit to it and tell you what keywords it thinks the page is targetted towards and thus hopefully rank for. Does anyone have any suggestions please? Hopefully this type of tool will help us understand why page A is being ranked for keyword X when page B is actually the page that should be being ranked for that keyword.

The only tool I have really found so far is http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

I dont want to tell the tool what keywords I am looking at, as with Moz On page grader.

Background reason (and possibly some one maybe able to shed some light on this also). We list a group of products... Nextbase Click 9 Lite, Nextbase Click 9 Lite Duo and Nextbase Click 9 Lite Duo Deluxe. All 3 are similar but very different products and each has its own page on our site. For the keyphrase "Nextbase click 9 lite" currently in Google we are listed for the pages containing the "Nextbase Click 9 Lite Duo" and "Nextbase Click 9 Lite Duo Deluxe"... but not the actual specific product page that targets the "Nextbase Click 9 Lite" product. Thus my reason for wanting to try such a tool that may help me understand why this is.

Thanks for any hints, tips or pointers.

Hi Phil (or any one else out there who is in the know),

hoping you could very briefly comment on whether you think how the videos are now technically implemented on our site is better than how they were before (which was in a lightbox which was calling another page i.e. as per above conversation). I believe it is ... but that means very little! Link to page with videos on it below:

http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/nextbase-sdv49ac/

Ultimately the aim is to markup our videos with rich snippet markup with the hope of getting a thumbnail image with our page listing on Google.

Thanks for any comments.

Hi all,

we have product category pages on our ecommerce web site and we also produce blog content (such as buyers guides, setup guides etc) to help with ranking and give our site some good quality, unique content. However we are sometimes finding that the buyers guide / blog content gets ranked by Google over our product category page.

I'm hoping, if I give an example or two, some one smart out there may be able to point me in the right direction as to how we can avoid this and get the product category page ranked instead? You will see from my examples we are linking internally using the keywords from the buyers guides to the product category pages in order to show the most important page to Google for these keywords and are trying to structure the product category pages as well as possible to make it the most optimized page for the term.

Example:

Keyword "twin dvd player"... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/ ... blog page actually getting ranked for this keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/dual-screen-and-twin-dvd-player-explained/

Keyword "site radio".... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/audio/radio/site-radio/ .... blog buyer guide page actually getting ranked for keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/Site-radio-buying-guide/

Any help / pointers appreciated. Thanks.

Thanks Mike.

External links... all of our external links point through to our old page http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/products.jsp?cat=1 ... and this old URL 301's through to the new one and we have quite a lot of links through to the original URL (37 root domains and 419 total links). As I understood it that link juice would mostly be carried through to this page (I hope). So in theory we have good external links to this page...? Does it matter the age of these links... I couldn't see in Open Site Explorer whethere there was anything that aged the links and then down valued older links?

Historically I have found that to get a decent rank on a plural we have had to include the plural version otherwise the ranking lags behind quite a lot and is much further down on the SERPS. We used to be around position 1-4 on page 1 for "portable DVD players" on our old site up until a couple of years ago, but "portable DVD player" at that time was languishing down on page 3! So I have always targetted both singular and plural terms as separate keywords generally.

Page speed... we're on the case and totally agree with you there. Not good enough.

Thanks for your pointers. If you could comment on the external links / 301'd URL I would be grateful. I'm also surprised you think we should just target either the singular or plural for a keyword term. Do you think this is a more recent change for Google?

Cheers for the reply. I have added a link for this product category to the bottom of the site since its once of our main categories... trouble is theres only so much room down there and we cant do that for every category we want to rank for!

External links ... yes. And social shares... we have done little to no social SEO what so ever but just about to embark  on this now!

Hi all,

pretty standard SEO question that I'm sure you are all getting asked day in, day out... the following page:

http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/

It's targetting keywords "portable dvd", "portable DVD player", "portable DVD players" & "portable dvd player for car". The page gets a grade A via Moz analytics On-page grader for the keywords. We have incoming links and I believe the page is structured correctly with all meta tags, H1 etc and tried not too overload the tags with keywords. We have the keywords in the URL etc.

We are still stuck on page 2 for all phrases.

Any thoughts or suggestions as to what we are doing wrong please?

Any help would be great.

Merci beaucoup Phil.  

Hi Phil,

thanks for the reply.

That's what i thought. Maybe as a short cut we will embed the video content directly in the product description text for now and hopefully that should then solve the issue for us, for now? Following which we can then look at a change of how the videos are implemented in a lightbox style implementation in the future as & when we have time and budget to spend on this.

With regards to the video quality... it's OK, I know you're not a fan! But thanks for taking the time to re-comment.  

Here's a chat we had mid point last year when we were just implementing these: http://moz.com/community/q/vimeo-pro-video-seo-and-rich-snippets

... we / I listened to you re the web site itself and didn't disagree at all with what you were saying re our site look / design and its impact on legitimacy / quality, site URLs and had known for sometime that we had to make a change. Thus following that discussion and other discussions I had already had with our then SEO company and another ecommerce site owner we implemented a Magento install which went live end Aug. We're now working hard to try and pull back our rankings and traffic, which has taken a hit after the implementation - but we knew that was the risk. But I think we have a much better front end site and a much better underlying platform to move forward with and grow (hopefully!).

With regards the videos, they aren't professionally created, we will hold our hands up to that. We felt there wasn't any point trying to achieve that on our "budget" as it wouldn't / couldn't ever happen and would probably look much worse if we did try to achieve that. We are a small business that is (we like to feel) expert in its area and are trying to achieve a niche where we are the "friendly expert" and give an unsurpassed level of service & support that isn't available from the corporates that we compete directly against. Our videos we felt show information to our customers, who are close to making a purchase decision, that they cant actually see anywhere else online (but could see if they were in a shop) and this is what we felt added the value. Plus it is unique content for our site which we hope cant hurt.

We hoped / hope that even though the content isn't smooth, beautifully animated etc etc the pluses mentioned above outweigh this.

As we move forward with the videos hopefully we can improve in the future... these are step 1 for our informational videos, step 1 of improving web site look / feel etc. All to be honed in the future.

As always any comments gratefully received ... on videos, new web site etc!!