Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Just an update for everyone. We use sitemaps, rather than meta tags, to do the circular href lang mapping for our localized domains. In doing so, we've found the HREFLANG XML Sitemap Tool from The Media Flow particularly AMAZING! Talk about saving time! Just make a csv file with a comma for each language/locale, upload it, and then download a zip file with all your sitemaps. Beautiful.
Some friends of mine are having their site redesigned. The designer is using Webflow, which appears to be a visual drag-and-drop designer.
Has anyone come across Webflow before? How is it for SEO? I'm not typically pleased with visual designers for SEO, but maybe somebody's had experience and thinks it's fine.
These are all great tips. At this early point in the game, your focus on old-school networking and on-page optimization will have a disproportionate impact.
I would add that your site looks like so many other design portfolio sites in that:
You need to look at your design company as if it were a product. How would you package that product? What are the buying stages? How do you move people down the funnel?
Most design firms have the same issue. They put their portfolio online and expect that to make them stand out. But your really could benefit from product-izing your business.
I think some flagship content could really help with this. The idea is to create a single piece of content - video, info-graphic, long-form blog post, etc. - that is relatively hard to duplicate by competition. Something really useful or informative. Make it free, then focus marketing and link building efforts around it. Bruce Clay, Inc. did this a number of years ago with their SEO Code of Ethics. Moz does it with their Beginner's Guide to SEO. Search Engine Land does it with their Periodic Table of SEO.
You want to gather leads higher up in the funnel and build links along the way.
With well-developed, useful, and focused content like this, it will be more likely for folks to share your site on social media and easier to establish yourself as an authority in something. That will result in easier link building.
If you do it right, it'll also entice qualified prospects. For example, you could create a blog post+video/infographic about 10 Ways Small Businesses in Utah Can Stand Out Online. With a title like that, you will have identified your audience - small businesses in Utah - and their pain - how to stand out online.
You would then have a pretty good hunch that folks downloading that offer are your audience.
I know none of this is technical SEO help for you. But content has the biggest impact on SEO ... plus, I've seen great content beat technical SEO before.
That seems like too much work. I would do this instead:
These sound like product variations to me. Since the content would vary very little between the versions, I would create a single product page that allows customers to choose the variations they want. A single page allows you to focus more on converting visitors on that page. Plus, you can combine customer reviews and other product information there.
(**Note: **If this product is on Amazon, then definitely make it a single product page with variations. Refer to the webinar by Rick Backus for why.)
Spreading that product content over 5 or 24 pages, with very little to differentiate one page from another, won't really help you in the long run. Google will see it as thin or duplicate content.
I would turn instead to your blog or other sections of the site to create the additional content you need to rank. For example, you could write articles covering:
This approach helps your internal site linking structure promote the money page. Each of those articles could link to the product page where customers see all your variations. Your external linking efforts could be more streamlined as well.
Hi Moz,
My Moz campaigns run from Thursday to Wednesday. That's because the person who set them up did so on Wednesday. Unfortunately, every other reporting tool we use thinks a week starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday ... Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, etc.
If I want to report on an actual week in Moz - Sunday through Saturday - I can't.
Well, I can, but I have to log in around 12:01 Sunday morning to create my campaigns ... which I did this weekend for our translated sites ... but I did it wrong because I entered the root domain rather than the .com/de directory, for example ... because it was after midnight and I was really sleepy ... so now I have to wait till next Sunday if I want Sunday through Saturday week/week data.
So here's my feature request:
Thanks. And please don't take the complaining part of this feature request to mean that I don't love you, because I do.
Boo. I am begrudgingly marking this question as answered.
Thank you for passing on the feature request, though.
I did get the same warning.
I want to track the competitor at their new domain. But I don't want to lose my historical data for that competitor.
One of my competitor's has changed their domain URL. I want to update this in the Moz campaign settings but I get a warning that all historical data will be lost if I do.
Is that really true? I replaced one of my competitors with another for a week and didn't seem to lose historical data.
Incidentally, could this be a feature request to allow more competitors to be tracked?
Thank you Aleyda!
Do you know which type of targeting has more impact ... language or country?
I don't know that we need country targeting because we don't display currency or sell offline in physical locations. Also, I doubt we would create multiple French sites ... even if we do want to target France specifically.
I would point out these key differences.
1. A blog gives you more control. With a blog, you can target the keywords you want to target. You can edit the content after you've published it. You can time when posts go out. Of course, it takes a lot of effort to come up with good content, but you're in the driver's seat.
2. A forum gives you less control, but you don't have to write all the content. The attractive thing about a forum - for SEO purposes anyway - is user-generated content. This is great because you don't have to do all the heavy lifting that real writing requires. The bad thing about a forum is also user-generated content. All those things you have control over with a blog ... you kinda lose them with a forum. You could exert a lot of control over your forum if you want, but then folks will stop contributing and you won't have a forum. Also, all that heavy lifting you save by not having to create the content may get replaced by the necessity of moderating the content.
3. You can build a blog steadily over time. With a blog, you can go from "Hello World!" to a good following just by disciplined, regular, quality publishing over time. You can start small and build.
4. Nobody likes an empty forum. Unlike a blog, a forum needs to go live with content already in it and conversations already happening. If you're going to launch a forum, I suggest getting some dedicated customers involved in a pre-launch. Seed the forum with a number of conversations before launching it to your full customer base. Otherwise, most people will get stage fright and you will have wasted your launch.
LindaLV is right. Here are some screenshots to help you out.
1. Expand the hamburger menu. Then navigate to Tools > Extensions (#1 attachment)
2. Either disable or delete the Moz toolbar. (#2 attachment)
That said, I recommend leaving it installed. I don't use it terribly often, but then there are those times that it comes in really helpful. So for most of my browsing, I leave it disabled. If you find it's covering up content while you're browsing, you can just click the toolbar icon to disable it and make it inactive. That's how I browse most of the time. (#3 attachment)
"Wick Video" is the name of the site, so I don't think you title tag would be considered "unnatural" by Google. (See Irrelevant keywords). Using the same word three times in a title ... that's probably stuffing.
More importantly, though, I'd just write in a natural way. Your headline reads naturally. It's not a list of keywords -"Animated Explainer Videos, Video Demos, Animated Videos by Wick Video". You're probably fine with it.
Seems like the report would ether be under
Acquisition > Channels > Social
Or, if it's set up to track as an event,
Behavior > Events > Top Events
Or, if it's set up to track as an outbound click,
Conversions > Goals > Goal URLs
I would not use bit.ly or any other shortener for internal links.
If you want to track internal links, then you should use Google's enhanced link attribution or URL builder. I prefer the link attribution tool over the URL builder, though. This approach is more natural for visitors to your site, and it allows you to reap the SEO benefits of good internal site linking.
If you want to track external links, I'd recommend Google's outbound link tracking, a url shortener, or both. For Wordpress sites, Joost de Valk has an old (but good) post on one way to do this with a plugin. But the idea can be replicated on other sites. Basically, you link internally to a directory that's behind robots.txt. Then 301 those links to your affiliate or shortened url.
Hope that helps!
The primary purpose of the alt tag is to assist those visually impaired visitors who are using screen readers. Just make the tag descriptive of the image it is replacing - alt="Photo of Pole Vault Accident". For video thumbnails, you should do the same thing if you can. The video title will work fine.
I consider SEO a secondary consideration for alt tags. You may want to include targeted keywords there. But really, if you're focus is usability, and if the image is relevant to the content of the page, then you'll satisfy SEO when you focus on the alt tags' usability.
There are a lot of other more high-impact factors you can focus on - both on-page and off. If you've gotten on-page optimization down to alt tags, you may want to spend more time on link building.
You would do the first option. The "streetAddress" property needs to contain all the information, even if it spans two lines.
Check out the example over at Schema.org - http://schema.org/streetAddress. That address contains 2 lines.
I think Hutch42 is right. If your urls have no file extensions on them (.asp, .php, .htm), you really shouldn't see any dip from merely changing over.
It would be worth triple-checking about the extensions, though. We changed our site over a few years back and saw a dip in some key lead-generating pages that had extensions on them.
One place you may see a difference is with load times. Your pages' code structure will likely change. And .NET/IIS sometimes has different speeds than a LAMP stack even with the same content.
These sound like product variations to me. Since the content would vary very little between the versions, I would create a single product page that allows customers to choose the variations they want. A single page allows you to focus more on converting visitors on that page. Plus, you can combine customer reviews and other product information there.
(**Note: **If this product is on Amazon, then definitely make it a single product page with variations. Refer to the webinar by Rick Backus for why.)
Spreading that product content over 5 or 24 pages, with very little to differentiate one page from another, won't really help you in the long run. Google will see it as thin or duplicate content.
I would turn instead to your blog or other sections of the site to create the additional content you need to rank. For example, you could write articles covering:
This approach helps your internal site linking structure promote the money page. Each of those articles could link to the product page where customers see all your variations. Your external linking efforts could be more streamlined as well.
I'm afraid you're going to have to overcome that shyness a bit. Links can be dangerous, of course, but they're vital. And if you avoid the less-reputable methods, there's not a whole lot to fear.
Jon Cooper of Point Blank SEO has made a great resource for link building ideas: Link Building Strategies – The Complete List. I highly recommend it.
Incidentally, the link from yell.com is no-follow, so it won't be terribly beneficial from a ranking perspective.
The other link is a followed link, but I didn't look into their authority.
