Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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)

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"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:

• All the types of wood we use in our cabinets
• The benefit of xx wood for raw or stained cabinets
• Do you need cabinet locks or not?
• What mirror background fits your room best
• etc.

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.

You need to use Facebook's Open Graph tags and Twitter's Card tags in the section. That's the best way to define what image gets shared on social media platforms, since Google+, LinkedIn and others will adopt these tags.

A bare bones approach will look something like this:

Facebook OpenGraph

(Note: There are some prerequisites with Facebook, so be sure to follow their instructions)

Twitter Card

I agree with Kingof5.

Don't impersonate another brand or mislead in any way. Instead, create content that distinguishes you and what you offer from "Pop Warner". You could use the phrase "Pop Warner Club Alternative" and still be optimized for "Pop Warner".

Just be clear you aren't them. And be honest with anything you say about them.

That's not ideal.

If you're trying to do this programmatically in a CMS, perhaps there's a way to do something like:

alt="Photo {Some Property}"

alt="{Some Property}"

alt="Photo"

Using "Null" is worse than leaving it blank, I think.

You can probably set it to ignore parameters you don't want added to the sitemap. Here's a screenshot from my standalone version to give you an idea of the settings.

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In general, I'd suggest you move away from a keyword-centric strategy and start thinking of your content in terms of themes. Google is pretty good at picking up on themes. And we're getting less and less visibility into keywords. With that in mind, I would probably pick a phrase or two as my core targets and then sprinkle in variations throughout the content.

For example, you could pick data capture software as the theme for your whole site because of the volume there (See attachment). It's broad enough for everything in the site to relate to it. Then use your research on specific terms to inform your choices about page titles and other elements.

A hierarchy like this may work:

• Software/Technology - main theme

• App - pages about your mobile applications

• Tools - feature pages; the 'tools' are components of or shortcuts in your software (See the "Screen Sharing Tools" heading on our page

If pages are extremely similar, I would combine them. Your links will be more concentrated that way. And you can outrank competitors with quality content, even when they have more content.

You could also try to target universal results on some of the more competitive terms.

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Nick, do you have any screenshots of the landing pages you're using for the campaigns? You could probably improve your campaign performance quite a bit by focusing on the landing page optimization, even with no other changes to your AdWords account.

I'm sure some folks here would be willing to give some free feedback on landing page design. Sometimes it's good to get others' eyes on things.

I don't take on AdWords clients anymore, otherwise I'd bid.

Linking to your homepage with "Home" as the hyperlink text isn't the best way to do internal linking. You would probably be better off having your logo double as the home page link. That's a very common practice, so it's unlikely folks would get confused. A logo with a really good _alt _tag would beat a text link that simply says Home.

That said, you would be even better served with a text-based logo that said "Kemp Ruge". With Google Fonts, you can make it accommodate any design for free. And it would be a better signal than Home.

Also, before I looked up your site, I thought you were talking about the browser tab. The text there is modified by changing the <title>tag. You could improve your title tag by including the brand name: <a style="font-size: 14px;" href="http://www.kempruge.com/">Kemp Ruge | Tampa Attorneys</a>, for example.</p> <p>Also, since nobody searches for "Welcome to ...", you would do well to rewrite your <h1> tag. </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <br> <br> <a download="xAfXb9r.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/xAfXb9r.png" target="_blank">xAfXb9r.png</a></title>

If you have ftp access to the root, you can simply overwrite the current one with a new one. Google will pick it up.

Also, you should include a link to all your sitemaps in a robots.txt file - also in the root. If you look at SEOMoz's robots.txt file, you can see how to do that. http://www.seomoz.org/robots.txt

I'd review this article for more ideas about why your traffic may have dropped [http://3qdigital.com/experience/diagnosing-traffic-drop/].

Also, when you do get into Majestic SEO, you want to look for links with high-volumes of the same, non-brand anchor text. If your anchor text is uniform across a majority of your links, that's not good. If it turns out to be the case, you'll want to contact as many of those websites as you can to see if they'll modify the anchor text.

You can get the list of good robots from the list at Robotstxt.org: http://www.robotstxt.org/db.html.

I'd recommend creating an edited version of the robots.txt file yourself, specifically Allowing googlebot and others. Then send that with a link to the robotstxt.org site.

You may need to get the business owners involved. IT exists to enable the business, not strap it down so it can't move.

Jenny,

Take a look at this post in the forums on indexing issues with site search - http://www.seomoz.org/q/block-search-engines-from-urls-created-by-internal-search-engine.

Allowing site search to be indexed can result in a ton of duplicate content on your site. I recommend taking the meta noindex approach.

The on page grade helps you ensure you've done everything on that page to help it rank. We have some F grades ranking well, too. But that's mainly because competition is low. There's a lot more to take into consideration, however.

Just a cursory look suggests you should focus on links. When I looked, neither Google nor Bing were showing external links pointing to the domain or the two pages in question. Some work there would pay off tremendously.

Also, you should create a Google Webmasters account and submit a xml-sitemap. When I've done that with a new site in the past, nearly all my pages received an initial crawl very soon after.

Along with the sitemap, you'll want to evaluate your internal linking. You're using navigation to link to your pages internally, but you may also benefit from linking to important pages within the actual content, as well.

One thing the on-page grader does not measure is semantic page structure. You have H2s above H1s. That probably won't hurt you a ton, but my eye kinda starts twitching.

For Webmaster Tools, you are only getting partial data from the 27th right now. I'd monitor WT for the first full week post switch and compare your data then.

Also, for Google Analytics, that 4% difference may be due to having only partial data from today. So you may need to wait a bit longer for a more accurate comparison there. That said, 4% difference in traffic isn't alarming for the amount of time you're digging into. You're probably overly sensitive after the switch. I'm sure I'd be.

Once thing you can do in GA is ask for higher precision on the reporting. Click the weird icon next to the graduation cap in the top right and slide the toggle under "Control the number of sessions used to calculate this report" toward Higher Precision.

I'm really interested in your experience because we're mapping out a move to https, too.

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Kate,

What if I have one url translated into French but want to target French speakers in multiple countries? Would I do this with my hreflang tags:

Note: I generated these with Aleyda Solis's international sitemap generator. Does hreflang="x-default" ever get used?

Has Google notified you of the need to disavow links in Webmaster Tools? Usually, there's a message about unnatural links on the Manual Actions page.

I've never preemptively disavowed links. Maybe that's wrong. But then again, no single site is giving us 23,000 links.

Could you model your approach after other subscription sites? Take, for example, the online version of the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/home-page. They present enough content in preview mode to be relevant to both users and Google. You know from the blurb what the story is basically about.

Once someone logs in, they get the rest of the content. But I don't think they get a separate URL.

I wouldn't do the duplicate HTTP/HTTPS approach. In the future, you may want the whole site to be HTTPS, so you'd have to face this issue again.

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Yes. The layout markup should not mess things up. Just put the whole street address within itemprop="streetAddress", and you should be fine.

That seems like too much work. I would do this instead:

1. Add rel=canonical on the non-/ version
2. Use htaccess to force the non-/ version
3. And update the sitemaps

I am seriously considering reducing the number of pages in a section of our website. We currently have 39 webpages. I'm considering reducing it to 6.

The site architecture would make more sense giving recent design changes. And we could focus more attention on improving conversions from these 6 new pages. But I'm considering doing this mainly because I think it'll help us do a better job of communicating to and converting our audience.

The new pages would be longish. The existing 39 pages are by no means stubs, but these new pages would be longer.

Anyway, what I want to put out for discussion is the SEO impact.

• What are the good SEO reasons for reducing the number of pages?
• Can 6 well-done pages out perform 39 pretty-well-done pages?
• How many queries can one page rank for well?
• Is this SEO suicide?

Honestly, there's a part of me that cannot believe I'm saying this, but I think my heart is in the right place.

My daughters have those owls on their bedroom wall.