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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.
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?
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.
Honestly, there's a part of me that cannot believe I'm saying this, but I think my heart is in the right place.
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.
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
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.
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.
We use a really good agency, but agencies can be expensive.
Have you considered getting some tools and doing things in-house? I like and have used both Marin Software and Acquisio. When I did consulting, I also evaluated Jumpfly (service) and Raven (tool). Never used them, but left the evaluation feeling favorable. It's tough to find a good PPC company when your spend is pretty low.
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. 
Have you seen this All In One SEO Pack to WordPress SEO Migration Guide? It doesn't seem terribly difficult.
Happy to help.
You're on WordPress. You may want to look into the WordPress SEO Plugin by Joost De Valk to help manage most of your page title tags and other meta.
Does Compete.com do that? I've never used them, but I know they offer competitive metrics. Traffic Travis does some link breakdowns, but it doesn't have a report exactly like that. It will tell you:
RavenTools also has a really cool link manager. However, I'm not sure whether or not you can use this on competitors' sites.
You may also be able to accomplish this in a moderately automated fashion with a combination of Excel and Majestic SEO. You could identify a lot of blog links, for instance.
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>
Yes. The layout markup should not mess things up. Just put the whole street address within itemprop="streetAddress", and you should be fine.
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 know you can use Google's Adpreview Tool to see how your paid listings appear for different locations (down to zip code). I'm not aware of anything like that for organic listings, however. And anyway, there's no way to automate that process.
Here's a totally hypothetical, non-tested approach that might work: What if you used a proxy tool like Proxybonanza with a simple desktop rank-checking tool like Web CEO or Traffic Travis. (These really have nothing on Moz in terms of feature set, but rank tracking isn't terribly complicated as far as SEO tools go.) I would assume that when you run a desktop rank tracker through a proxy (especially if you can define where the proxy locale is), the results would be for that location. That said, I have no idea whether it's possible at all to find and use proxies for a specific zip codes. So all this may just be me being dumb.
Again, that's a completely non-validated approach. Just trying to help you think outside the box. My level of local-SEO expertise stops at the country level. And even there, I've got a lot yet to learn.
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.
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!
JVRudnick, your story reminds me of this cool new site you can use to see whether the NSA are watching you: http://AreTheNSAWatchingMe.com/.
Also reminds me of the T-shirt I wore yesterday.
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.
I get a 504 error when I first tried to load your site (https). Then I loaded the http version, but was redirected to the HTTPS version after some time. Not sure what's going on there. I could not repeat the error.
Also, Webmaster Tools data is about two days delayed. Are you sure you're comparing the same days in both applications? (Not uncommon mistake for me to have made.)
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)
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.
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.
I believe your problem is in your robots.txt file. You're attempting a wildcard blocking of the search results pages with this line:
Disallow: /listings/search**?***
However, the asterisk ought to precede the question mark. If you want to block all URLs that include a question mark (?), do this:
Disallow: /listings/search***?**
Try that and see what happens. I've also found Aaron Wall's article on robots.txt to be helpful. Good luck!
Also, adding "noindex, nofollow" to the section does not necessarily keep a web page out of Google's index. When you think about it, you realize Google has to crawl the page the see that meta tag in the first place. Robots.txt is much stronger.
If the main website is in WordPress, I recommend creating a new page template in your existing WP installation, and using that to create your landing pages and microsites.
Adding another subdomain or a separate WordPress install is only going to give you headaches. Analytics, updates, plugins, etc., all get more complicated when you do that. It may seem like a quick fix, but you'd only be making trouble for yourself later.
Better to spend the time up front creating new page templates on your existing WP domain.
Here's an article on creating new page templates: http://codex.wordpress.org/Page_Templates
Here are a couple of articles on creating new sidebars:
I agree with alecfwilson, especially the part about superfluous directories.
One thing I'd add, since it's probably a wash whether you use "products" or "shop". See if either word gets used in searches for the products your selling. This won't be the case in everything you sell online, but sometimes the words "product, shop, store" get used in the searches.
If everything else is equal, I'd pick the url structure that includes the words most used in searches ... ONLY if you can also do that while maintaining a natural, semantic, streamlined url path.
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.
"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.
You could extend that meta robots tag a bit: name="robots" content="index,follow,noarchive,noodp" />
But depending on when you made the change, it may just be a caching issue - it was cached on Sept. 8, 2014.
You can use Google's Fetch as Google or Structured Data Testing Tools in Webmaster Tools to make sure the title tag is showing up properly for the next time Google crawls, but I doubt that expedites anything.
Probably just need to wait for them to crawl you again and update their index.
Almost everything we talk about here involves making our content, or ourselves, more findable. However, a few years ago someone asked me this question: "How do I disappear from the internet?"
She had a blog, a Facebook account, and some miscellaneous community engagement. Perhaps she was had witnessed a murder by a mafia hit man. Maybe she had an ex-boyfriend who was stalking her. She could have been going overseas as a spy. Or maybe she was in trouble with the law. Or she could have just been looking for a job but fearful of the content from her college years.
Whatever it was she wanted to disappear from the web ... to go off the grid.
Here was my advice:
I saw a news article today that reminded me of her question and made me wonder what I missed, if anything.
In my college art classes, we would sometimes draw the area surrounding the subject - the negative space - rather than draw the actual subject. This question is like that. What does un-findability look like? Maybe that will bring out some insights on optimization we haven't thought of.
So if it were you, how would you go about disappearing from the internet given your current level of engagement online? Maybe it would be helpful to imagine yourself in a witness protection scenario.
I'd like to get some recommendations on self-paced SEO courses. They need to be online, and they need to be rather advanced.
Moz has perks for both Distilled U and Market Motive. Has anyone gone through these? What are the differences in format, content, etc.?
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'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.
This is good news. I compared the stats in our accounts.
The Google Webmaster Tools data imported into Google Analytics is still rounded off.
However, the Google Webmaster Tools data in webmaster tools is much closer to the Google Analytics stats for google / organic traffic [Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium = google / organic] than it has ever been.
The clicks recorded in Webmaster Tools are slightly higher than the visits recorded in Google Analytics. That makes sense, I guess.
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.
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.
