Welcome to the Q&A Forum

CMS stands for Content Management System and Wordpress is one of the most popular of the many hundreds that are out there.  Thesis is one (again of many) themes that can be applied and modified to a site to give it a look and feel to a site.

There is really no such thing as best platform per sé in my opinion and there is a lot of spin out there about SEO ready and SEO friendly.

At the end of the day if your sites are going to be modest sites with useful helpful information for your clients it doenst make a difference what platform you sue once you follow solid site building and established content creation practices.

Admittedly Thesis and Wordpress (of which I use both regularly) make life easier for you but unlike clothes make the man platform does not make the ranking.

You can as easily rank with a set of static HTML pages as with a CMS as with a custom application for loading up images onto a set of pages.  The amount of technical nous to make your changes will vary however from one to the other.

The sites as you describe sound to me like internal or 'closed' group sites that don't really need to rank so I wouldn't sweat that and go for any of the many CMS that are out there like Wordpress that make the addition of content a lot easier.

Agree strongly Valery there (get it - sorry saddo response)

Strong is coming to the fore more as the default for bold on most WYSIWYG editors but I don't think Google worries too much about it.  There was a lot of activity in making your first use keywords bolded for the first paragraphs to help SEO but for product pages I would personally concentrate on adding content so for the T-Shirt page that you refer to here I would write a little blurb about the group, mention the material of the T-Shirt.  Even a short blurb as to what the image on the T-Shirt is about.

You are looking for people who are fans of this group (never heard of them myself) who search online   If this is one opf their songs then perhaps a YouTube link.  Looks like there are a lot of vendors out there selling T-Shirts of this type so make the page stand out.

IMHO bold/strong is the least of your concerns.  Work the group angle as hard as possible.  The T-Shirts aren't a cheap item so you should explain in the text what makes them worth the price.

Hi Brett

I had a very quick look at your site (if this is the one you are talking about) I think that for real estate you really aren't going to get buyers to give ratings for properties.  From looking at your site I would think a conversion is getting people to buy or sell (buy I guess is preferable).  I also think the perfect conversion for you is the phone call or email and your email form is buried a few scrolls down I think that it takes quite a few clicks to get to the properties.

Rather than a five star rating I would restructure your site to get buyers and sellers to the information quickly.  I don't think the site is currently doing this.

You have a lot of good information and data on the site that could be presented really well and drive the desired conversion.  I would think about simplifying and work out a conversion channel for people coming to the site so that you move them to the property and then the conversion you want phone / email / contact.

hope this helps....

Kieran

Either

Just make sure that if you choose to different pages that you choose good anchor text.  Its nice to get he offer of a link.  Also send them a nice note thanking them and keep in touch with them and don't run away after getting the link.

Just make sure that you don't redirect all HTML files.  I suspect that either way is equal.  What you are telling in either case i

"Hi Google we have moved but don't worry we have moved here"

Like the EGOL humour plus agree with EGOL 100% here.  100 hits and getting Facebook like is pretty good reward.  I assume that you are linking within your site as well to keep people on the site.

And to answer your question you should always try and write articles that are useful to the Internet community but also to you.  Socialize the pages as suggested but if you can write this quality on cities I am sure that you can also write it on Air Conditioners.

Hi Niall

Responsive design seems to be everywhere now and your point above seems to touch on this.  From a UX perspective there really isn't a perfect design that caters for every single display and user.  Google Analytics allows you to track screen resolution so I suggest that for any particular track this for a while and if there are mutliple types  then think of designing to cater for it.

However even though I am in website design I tend to head for he safety of the middle ground and have not yet fully dived into the HTML5 /Responsive area yet as most customers are not demanding it.

However as the tablet and smart phone become the default device as opposed to the fun one it may become an issue.

hope this helps

Kieran

In the footer of the page you have 3 links to these loactions but the links are just to the existing page.

Also when you say you have 99% covered the fact of the matter is that you never have everything covered and for a nice like yours I would spend time every day looking at my content working on various aspects, checking my keywords, and a host of other items.

From a conversions point of view I do not think the  landing page encourages immediate action for people arriving there.

Your Title tag

Compare Prices – Best deals offers on computer games for PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PC | Cheapfindergames

looks a bit wordy and I am not sure if it is focused on your keywords (which you don't mention but I assume are games.

Plus as an FYI our Wii/ PS3 / Xbox links are only directed to the home page at the moment so might be worth correcting (actually I wouldn't have them twice on the page

A lot of these sites are badly coded garbage.  I would ignore these sites.

Hi James

A big drop in a few days indeed but it might just be a temporary thing.  I would give it a few more days and see if ti continues then send on a link and maybe we can help you dig.  have your rankings dropped as significantly?

Lonnie

Above are good points but I think on their own wont put him up the SERPS for the keyword combination alone as it has 40-60K searches per month by some pretty established UK players.

He should do them but there is a lot of additional work (aka slog) along with Aran's points above for a start

To be honest I don't know. The search volume is in the 40K region sotough space for those two words.

If I was you (hate that phrase  :-)) I would spend some effort on looking at something long tail   I had a quick look at keywords for this and there are some 'nice' candidates with relatively modest compeition.

• cheap Arsenal shirt

• new Arsenal kit 2011

• arsenal shirts cheap

• arsenal shirt sale

Hi Simon

As a Man City fan I had to be brave and open the site but it looks like a nicely built Zen Cart site and he calls to action are good (wont be buying one by the way).

You say main keyword target in your question and this is often asked here and my first advice is not to focus on a narrow keyword set.  I would look at a list of keywords in the 3-4 word range and at least have list of 15-20 word sets and direct your pages in this direction.

The football / soccer shirt space is really busy and I would spread my wings in the keyword space a bit to try and capture some of the other keywords (I was prompted Arsenal Shirts for kids when I typed in a quick Google search)

I would also spend some serious time on your product descriptions and try and make them unique and richer for people and for search.  For instance at random I picked

_emulate the skills of star players like Aaron Ramsey, Marouane Chamakh and Thomas Vermaelen. _

and there were at least 4-5 sites with this identical text (and yours wasn't even there).  This does not help.

I would also look at making your URLs more search friendly.  Zen Cart has some plugins to accomplish this for you and wouldn't hurt either.

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&cPath=40_47&products_id=231

Cheers - that we me just there - A new SEO plugin killed it which I quickly deleted (it wastn even active but screwed things up).  Site back to 'normal' now

Thanks for checking.

A friend of mine has a site (http://bit.ly/q4iWkM ) that was ranking number one for their key word (Drimnagh() and has now completely disappeared off of the ranking.  I did some checking and can't see a problem.  She does have duplicate meta and titles throughout but this shouldn't be a punishable offence that I know of and is something that I am going to correct with a quick plugin install.

I couldn't see any redirects or code stopping search either.  When you do site:URL it shows up OK as well.

She is client of mine (for website not for SEO) and she is really upset about it so any help from the forum would be appreciated.  This isn't even a site I did but you couldn't get a better person to work with so I am eager to help where and if possible.

Guinness all round if someone solves it next time you are in Ireland

I have never had to do it but there are tools like PowerMapper which is quite pricey for what it does.  Does he actually want a visual one or more like a tree like structure.  This probably more 'doable; by dumpinghte XML into some formatting tool and importing it into HTML.

If you create the embed code with your link back to the site then you will get the juice.  You cant actually put a link in a graphic as far as I know (yet!) so make sure the Widget code is attractively titled as well so people will actually like to use it along the lines (not saying this is the way to go by the way)

Fabolous Infographic - Visit The Site for More by [Jesse Walker - Uber Infographic Guy](hhttp://www.yourwigglywidgettysite.com / "Jesse Walker - Uber Infographic Guy")

See Googles statement on this

http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/privacyoverview.html

Unless the person is using an IP address cloaker the IP address that they are coming from should be taken at face value.

Thanks for the nice words  Ryan and I am above now

I'd tend to agree based on your response with irldonalb and your post is quite pertinent as there is an YouMoz Blog by chadburgess post that doesn't exactly point to this (it is realted to noindex but the tactics to get back on Google eyeline are still relevant)

To possibly (badly) summarize some of his tactics that relate to you

• Create some fresh content 1-X pages depends on your capacity and do some internal linking and Google will see this.
• Get some social juice going with your links and recruit some help of friends and associates to spread the word.
• Resubmit your sitemap to Google Webmasters

The full post is here and it is quite an interesting one - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/accidental-noindexation-recovery-strategy-amp-results

Good luck with it and report back with your success levels..

Kieran

Hi Jon

How old is the site and what keywords / niche (well it is clear betting) were you ranking for?  FRom a quikc OSE check your site is just developing.

Kieran

Have you rung this business?  Ask them where they are located.  In theory there is nothing stopping someone from using your information for a location and they may have verified using and SMS and not the postcard.

Try the old fashioned way first.

Hi Amy

_will losing links from these sites harm us? _

If you are worried about the link quality just put them into Open Site Explorer to see their weighting.  If they are spammy then delete.

_Perhaps more importantly, is my plan a terrible idea in the first place? _

If you know/feel/think that your link list is spammy then I would delete them and so it is a good idea.  This SEOMOZ link is worth a read as a refresher course on the topic if you haven't seen it already. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide

Good luck with your efforts

Hi Derek

There was a time when I was in the camp that content was enough,  however the statistics tell us that although content is a significant part of the pie chart of factors it is still only one of them.  Like you I held onto the hope that if I build great content and sat back that the people would find me and the rankings would come.  However mostly from this forum and from extensive reading elsewhere I have let go of this grip.

, would it be possible to rank well without putting much emphasis on backlinking if your content is significantly better than the rest of the ranking pages?

The short answer is if the niche is non-competitive then possibly but if there is any element of search traffic then no.

But all is not lost.  First however do not become fascinated with an actual word count for your posts as length does not equal quantity (in fact break it up into a 2-3 part articles if it is good.

But back to the question.  If you have good content and believe it is better than the others than you should work on publicising it and encouraging people to link to it through the many link building methods available.  Even when you say that you have a 2,000 word  article of good content I am immediately interested personally in seeing it.    Have you put it out on Google+ which is now open to everyone?

Do you Tweet it, Facebook it and put it on your Feedburner even? Have you emailed your friends, customers and colleagues telling them about it.  This isn’t link building per sé but it is a small part of the many things that go on.

** or has the game not changed that much?**

Again what I realise more and more is that the game IS changing every single day as new tools approaches come into play.  However saying that I would say pick 5-6 strategies and work these for 3-4 weeks while continuing to build the quality content you mention.  Work these hard (look here on SEOMOZ for some of them).  Track your performance for desired keywords.  Revise strategy, maybe change an approach and start again.

It is hard work and I consider myself a super-novice compared to others but it is about applicaton, assigning your SEO block of time per day then just doing it.  In fact I think SEO is even becoming a depreciated term  as I often think of it as site public relations more than optimisation.  If you publicise your site well the results is good rankings as people line up to link and publicise it for you.

Hope this helps ??? (send the link would like to see the site!)

Some other Useful SEOMOZ Resources to Have a Look At

• The Definitive Beginners Training
• An excellent SEO Powerpoint Deck from Rand which I 'borrow' from a lot
• This Q&A Forum will help but use the search function as well as nearly all the bog posts and articles are well thought out and well written from intro to advanced

Best of luck

Kieran

No problem...

Installing a blog to your main site shouldn't be a problem really msot of the CMS out there tag on pretty easily.

This site is a great resource so come back often - Since my recent joining I think I have doubled my knowledge levels and still so much to learn,....

Best of luck with it -

Kieran

_For link building, I was thinking along the lines of researching relevant sites, asking to be a guest blogger, or providing them with some unique content. _

This is a good tactci and looking at your site I am sure that you can provide this.  It takes time and you have to put the miles in I think.

Currently i'm looking at improving the rank of our Investment Newsletter page. SEOMoz gives it a grade A in the on page optimisation tool. But we are only on page 3, where as two of our competitors are on page 1 with equal or lower grading.

So do you believe the main reason for this to be our lack of links?

The page grading tool is a Get the basics sorted out tool and I think personally it helps you focus on the message of the page.  The next leve is to look at what is on the page.  I often go back to pages (and do this nearly every day) and ask mysef was I drinking when I did a certain page.

I would seriously work at getting the blog back in the mains page as when you click away you are well... away..

Hi Adrian

Well done on ranking for Collectibles in the UK it is a competitive  space with lots of search – I didn’t see you at number one however so I would suggest you check with personalized search turned off.

**However I feel we may be held back by our Domain Authority score. **

Now you mention Domain Authority.  Your domain authority is currently 32 so growth is of course Welcome.  A lot of that comes with linking from high authority sites.  Your site looks like is a powerful source of information on collectibles on first glance but on closer inspection it also looks like that a lot of it is curated news.  I would think about developing your own news and information.

Your blog also is on the WordPress.com platform and is not self hosted. I would work to correct this and bring the blog back onto your local site as you are moving traffic off of your main site.

We are well set up for a content based strategy due to "News" nature of the site. My ownly concern with link building is i've heard that it could potentially negatively effect us.

I am not sure what you mean here.  Lnk building is something you should be thinking of even through organically spreading good news and articles that people link to and share on the Net.  If you produce an excellent article with an interesting slant on a collectible then it may get added juice and get links.

Or is the risk of link building only really associated with black hat methods?

Link building done well and professionally (as I with the ethics of a professional as opposed to paid) should be part of your marketing plan.  Many companies now employ full time Internet marketing experts doing just this as part of their brief.  Link building is not equal to black hat.

One last thing. I've been using the Google keyword Tool to judge competition for specific search terms. Is this useful for organic search? Or is it only relevant for PPC?

On accuracy of the Keyword tool irldonalb is right and the tool is inaccurate and should be used along with Insights and some of the tools here on SEOMOZ if you are a member.  But it is still a good indicator and shows the level of activity.

It is relevant to both search and PPC.  Google never claims for it to be 100% accurate either but it is used by most people these days as on of their go to tools for their keyword research.

Finally it IS worth while reading though here a bit (if you havent done so already for more ideas and tips for your SEO campaign.  I visit it regularly and it is one of the best references.

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Sometimes OSE can take some time to index your pages.  The OSE index would not be as fast as the Google Index so that may be the reason.  Your post is quite pertinent as Rand Fishkin posted a blog post on the updates and upgrades that are being made to the system to improve the depth of the crawiling

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-september-update-feedback

Best of Luck

Kieran

I wouldn't worry too much about the double redirect but how old are the pages that you are redirecting?  Are they getting a lot of traffic?

Never seen a double re-direct before but then again I have never seen a lot of things

Hi Don

The rough (current) rule of thumb seems to be in the 150 range per page.  If yours is really going way beyond this you may need to rethink your plan.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link

Indexation isn't the be all and end all though - you can always redirect them which isn't too bad

That's a bit of a pain.

If anything tell them to set up a custom informative 404 error page that will at least direct them somewhere else and not bail from the site.

Not all errors are bad but for instance if you are getting 404 errors and the actual pages do not exist anymore then you should do 301 redirects on your .htacess to point Google to the right page.  Doing this will sort out a lot of the errors.  But if you are getting 404s and the pages are there then that is a bigger problem

Restricted by robots is not an error as this is telling you that you don't want somewhere crawled.  Check the file to see if it is correct in what it is restricting.

How often are you pushing your sitemap out to Google.  If you are as active with pages as your posts suggest I would think about submitting a new one or automating its creation.

If you are actively working the content on the sties there can often be this level of SERPS  bouncing.but if you continue with the content I wouldn't worry too much about the errors for the moment and do the housekeeping above.  There are very few completely spotless sites out there and the Google Webmaser  tools and even the SEOMOZ tools here will always give you some level of errors.

hope this helps

Kieran

Thanks Shelly - appreciate the positive feedback!!! Hope I never have to use Blacklisted Loans though....

Hi

I would recommend starting with this to at least get an appreication for the business of SEO http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Read the questions and answers here on the forum and spend time looking at the blog posts and Webinars that indeed confirm that there is no magic wand

Update: On re-reading this I also realised that it may have been a bit trite.  The most important thing is that from the beginning you are thinking of it and it is part of your focus.  Make the entire team aware of the importance of this.

Saw this and tried the following which isn't automated but is one way of doing it.

• First install SEO Quake plugin
• Go to Google
• Turn off Google Instant (http://www.google.com/preferences)
• Go to Advanced search set the number of results you want displayed (estimate the number of pages on your site)
• Then run your site:www.example.com search query
• Export this to CSV
• Import to Excel
• Once then do a Data to columns conversion using ; as a delimiter (this is the CSV delimiter)
• This gives you a formatted list.
• Then import your sitemap.xml into another TAB in Excel
• Run a vlookup between the URL tabs to flag which are on sitemap or vice versa.

Not exactly automated but does the job.

Matt Cutts video here speaks to this topic

Hope it helps...

watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k

I agree with EGOL here but if you want content evaluated and the best way is to put it out there through social and other forums for people to give you feedback.  I got some really great feedback from this forum for example on my site recenly that I have been working on since nearly every day.

Tools generally only take you to a certain point.  If you are at the early stages of writing content and are reluctant to put it out in the main stream then use your email address book and ask for feedback on a few links from friends and if they are good friends they will help with some feedback.

But ultimately it is the market that gives the best feedback and needs you to pump it out bit by bit.  Copyblogger says write , then write some more then write some more again [paraphrased here a bit]

Hi Kristi

Can you post a link please so that we can have a look please?  And is this happening for all pages or just some?  Is this a Wordpress blog?

Kieran

I agree with Daniel here - its what in the pages that count more than the link structure.

Daniel  Why would you say he should he ditch the blog in the path - if he has a blog he has a blog ??

I recently went to myblogguest.com and found a pretty active community there with a well  moderated group.

Wow Sha

Thanks for the words above - you are right on the nail and I already made some changes.  I am doing a root and branches change now to the language I use and the We v. I that is prevalent throughout the site which reads badly.

I am a terrible speller and your points on even these simple points make sense and I have corrected this glaring grammatical error and I increased the amount of words on main page,  added my Google Places map and wrote a little bit more about me as well.

I am now working through ALL my 106 blog posts to make them crisper, with better keywords and of greater value as a lot of them were written in haste and need work and proper spelling (!!)

I am revisiting my decision to leave SEOMOZ and may stay a little longer as even this postalone is worth the fee for this month!!  I hadn't actually realised I had a once a month private question either so I am lining that one up.

LAstly I am starting to munch on the elephant.

No problem thank you for commenting.

Thanks Ryan.  I have my graphics guy working on cleaning up the logo which Is not great.  I will look at the spelling errors and of course I don't take offense in fact go as hard as you want.

I appreciate the comment on focusing the level of expertise at least in terms of on site.  One of the items I need to do is work back through all my blog posts over the past year and tidy them up as I know the need a ton of work in the first place and this is an area I will work on,