Hey,

Not sure if you aware of this but local search results do show up if you search this term: ‘web design in vancouver’...but hey thats not what you asked so lets get on with the answer:

Creating citations simply to improve your website ranking will work, but your on-page optimisation needs to be at its best. My first tip would be to fill every citation with as much detail as possible. Make sure you add photos and videos and have a unique description for each citation site, but remember to include your keywords in the description. The Name, Address & Phone Number (NAP) will need to be kept consistent to get the full benefit of creating these citations.

For on-page optimization, I can recommend a few small changes that can go a long way! My first step of advice would be to add a schema markup of your address into the footer of the website. A schema markup allows google to recognise the address as a formatted address, instead of viewing it as a piece of text. Another useful tip is to make sure you are getting the full benefit from your page titles. I tend to structure page titles like this:

target keyword | Business name

so for a web design company in vancouver called Funky web design, I would do something along the lines of this:

Web Design In Vancouver | Funky Web Design

Hope this helps!

If you are using the SEO plugin it allows various variables in the title templates. So, to use the page / post title and the site name you would use:

%%title%% | %%sitename%%

To use the title and the site description you would use:

%%title%% | %%sitedesc%%

If you wanted title, site name, site description

%%title%% | %%sitename%% | %%sitedesc%%

If you go to the help tag under the Titles & Meta's section you can get a full list of these variables you can get to customise your template titles.

But, the plugin also allows you to customise on a page by page basis in the page / post settings which is also really useful.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

In Google Chrome:

1. Right click on the page in question and select: View page source

2. Search for <title></em> to see your title</p> <p>3. Search for <em><span><meta </span><span>name</span><span>="</span><span>description</span><span>"</span></em> to see your description</p> <p>Shout if you get stuck!</p> <p>Cheers<br />Marcus </p></title>

Ha, well, I am back.

Been busy, busy, busy, but nothing works for letting off a bit of SEO steam like the Moz Q&A!

Oh, and I really want that Roger T-Shirt!

Ha, for sure! Good domains are like gold dust in some instances and I would pay 5x what they are asking.

Hey,

Adding /co/ to your robots.txt will sort this out long term and you can remove these pages (or at least hasten the removal of them) in Google Webmaster Tools.

I have seen this approach before where a 302 page is used as a proxy to do some processing and then forwards on to something else. Not ideal from a Search perspective as this is a temporary redirect being used in a permanent situation.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hmm, not entirely sure, can you provide a link?

I have seen something a little odd recently with page titles. We are working on our new site,  was going to use Joomla and the Zoo CCK but unbelievably, whilst they have a really cool blog system built into Zoo, you can't set page titles so all article titles are the same and it uses the blog title.

But, we are seeing google take the article titles from the H1 and create it's own title tags from these to return the page in the results with a good, clickable title.

Obviously, we are going to change this and go back to Wordpress as it's a dealbreaker not being able to set page titles but the behaviour we have seen from Google in this instance is interesting.

So, sorry, waffling, are your page titles exactly as  you have put them? Is it trying to add anything? Do you have any special characters or anything that is causing problems?

I have just  done a bit of a random google and I can see lots of page titles getting cut off at around 58 characters in where the page title is longer than that. Lots of other full titles seem to be coming in at around 62 so there must be a slightly earlier breaking point now. Doing a bit of googling it looks like you can get snipped at anything over 64 so I would just work on getting them a little shorter.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

Hey Alex

There is a good overview of this here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Outside of the homepage, a slash url and a non slash URL are regarded as two seperate pages so are technically duplicates. Now, Google will generally deal with this but it is not optimal (which is what we are all about eh) so you should make a call and either go / or no / and then 301 the other version to the default.

The homepage should resolve on both and 200 for both and not redirect to the non slash. The browser will generally remove the slash on a root URL.

This is from the above link:

Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.

If you are using a CMS there are usually plugins or configuration options to enforce a slash if that is your preferred option.

The big deal here is to

A - be consistent

B - 301 the alternative to the preferred for crawl optimisation and to ensure no daft duplication issues crop up.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

That is certainly my understanding - the homepage is a special case.

This pretty much details it in full:

To slash or not to slash