I agree with Ryan.  The one thing to consider is whether redirects will help or hurt your site.  Even websites that are appropriately redirected lose some link equity in the process.  See Matt Cutts' video here which says that roughly 10-15% of PageRank is lost through redirects and outgoing links.  Therefore, if the site has existed using the format domain.com/post-name for a long time and attracted links to those URLs, then the small benefit you get from redirecting to domain.com/keyword/post-name may be outweighed by the natural loss of link equity.

I'd go with Business Name, because it's more likely to be searched.  Searchers like to see content that matches their exact query.

Also, personally I hate when people use copyright / trademark annotation in copy when they don't have to.  Others may disagree, that's just me!

If none of these pages are indexed, you can block them via robots.txt. But if someone else links to a search page from somewhere on the web, google might include the url in the index, and then it'll just be a blank entry, as they can't crawl the page and see not to index it, as it's blocked via robots.txt.

Blocking the pages via robots.txt prevents the spiders from reaching those pages. It doesn't remove those pages from the index if they are already there, it just prevents the bots from getting to them.

If you want these pages removed from your index, and not to impact the size of your index in the search engines, ideally you remove them with the noindex tag.

Hi,

I work with a client who has a large affiliate network pointing to their domain which is a large part of their inbound marketing strategy. All of these links point to a subdomain of affiliates.example.com, which then redirects the links through a 301 redirect to the relevant target page for the link. These links have been showing up in Webmaster Tools as top linking domains and also in the latest downloaded links reports. To follow guidelines and ensure that these links aren't counted by Google for either positive or negative impact on the site, we have added a block on the robots.txt of the affiliates.example.com subdomain, blocking search engines from crawling the full subddomain. The robots.txt file is the following code:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

We have authenticated the subdomain with Google Webmaster Tools and made certain that Google can reach and read the robots.txt file. We know they are being blocked from reading the affiliates subdomain. However, we added this affiliates subdomain block a few weeks ago to the robots.txt, but links are still showing up in the latest downloads report as first being discovered after we added the block. It's been a few weeks already, and we want to make sure that the block was implemented properly and that these links aren't being used to negatively impact the site. Any suggestions or clarification would be helpful - if the subdomain is being blocked for the search engines, why are the search engines following the links and reporting them in the www.example.com subdomain GWMT account as latest links. And if the block is implemented properly, will the total number of links pointing to our site  as reported in the links to your site section be reduced, or does this not have an impact on that figure?From a development standpoint, it's a much easier fix for us to adjust the robots.txt file than to change the affiliate linking connection from a 301 to a 302, which is why we decided to go with this option.Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Mark

The form could trigger a google analytics event on successful submission without having to take you to a confirmation page. You often have ajax forms that don't load a new page, and you can track success of the form with a google analytics event and a not a pageview of a thank you page. A very popular solution that works this way on Wordpress is Contact Form 7.

When your form "wipes the data" as you said and shows the customer the successful form submission, you can trigger a Google analytics event then.

Mark

I don't think this should be counted as a bounce, because the visitor converted by filling out the form, but analytics may track it as a bounce, because they left after one page and the form submission may not be counted. I would trigger the form to fire an event upon successful completion, the event by default should count as an interaction and thus not as a bounce on the site.

See this resource here from Google Analytics - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide#non-interaction

Particularly, this sentence - they're talking here about the default consideration of events, as long you don't specify it's a non-interaction event - "a single-page session on a page that includes event tracking will not be counted as a bounce if the visitor also triggers the event during the same session."

So set up an event to capture form submission, and this should solve your one page visit/form submission/bounce rate quandary.

Good luck,

Mark

Not sure why this is growing recently, but when learning regex for Google Analytics with the awesome LunaMetrics regex guide, I remember coming across the need to write brand names for advanced segments and to cover the possibility of two words being written with or without a space. Don't remember exactly where I saw it, but since then I've been writing them this way (\s|+), if I were writing seomoz for a brand advanced segment, and wanted to cover seo moz and seomoz, I would do it seo(\s|+)?moz

Basically, the regex for a space is \s, but analytics sometimes treats spaces as +, so to cover your bases, you do it either with a \s or a +.

My point is, this has been around for a while - not sure why the sudden increase, but I know this has been around for quite a bit. Maybe try drilling down a bit and seeing if you can find a common denominator here about the traffic and what is causing it.

Mark

I would also look into sorting the data by the metrics you want, and using weighted sort instead of the default. Weighted sort takes into account other metrics as well - so this way, when you sort by bounce rate, it doesn't just show you 100% bounce rate at the top, even if that page only has 1 view and so is skewed, but gives you a much better idea at pages that are performing poorly and actually getting visits.

You can read more about weighted sort here on the GA blog - http://analytics.blogspot.co.il/2010/08/introducing-weighted-sort.html

Hope this helps,

Mark

sure - no problem

My question to you - why do you want to blog about candles? Is this as a hobby, passion, or is this a method of bringing in customers to ecommerce site. You have to look at your goals for blogging - branding? Customer acquisition? Positioning yourself in the industry as an expert?

If customer acquisition is important to you, I'd recommend building the blog on the site itself, in a folder called /blog - this way, as an expert in your niche, you've positioned yourself in that manner, and people will want to buy from you due to your expertise.

From an SEO perspective, your high quality blog should naturally gain links, and can certainly be promoted through outreach and gather links in that way. This will help your ecommerce site's visibility and reach in the search engines, and will strengthen the domain as a whole. You don't get this if you blog offsite on a different domain - you won't be gaining this link strength for your site, which should be an important consideration.

Mark

I'd go with Business Name, because it's more likely to be searched.  Searchers like to see content that matches their exact query.

Also, personally I hate when people use copyright / trademark annotation in copy when they don't have to.  Others may disagree, that's just me!

I don't think this should be counted as a bounce, because the visitor converted by filling out the form, but analytics may track it as a bounce, because they left after one page and the form submission may not be counted. I would trigger the form to fire an event upon successful completion, the event by default should count as an interaction and thus not as a bounce on the site.

See this resource here from Google Analytics - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide#non-interaction

Particularly, this sentence - they're talking here about the default consideration of events, as long you don't specify it's a non-interaction event - "a single-page session on a page that includes event tracking will not be counted as a bounce if the visitor also triggers the event during the same session."

So set up an event to capture form submission, and this should solve your one page visit/form submission/bounce rate quandary.

Good luck,

Mark

Blocking with robots.txt doesn't remove pages/files from the search engines, it only prevents them from crawling the subdomain. If they already crawled those resources, as they have in your case, the robots.txt will just block them from visiting it again, but will not remove them.

What you should do is authenticate the subdomain with webmaster tools, and then remove the subdomain via the url removal tool, as you asked. This is the way to go about it.

To verify the subdomain, there are multiple options, including via your host, or you can modify the dns to prove you own the subdomain - it really depends on your setup and what you need to do.

But to remove these results permanently, with your robots.txt block, you should do it via the URL removal tool.

Good luck,

Mark

For webmaster tools, you authenticate each site separately. These are different country level top level domains, and will be separate entries in webmaster tools. In addition, if you have different subdomains on the sites, www, my.peinsa, news.piensa, or anything else, you set those up each as a separate entry in webmaster tools.

You can geotarget the different sites/subdomains in webmaster tools as well - it really depends on the setup of your sites and the targeting you want to implement.

Mark

searchmetrics.com can also provide you with a bunch of this data - you can usually see where a competitor ranked for a keyword historically over time - I would check them out - I find it very helpful for competitor analysis

Use Google Analytics for this - set up your conversions as goals, and then you can track via various reports the conversion process - what did they do, where did they go, how did they flow through your website from initial landing page to full conversion.

Google Analtyics is very powerful - it does multi touch attribution - multiple visits until your conversions, how they came each time to your site, etc.

It really is a wonderful tool - here is a guide to setting up goals - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1032415?hl=en

Once the goals are set up and the data is flowing, the fun really begins, and you can make lots of actionable analysis to improve your site based on it.

Good luck,

Mark

If you're finding these tags are missing meta descriptions, that means they are pages that don't have meta descriptions. This points to a larger issue - do you want each page being created by Wordpress for each tag you use to be indexed by the search engines? Are these high quality pages you'd want a user to land on? Do they provide value? If not, you don't want them to be indexed. You can use a Wordpress plugin to control indexation of these tag pages - Yoast's SEO plugin, http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/, besides for being awesome, will control this for you. Install and then go the indexation section, and from there, you can control what is indexed and set the tags to not be indexed.

You can do lots of other stuff with the plugin, and I definitely recommend installing it either way.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any issues with it.

Instead of looking at keyword density, I'd look at more important metrics and factors in on site optimization.

Use moz's on on page report card http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new to check your onpage optimization. Also, you can use the toolbar to highlight a certain keyword. I think most people nowadays don't really take keyword density into account, unless it's extremely high and the post is very spammy looking. Go for natural text that will make sense for a reader, a real human being, to read the content. Use your keywords naturally throughout the text, and I think you'll see better results than incorporating a keyword wherever possible to increase keyword density levels.

I don't think there's no reason to nofollow this branded link - you built their site, they chose you and have kept that link on there - that's a pretty good signal that they are endorsing your work. If they want it removed, by all means they'll remove it, or ask you to remove it, or replace you with someone else and remove it. So I'd leave it as followed - but definitely go with branded.

You may also want to consider creating a page of clients you've worked with in the past/portfolio type page, and then link to that page instead of the homepage. If you get hit, you can always kill that page and start another internal portfolio page. With the homepage, that's much harder to do.