Agency
Posts made by MarkLoud
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RE: FB Sharing
Competitions are being run for the benefit of brand awareness, social media interaction and retention. If there is a possible SEO "edge" to be gained with adding in something I don't see the issue with that.
Again the question is, do people think a share to a more prominent page like a homepage is more worthy from an SEO point of view than a deep sub page?
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RE: FB Sharing
I don't disagree with either of the above points, I guess what I was really wondering is do people think there is an SEO advantage with doing one over the other?
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FB Sharing
Hi everyone,
Just a quick straw poll to see what people think?
When running a FB competition is there more value in sharing the competition url on the website (a sub sub page) or sharing the homepage url with very obvious directions for the user to find the competition page?
Thoughts & comments?
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RE: Moz bar down?
Have to say I am really dissapointed with the way in which some of the tools consistantly drop their service - especially the KW tool
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RE: Duplicate Content and URL Capitalization
Hey Jom,
I must admit I am not sure on the level of urgency to sort this problem out but personally I like to keep the duplication of content to a minimum.
There are multiple ways to sort this out but the most straight forward would probably be to add a rel canonical tag to your web pages.
Here is a good post discussing the faceted issues you can get from e-commerce site, here is SEOMoz's canonicalization guide and here is another seomoz blog post about e-commerce sites and the use of the rel canonical tag.
Hope this helps
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RE: Tracing Google Analytics 'goal' back to original search phrase
Hi Mike,
This is pretty straightforward:
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Go to customised reports and create a new one.
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Fill in all of you relevant metrics including your goal completions
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For your top level Dimension select Source from Traffic Sources
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For you next Dimension select Keyword
You can then drill down to see the keywords
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RE: How to do this type of listing on Google organic search results?
The guys are correct, sitelinks are out of our mortal hands, however should you be lucky enough to get some sitelinks you will be able to manipulate which ones that are shown via your webmaster control panel.
And if you want to make yourself feel better in the short term just google your domain name and you can see it happening for yourself
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RE: URL Structure Question
Hey Mike,
Opt is correct the .htaccess file is the way to go but I would first test this in a sandbox / development environment as messing with this file can bring your entire site down quickly if you get it wrong (and sometimes you think you have it right and there is a knock effect elsewhere).
Failing that you could always add rel canonical tags to your site which either use the trailing slash format or not. This may be easier to do depending on the CMS you are using.
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RE: Please take a look at the SEO of my site
Hey Bob,
I dont want to get into the whole link building aspect as this is quite an indepth thing to do, however I thought I might just throw a few on site suggestions.
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you are using multiple H1 tags and are not using H2. I would fix this
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Your meta descriptions are too long for the search engines (Google) to pick up without making it a synopsis ending in "...", I would try to get this down to 165 chars so you can control what is being shown in the SERP's
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Your articles could do with having customer Meta titles and descriptions
This was just what I saw on first glance, I will let you know if I see anything else
Mark
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RE: Why am in not seeing inbound links
Hi Dave,
Bandicoot is correct. However I thought I would just add 1 more thought.
If you are using Linkscape for this analysis this data set is usually a little behind in "freshness" and this could be 1 reason why you are not seeing your links, also I believe Linkscape also trys to cut out some of the cr@p so you might not see some of the lower / spammier links in here.
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Image Maps vs. Normal Images
Hey Mozzer's, quick question:
Does anyone out there have any opinions / research on whether the use of image maps is an effective way of linking to other pages on a site as opposed to using seperate images?
Does Google read alternate text from an image map in the same way as a regular image?
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RE: Is anyone using Media Temple?
I used MediaTemple for 2 years before moving hosting locally ($50 per month is cheap for Ireland!).
I have to say they were great, there was no downtime and the spec of the DV was immense.
The support was a little slow sometimes but I rarely needed them and I always got what I needed from them.
No question in mind for reliability which was my main concern.
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RE: How I implement the cross domain rel canonical?
Yep that's it.
You link the one on othersite.com so that the content is marked as being a copy and the source is mysite.com
The link on mysite.com just confirms to google that your is the original in case there is any misunderstanding
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RE: Adwords Confusion - Where are these clicks coming from?
Just another thought, have you tried seeing what your search term report tells you in Adwords as this might show you search terms that have clicks against them that are not showing on the main overiew panel.
Go to the Dimensions tab and change the view to Search Terms and drag that out to Excel.
The other possiblity is that Google has just gone crazy....... had to happen some time
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RE: Adwords Confusion - Where are these clicks coming from?
Also another possibility is that they have been free clicks. I think I have seen this mentioned somewhere in adwords reports, I think it has something to do with when linking your google places account with your campaign - have you done this?
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RE: Adwords Confusion - Where are these clicks coming from?
A couple of thoughts. 1) these are unlikely to have come from the display network as they would not show Under the search total, so safe to say your campaign settings are fine. 2) have you deleted any keywords or edited the keywords in any way (even the match type)? If so adwords won't show the clicks against the original keyword, it will clear the stats for the updated keyword and just keep them in the total at the bottom. E.g you had 2 clicks on "blue widget" and you edited the keyword to [blue widget], adwords will clear the 2 clicks alongside the keyword but keep them in the total below. Mark
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RE: Quick Keyword Difficulty Question
Hi Joe, I have found that most scores for what I deem to be mildly competitive keywords seem to be around the 45% - 55% Mark, with those being strongly competitive at 60%+ and low competition at about 25%. I have never come across anything dropping below 25% or above the high 60% range so for me I use these as the limits. So to answer your question I would classify a score of 60% much more competitive than a score of 50%. Mark
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RE: Best practices for temporary articles
I agree with Aran, setup an archive system that keeps the articles under the same URL but does not show them live on the website.
Alternatively you could setup a dumping "archive" folder where you drop all old articles in and use this link as your rel canonical link
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RE: Help with On-page Optimization in Campaign Manager
Hi Fraser,
On the On-page Optimization summary page you will see your 11 keywords listed (if not go to the Add/Manage keywords option and add them).
By default I think once the campaign does a crawl it tries to match up your keyowrds here with pages it finds in the SE's index, sometimes these dont match the pages your are trying to optimize the keyword for. All you need to do is to click on the keyword from the summary list and then on the report card page change the URL to the one you want for that keyword. Simply run the Grade optimization report again and then click the run weekly option to make sure you track your changes in grade.
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RE: Free link on a Paid Link Blog
Hi Tom, I guess there are a couple of points here to think about. Firstly is the blog in question relevant to the website it is linking to? Would the search engines find your featured article out of place on this blog and therefore look spammy? As long as your outreach campaign is targeting quality sites there is no reason to be concerned. Signs for concern for me would be an eclectic mix of posts and articles that make no sense being part of the same website / blog and / or a spammy looking link structure of it's own. After all paid links do work, as long as they are the right sort!
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RE: Two basic questions re. Crawl Diagnostic results
Dan,
the meta description is your chance to pitch to your customer and nothing more. It is entirely possible to throw away the benefit a #1 ranking can give you in click through if you meta description lets you down.
Also for me it is very important to keep within the 70 characters limit for the page title as having overly long titles can not only not read correctly in the search results but you may be diluting your affectiveness on targeting a page for a certain topic both to the user and the SE's
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RE: Google Analytics - paid & unpaid visits messed up
I know we are talking basics here but have you made sure that you have your Adwords account linked to your Analytics account?
Also what I tend to do is to create seperate profiles for different types of traffic so that I can get an overview easily from the Analytics overview page and I find it easier than segmentation for reports. Here is what I do for those that are interested:
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Returning Visitors Profile - create custom filter (include) on visitor type and type in "returning"
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New Visitors Profile - create custom filter (include) on visitor type and type in "new"
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Paid Visitors Profile - create custom filter (include) on campaign medium and type in "cpc|ppc"
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Organic Visitors Profile - create custom filter (include) on campaign medium and type in "orgnaic"
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Social Media Visitors - there are alot of filters on this one!
By doing this I have never had any data issues with one profile merging with another
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RE: Should I include a "|" for better page title SEO results?
The pipe and hyphen as already suggested are the way to go for pure usability and space saving for your title tag. In my opinion neither has a direct SEO advantage over the other however they both have a distinct advantage over other techniques. For me keeping the keywords used in the page title to the point help without any extra "by, or, and" breaks the keyword blocks both visually and semantically for the search engines. Now don't get me wrong I don't think this makes or breaks a good SEO effort on a page but for me it's certainly a preference.
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RE: Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?
Roger, The way we have approached this in the past was to go with separate TLD's using Magento. The main thing we did was to focus on a complete content rewrite for all pages including product descriptions to remove any possibility of duplicate content issues holding back the new sites and then set about localising with directories, webmaster tools and some low level link building. This seemed to do the trick in getting our .co.uk and .ie domains to rank above the older .com original site.