Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks guys really appreciate the advice. We've decided to buy the CCTLDs and hold them (to avoid anyone else from taking them) but we're going to move ahead and follow your suggestions of using HREFLANG.

I've been asked to rank the website of an international association under the same keywords but in multiple languages (they rank very highly for English speaking countries), however they only have the one website with 1 .com domain.

Question: Is the better approach to translate the site in multiple languages and then allow people to select the language they desire?

OR

Buy ccTLD and run the site multiple times in different languages as separate entities?

Mike Salt

ipositions.co.uk

ipositions

(Yeah that's us, but we deal with small businesses more than we deal with large companies since we're not a massive company ourselves)

If you're new to SEO I would recommend 'All in One SEO'

" target="_blank" doesn't affect SEO in anyway from my experience. I even looked around online and no one has had any complaints.

Some people however might get annoyed by the pop ups so it might affect the time they spend on your site. Not the biggest issue I would say. Your site does however take a while to open, might want to look into that.

Hope this helps

No problem Barney good luck!

Hey Barney I'd be happy to have a chat with you if you have the time, We deal with loads of UK clients at that price range. If you message me your number I'll give you a call (and show you some proof :))

Where are you based ?

Can you post a link to the page, I'll be happy to tell you how to do it.

First of all I should point out that the H1 tag will not make or break your ranking. It holds very little importance in Google's consideration of your page.

While it is best practice to have it in order to give a title to your article, product etc. I would not hide it in another tab. For one Google does not see your site as humans do, in the source code the H1 tag will appear very low on the page if it's hidden in a tab which brings down the value of having that H1 tag even more.

However the most important thing I'd like to say is this, in your example it appears that you wish to rank for the keyphrase  'White business shirt'. I am assuming that you have more than 1 product page that would fall under this category apart from 'White poplin classic fit'. Does that mean that you wish to optimize all those pages for the same keyword? If the answer is yes I should remind you that you should never target a long tail keyword with more than one page. It might be a good idea to simply optimize the category page for each product line:

Title - (Luxury/affordable/cheap whatever you want) Buy white business shirts

Meta description - A wide range of white business shirts by Jason Muller

H1 tag-White business shirts

• Link to 'White poplin classic fit'
• Link to White poplin medium fit'
• Link ''White poplin large fit'

Some sort of description of what poplin means, the material, the grade of white these shirts are, where they were made, etc.

and the other on-site seo steps we usually take to make Google happy.

This is how we do all our e-commerce SEO and it works great for us, hope this helped.

Was it $400 monthly or what?

If you've paid a 1 off fee of $400 for "SEO" then you did not receive what most of us on this site would call search engine optimization. In other words rather than being scammed, you just bought into something which was not SEO. You are right though in saying that someone willing to take your $400 for something he calls SEO is probably the kind of person who would ruin your site if you push for a refund (I've seen some dodgy companies do this to their clients in the past)

Just cut your losses, find a better SEO company and let them deal with whatever damage has been caused to your site by this other company.

Be prepared to spend quite a lot more than $400 though, if you're going to insist on cheap don't expect miracles.

Since you are trying to dominate the first 5 positions because you want people to buy from you I would recommend building a new site from scratch with the following:

• Different domain registrar
• Different hosting company
• Different content
• Different link profile
• Different site design

...you get where I'm going.

I can vouch that having done this for a certain client of mine it is indeed possible to dominate a keyword but you have to pose a competing company.

We did this because we had a client who owned 2 hotels with 2 different names that were right across the street from one another in London. In our case we were also able to register two Google places listings.

I was personally uncomfortable about doing this as room service was provided by the same chamber maids, the food by the same chef and the prices were identical. The only difference was in who manned the reception area and the decoration of the rooms...

If you are currently number 1 for most of your keywords but you feel that some people are buying from your competitors there must be a reason and creating a duplicate of your site won't help even if you have the first 2 pages covered. I would invest my time in finding out why. Could it be the prices, the product itself, delivery options, site structure, the images you use etc?

I would  build the new site, not to trick customers into buying from me, but to learn what their preferences are and then apply them to my main site.

What I'd do is set up a poll/survey for people to vote for their favorite restaurant and then announce the winner on a monthly basis.

I would then send an email to the restaurants telling them about the competition and encourage them to get people who visit their site to go and vote for them on your site.(Easy back links and visitors)

Finally I would offer a $50/100 voucher for a random person who voted for the winning restaurant to spend at that restaurant. (This will encourage the restaurants to add the link in the first place and the visitors to make the effort to go to your site and use it.)

The setup for this would take no more than 10 minutes. so it's a very easy thing to do and will get the ball rolling very quickly.

Hope this helps

I see the problem here, were you using the Google Keyword Tool?

If yes then on the left there is a box headed Match Type

You will find a tick near the word Broad

You need to UNtick that and then tick Exact

I've attached an image of what it should look like, hope this helps

MdJCI.png

From your question you mentioned 2 or 3 competitors which means that you should still be able to achieve a first page position for the keywords you're targeting but perhaps not the top 3. In that case it comes down not only to optimization and link building; Is your site as useful as theirs?

A question I very rarely hear people asking in the SEO field is "I want to compete with someone for certain keywords, but is my business worth being ahead of the competition at this point?"

As well as content might be written, the moment you enter the e-commerce side of SEO the prices, delivery model/costs company reputation etc come into play a lot more than in the service industry. Especially if the product you're selling is the same one your competitor is selling. How many different ways can you describe a product?

My point here is the better the business model you are following the more likely people are to use your site than your competitors and in time you'll beat them in the SERPs. You should still put effort into generating content and building links but it will be easier if user experience on your site outclasses that of your competitors.

Hope this helped

Very valid point Alan thanks for the heads up however I feel that the thumbs up system is most useful as an indicator to others who are probably faced with the same question as to which answer is the most appropriate.

I don't consider myself to be an advanced SEO so when I read the responses to certain questions I am not always able to determine which answer is the best one, that's when I look at the number of thumbs up each response has received as it is usually a good indicator.

Having said that I do believe that anyone who puts effort into leaving a useful response should be rewarded, nothing makes me happier  then when I am called out and thanked personally

Would it be possible for you to contact the people you bought the links from and have them removed?

Also what is the time frame from when you were on the first page to when you dropped?

I think at this point if this has only happened recently then it's too early to talk about building a new website with a new domain. I would add more positives like good content, social activity and quality links while fighting to remove the bad links.

It seems like you're the only person to have had such a bad experience with customer care, could it be that your tone on the phone was similar to the one you are having here?

Having said that the rank tracker tool is glitchy but it clearly says above it to simply create a campaign for more accurate results

I don't think it will make much of a difference if you say branding branding branding, ultimately what you can do is try it, then wait till the page gets ranked, remove two of the brandings, see what happens, then act accordingly. If it sounds natural, like a pep talk, then you won't have any issues.

Those services you mention which give out thousands of forum profile links are usually not worth your time or money, you see the same thing with generic directory listings, they are useless. Unless the forum topic is relevant to your website and they are do follow then don't waste your time.

I've found that signing up to 3 or 4 popular forums and being really active in them is a lot more beneficial in the long run.