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.

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

This really depends on the topic of your site. Could you give some indication?

I'd build a new adsense site on Lowcarddiet.com but I'd host it with a different company so I don't get penalized for having the same C block address for both sites.

To clarify you would only need to do this since you're trying to optimize the two sites for the same keyword,

From what I've seen Google assumes that sites hosted by two different hosts are probably run by separate entities, and therefore links between the two sites are less likely to appear as an effort to game the SERPs.

This of course brings up the question of whether EMDs are still worth buying in which case I would say they are.

Finally the most important question is whether you already have a presence on the first page for that keyword, if you've got the number one spot I would justify making the effort of getting another site there, if not then your time might be better spent improving your rank for that keyword.

Hope this helps

I really think the biggest factor is whether all the content is going to be exactly the same but translated in dif. languages or you are creating a product or service that spans 10 different countries.

For example; if you are creating a site about how to stop smoking or about the same products and you translate that to 10 different languages then I suggest using Ryan's approach.

If however you are creating something country specific, like a directory for businesses in each specific country then I would simply run with 10 domains (if you're lucky enough to find the same name with each ccTLD for the countries you're targeting)

I'm guessing that if you are willing to make the effort to redo the content in so many languages then the financial payout should warrant spending the money to buy 10 domains + hosting etc.

If you specified the topic of your site someone who's already done it might offer better advice, hope this helps

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.

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.

Here's an old article by Rand about Flash: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/flash-and-seo-compelling-reasons-why-search-engines-flash-still-dont-mix

My two cents, Flash sucks the life out of SEO.

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

That's exactly what is happening to us, is there ANY way at all to block our site from appearing in a certain country completely?

First of all I want to say that I hire 2 great Indian SEOs at my company and this question is in no way meant to offend, or single anyone out.

However

It's come to a point where the amount of emails we receive for "Ethical SEO, High PR Guaranteed Link building Services, SEO professionals etc" from Indian based companies is costing us a lot of time on a daily basis to filter out spam from real enquiries.

Blocking their emails is not even working as they use gmail accounts and multiple domain emails so we can't keep up with them.

I have even spoken to some of the owners of these 'companies' and they admit using different email accounts so as not to be blacklisted.

They also seem to believe that the opt-out option (which is legally required when sending out promotional emails) is itself optional!!!!!

Now when I asked how exactly they were getting my email they said that they get info from the, and I quote "first page of Google"!!!!!

So my question is the following; is there anyway I can block my site from showing up in a particular country altogether?

Again this is in no way attacking ALL Indian based SEO companies, my beef is with the 74 (we counted) different 'companies' that are flooding our email with offers

P.S. Is anyone else having these issues?

Would help if you indicated which particular industry/product you are referring to. We provide internet marketing, not just SEO, to some big manufacturers in Holland and Italy and I can tell you now that the ball game is different when you're dealing with the medical electronics industry as opposed to glass or beer factories.

Have you looked for the email address of the webmaster using whois.net? That's the first thing we do when contact details are not provided on the site.

I've seen a lot of people here going on about removing bad links and where possible I agree that it should be done. However a line must be drawn where getting a link removed becomes too time consuming to be worth the effort. That time would be better spent creating content, reaching out to popular relevant blogs etc and create enough good links that offset the bad ones.

Hope this helps

A site targeting "orange juice" and "apple juice" as keywords is the example I'm going to use.

Would you have any EMD related benefit if the domain was appleorangejuice.com for either of those keywords or both?

To elaborate, this is NOT a question about how users would respond to such a domain.

I think we can all agree that having the domain orangejuice.com would make ranking for that term easier and the same with applejuice.com.

Is there any benefit then in using appleorangejuice.com with regards to optimizing for Both keywords or only 1? and which do you think would get the bigger benefit; apple juice or orange juice since the latter appears in sequence?

I also feel the need to mention that this question arose from the fact that one of our clients insists that having the keyword in his domain will make his life a lot easier but the EMD for that phrase is not available so we're looking for different domains that are not mind numbingly obvious in their attempt to get ranked quickly.

Same here we've tested this out and it makes no difference at all. If it did in the past I wouldn't know but as of 2010 (which is when we tested this theory) the length of registration didn't make an impact on ranking.

Low hanging fruit is what you are looking for, what we do is first use the adwords keyword tool followed by the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool. It's not perfect but it gives an indication of how easy it will be to rank for a particular keyword.

EGOL is right however in saying that if a keyword is easy to rank for then the reason is that your competitors have regarded that keyword as not being valuable, meaning you won't either.

Thanks for your response Ryan, I totally agree that the tools you use don't necessarily make you an SEO, it's how you use them that matters. With regards to Woorank I've only used the free version and I agree it's buggy but there's a lot of potential there. Thumbs up for your response pal.

There's loads of free and paid SEO tools out there and I'm trying to find out which ones make up a common denominator for most professional SEOs.

Has any of you experienced drops of about 12 positions then back up etc. in the last few weeks or are you just experiencing position changes of 1 or 2 places?

Hi Paul,

From personal experience I would say get the TLD that is relevant to you, so if you want to rank on Google.co.uk I would go with www.verycool.co.uk. Of course ultimately you can rank in other languages but as standard practice we always start with the local extension that is most important to us

Hi thanks for the reply (first time a moz staff member gets in touch with me Woot!) I've literraly copied part of your answer and sent it to my clients and it seems to have done the trick! Thanks a million!

I have been using the rank tracker to update clients on their current positions/improvements etc. but have been told a number of times now that the results they were seeing were not the same. Does the rank tracker work by giving results based off my location or from somewhere else or what? I should mention that I am based in Malta and my clients are based in the UK and Italy (with their sites being optimized for local keywords) I also ask them to clear their browsing history and to restart their browser before they check.

Does anyone know of a plugin/theme/template that would allow me to create a site with the following features:

1 section of content that is public

1 section of content that is only for registered members and that is hidden until you log in.

A registration page

A sign up form

If you are only targeting for US traffic then I would definitely set GWT to target the US. You will never be able to completely cut off foreign traffic and you shouldn't want to however if you want to increase the visits to the site you should build backlinks from US sites, blogs etc. and start using social networks and target Us nationals.

Hi, apart from owning iPositions I have shares in a cleaning business and certain other businesses in the wedding industry. Like Thomas said internet directories like the yellow pages still bring a return and we do in fact use them. We also advertise with Google Adwords and even though we are also ranked highly for our local keywords I would never stop using Adwords.

For the cleaning business Facebook advertising was useless but for the wedding ones it works great, so again it's all about trial and error.

We do a lot of email marketing and it has a very very high return simply because our followers are people that would have already bought from us before and are keeping an eye out for more of our email-only offers.

In total our internet generated sales can be divided into the following demographic:

Organic positions on SE: 20%

Paid listings like Google: 25%

Paid listings like Yellow pages (and some other niche directories for the areas): 30%

Facebook: 5%

Email marketing: 20%

Most of our traffic comes from  organic positions but we seem to get better conversions from our paid efforts.

Hope this helps

Hi a very big percentage of my client base is in the hotel business; you said that your adwords costs are very high and I was wondering why that is. Are you trying to achieve the very top spot? That's unnecessary because in the hotel business people don't choose the first hotel they come across they shop around so even if you are floating around 6th place your're still going to receive a high number of clicks, but on the plus side they won't cost so much.

If your client needs to fill rooms quickly (a request I get from my clients on a regular basis) we tend to change the wording of the advertising to attract last minute travellers; people who go bargain hunting by signing up to a last minute offer for hotel rooms and flights.

I don't know if your client is willing to go down this route of attracting the last minute traveller but if he wants clients by next week that's the only way he's going to do that.

Hope this helps

Well, you can perform a search for 'Free premium wordpress themes' and you'll get a very big selection of fantastic designs or you can go to elegantthemes.com and pay for one.

And yes Wordpress is very SEO friendly I believe Matt Cutts even said so.

Hope this helps

You can easily build a website with wordpress and there's loads of themes you can choose from which you can then edit. Have a look at these an see if you like any. They're all free by the way - http://www.fabthemes.com/

I strongly recommend you build the site using Wordpress, site builders are usually very limited.

Have you rebuilt it on Wordpress?

"What we're noticing is that growth in search traffic is much flatter than it usually is after the first month of a new client blog."

Given that you are already seeing less progress than what you are used to I would go ahead and put something else on the Spanish page until the content is translated.

Even better would be not to release the Spanish page until it's ready, is that an option you have?

I speak 5 languages and therefore have the opportunity to do on-page SEO and content writing for 5 different cultures. This question to me has much to do with the way Google translator works. It doesn't, trust me! Which then makes me wonder how the web crawlers, which are designed with English in mind, can fairly and equally attribute the same ranking points to a foreign website.

Since Google seems to use sematic search technology I'm wondering if foreign sites have it easier or not.

Any ideas?

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.

You're trying to stuff too many keywords on one page, also the H1 tag will not make or break your on-site SEO so don't obsess about having to put your keywords as an h1 header .

Why don't you split the keywords on 2 or 3 different pages and do the following:

Keyword + Catchy heading

I've copy and pasted this from Rand's post of a few weeks ago. This is mainly about the title tag but is also valid for the H1 tag in my opinion

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday

your titles need to be authentic. They need to sound real. They need to sound like a human being wrote them that was not intending necessarily simply to rank for phrase after phrase. I'll give you a good example. Bad: web design services, web design firm space brand name, whatever your brand name is, web design. What does it sound like? It sounds like all you're trying to do is rank for keywords, not show off your brand name, especially if this is your home page or those kinds of things. You're repeating keywords three times. Web design is in this title three times. Think about whether a normal human being would read that title and think, oh yeah, that sounds legitimate. No, they'd think to themselves there's something fishy here, something spammy, something's wrong, something manipulative. Try instead, probably equally effective, if not more, brand name web design Portland Spiffiest Design Services. Now look, I've got the word "design services," which you wanted to get in here. I've got the city where you are that you're trying to target, got brand name web design, right, sort of branding myself as the product and the keyword. Much, much better.

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.

We're active in the Italian market, if you need any pointers let me know

You won't be awarded any PR value if it is not a link, at best someone might copy and paste the text link and visit your site. In that case I woud usually contact the web master and ask to make the text link a proper link.

By achieving target you mean you've already gotten your client to the first page, number 1 spot for his primary keywords? If yes and I were in your position I would track the conversions he is getting at the moment and then focus on related long tail keywords.

The one thing I would do if i were asked to deliver results ASAP with this budget though is to set up a PPC campaign. If your client is already ranking under keywords that are generating business, why not double that presence with sponsored links? (This is one of our most basic strategies and it works beautifully for us)

"And if one was so inclined to build bad backlinks to a competitor it would have a negative effect"

There is a whole branch called Negative SEO specialised in destroying your competitor' SERPS and though you will find loads of sites promoting that they do this in a "Completeley legal" I urge you not to succumb to the temptation of trying it.

The time and money you would spend trying to negatively impact others would be better spent on optimizing your own site, and think about it: If suddenly anyone above you starts dropping in rankings and your site is the only one that ascends don't you think someone is going to wonder why?

You seem to have answered this all by yourself already, reciprocal links and close to useless nowadays and since you do not think you will get any direct traffic from their site I wouldn't bother if I were you.