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Google does look at h tags to understand the structure of the content on the page better, Googler John Mueller confirmed this several years ago. Therefore it’s good practice to have your H1 as a main page or title of the piece then main subheadings as H2, any further sub-headings needed to divide content under these H3-H6. A lot don’t go to this depth and focus on H1 and multiple H2s achieving good results. When I have taken it further I don’t believe it has made a significant impact on rankings compared to when I haven’t. 
Hope this helps

Thanks for the update Christy

It’s a shame as it gave a real incentive to people when it used to work properly. I’m hoping the Moz staff see this and give feedback or can look to get it fixed. Earning points and getting on the first page takes some doing and held some recognition over the years, so it would be good to see it working again

Oh on a side note sorry if this is in the wrong category wasn’t an obvious choice unless I missed it

Not as active as I would have liked recently but still visit and login, answering a question now and again, yet I can see my profile is still listed as unranked. until recently I was somewhere around 45-49 and have been for many years - the criteria appears to be what it has for the last ten years or so. I see people with lower moz points outranking members with far more points. I can even see one with 0 points now appearing in the top 50 so my question is - is the moz community rankings broken or have I missed something? I know once before I pointed it out and it had to be fixed...input from all welcome

The key is competitor analysis I would say in your case to work out what content the others are doing successfully. In reality, I have worked in similar (managed apartments that could be rented for work or holiday in well-known cities) and done posts around attractions that have earned links ultimately increasing the site's authority and rankings. I did an outreach campaign asking the places for some input and images that we could use then I wrote the post and sent it to them. These were posts such as top attractions in x.

I think the best way to answer this would be go look at the landscape - e.g. I used London Bike Tour and you will see what titles are ranking and then click the links to get an idea of the page contents intent - what I saw was mainly tours you can book listed. Page titles are important but so is the page content - even if you get to page 1 briefly if the searches intent isn’t served by your content you are likely to see poor engagement metrics and you won’t stay there long.

If you take Burgundy specifically the results landscape is slightly different with more pages ranking with specific routes rather than tours available from providers. For your page title in theory it would be possible however I would personally go more down the route of Burgundy Bike Tour - A Cyclists Guide To Burgundy. Again it is hard to judge without seeing your page and domain but it appears competitive, so it’s hard to judge your chances by page title alone. However in my opinion it would be wise to have it laid out more like this with specific term at the front and then additional related text after leaving room to capture related longer tail searches and encouraging engagement. If I were looking for a biking tour of Burgundy with the intent of finding routes I would be encouraged to click on one that says guide...

Have a look at Brian Deans Skyscraper technique - backlinko.com. in general if you put relevant content (such as decent long form blog posts) out in front of a relevant audience such as on social media you will find you automatically start to pick links up. Engage with influencers and interact with their stuff - you will find they often reciprlocate. Another technique that can be quite successful is asking others to guest post on your site or include their tips in an expert round up - that way you are often getting links without directly asking for a link. Great thing is if they don’t link other fans often will and either way you are adding more quality content to your site.

I tend to see bigger jumps prior to page 1 and then once on page one it can be slow moving sometimes gaining and losing a few places as it moves up. In the earlier stages you can see several movements in a month often weekly (hence Google Search Console having 7 day filters)  but again I tend to find slower on page one. It’s quite common to see ranking jump 3-4 pages or even more  on the way to page one. During the first 3 month or so you often see most movement slowing down in the months after as it settles to its potential on page one - again depending on what engagement and links keep coming in. I wouldn’t say there is a definitive pattern across all the sites and niches I work however the general improvement I have spoken about here is I have found common. I have seen others say it takes blog pieces over 12 months to reach their full organic potential.

Have you explored what the current landscape for both types of term is? I would start there so you get an idea if any with title tags of similar intent rank for the types of terms you are asking paying close attention to keyword order and the page content. For instance, when I looked at page 1 for a "[major city] bike tour" one of the top results had the page title containing "explore" however in terms of keyword order it was later in the page title and the on-page elements such as the URL and H1 were focused on the more specific term [major city] bike tour. I think you also need to take into account what the page content is - for instance, this one with "explore" in the title still had the intent of listing the best bike tours to book rather than route or landmarks again making the intent more relevant. I think you are right to think in this instance you would struggle to outrank pages that are listing specific bike tours you can book when I had a glance at the landscape.

William is right meta keywords is essentially a worthless tag that is no longer used by most search engines, as it was a method abused by spammers in the past (in the days of the meta crawler when you could type any term in and still be served porn). Bing still takes them into account as a signal for spammers not ranking!

http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874

I always look at competitors meta-data in order to give me a quick overview of their targetted terms, so I would think about ditching them if I were you, though don't panic if you don't., just don't give precious time to them..

I would create 3 separate pages providing one of those 3 terms isn't your main key term and already targeted on your homepage. Then I would look at creating an internal navigation structure that pointed at these pages using the keyword anchor text as their label as long as it appears to be natural. I would place the keywords as the url - www.domain.com/keyworda.html (or whatever extension your site has). I would then look at gaining links to these pages, but I would be careful with the anchor text that links back to my pages especially since the Penguin update when link profiles are under more scrutiny than ever and it is important to look as natural as possible.

Going back to your pages I would look at optimizing your critical on-page elements such as title and h1 header so that it contains your keyword but do not stuff these elements and try to make them as natural a possible.

When linking building I would do more research on here as there are so many different ways that you can create good natural content and get it in front of an audience so that links will be gained. It is hard to give you suggestions without knowing what your site is about - is it car accessories or was that just an example? Think of things such as building a good social following on networks such as twitter and try to pick out influencers/authorities in your niche and then build a relationship with them so that you can create content and put it in front of them so they will spread it to their following and so on.

Could you create a blog in relation to your niche and encourage people to guest post? Could you boost your content by encouraging reviews/testimonials? Have you thought about creating how-to videos or guides if appropriate? Are there any communities around your products and have you thought about getting involved?

Remember when linking building:

great content + exposure = links

Exposure is key and this is where building things such as a social following and a decent email list will work wonders..

Hope these suggestions help - I have had success with the same formula myself..

Hi Jack,

To increase your Domain and Page Authority you need to increase links to your website and in particular your homepage if you want to increase that specifically. To do this you need to think how can you create some decent content that is link worthy and then you need to make sure it gains exposure so that it will start to gain links. There are lots of ways that you can increase your link profile using things such as:

• In depth product reviews,
• A blog (consider encouraging and rewarding guest bloggers that are authorities in your niche as they will have a strong, relevant following),
• How to videos in relation to your products and how they might come in when carrying out a task for instance,
• Content curation is also an idea (some decent articles on this on SEOMoz).

Now for the exposure; best place to start is to build up your social networks and start to interact and form relationships with people that are likely to have an interest in your products, in particular those that are authorities in your niche/product area. Then when you have built relationships with them you can expose them to your new content, which will then hopefully get passed on to their social following and through this you will start to gain links and more attention slowly establishing yourself as an authority in the process - win win situation!

If you do this and work hard at it your DA and PA will increase as you want it to. Just remember that when you are building links in a post penguin world don't over do the anchor text and always go for quality links over quantity, don't start using dangerous methods, such as forum signature and blog comments. Hope this helps - Good Luck!

Here is a link to some more thoughts and details in a Q&A about link building - http://www.seomoz.org/q/drowning-in-a-sea-of-link-building-advice

Hi

I find the quickest way to do this is to Google your UA number.

You will also find this site quite handy for this - http://www.namesense.com/

Hope this helps

Matt

The biggest issue here is that the developer did a blanket redirect to the homepage of the new domain - never a good plan. You are using a 301 redirect to tell search engines that a page and its content has moved to a location - however the content should still be the same or similar. That way the URL that is being redirected to is still relevant when people visit via the old URL. Obviously when you do go down the route of doing 301 redirects even done properly can cause some fluctuation in rankings, but it is best practice to minimise impact of such a move and transfer old authority gained through links.

As you say why did the developer or site owner decide they needed to move domains? If they were doing well to start as you say this really doesn't make sense. You can reverse a 301 redirect  - this old Q&A you might find interesting.

http://moz.com/community/q/undo-a-301-redirect

If you are going to reverse things I would do page level redirects from this new domain back to the old.

Go back to the old structure and URLs if possible - do you have an old sitemap or crawl of these? If not you will find the way back when machine handy for seeing old site structure I find - http://archive.org/web/

I would then submit a new up-to-date sitemap of your old domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

On a side note - has the on-page such as page titles and other ranking factors been changed since the move to the new site? If so I would look to change these back to when you had stronger rankings.

Not a simple case as you say but I hope this helps

I know it probably isn't what you want to here but if you have lifted images from Google Images without checking the copyright status I would shoot it again - I don't think a copyright disclaimer will protect you. This is the last thing you want to cause you an issue - people like Getty Images are always on the look out for sites unauthorized use of their images. This can lead to hefty fines - I have seen sites fall foul of this...

Hi Eduardo - have you considered creating a team section on your website, talking about your database developer(s), their experience in database development and examples of previous work. You could easily optimise this page for the term database developer and you could also use the keyword in the anchor text on your internal link structure (menu) without it being incoherent/unnatural.

You could also consider producing an FAQ or Question and Answer section on your site and answer general questions on types of database and development etc. This is how I would go about optimising for your targeted term, then you can work on the off page elements such as links and social media making the link juice flow to pages such as the one I have suggested so that you can rank well for your targeted term with time and effort. I would also optimise the URL of the page to include you targeted term without going over board and making it look spammy. Hope this helps!

Hi Savio,

I think that you will find this whiteboard Friday very interesting in relation to comment marketing - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/comment-marketing-as-an-inbound-tactic-whiteboard-friday

In terms of links carrying any weight, I think it is important to think about quality and building trust in a community before posting links. I would also be very careful with anchor text. What you have to remember is that since Google's Penguin update link profiles have been under more scrutiny than ever so having some blog comments from appropriate blogs in your niche will carry weight. If a link is no followed then it won't pass link juice and so help add to your authority but what you have to look at is what other value it passes in terms of referral traffic, recognition etc.

People have tended to stay away from using blog comments as a form of link building because this leads to spammy practises of just posting for links sake. If you have a lot of anchor text from random blogs then it will stick out like a saw thumb when Google looks at your link profile and you are likely to get hit. However if you use comments properly and it is appropriate to link to your site occasionally then you are more likely to add value to your site in the eyes of the search engines...

As you say you are leaving good comments and adding value so this is a natural practice, but purely looking at it as a good form of link building then I think you need to rethink things. As Rand says; using comments correctly will help you build authority and gain recognition in these communities which will help with exposure to your site and work. From this you will pick up links naturally.

_"_You are not, not trying to build links. No, not directly anyway. Eventually, over time, one of the goals is hopefully to get some links, maybe to get a blogger to mention you, point over to your stuff, not to build profiles, which, essentially, is just a form of link spam or of reputation management where you're building all these profiles across different sites, and not to comment without adding value." A quote from Rand's WBF from the link above.

Hi

In terms of how you can handle duplicate content I would suggest having a look at this guide from Moz themselves - http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content - if you then have specific questions don't hesitate to come back and put them to the community - you are sure to find some great advice.

In terms of how you can improve your websites SEO I would suggest that you look at Moz's free guide to SEO - there are lots of things that you can do to get your websites ranking improving for keywords that you are targeting.

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

I see your website is on WordPress - I would recommend that you consider installing the Yoast SEO plugin - it will help you optimise your site in terms of SEO. This will also help guide you on how to use it -

https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

This is a guide from the creator.

Welcome to the community

Hi - please see the responses on this Q and A in relation to what you are asking - http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-comments-good-for-seo

I think you should avoid this as it is a dangerous practice and potential for a penalty is high!