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Hi - reading the article the impression I get is that you still need to have modified your existing tracking code to be able to use this feature when the tab does appear on your report. Are either of you already using the social tracking plugin?
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1316556
Sorry if its obvious and you are but thought I would check..
Haha I wondered if you would read the article and notice that - I think your evidence above my prove that button colours really can make a difference. I have found the same to be honest. I also found changing the colour of a call to action resulted in a significant increase in click-throughs from my landing pages.
Some times I think things are just common sense and in a lot of cases I have found that the more you can spell something out for visitors the more they complete your desired actions. You can't argue with metrics and split testing in my opinion.
Hi Matthew
In order to capture more email addresses I would advise that you have some sort of incentive that makes it worth signing-up for - maybe a discount or some free aspect to your service.
I would also make sure that you customize your messages to different groups where possible - for instance you would want to hit a different angle with existing customers as against potential customers.
I imagine you are already planning on doing this but I thought I would mention it - create and integrate your form from AWEBER as this will make list management so much easier and you can create auto-responders easily. For instance if a person signs-up with your form you can have it set so that an automatic email with an introductory article or an offer is sent.
Always make sure you capture the persons name in the form so that you can personalise your email campaigns.
When sending your campaign with links to your blog I would write the email so as to encourage readers to leave comments on your articles as this will be beneficial in many ways..
I would also consider encouraging customers to forward emails that are promoting your blog posts. This will increase your traffic and will help capture more email addresses in my experience.
I would also encourage you to push your blog posts via social media as well as by email, but I would try and make sure subscribers are getting extra value for being part of your email list - like I say maybe occasional promoted giveaway or discount etc.
Chamber of Commerce specific - personal email maybe saying something like it was great to meet you at the chamber of commerce. I thought I would email you as I am starting an new periodic (weekly, fortnightly, monthly?) email about current SEO and our experiences/findings/knowledge so I thought you would be interested. As well as receiving some great information you will also be entered into a free prize draw or x amount discount on work (you would have to decide which works best for you), which is only available to those on our email list.
I find http://blog.deliverability.com/ a very useful resource when it comes to email marketing - lots of interesting information that will be of great use to you.
There are so many things you can do with email marketing and it is such a powerful tool if used right! These are just a few of my thoughts on your subject which I hope will be of help and will get you thinking...
Matt gives you some good advice below - I thought I would just throw http://www.brightlocal.com/ into the mix for you to consider...
Hope that helps!
Hi Carl
I have a UK site that has the same issue - I don't think it is anything for you to be concerned about, it is just the language settings on the person's computer. I know it isn't an issue because when I send an email campaign out it is to 1000's of UK customers that have been signed up and tied to their accounts at their UK addresses so I know that they are in the UK, yet the majority of visits from that campaign report reading languages as en-us. I hope this helps put your mind at rest! I know at the time until I looked deeper into it and did that test I was a bit concerned too.
Hi
You may find this useful as a potential solution different to that above -
Install one of these contact form plugins on your site if you don't already use one of them:
Then install this - http://helpforwp.com/downloads/campaign-tracker/ - it will provide referrer information - showing how the visitor arrived at your site as required.
There is a cost involved but this isn't massive and hopefully you should be able to install this and set it up yourself relatively easily.
Hope this helps 
Matt
Good point Keri - I think it would probably be appropriate to have a link to this as well http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
Have you considered verisign - http://www.verisign.com/ and one of their SSL solutions, with extras such as
http://www.symantec.com/verisign/ssl-certificates/secure-site-pro-ev?inid=vrsn_symc_ssl_SSPEV
Click on content > site content > Pages - then find and select your cart url. At the top of the report you will see the navigation summary tab which shows the previous page path and the next page path visited - you can click on these to follow the navigation routes taken. Hope this explains what you are looking for.
I have also noticed when answering questions myself and also when viewing unanswered questions that people regularly have their questions answered on here, but don't give credit to the people that are answering them. Are all mozzers aware that after so many automatic thumbs up from Q&A they no longer count, so answering a question and getting no recognition from the poster leaves the exercise almost pointless.
I think that it is a case of lack of knowledge and forgetfulness, as I have regularly seen verbal acknowledgement of an answer but no thumbs up given.
Is there no way round this? I know how busy the SEOMOZ staff are but to keep this community improving I think that this should be addressed as it is disheartening and I can imagine that some have already been put of from answering questions! Maybe look at appointing some specific Q&A moderators and not just associates?
Hi Luke
I had the same problem and this is how I fixed it - I registered the development domain with GWT and then put in a removal request. I also got our developers to setup a robot.txt file to tell search engines not to index any of the site - the contents of the robots.txt file are as follows:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This soon fixed the issue for us. Hope this helps - obviously you don't need the robots.txt if your are just going to take the site down completely as there will be no worry of people finding it in search engines and mistaking it for your live site or search engines finding duplicate content. I used this strategy as we still use the development site for testing etc before going live.
Can I just check is the URL on a separate domain? If it isn't and it is part of your existing domain for instance you can still block that URL using either a robots.txt file or a no index, no follow meta tag. You can also request removal of specific URL's within a site in GWT.
Hi Caroline, links that are no followed don't directly pass any value in the form of link juice which has a direct impact on SEO and search rankings. However they are still very valuable as they can be linked to by countless people (on their own websites and guest posts meaning potentially followed links) that become aware of your links through social exposure on twitter and similar.
I did a bit of digging as I knew there was a decent Q and A on this here you go - http://www.seomoz.org/q/value-of-twitter-links
Vanilla sometimes is the best flavour - I'd definitely give it a go! Here's to making the web a better place Egol.
Hi Sander - you can achieve what you are looking for using advanced segments on the report you mentioned above. Click advanced segments > +New Custom Segment. Then name your segment something suitable. Select the green box that defaults to Ad Content and type keyword (select this from the list once it appears as it is your dimension). Then on the drop down box that says containing change it to exactly matching, finally enter your first keyword in the last input box. Repeat this process for all your keywords that you want in your custom report and make sure you use the Add 'OR' statement and the dimension option every time. This will produce a report that can be downloaded in pdf containing only the keywords that you have selected. Let me know how you get on...
Hi Patrick
I would just log in to SEOMoz next time you are with your client and ask them to go through the process of granting permission to their Facebook explaining what you are doing and why. I don't see this being an issue with your client...
If there is an issue maybe demonstrate what connecting their account will give you access to - show them another campaign with Facebook connected if you have one?
Hi Paul
Have you looked deeper into your analytics - how do your traffic sources for the two sites compare- are they different? Are you getting traffic from keywords on your new site that you aren't on your old site? If so what is the bounce rate on these terms - my thoughts are you might be ranking well for some keywords that don't provide visitors with the information they are looking for. Alternatively your page could be so relevant for that search keyword that visitors don't need to dig any deeper into the new site. In this case time on page should give you a clue as to which of these it may be in this situation - is the time on page too short to read the content for you average person or not - how long does it take you to read? It might not be this but I always find looking deeper into the analytics of a website tends to hold the key, especially when you are comparing it to another site that you own in the same niche as you are in the fortunate position of having access to both sites analytics. Hope this helps.
I think you are right Egol - link profiles are under more scrutiny than ever and that is where the biggest risk of gaining a penalty lays.
Spend time and create decent content rather than spammy keyword laden pages - I have seen you push this point many times on here and elsewhere.
I also think people can take a big clue as to the quality of their content from their bounce rates and time on page stats - pages ranking for keywords but having a relatively high bounce rate and a low time on page.
I tested this out myself but couldn't replicate it, however I can imagine it happening - like you and others have said they are testing things all the time.
Maybe they ran out of bananas that day! Just imagine all those years we have spent trying to second guess the algo of Googlebot and the key was a monkey haha.
The only problem with vanilla is that it is easily influenced by other flavours around it don't you think..?
Hi Craig
Sorry for taking a while to come back to you but I have been very busy, however I have a couple a question -
When you first noticed the blocked pages had you made any changes to the site at that time and if so what were they?
Have you done anything that could have slowed your site down - running your homepage through a speed of load test I notice that it took over 4 secs which isn't very quick.
I once had an issue of lots of pages being de-indexed when we made an update to our sites template and the load time increased drastically. Even if this isn't the cause of the issue looking at optimizing your load time will help increase the speed at which your site is re-crawled. Google will be able to get through more in the time it allocates to crawl your site each time it visits if it is smaller and loads quicker hence speeding up your recovery.
There are lots of tools and information on optimizing load times - here is just one - http://www.webpagetest.org
Hi Alex - have you considered using a format such as this for your title tags -
Word | Brand Name
However to actually answer your question it is fine to use hyphens I have several well ranked pages that use a hyphen in the title tag and this has not caused me any issues - out ranking sites that don't use the hyphen format. The thing I would think about though is having your brand regularly coming before anything else in the title tag that's why I suggested the format above - just a suggestion. You can still rank well for branded keywords with your brand being second in the title tag order.
I agree Andrew it has been a good discussion - that is the great thing about this community you can actually bounce ideas off like minded folks that have knowledge and understanding of what you are doing. I think it also shows that there are always several ways to go about things - it is like this discussion it has really got me thinking and I think that can only be a good thing! Thanks
Hi Peter,
I have two websites that are in the same niche on different hosts, but under the same Google Account for Analytics and Webmaster Tools which have links to each other. The links are branded and not keyword anchored and I haven't found this to cause any negative impact in the SERPs.
In my opinion, as you mentioned, it is natural for the two to link and the most important thing about link profiles is that they look natural and not manipulated especially post penguin! Hope this helps!
Hi Luke
I wouldn't particularly worry about the actual keyword density of the page but more about whether your keyword optimized text actually looks natural and not stuffed with a set keyword. In regards to meta data this doesn't have an direct value in relation to your search engine ranking. I personally don't use meta tags as this tells my competition exactly what keywords I am going after. As far as meta description goes this is important because it influences what text is displayed against your page in the search engine results. Good meta descriptions can help influence whether people click through to your site from the SERPs. Hope this helps.
Keyword density is so old hat - if I were you I would stop measuring your pages by keyword density and make sure that you right decent content that contains your keyword. Also placing your keywords in important elements such as the title tags, H1 header, etc. In direct answer to your question if you insist on measuring keyword density meta data won't count as it is not a ranking factor - the days of meta crawlers are long gone!
Hi
If you are trying to build a funnel with a specific page that must be visited before reaching the destination page please see the attached screenshot of how to do this.
Just turn on funnels when you build a goal add your page x URL and make it required.
Here is more on this from Google - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1116091?hl=en
specifically - "When you create a destination goal, you also have the option to create funnel for that goal. A funnel is a sequence of pages that you anticipate users seeing before they reach the goal. Report data for the funnel appears in the funnel_Visualization_ report."
Hope this helps!
Matt
A website needs links like a car needs fuel when it comes to search engine ranking, however as Bryan has pointed out it is important to focus on quality rather than quantity. I just thought I would add some information on link building that may give you some ideas -
http://www.seomoz.org/q/drowning-in-a-sea-of-link-building-advice
- I would read all the responses as there are some ideas in there that might help you..
In regards to social media it sounds like your followers are increasing, however how are you finding your interaction with authority figures/ influencers as these relationships will help gain exposure - you might even be able to persuade them to produce a guest post for you if you decide to go down the blog route on your website.
Hi Leona
Googlebot-image and any of the other bots that Google uses follow the rules set out for Googlebot so blocking Googlebot would block your images as it overrides Googlebot-image. I don't think that there is a way around this using the disallow directive as you are blocking the directory which contains your images so they won't be indexed using specific images.
Something you may want to consider is the Allow directive -
Disallow: /community/photos/
Allow: /community/photos/~username~/
that is if Google is already indexing images under the username path?
The allow directive will only be successful if it contains more or equal number of characters as the disallow path, so bare in mind that if you had the following;
Disallow: /community/photos/
Allow: /community/photos/
the allow will win out and nothing will be blocked. please note that i haven't actioned the allow directive myself but looked into it in depth when i studied the robots.txt for my own sites it would be good if someone else had an experience of this directive. Hope this helps.
Link profiles are all about looking natural and that is what Google is looking for especially after Penguin. If it is natural and beneficial to your visitors to link back to the big company then do so, as this will help your link profile in the eyes of the search engines.
Check this whiteboard friday out by Cyrus Shepard - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday
I have found to some extent that this is natural, however in order to combat this with one of the sites that I work on we have made sure that the exposure, especially through social media has been staggered, not hitting everything at once, so that it has been clear to search engines that the fresh content is still important in relation to the terms that it is ranking for. I have also produced content related to this in the form of a series clearly linking to the original so that every time one of the pieces of new content get traffic, links and social recognition so does the original piece showing that it still has relevance in the current rankings. I have found this has worked and we have kept pieces ranking like this.
From experience of implementing this on several sites, the times can vary quite a lot depending how long it takes Google to re-crawl and index your site, so unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule to how long it should take before you see the benefit from it...
I have definitely seen it take longer than a month to fully change over.
Ann take a look here at Matt Cutts (Google) video discussing 301 redirects - he mentions that it can take anywhere from weeks to a few months for a 301 redirect to be fully recognised by Google, providing it has been setup correctly.
Hi Leona - what you have done is something along the lines of what I thought would work for you - sorry if I wasn't clear in my original response - I thought you meant if you created a robots.txt and specified Googlebot to be disallowed then Googlebot-image would pick up the photos still and as I said this wouldn't be the case as it Googlebot-image will follow what it set out for Googlebot unless you specify otherwise using the allow directive as I mentioned. Glad it has worked for you - keep us posted on your results.
The first thing I would say to this is since penguin link profiles are under more scrutiny than ever and as such you really want to have a natural link profile. Realistically is it natural to have only inbound links? - no a natural link profile will have links flowing in both directions and as such some will be reciprocal. However you need to make sure that if you are doing a reciprocal link with a website then you linking back would add value to your visitors. If you are going to reciprocal link I would work to this principle and keep them to a minimal and then you should be ok. I do personally have two sites that I work on that are linking to each other and this hasn't caused any negative impact on my rankings as they both rank well, but the link makes sense and I haven't created sites just to link to each other.
If you are thinking of going down the route of offering links to other sites if they link to you purley to boost the flow of link juice and increase links to your site then I would stay away from this practice, as there are penguins swimming in those waters!!
Robert gives you a very good answer; a page with low ranking is ideal for being improved through optimizing the on-page factors and gaining links to your pages. If you have a blog linking to these pages is a very good idea to bring them to visitors attention again.
Just to reinforce this point - Thankfully page ranking doesn't carry over otherwise there would be a lot of us in this industry struggling!
In relation to internal linking I would look at where these pages sit in your site architecture in terms of links to them - are they prominently linked to in your navigation or are they buried deep in your site. If they are buried deep would you be able to include them closer to the top of the site navigation (in terms of including them higher up the navigation levels, such as only taking one click to get to your low ranking pages from the homepage) with approrpriate keyword anchor text linking to them? Depending on your site this is not always appropriate but it is a concept worth considering as it will make a difference in my experience.
Hi Mohamed,
Vahe gives a great answer to your question and you shouldn't just rely on the SEOMoz tool for your keyword monitoring, although I think the tool is great at giving an overview and I use it constantly.
You might want to consider using filters and advanced segments in Google Analytics, as it will identify keywords that are sending traffic to your site and what position they are, making it easy to do what you want. I did this after Bryan Casson produced this excellent, easy to follow post on here -
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/show-keyword-position-using-filters-and-advanced-segments
I hope this helps and adds to Vahe already good answer
Hi Max
A couple of questions to understand your situation better - do you have both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools installed on your development site? Is your development site out ranking your main site for any of your key terms?
In my experience unless your development site is out ranking your main site I would add a robots.txt file to disallow all bot access and then I would also put in a removal request for your domain on Google Webmaster Tools. I found this fix very quick - within a matter of days everything was fixed.
However if you feel that you are getting traffic to your development site and it is out ranking your main site, so you have decided that the rel canonical option is best I would still remove your development site when rankings swap around (as Marie pointed out this took a week or so for her).
In regards to your development site I would always aim to have it removed from the index and when you have your issues sorted I would place a password on the whole site so that nobody can access it other than you or someone that has the password. This will allow you to use your development site to its full potential and not have to worry about competitors that have found the URL monitoring your development site even when it is de-indexed!
BTW when I had this issue I had several thousand pages indexed in Google from my development site. Unfortunately I can't give you an exact time as to how long it will take to fix this issue as it all depends on the current crawl rates to your sites.
Hope this helps!
I would look at other methods of link building other than trying to get links via comments on forum as this is a dangerous tactic especially post Penguin when link profiles are under more scrutiny than ever - there is also little to no value in this method and essentially if you are commenting just to get links it is a form of spam.
Hi Quilbur
These guys have all given you some great answers I just thought you might like this extra little bit of info - Bing actually takes meta keywords as a spam signal since about 2011.
Have a look at this article by Danny Sullivan - http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874
As the only thing that meta keywords actually do is make it easier for your competitors to know what keywords you are targeting (as jamesm5i stated) I never implement them.
I always make sure that there is a strong call to action on the meta description as I have seen the results of implementing this with sites already in postions 2 and 3 - a strong call to action increased the search traffic generated by them significantly.
Hi Jay,
You need to add quality content but make sure that this content receives exposure through channels such as social media. To add authority to your site you need to build your link profile up, but you must be very careful when doing this in a post penguin world as link profiles are under more scrutiny than ever. Make sure you focus on quality over quantity and definitely be careful you don't build too many links that have exact match anchor text. You need to focus on drawing people to your site and wanting to read your content to become an authority. I would really work hard at building a strong following on social media channels and I would work hard at building relationships and interaction between you and social influencers/authorities related to your niche. Once you establish such relationships you can then expose them to your content and then this will help gain exposure for your content, as they will hopefully talk about your content, starting discussions related to it and also making their followers aware of it through retweets for example. This will lead to people more people linking to your content and in turn increasing your sites authority.
N.B I also think creating a blog for your site and encouraging guest posts from relevant social influencers is a great way to build links and authority for your site as they bring an audience/following with them.
Hope this helps give you some ideas for building your sites authority. I would suggest looking at link building Q&As for more excellent ideas from the community. You might also like to consider content curation...
Do you mean that you are copying your competition and putting links to your site on forums and on blog sites?If this is the case then I think the links are of little value and can actually lead to penalties in the SERPs.
Please see this response to a similar question regarding these types of link: http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-comments-good-for-seo
Also see this Q&A for sensible link building advice:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/drowning-in-a-sea-of-link-building-advice
Hi Marcus -
I agree that there is no doubt that you can gain some decent referral traffic from a link placed in an appropriate thread on a forum - especially if you are a regular contributor.
However I think it still needs to be considered that dropping links to your site on multiple forums is likely to get noticed by Google and this could impact on your search traffic. Swings and roundabouts from this view point, but I still think you need to look at it and consider it from this angle, especially in the current climate (post-penguin).
Everything is OK in moderation, but as a link building strategy?
One link every so often would be fine, but if you were to gain numerous in a short space of time you are likely to get flagged...
I think that none keyword anchor text such as your websites URL is safer if you are going to have a followed link from a press release. Although I would be careful if you are creating a press release to gain authority from the link(s) in it with the recent changes by Google. Remember the main aim of your press release is to gain your brand exposure and even if the link from it are no followed if you do it well and what you have published is news worthy you are likely to pick up followed links and social shares from other sources indirectly anyway.
Always a good recap I think - http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339
Fairytale of New York - The Pogues for me - though Mariah Carey - All I want for Christmas is You! has a certain charm about it haha
Hi Zach,
Whether it is local or international the process for gaining quality links is the same you need to create great quality content and then you need to make sure that it gains the right exposure. This will bring you the quality links you desire to increase your sites rankings. There are lots of methods for creating decent content, such as product/service reviews, blogs including promoting guest blogging from authorities in your niche, examples of work you have carried out (case studies), content curation (see SEOMoz Blog) and more.
To gain exposure it is important to interact with as many potential customers and also others involved in your niche as possible, this is where social networking comes in. Building up your social following and then interacting and building relationships with authority figures that are related to your niche will allow you to expose them to your content through passing on links through tweets etc. If you have built a good relationship this will cause your social followers to share it to their own network and then you will gain increased exposure which will lead to likes, G+'s, tweets and links from other sites. It is important to make sure you include social bookmarking on your websites to help facilitate this. If you are blogging and you have built relationships with authority figures you can then ask them to create a guest post on your blog - you might need to offer an incentive. They will bring the attention of their followers with them which will lead to more exposure and links - improving the authority of your site.
For local SEO it is so important to network online and identify local influencers as this will bring you business - I have found that social networking allows the online word of mouth about decent local business to happen an a much quicker rate - this is flourishing!
I hope this helps - one suggestion is you look into the link building discussions on here for more ideas.
Obviously as you say making it part of your existing site would be ideal helping to further strengthen your sites authority with the links that you pick up. However setting your blog up as a standalone site could still work well and help drive traffic to your site. You may even find that you can encourage more guest posters if your site is standalone helping to build interaction and setting your self up as an authority/influencer in the niche. Linking between the two shouldn't be a problem as I have done the same with previous sites in the past with success as it was a natural think to link between the two.
So the long and short is that you could make this tactic work for you, you just have to weigh up whether the extra spend adding it to your site would be worth the potential links and added authority your site is likely to gain or not? Obviously as a separate site that links to your existing one you are only getting one linking root domain, whereas there is the potential to pick up numerous to your existing site if the blog is part of it and if you do the blog well and market it...
Also think whether it would work better to be standalone or part of your site from your current audiences perspective? Are more people likely to read and comment if it was seen and branded as a separate entity or part of your existing setup?
"I see SO so many sites ranking with nothing but press releases and garbage article submissions... What does it all mean? I don't know. But I do know we are working on a press release to go out this week and I need to make a decision on this...hmmm"
Depends how safe you want to play it and how strong the content of your press release is! How many press releases have you done in the past with followed anchor text links? Do you have a strong well balanced link profile? I see sites that are still getting away with using this practice but they are in for pain when Google finalizes how it will deal with those abusing its latest guidelines - I don't think Matt Cutts and others at Google would empathize this if it wasn't worth taking note of! As with many manipulative practices those committing them don't suffer straight away but when they do get caught it is usually painful...
I would opt to play the long game and look at using your press releases as a way of attracting more attention that will lead to links and social shares rather than using them for direct followed links to increase authority..
I agree with Richard, I would look at having my content hub (blog) on my own domain, helping to enhance the site as an information resource and directly benefiting from any links that it earns with the posts that you create.Lots of interlinking between your site and your separate blog on blogspot or wordpress.com isn't great either.
I would look at ways that you can create some great content that will enrich your current site, from what you have put there appears to be a lot of scope. You need to think about how you can gain links in order to be able to increase your ranking for targeted keywords. I would definitely think about your idea of a blog and invite guest posts/ reviews from current users of your free football game or even better industry authorities (well known gamers/reviewers). This will help increase interaction on your website and this will lead to increased traffic and more links. Think about incorporating how-to guides which can be both written and video based recording actions from game play etc. I would also concentrate on building up your social presence and make sure you look at building relationships with social influencers such as well- known game reviewers/gaming sites and publications. Building these relationships will help increase your exposure as you can make them aware of any new content on the site you are now doing SEO for and this in turn will lead to them pushing it to their followers which will again increase traffic and links will come. As we all know these links will increase your sites authority in the eyes of the search engines and you will gain ranking and search visits from none branded keywords. Hope this helps!!
It all depends on the quality of the links that you are gaining as to how quickly Google recognises them.
In regards to speeding up Google finding links to your site that you have managed to gain I would say this is not possible as it is down to how frequently Google crawls the websites that links to you and Google actually crawling the page that links to you. This could take a while if for instance a site has thousands of pages and a low crawl rate from Google.
Hope this makes sense.
