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For SEO reasons I would strongly recommend that you don't show a splash page to visitors because this is going to cause crawling issues for the search engine bots. I would load a popup (like you mentioned) and then when the user accepts the warning it stores their response on a cookie.

Hi Dana,

You need to probably flush out a load of your inactive users (which you can do using tools like Sprout Social or Tweepi). Looking at your current following I would say it needs to go down by a few hundred really.

Once you've done that give it a while and then you can start adding people - but do it in small chunks at a time.

Matt

Hi William,

I think the linking on the page could do with some improvement.

The first thing I would do is remove the 'www.canvaspaintings.com' link from the header & footer as there is no need for them. And, like you said, maybe a bit of improvement to the navigation links.

As well as this, I would look at using h1,h2,h3, etc tags a bit more effectively as this can make a big difference.

Hope these quick tips helps slightly.

Matt.

This is definitely the best thing to do. Whenever a page goes to a 404 you should be consider a redirect of some sort. I would take into consideration user experience when you're doing your redirects as a priority.

In general, when I work with e-commerce website, I will 301 redirect old product pages (now 404 pages) through to the main category pages. This provides a good user experience and any links that were pointing to that product page can be flowed into the category page (you'll be surprised how much traffic you lose from not doing this).

Hey James - been a real nightmare since the API update as the plugin that I used doesn't work anymore. Tried your plugin out and it works great. The only thing that I real really annoying is that you have to I purchase the pro version to select how many tweets to display. Quite rare to see plugins like this that aren't free so wondered why you went down that route (as I can imagine it putting a lot of people off - even if it is really cheap - because of the extra hassle of putting in payment details, etc)?

Hi Adam,

I wouldn't worry too much here. What it probably is, is because you have set up new a new URL architecture, Google is now having to index those new pages into the search engine. As a result of this, you may not be appearing in the search engines for such a high spread of different keywords than you previously were.

Personally, I don't pay too much attention to impressions as I focus more on actual click-throughs to the website. If your Google Analytics data is showing that you are maintaining web traffic levels to the website and you are getting good traffic through the organic search listings then everything should be fine.

Give it a month or so and you will find that your total impressions will rise up again. Just keep an eye on web traffic and actual organic search visits for now. I would anticipate that you would get a slight drop for a new site in the short term anyway.

Hope this has cleared things up.

Matt.

Hi Nicola,

I think that you need to think about 2 things here before you go ahead with this:

Firstly, I would definitely class this as grey hat. It could be said to be a mild form of negative SEO. I don't quite know how your users would feel about this as well, because many people will actually see right through this. As well as this, if you are going to try and outrank your competitors for their own brand name, it means that you are going to be competing with their homepage, which is likely to be extremely difficult seeing as you will have a hard job getting links to your 'competitor brand pages'.

Secondly, it is worth thinking about how this will affect your brand. For example, if a user enters your website through another brand-name page, it could provide them with a lot of confusion, and this could lose trust with your customers.

Personally, I would stay away from this tactic, as you have much more to lose than gain in this kind of scenario.

Matt.

Hi John,

This depends on what CMS you are using (if any). If you're using WordPress then you can do this pretty easily by using a search engine friendly URL permalink (which you can often get plugins for on most CMS's).

Let us know what platform you are working on and it will be easier to diagnose.

Matt

Google would probably look at that as an 'exact match' but bare in mind that this isn't really the be-all and end-all of your SEO. Google is weakening the value given to matches like this so I wouldn't worry too much. Focus on your links

Hi Tim,

What I would recommend is to have an intro paragraph, like you've said, on the page in one way or another. This could be in the footer if you have nowhere else (however, I would get rid of those spammy location names that are currently there). Try to get a couple of hundred words if you can (but this isn't always the case.

I'd also have a look at your internal linking to see if you can link back to your homepage with your keywords within the deeper articles within the site. I wrote a full guide on on-page optimisation that you might find useful - http://www.wowinternet.co.uk/blog/on-page-optimisation-with-a-view-to-the-off-page-seo/

I'd also revise your current title tag on the homepage to get some more keywords in there.

Having said all of this, it isn't always possible to optimise the homepage of a site with lots of the keywords so I would place a lot more of your focus towards building relevant links to the site. Get a load of social signals pointing to the articles and, where possible, have some exact match anchor links going to the homepage from relevant websites.

Hope this helps.

I would go with a title like this:

In2Town: Online Lifestyle Magazine - Health, Lifestyle and Style News

Reads a bit better (which will help CTR) and you are getting all of your keywords within it.

Regarding the intro content, yes, content above the fold is much better and I would probably advise that you place it just below the navigation menu. I only mentioned the footer area in case that wasn't a viable option from a user experience point of view.

Matt

No problem.

You can edit the canonical links through Yoast's SEO plugin, just go into the page/post and then navigate to the 'advanced' tab within Yoast - you can then set the custom canonical link.

Regarding your links that point to you with no trailing slash, WP automatically redirects any URLs without a trailing slash to one with one - this will then flow the PageRank into the correct URL, so don't worry.

The canonical tag should be used to redirect Google bots to the original page without affecting actual site users. If your /?page=kontaktine-forma is a duplicate of your homepage then yes, you should have the canonical link pointing to the homepage - if this is the case, you don't necessarily need to do a 301 redirect, unless you dont want your users to visit the page.

In short, you don't need to do both a canonical link AND a 301 redirect, either one should be fine - 301 redirects should be used more for user experience, so bear that in mind.

Hope that helps.