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Thanks guys! I'm glad I asked. You guys rock!

Hey Mozers,

I discovered this morning that the home page for my website is rendering fine in Chrome and Firefox, but very poorly in IE. My analytics show that over 50% of my visitors are using IE. As a result of the problem, IE has a bounce rate 32% higher than other browsers.

I'm not a web developer and I'm fairly new to SEO, so I'm guessing that it's going to take me at least a couple days to get it fixed. In the meantime, I was considering doing a 301 redirect from the home page to the largest category page in hopes of keeping some of the IE users from bouncing while I get the home page sorted out.

Would there be any long term negative effects from this once I get the page sorted out and take the 301 off it? Are there any other solutions that would be better?

Thanks for the help!

You may also consider trying to find a workaround in your PBX system. We had a similar problem and determined that the best solution was to program our phone system so that each DID rang to a separate queue. It was labor intensive and repetitive, but ultimately it gave us the ability to run reports on queue activity and reverse engineer the number of calls from the reports since each queue only had one DID pointing to it. Your system may or may not have similar functionality, but it may be worth looking into.

Good morning!

I'm working on building out a new website for a regional insurance agency specializing in auto insurance for high risk drivers (ex. Tickets, Accidents, Dui's, etc.). Due to the competitive nature of our industry, I believe it is best to focus on very localized long tail keywords, instead of broad terms I don't have any chance of ranking for.

Our keyword research indicates that there is an opportunity to optimize and potentially rank for keywords that include geographic modifiers for towns and cities within a roughly 50 mile radius. The problem is, there is only so much you can say about auto insurance. On the one hand, I would like to have individual landing pages for each keyword phrase. On the other hand, I don't want to look manipulative to Google or hurt user experience by creating a bunch of pages with relatively similar content.

Can anyone offer some advice on how I can structure the site/content to optimize for each geographic modifier without having lots of pages that are very similar?

Thank you!

Thanks for the advice! We will definitely continue focusing on the long-tail on our site.

We definitely aren't focusing solely on SEO for our business. It's tough, especially since I am teaching myself from scratch, so it is just one of the many ways we are trying to compete. Our hope is that in the long term it can be one of the many ways we drive new business.

Thanks!

That makes perfect sense. I'll have to come up with a different strategy. I'm glad that I asked!

Thank you!

I work for a small family insurance agency in CA and I am trying to learn how to compete in this extremely competitive industry. One of the ideas we had was to purchase all the long-tail keyword urls we could and use them as landing pages to direct traffic back to our primary site. (ex. autoinsurancecity.com).

Our thought was that we could put landing pages on each that looked almost identical to the main page and use the navigation in the landing pages as links to direct traffic to the applicable category pages on the main site. (Ex. autoinsurancecity.com -> mainpage.com/auto-insurance).

My concern is that I want to make sure we don't tick off Google. Implementing this strategy would result in each of the category pages getting lots of links from the landing page navigation very quickly. I don't think the links will be worth much from an SEO perspective, but I don't want them to look like spam either.

Any suggestions on if this sort of tactic would put us at risk of being penalized? If so, does anyone have any suggestions on a better way to implement a strategy like this?

Thank you in advance for the help! I'm totally new to this and any advice goes a long way!

Thanks guys! I'm glad I asked. You guys rock!