Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Peter,

That's great thank you - I hadn't realized about the gear icon to make a custom expression. Thank you for all your help.

Hello,

A client has asked us to track the journey each separate referral traffic visitor takes through out the website. I have had a look through analytics and am not sure how to ensure I can do this for all referral traffic visitors?

Can anyone help? Thank you.

That's great thank you for your response.

I thought that might be the case, the websites that I was on this morning were raving about it and I thought I would check before I looked into it further.

Thanks again.

Hello,

I have been doing some research this morning and have come across Scrapebox, does anybody use them? What do people think of the comment poster?

Thank you.

Hello,

A couple of competitors that I keep an eye on over the last couple of months have been really going for the Google + links and according to Opensite explorer they have over 200 social page metrics for Google +.

I was just wondering if there has been an update that I have missed that gives follow links for Google + or does Google + affect Domain authority?

And if so can I just use my own Google + account to create these social page metrics or does it depend on someone else sharing my posts?

Many thanks

Hello, a client has asked us today to quote for how much it would cost them to get a micro site built. A Google employee has told them that because their current URL doesn't include .co.uk or.com it is simply: brandname.word that it will be harder for them to get their website to rank.

My understanding is that micro sites aren't a good solution for any problem as Google doesn't like them. Would it be better for them to buy a .co.uk (they are a UK company) url and then redirect the url to their current website or is there a better solution?

Many thanks

Thank you so much everyone - that's great! I will look into all your suggestions I really appreciate it.

Hello, Is there anyway of finding out all the keywords that Google is currently ranking our website for so that we can then build on those keyword positions?

Many thanks,

Hello,

Thank you to you both for your answers I really appreciate it.

Thank you

Hello,

I have just been checking my link profile and according to webmaster tools a competitor is linking to my website. Is there anyway of finding this link besides looking at every page within their website?

Many thanks

Hello I am doing some keyword research support for a client. The keywords that we are looking at Keyword A is 880 LMS and Keyword B is 2900 LMS through Google Adwords. When we look at Google Trends Keyword A is showing much high traffic than keyword B. Does anyone know why this is?

Many thanks

Hi Bruce

That's great thank you for the information and all your help.

Hi Don,

That's great thank you for your time and help. I really appreciate it.

Hello,

It doesn't matter what keyword I put into Google (when I'm not signed in and have cleaned down my browsing history) the contact us page ranks higher than the home page.

I'm not sure why this is, the home page has a higher page authority, more links and more social media shares, the website is an established one. When I have checked Google Analytics my home page gets more people landing on it than the contact us page. It looks like people are ignoring the contact us page and scrolling down until they find the home page.

I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have.

Thank you.

Hello,

On May 12th my average session duration within Google Analytics went from 1.12 seconds to 10 seconds. Every month since then it has had an average session duration of around 10 seconds.

My traffic over this time has increased. I am concerned that the website is being attacked by bots. What should I be looking out for to work out what is happening?

Many thanks for your help.

Hi

Try this website to start off with - there is certainly lots of information on it http://socialtriggers.com/twitter-tips/

I hope that helps

Hi

I have just been reading this article:

http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/ratings.html

within the page it says this:

If your online store is rated in Google Product Search, you have four or more stars, and you have at least 30 reviews, you'll automatically get seller ratings with your ads.

It might be that the reason why the rest of your review are not showing is because they are less than four stars?

Hope that helps

Hi

We do both in house SEO training as well as SEO consulting. We have found that SEO training is a great way for people to learn more about us as a company and then we can introduce the other services that we have to offer as well.

When people choose to have the SEO training over us completing the SEO they then understand the work that is involved, this can then lead them to changing their minds and wanting us to complete the SEO.

I would embrace the opportunity of being able to offer either training or consulting to your client. Either way if they are a happy client they will talk to other people about you and your company and this may then lead to other bigger clients.

I hope that helps.

Hi

I was reading this article the other day http://moz.com/blog/tips-to-use-google-for-seo which talks about how Google + can help SEO. I have also read in another blog post that if you place a link to your website within a status update and then your post is reposted by someone else on Google + that this is counted as a link by Google and can affect your Page Rank.

It might be that the majority of the page rank that the website did have was from using these kind of tips and from links from within their Google + status updates being re-tweeted and when their Google + Account was suspended then all of the page rank stopped being passed to their website?

Hope that helps.

Hi

I'm not sure if this is what you are after, if you go to analytics and then Goals - Overview - there is a box on the main part of the page that says 'Goal Completions' which I have been using as the total number of Goals. All you then need to do is change the date range at the top of analytics to see the cumulative total over any given period of time.

Hope that helps.

Hi David,

• Is there different address/telephone numbers on the websites, one UK and one American?
• Is there one website with UK £ for currency and American $?
• In webmaster tools is one set as a US based website and the other UK?
• Does one website have American based links pointing to them and the other UK based links?

We looked into something similar for a client that was wanting the same website in terms of content for 3 different countries and we came across this blog post http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

After reading it we felt that along as the above were different and that the UK website had a UK IP hosting address and the American one had an American hosting IP address we felt it would be ok.

Would be very interested to hear from other people's experiences with regards to this in case we have got it wrong.

Hope that this helps.

Hi Mark,

A similar thing happened to a client of mine. When we looked into it a company of a similar name was doing an advertisement drive in America.

When people were typing in the name of the company into Google and only remembering part of it if our clients name came up as well as the other company and people were mistakenly clicking on our clients website.

It is worth checking to see if there are any similar named companies that operate out of America and check their website to see if they are running any promotions.

As Chris says it is also worth checking back over any changes you have recently made to your link profile as well.

Hope that helps.

I have just been reading a really interesting article about link juice.

The way I read the piece the author was saying that there has been a change in the way link juice is blocked with 'no follows.'

The author seemed to say that there has been a change and now even if you add a 'no follow' onto a page that the page will still send link juice to that page. I may have read this wrong.

I just wanted to check if anyone else had heard this at all?

Many thanks

Hi Seda

I have just been doing some research on the passing of link juice from Twitter this morning and came across this article online. http://abertram.com/t-co-no-longer-passing-link-juice/ I have also read that Facebook links have 'no follows' attached to them.

Twitter/Facebook etc are really great for passing traffic to your website. With Opensite explorer showing how many facebook shares, Google +1 button etc then it would be important to keep encouraging genuine customers/clients to share and like the content that you provide on your website.

I would have thought that as long as the links were genuinely created by real Facebook/Twitter users then I wouldn't have thought that the links from Social Media would be a problem (as far as any Penguin penalties went). Any drop in search rankings is more likely to be because of links from websites that Google considers from bad neighbourhoods/link farms etc.

I hope that helps with some of your questions.

Hi Matthew

I wouldn't have thought it would cause any problems as long as it was true.

If you can truthfully claim to be the 'best' or 'No1' in your business market its worth double checking that there are keywords based around this for your brand/business before changing your title tag.

Hope that helps.

Hi Jan

Like Michael says Pinterest has "nofollows" attached to it so you wont directly benefit from having been pinterested 25K-56k times in terms of link juice.

The benefits that you are getting from  the pins is the passing of your brand through out  all these various Pinterest Accounts and then for all their followers seeing your brand as well.

There are some interesting tips on Pinterest here http://socialmediatoday.com/malharbarai/1182326/5-seo-tricks-pinterest

Hope that helps.

Hi

I have read that it takes between 1 - 2 months for you to start seeing a change and 2 -3 months before you start seeing a really significant change to your website.

Hope that helps

Hi Branden

From what I understand favicons of any kind have no SEO value to them.

Favicons have a benefit from a customer point of view if they save your website to favourites/bookmarks they will then be able to identify your website a little easier through the favicon as they will recognise the branding.

One question that I don't know the answer to is: will the animated favicon slow down page loading time? If it does I would avoid them as this could have a negative effect in terms of customers interaction with your website.

To be honest I'm not sure that it is worth creating an animated version if it is going to take you away from other brand building strategies. Although it could be fun creating them.

Hope this helps.

Hi Juan

From what I have read most directory sites, outside the likes of Yahoo, are actually link farms in disguise. Google is targeting these websites and you will receive no benefit from the transfer of link juice. You are far better off spending time creating strong links with relevant sites and share-able content that will provide great information for your visitors.

Rhea has created a great webinar on the subject of link building that would be worth watching http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/link-smarter-not-harder

Hi Jake

We are a UK SEO company that has worked with eCommerce companies both from a point of view of training people on how to complete the SEO on their website themselves as well as completing the SEO project for them to help them achieve their business goals.

We would be delighted if you would consider us. Our email address is info@mblsolutions.co.uk.

Hi Hayley

I'm not sure if this is of any help:

http://nagranowrimo.tumblr.com/post/44185866832/day27webcomichosting

or this one

http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/image-hosting-websites

Have you thought about putting it into a Powerpoint and hosting it through Slideshare?

Hope you are able to find the right place for the comic - it sounds like a really interesting idea!

Hi Juan

It is worth taking the time to treat the pages as separate. The search terms can change from country to country and may mean that you are optimizing for a term that is not searched for in the English speaking country's that you are targeting. Have a look and see what your competitors are doing, this should give you a good starting point.

As you say it would be important to ensure that you did the link building differently for each website. English language websites pointing to the English page and Spanish websites to the Spanish pages.

Are you able to host the pages in different locations? If you could it would be worth doing so, you will find that this has a positive affect on the SEO.

You can also change the country that you are trying to target within Webmaster tools. (Sorry to write this if you know that already)

Hope that helps

Hi Michelle

Try;

• adding Google Places to your website
• In your website I would add in to your contact page UK in the address as Google uses the address details within a website to identify where the business is based
• changing the language in the source code from US to either English UK or just English.
• It would also be worth looking at getting a broader range of UK based links as when I did a quick link check many of them seemed to be .com.
• Can you get hold of the URL www.nut-job.co.uk and redirect traffic from that to your .com site?
• Do you have Google Adwords? You can change the settings in there to just focus on UK searchers and not US

Hope that helps

Hi Gina

Thank you for the extra information that you have provided, I have gone with Cemper for the moment as they have a free online trial. The link removal request tool sounds really handy as well. I'll pass that all onto my clients and let them make up their mind as to which one is right for them. Thank you for your help.

Hi Alan

Thank you for your feedback, yes you are right I can look at a website and see whether we would want to be linked to it or not. And yes its a good point that all of the links would need checking before doing anything with them.

I was looking for the tool to help with clients who don't have any SEO experience and are wanting to keep costs down to help clear up bad links that are currently pointing at their websites that other company's have set up for them. I wanted to be able to give them confidence to be able to use tool's that were simple and effective to use that would help them make choices that were right for them. Thank you for your feedback about double checking the links I will add that into the mix with the advice from Tom, Kyle and Gina and pass it all on. Thank you for your help.

Hi

That's great thank you both so much for your answers it has given me the confidence to move forward and help my current client and future clients out using these programs.

Thanks again

Have a good day.

Hi

I have been doing some research today to help a client who has lots of links to their site but they are mainly of low or no value. The links were created by another SEO agency so we are not sure in all cases how the links came about or who to contact to get rid of them.

I have come across link detox http://goo.gl/o2fKl. I wanted to suggest to my client to use this to help them see what links are bad and what should be kept

I have two question's;

Has anyone had any experiences with this program and have found it useful?

Would there be any negative affect of us using this program with reference to my clients website?

Many thanks for your help.

Hi

I guess it would depend on what the product is and what the article is about, I think the best way is to think like a customer. How would you see your customer using the blog? What would they be interested in reading about?

Using your example of the running shoes and the best athlete blogs article, I think it would work really well if you included in the article a picture of each athlete and then a link beneath the image to the page within your e-commerce website that has the pair of running shoes on that they are wearing.

That way you get an interesting opinion piece article that will encourage discussion as well as a link to your e-commerce website and different products within it. Hopefully this way people are less likely just to read the article and leave; instead they will have a look and see what type of shoes their favorite athlete wears. (and then hopefully buy them as well!)

Hope that helps

Hi

Hope that you are well.

Single words are really hard to win especially ones as highly competitive as these.

By creating really great content within these pages that contain your keywords and writing your keywords within your title's/urls/alt tags you will be strengthening these pages. By having other pages within your website that contain links to these pages that have content relevant to seo and web design you will further strengthen these pages.

SEO MOZ have this great blog post as well that should help you http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

You will have to be careful to ensure that your site isn't overly optimized and you have a strong link profile attached to your website. Try Rhea Drysdale's webinar - I found it really useful. http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/link-smarter-not-harder

Hope that is of some help.

Hi Chris

I hope you are well.

It's not something I have heard of before, I have managed to find this explanation http://digitalmarketing-glossary.com/What-is-Drip-feed-blast-in-SEO-definition

I'd stay well away from it if anyone has advised you to do this for your website as I think that you would get punished by Google for a practice such as this.

Hi

That's ok no problem. To be honest with regards to the levels of competition for a term we just use the keyword tool and look at the LMS and competition, even though it's not 100% accurate we find that it gives us a 'ballpark' to work from.

Once we have narrowed down the field a bit we also use Google trends to help see the patterns of how people search and use different keywords through out the year. This can lead to some useful topics for targeted blogs through out the year to make the most of the keywords.

I did a quick bit of Google research and came across this site http://www.verticalleap.co.uk/blog/seo-traffic-predictions-how-to-calculate-keyword-value/ which may be of some help to you as well.

Good Luck!

Hi Janc

I think it would depend on four main things

• how competitive each keyword was compared to the potential traffic
• how far along the buyer journey the keyword was - you want to be in a mix pf places so that you can build up a brand reputation. It is most important to be at the end stage of the buying process so that you are more likely to convert people as they will just be looking at price/service at that stage. For example compare the term "mountain bike" to "men's red mountain bike for sale" your second customer is ready to buy having done most of the research they now know what they want.
• how the words will fit into your current site structure
• the profit margin/the importance to your business that the keyword relates to

We always start off with a handful of keywords (or group of keywords) for ourselves and our clients and then when we feel that they are working well for us we expand the selection from there.

For example say you had a website selling stationary, when you look at your sales you find that when somebody buys a pencil from your site they always also buy a pencil sharpener, pencil case and ruler to go with them so that they have the set. The traffic and competition might be both middle of the road but the profit margin and the importance to your business is high.

You also might notice that although there is a lot of potential traffic around the keyword phrase 'buy staples' and the competition is low you find that these customer only buy staples and the margin for your business is low.

You would first of all start with the keywords related to the pencil and then expand from there, knowing that the keywords that you were targeting had the most positive affect on your business and led to longer term sales and growth rather than a one off sale.

Hope the above explanation helps, if you have any further questions please let me know and I'll see if I can explain it better!

Hi Mark

SEO MOZ have a great article giving you  insights into keyword research http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/advanced-seo-keyword-research-tips-and-ideas-14216

When we are working on a website for a client or ourselves we always do the keyword research from both a potential traffic point of view through the keyword tool as well as through a customer point of view - what they will be looking from us to buy/what problem that they want us to solve. That way we can ensure that we have the pages to take them to within the website to answer the questions that they have.

Where possible we include the keywords within the URL's as we believe that is still part of how Google is indexing the pages and how people like to see the pages. e.g if you are on a site shopping for shoes you would be confused if the url that was in the address bar had words relating to Cars. It is important that they are not overly optimized as Google at best will ignore the page and at worst penalize you for the over optimization.

Hope that helps

Hi Jean

I'm sorry I don't have the answers to all your questions I'm afraid but hope this will help;

• Have a look at this website for how to optimize your blog for keywords http://basicblogtips.com/optimize-for-better-rankings.html
• With regards to every post from your blog having a link to your website, the more links you have from your blog to your website the more the link juice will be split along the links. You wont actually be directing additional link juice to your website if you have 100 links over just having ten links for example. Hope that makes sense.

Hi

SEO MOZ have a great explanation of what Anchor Text is http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/anchor-text

They also have a great explanation for keywords http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

In short it is best to use your keywords within your anchor text rather than generic words such as click here. The search engines will see your keywords within your anchor text and will understand more about the areas your business is targeting. e.g using your example of black German shoes, if you had this phrase in your anchor text search engines would understand that you were a company selling shoes. Simply having 'click here' wouldn't tell the search engines anything about what your business was selling.

Hope that helps.

If it is purely from an SEO point of view then I think that I would avoid doing the micro sites, I think that you would get penalized from search engines.

I agree with Tom if you are putting all that work in that they are suggesting then why not just put that amount of work into your main website/blog/social media? That way you are unlikely to suffer any negative affects and will receive long term benefit in terms of content production, traffic and social media shares?

Hope that it all works out well for you.

Have a great weekend.

We have used micro sites in the past for targetting 'niche' long tail keywords that would get lost within our main website. They have purely been from the point of view of benefiting the customer in helping them to find information that they need.

They tend to be for areas of our business and keywords that are on the fringes of our business.

We have found that by having a micro site it enables us to talk to our customers about these individul products directly to them rather than on a page that is within a website talking about a wide variety of products. (along the same lines as Mike explained in his example) We have two micro sites and one works really well for us the other doesn't. It is worth considering but like Tom says there are a number of warnings to take into consideration.

I think overall it depends why you are considering building the micro sites? If it is for the benefit of the consumer so that they can have clear and concise information that is relevant to them then it is worth doing with caution.

Hope that is of some help.

That's great thank you both so much for your help it's all sorted now.

thanks again.

Hi Elimark1611

Thank you for your message, unfortunately I have already tried that and the ads still come through to our website. Do you have any other suggestions I might be able to try? Thanks for your help.

I am looking for some advice regarding You Tube and removing the adverts that are within the videos when I host them on my website. I 'Googled' the answer and all the information that I found was relevant before the latest You Tube update?

Many thanks in advance for your help.