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Actually blogs are talking too much about link building that it seems like on-page optimization is less important or some even come to me for link building on their website with any on-page optimization was not proper.
I think On-page optimization is really important and out of all the on-page factors title tag is one of the most important one. I think if title tag can be handled correctly you can actually beat your very powerful competitors for some of the highly competitive key phrases.
Ann is smart indeed and I always mentioned that she is one of the few people who actually help me get better at SEO and blogging.
Getting free traffic idea is terrific and easy if the community is helpful but if the community is hijacked by spammers and there is no moderator that same good website becomes the real pain in the head...
As I said, Ann is smart so she must have some keep check on it but i would love to hear from her about the maintenance of the highest quality.
Well, to be honest Chris, It is a poorly maintained site. I mean deleting the past news is not at all the solution... I guess the right solution is to work on hosting side and enhance the data base or else the problem will be continuous.
If you are going to use too many redirections this will cause another problem and at the same time will slow down your website speed.
Actually 404s are generating because the URL is available in Google index but there is no page on your website available against it and this causes a 404... The easy way is to reduce 404 is to send a removal request to Google from Google webmaster tool.
And for future... instead of removing pages you should try investing on database and better hosting.
Ok, when the question starts it sounds real easy to me but down the question it become too complex that it makes me confused on how to answer...
For Business listing I think it’s best to go with http://www.example.com/biz/my-business-name
For category pages the URL should be like http://www.example.com/oh/car-parts (oh represents the city name while car parts in the category)
All categories should come in all states for example if a person in California looks for car parts the url should be http://www.example.com/ca/car-parts
Reason why you should adopt this structure...
Hope this helps...
Sorry about that... must be my bad!
Well yeah Google Places is more focused on delivering the results from the area and surroundings so it’s almost impossible for you to rank in local searches...
I think in that case Matt’s suggestions are helpful in that case and that is to make country specific pages with keyword and make it rank accordingly (not not over optimized to make it look spammy... do it the natural way...)
Hope this helps...
Hello Ricardo,
This is actually a difficult question to me or may be the information is too much scattered but I got a way to reply you that might help you come up with answers to many of your questions...
If it would be my business or if I will be working for this website this is something what i would recommend.
It is always great to talk to customer in their own language so if we can talk to customer in their own language and with their country TLD this will help them trust us easily instead of a single website that is based in English (universal language).
I would prefer to have 3 domains with content in 3 different languages that is English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Example:
Let’s take English version as the main website (as it’s a universal language) and the other two websites as branches.
Google Maps does offer local listing for Portugal, Spain and England. If you have physical location available within 3 areas you will be able to register each website within the targeted area.
Again as I said it’s great to talk to customers in their own language. If cost is not the big issue the it’s great to have language based pages targeting the right kind of people but if budget is the issue then its great to come up with one but active facebook page (English should be the language).
When you have one page in English you should understand and take care of the customers in other countries as well and entertain them from time to time accordingly.
Hope most of your questions are covered... let me know if you have further question in mind...
If the links in the footer of the website are of the same websites (internal pages) then removing them from the footer (as per my personal experience) will cause ranking fluctuation ...I am not sure why you are removing it but if it is because you want to stay away from the penalty caused by site wide links then IMPO with internal pages this won’t be a problem...
If you really want to remove the link from the footer the best idea is to remove the links one by one and see the impact of it on SERP rankings overall...
that's what i said.. it should display when someone search for you in the search engine.
I think format can be different from website to website... for blog using this in the post will not really a good idea but if you are a service website with 15 to 20 pages that its great to use it on all pages.... where as with eCommerce the scenario is different...
I don’t believe on 70 characters theory anymore as Google is looking for pixels and title space that appears in search results is more depends upon pixels...
I think adding a company name (not URL) at the end of the title is great but it should appear in the search results... i don’t see any great SEO value out of it but it is surly great from the branding point of view...
nops for pages within the domain you should use '-' to separate it instead of '_'.
The reason why you should not do this in the main domain is because it looks spammy to many people as this is the format that most spammers use when buying keyword rich domain names...
Let’s talk completely about branding, I would never recommend you to go for .co domain when .com and co.uk is already taken by other companies...
It’s always an advantage to me to add keyword in the domain name but don’t push it too much if you are not getting it focus more on branding and choose a domain name that is easy to remember.
For separating keywords in the domain i would say do not use it and if it is necessary then use ‘-’ instead of ‘_’.
Hope this help!
Obviously it really depends on what you really want from that forum... but in a normal state it is always good to go for sub directories instead of subdomain...
Matt Cutts of Google also did a post on his blog regarding this you can read it here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ and i guess this will help you more...
Hope this helps!
It would be great if you can share some real numbers here! This way members in this community can help you better with the ideas they have in their mind (two heads are better then one!)
looking forward for some DATA from you.
Milos, not really sure about others but it is really tough for me to say anything about your specific case without having a look at your website.
To me every case in terms of UX is different but obviously its most depends upon users and how they have behaving on the website. Generally i think you should not focus on words but you have to look in to analytics to get some data in hand regarding what pages are most visited, how users are behaving on the website, how user behaviour is impacting sales and then come up to some decision about eliminating or changing any page of the website.
Even though you said people are engaging well with products on the home page you have to see what route most visitors choose to made a conversion and consider the changes accordingly.
The advice would be to discuss the website in detail with any SEO so that help can help you with different scenarios and possibilities...
I n order to increase the Page Rank of the website i guess there should be link on the home page as well as links on the specific pages...but the point to consider is that quantity of links might not help you in this case but you should consider quality links pointing back to your site...
Interesting discussion! I would love to start with dividing the 3<sup>rd</sup> party website in to different forms.
Option 1:
I think this is something here many SEO firms and freelancers are focusing already but i still think it needs more focus and concentration. If a business plays a vital role on 3<sup>rd</sup> part websites like stay action, reply to questions and reviews and communicate with the clients on regular basis i believe this can seriously help businesses get some serious leads.
This will be a great option for local business who offers services within a limited area. Websites like Google Maps, Yelp and other yellow pages websites are great in that case...
Option 2:
Portals or websites like Trip Adviser or more are helpful but one need to spend some major time there... I personally don’t think that many people are investing their time on building strong presence on these websites, although business with limited online marketing budget should focus here specially websites from travel, Real Estate and hotel niches.
I think service providers (this goes to me too) should invest more time building strong presence there because i think many people use these kind of portals before making any decision so I think building strong presence will make a difference.
Option 3:
This is the most interesting and time taking at the same time. Websites like SEOmoz who are the industry leaders in their particular niche but does not offer SEO services are great place where you can build your brand. This can be possible by being active in the community, commenting to daily blog posts, writing guest posts on the blog and building strong and communication with the community not only on the platform but on other channels like twitter facebook and emails.
This will help you build yourself as an expert within the community and you can get a chance to get more leads for your business.
Hope this helps, love to listen your point of view on this...
Justin my answer will be short and smile and i am pretty sure that you will not like it too much!
Now when you said you don’t have enough links, so you have two options left
Move for option one will make your condition worst, you might even fall from #11 spot (dangerous option)
Moving for option two might take a bit of a time like (a month or more) but you will move to page one with stability and you will make more money from it.
The choice is always yours but keep yourself updated with the result of each option available.
Francisco, depends which medium you like the most i mean reading or looking to videos... but if you prefer reading the very basic of PHP with examples and tutorials then i guess this guide by plusnet should help!
http://community.plus.net/library/website-design/a-beginners-guide-to-php/
In my opinion you still have to compete with them.. the only way i see you can out rank them is by having a country level domain like .co.in or similar!
how do you know that other website is not from India.. its like they are not hosted from the Indian IP?
I think not in this case... but if you have a country specific domain then this is quite possible!
Your question is not clear to me, so you want to say that if you have an Italian based website so that you can rank better in some keywords (may be location based) against your competitors although your DA/PA is lower than the competitor…
In my experience yes! But if you have more websites from the same country then you have to compete!
Having a lower number of links in OSE is common to everyone if you go to Majestic SEO you might find the accurate number of links.
Thanks Mark for the Google words and your insight about it but I am still not convinced with the ground realities...
Setting up a Geo target in Google webmaster cannot block you on other areas (this make no sense to me!). There is a strong possibility that US websites may not rank higher in UK search results but the website will be completely blocked (i don’t agree)
I have a website that has a preferred location as UAE and I can literally access that website from all regions... and on some general keywords it is ranking well in US although that is not my exact location...
Honestly Alexa, Compete or Quantcast all are the estimators and can be seriously wrong at times... I think there is no tool that can give you the exact data of traffic (this is the real beauty of the online marketing) but there are several things like organic rankings, what estimated traffic they can get and how they are performing in PPC and some other data can be found through tools like Keyword Spy and SEM Rush!
ccTLD and Sub directories both are valid but it is preferable to use subdirectory instead of ccTLD.
By the way duplicate content can be a huge issue in that case weather you go for anything ccTLD, sub directory and even the different domain.
I would highly recommend using the sub directory with a unique text in it! Or use the different language (same content under different language won’t be a problem!)
Although it’s not pretty common so I guess you should double check this on Open Site explorer or Majestic SEO and if this is really the case you should look deep in to things to find out what really is going on because this can be serious at times.
Although links does not have a direct impact on rankings because if you are building lousy links then rankings might not get a positive spike but if links are good then sure you can. You said you are seeing good rankings from the last 2 to 3 days so I think you should send some more days before come up to the conclusion and in the mean while continue building great links...
Google test things from time to time and this something causes a fluctuation on few of the key terms and websites that are ranking for those key terms...I think you should be too much possessive about rankings and should not really check tit on regular basis...
I think you should stop thinking about this for few days and then you will notice the rankings stabled at one point... normally fluctuations are the market of the process so don’t take this too seriously.
If you are going to select any particular region, you will never block from all other locations.. in my opinion, if you are going to select a targeted country this will help you with ranking better in that particular location but you will still be appearing in all regions and ranking for the organic terms accordingly.
I never heard that to buy a country level domain you should be the nationalist of that country and this is not true as far as my knowledge goes because I have bought different domains for different locations and never had a problem!
If you r target market is US then i would prefer you to go for .com domain but if you have any other specific country as a target then going for any ccTLD is a good idea.
hope this helps!
Oh, check this out its Spanish way of abbreviation check this out http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_US_abbreviated_in_Spanish_EEUU and you might have the better idea of it.
hope this helps!
Nakul, is right but also if you are using the wordpress then instead of going in to .htaccess use the redirection plugin!
I am not exactly sure but I guess its counting the word available in all parts of the page that includes header, sidebar, footer and more...
Also, it’s not only about exact keyword but if you are using the term with other words then it is also countable.
Hope this helps!
It’s always a good practice to have a IP of the same location as it builds the trust over search engine and audience and you can easily rank for keywords you want on that location based search engine.
For example if you have a US ip and want to rank for .com.ec then it will be quite a difficult job but instead of this if you have a IP address from Ecuador and want to rank for .com.ec then its relatively easy!
To be honest, I f i would be at your place I wouldn’t have used that and if it was available I would have delete it till now for few specific reasons...
Hope this helps!
Wordpress is indeed a great platform to go for your personal site and you will find tons and tons of resources for building website using wordpress.
I think reading too much will confuse you but this guide that i am dropping here is great as it covers almost all areas ofwordpress.
http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/download-build-your-own-wordpress-site
A little confused question so let me explain what I understand from this and then answer to you accordingly.
I think you mean to say that you have one website that is example.com.au and that is available on zen cart... and you are asking what if you load the same website on a .com domain so will your website get penalized in Google?
If this is exactly what you are asking then let me logically go for it.... duplicate content has no penalty but Google didn’t like it and that is why does not promote the duplicated content against the unique one...
So as far as the penalization is concern, I don’t think so but you might see a fluctuation in rankings and most probably you might not see good rankings for .com version as it will be the copied content!
I am not sure if it is optimism or not but history teach me to respect this BIG G because it evolves and get better with time... I understand as a business it’s a pain and make one frustrates but this is how the world is!
If you have a plan to move with the links then I would prefer to go with links the ethical way that are related to your subject and niche.
Justin, to be honest i am not here with te solution but some tips to you with my personal story...
I have been through this before and to be honest Google does contain the crap on the top for some of the extremely high competitive and business generation keywords.
Let me tell you my story! I was working hard to get the first page rankings for one of the most competitive keywords in my industry and guess what i was there on the 2<sup>nd</sup> page and then stuck, and was not moving forward and the most surprising thing is that on the first page there were around 4 to 5 websites that have nothing to do with that keyword but just because they have some advantages like exact match domain and lot of links from Chinese forums they were out ranking me and enjoying the traffic.
The only good deed I did was not to build junk link at that time and this was the only thing that later save us from penguin.
I agree that junk links on some areas are still winning but killing evil by getting evil is no point... i think you should focus on building quality link and you will beat them with the time... Google is constantly getting better so with the time you will out rank them and win the SERP ranking for desired keyphrases...
Hey Stefan,
You didn’t mentioned the version of Joomla you are using at the moment so it’s difficult to come up with the exact solution but why don’t you use URL redirection module
Check this out and this might help! http://www.seoeducation.in/how-to-redirect-url%E2%80%99s-in-joomla-with-sh404sef-module
Thanks!
I always recommend the simplest and shortest URL ideas to all my clients because this way a website user can easily guess what the page is about without getting in to page. The short and easy URLs are good with search engines and links as people can easily link to it and as short and clear URLs are SEO friendly you get the search love from it as well...
In your case i would highly recommend to go for the following URL scheme:
News:
http://www.domain.com/news/what-the-news-topic-is/7543
Download Section:
http://www.domain.com/downloads/file-for-download-8743/
Forum URLs:
http://www.domain.com/forum/whatever-thetheat-name-is/
This way you will get lot of search engine and user love. Remember to plan the redactions before you go for implementation or else you might face a SEO smack that would be hard to recover.
hope this helps...
Personally i never thought of this but logically there shouldn’t be any preference in it...i think if there is a lot of text available on the page then the page that load quicker will have more preference over the one that take more time than normal in loading the page.
Why shouldn’t be any difference is because either way you are helping user to get more information about the page and subject so it’s doesn’t matter that the text is available as hard coded or coming from the data base until there is no problem in indexing the content and page load time.
#justathought
Ok this answer is half so i am not really sure why it is appearing on every page of the website... there must be something wit the comment plug-in he is using... (I may be wrong on this)
But your real concern that Google will find it spamming... I don’t think so... and one of the reason is that your anchor text is similar to your domain name and this is one think that makes it natural...
I would recommend not using Blog Comment as a way to generate links on your site as Google will count as SPAM!
SEOmoz dose have a Rank checking tool and here is the link to it http://ranktracker.seomoz.org/
hope this helps! 
Ok, here are the few possibilities to see if anyone fits for you...
And if it is passing a 404 error that means the page is no more available on the website so the best thing you can do is to redirect the URL to index.html
To be honest its difficult to come up with any name but there are several things you can consider...
Search within the SEOmoz community... see what their activity rank is?... see how they perform in daily blog comments, in QnA section and select few... Talk to them...compare prices and services and i am sure you will find some one fit for you!
Pro tip: Cheap prices usually offer cheap services...