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my ultimate answer would be the same

I am actually happy that you are not one of those who believe that the importance of website is nothing but a company display! When you are redesigning your website this time you probably should consider the following things in-mind regardless of what CMS systems you use and what kind of design you have.

-          It should not take 3 to 5 seconds for your website to display its first page to your target audience.

-          Design and navigation should be easy enough for a visitor to continue their journey on the website instead of bouncing right after landing on the website.

-          Clear call to action so that he can easily convert in to lead and customer if he wants.

There are more ideas as well. Here is the checklist from hubspot that you should consider important when redesigning your website. http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/file-13220778-pdf/docs/ebooks/10-step-checklist-website-redesign.pdf

If you managed to create your website using this checklist not only your search engine visibility gets better but it will also help you increase your conversion rate as well as your website will be much more user friendly as it is at the moment.

Hope this help!

Hi John,

Here are a few reasons why you got a "0 percent link acquisition rate":

• The email pitches are all self-promotional (doesn't add any value to the recipients). You may want to try sending an email and just simply describing your content, then ask the target if he wants to see the page. Give him the link (if the content is uniquely useful, he will not hesitate to link to you).
• The potential linker is not interested to your content (you need to qualify your list of link prospects before sending emails to them). Make sure that the people you want to reach out to are interested to see, share and even link to your content.
• No pre-engagement activities. Tap into the radars of your target linkers first. Comment on their latest blog posts (with value-added insights) and subscribe to their email lists. This way you can increase the odds of getting a link from the prospect since you're not a stranger anymore to him/her. Check out this resource for more tips.

Happy linking!

Hi Mack,

For less developed markets, acquiring links would really cost you some money either in developing a content asset that is targeted to tangent industries (not just to the specific industry where the website belongs) or in setting up scholarship programs that aims to provide value to community user in that niche.

In fact, you don't need to tell the webmaster to link to you from their pages, if you know that student discounts is what the .edu/.gov site is interested about, then it won't be difficult for you to get links from them.

You may want to check out this post for more link building tips for boring/difficult industries: http://digitalphilippines.net/link-building

Cheers!

I highly recommend LinkCore Media, it's a link development and content marketing agency that specializes in high quality link building services to local and offshore clients. It was founded by Venchito Tampon. If you want to learn more about their link building services, you can check out this page.

I am not sure if you are looking for a full time job or asking for people to work as a freelancer but if its a full time let me know and I will refer you a guy who is smart when it comes to local SEO.

Hope this helps!

I believe Wedding Photography is a competitive keyword and ranking on local for this kind of keyword we need to think and act beyond basics.

Miriam Ellis did a great post on Moz that illustrates guide on local SEO rankings: http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide

Please take a look and go from there accordingly.

Hope this helps!

I wrote a detailed post on SEMRush that talks about step by step research in order to come up with the list of keywords that are money making or help you get quality traffic and leads from search engine.

http://www.semrush.com/blog/publications/judge-value-keywords-business/

Go through the post and you will have a better idea. SEMRUsh does have limited countries but I think Google Keyword planner can help better in this regards.

Hope this helps!

Jonathan, the best way to start is by placing the problems at the front of you and see what problems are important and whose solutions are not easily available. When you say audit, the first thing that comes in to my mind is Screaming Frog. If you can make something more amazing and detailed then screaming Frog you should go for it.

Same goes for others. The idea is simple, place the problems at the front of you, think about the solution you have, see what other products offer the same and see if you can come up with a better option.

If you are going to come up with yet another product in the market, you will not survive in the market for a longer period of time.

Just a thought!

Ok, this is how I look at the situation.

1. ABC.com
2. ABC.com/index.php

So you have two URLs and the question is either to redirect301 or use canonical? In my opinion 301 is a better solution and this is because it will not only redirect people to the preferred version but the link value as well.

Whereas, with canonicals only search engines will know what is the preferred page but it will not transfer the link value which can help you with organic rankings.

Hope this helps!

Looking at the snapshots and the description I think this is not really a big problem! As you moved to a new server, it is normal for a crawling rate to go high (talking from the personal experience). And as you said you have moved to a new server so it will take a bit of a time before that yellow will turn in to green again.

Hope this helps!

OK, there may be other factors as well but yes exact match domain do have an impact not huge but they do have the power to outreach if all other things are working along.

I think this is what you should do:

-          Audit the website and see how many total links they have and how many are coming from quality sources. Compare it with your link profile and see if this is the problem

-          Another Research why they out rank you can be the quality of content on their website as compare to on your website. You can improve the quality by rewriting content plus adding some additional informative content.

-          Check social and compare it with yours.

Ideally, perform the complete website audit for both websites and if data says you are better it’s just the matter of time that you will again rank and the competitor will either go down or will completely go out from the search results.

Hope this helps!

True, no matter what the platform is if the Meta description is identical to the description of the product on the page it will not be considered as duplicate content but if the product page content is identical to some other page within or outside the website that will be considered as duplicate content.

Hope this helps!

Re-launch s directly proportional to traffic loss but proper planning and launching strategy can help you keep this drop to minimum.

If you are relaunching with keeping everything document, redirections, 404, content updates and more than this temporary dip can be minimum for a small amount of time.

Whenever relaunching it is important to keep few things in mind

-          Get a PR for the relaunch

-          Get new quality links back to the profile

-          Update new content more actively.

This will give Google a hint that you are serious about your business and people wants to see you more in SERP results.

Hope this helps!

I agree with Sage!

Never shift a website from one country to another country by myself but let me tell you what theory tells us.

-          Map Changing

If you website was associated to any business registered in Google Maps and other yellow pages than you carefully need to remove all listings and re-register it on another country. These will defiantly going to hurt your rankings on specific country where you were ranking before.

The problem is results for every country are different from others so if the rankings didn’t really changed (most probably it will fluctuate for local keywords) the rankings that you had in US will not be the same in AU.

What you should be doing.

1. Change your NAP and Re-register your maps in Google and other Yellow pages.
2. Update content accordingly
3. Get new links from .AU domains
4. Change your targeted country in Google Webmaster Tool
5. Get links from local keywords

And you will see your rankings will start appearing in google.com.au

Hope this helps!

Thanks Tomas,

I was trying to come up with a detailed answer but nothing was making sense to me at that time. Kudoos to you as you covered all the possible questions

http://www.redirect-checker.org/ This is the website. Just enter your URL and it will show you the status code of it.

As simple as that!

In your given scenario the best idea is to leave a message a t the top of the page that the product is discontinued and for new products take them to the new products page. Leaving them no follow or follow is up to you.

1. If you will leave them follow with a custom message that will take them to a relevant page will help decrease the overall bounce rate of the website.
2. If you no-follow them it slowly and gradually will be no index from the Google and the traffic that was coming from search engine to those pages will be discounted.

If I would be at your place, I would have designed the powerful message with bright color at the top of the page and will leave them follow as this will allow some of the traffic on that page to move to other areas of the website.

Hope this helps!

Having an identical image and page name didn’t sounds spammy to me at all but if your page will contain the same keywords everywhere in title, description, h1 and more than obviously it will become spammy and it will hurt your rankings from the desired key phrases.

Hope this helps!

I seriously do not understand your question. Can you please try to be a little more specific about your question so that I can answer accordingly!

Please consider!

Talking from the experience, if the content is good, link profile is legit then EMD always help you stay on top as compare to competitors who are using brand names in their domain name.

Hope this helps!

What is your point? Having too many internal links on the page (automatically) or no external link on the page? I mean having internal links on the page is a fine strategy (not sure about too many) but having external links is always a plus point as you are showing your audience that you are open and ready to recommend others on your website.

This has ranking benefits to an extent too.

Hope this helps!

Hey Wayne,

Again there is no rule for it but the censorship and keeping the article quality alive is in your hand. I have seen articles that contain 5 links in total and still contain the quality on the other hand there are articles where 2 links does not make sense.

You said 5 link all going to one money making site, this sounds fishy to me!

Hope this helps!

There are tools that uses Cloud based IP so that they can get result exact from that location that includes tools like advanced web rankings and Rank Watch.

Try any of these tools and I think you will be able to see the results from certain locations.

Hope this helps!

P.S. VPN is also a good option!

There are really tons of SEO companies offering snake oil services. When people ask me how to find a good SEO company I give them a step by step process and here is what it looks like:

-          If you have a big budget, Moz have the list of companies “List of Recommended Companies” just go there and choose anyone of them and you probably will find the one you are ideally looking for.

-          If you have a small budget lesser then $1000 a month most probably no good SEO company is going to touch you unless they are new and wants to build a reputation or you cut a good deal with them.

-          If you have decent budget, here is how you should go about it.

1. Choose the list of companies and check their expert level. Blog and their presence on social media will help you judge that.
2. Instead of email communication, try and talk to them over the skype and voice. Understand their vision and find out more about what they can do for you in terms of ranking and conversion.
3. How will they do it is very important. If they are not transparent and open about their process, cut them from the list, otherwise go for it.
4. Set clear goals and deliverables. We will provide you rankings and not sure about conversions is not a good deliverable. They should set goals everywhere that includes traffic, rankings as well as conversions.
5. Give them independence to do everything that gives your business a positive bump.

If any company you are in contact with is fulfilling all the requirements then you probably should go for it.

I looked in to your website and this is what I found within the first 30 seconds:

-          The website design is boring and does not allow audience to engage. My advice is to try A?B testing of your website design.

-          From the ranking perspective I don’t see many problems. You are ranking well for many keywords (just not only on the first page). You need someone to work hard for you and take these rankings to the first page of Google so that it starts converting.

-          Links are not bad either, just need to kill some links coming from Press release websites.

I think overall you are in a better situation than most. All you want is a company who can help you improve your website CRO areas plus hep you get the rankings on the first page of Google.

Hope this helps!

My advice is to redevelop the content of the ideal page and make it more keyword specific. Give internal link from the page which is ranking to the page which you ideally want it to rank.

Give another link to your site structure and see if you need any improvement on that level.

Also build some good links with anchor text that target your keyword and instead of the home page link should go back to that particular page.

Hope this helps!

I think in order to increase DA you need to link to different parts of the website with verity of different anchor text so if the link is making sense and coming from a decent and relevant website, you ideally should go for it.

Hope this help!

I believe Google have started considering sub domain as part of the main domain so multiple links of the same domain in the search results is hardly a chance and if you are seeing it, it’s a matter of time when this will change.

If you 301 redirect two pages the preferred version will get the links and authority of almost two pages but I am not sure how Google will take it when it comes to rankings as there are 200+ other signals that Google uses when ranking a website in search engines.

Ideally what you should be doing is considering your audience in mind before taking any action. If consolidating two pages as one will make a positive difference to audience, I believe you should go for it as audience comes first and search engine comes 2^nd.

Hope this helps!

Got it! will PM you the problems accordingly!

George, I guess you forgot to include the URL of the website you are trying to optimize and what keywords you ideally want to rank for but here are some general things you should be looking in your website.

(If Local) Your website should be included in all major map submission websites like Google Maps, Yahoo local and Bing Maps plus you should also include your business listings to yellow pages and data aggregator’s websites with the similar NAPs.

If you are a local business and want to rank for local keywords, than this guide can help you in the longer run: http://www.setalks.com/local-seo-answered/

Also if you are targeting other general terms, do let me know and I will reply to that accordingly.

Hope this helps!

The shortest and sweetest answer to this is YES!

Long tail keywords are the combination of (mostly) of few head keywords and when you link to long tail it automatically benefit your short tail keywords too.

Personally I was trying to optimize for bigcommerce premium themes and get some links with the same anchor text and as a result my client was appearing on the first page for both bigcommerce premium themes as well as bigcommerce themes.

Hope this helps!

Domain Authority is a signal by Moz.com and it works similar to Google Page Rank the only difference is that Google PR updates without a given date and DA updates after every month. In the last updated I have seen the drop of 3 numbers down from 40 to 37 so this happens from time to time and there is no problem with it.

For more information regarding this I am sure anyone from the Moz staff can help you with that.

Hope this helps!

For tactics and technique there are tons of blog that update on regular basis. I would suggest you to keep a close eye on Inbound.org and you will have all the best content in the digital marketing niche for that very day.

For SEO news and what is going on here are some of the blogs that I would recommend:

-          SERoundtable.com

-          SearchEngineland.com

-          Searchenginewatch.com

-          googleblog.blogspot.com

Forums include, Webmaster World Forum.

Hope this helps!

This is interesting that you are actually running an experiment within your industry. As per my research and daily random Google searches I do under different niches I see that this EMD technique works but the weight of it is not much like if someone have a better link profile and content he/she can easily outrank the website with exact match domain.

As far as your core question is concern, the stop word in the domain name should not hurt your experiment!!

My advice on experiment is to keep the link profile low at stage one to see if SERP changes without links on the website or at-least when the link profile is low. At Stage two build some good links back to the profile and see if you are outranking the website that is currently ranking.

I am not sure but sometimes websites with mediocre content contain such links that are hard to beat and that is why they managed main their position on money making keywords.

Best of luck for your experiment!

Regard,
Moosa Hemani.

I will totally agree with EGOL's idea. If the website speed time is fine you don't really have to go for all the non important code ethics and everything.

I will partially agree with essential-pest!

If I would be at your place, I would have contacted the site owner first and requested him to remove the link and incase or a positive reply bingo, but in-case of no or negative reply you will only left with one choice and that is to inform Google about your problem and you can do this via using disavow tool.

Hope this helps!

As far as I see your website I see images are getting indexed (not all of them but they are in the Google search index). Why are they not appearing in the search results when someone type in related keyword is a different question. If you are looking for that my advice would be to use proper, optimized and natural anchor text instead of targeting keywords all the time.

Also try to change the name of the images to something more relevant. “liposuction.jpg is much better than big-imagejpg”

Hope this helps!

This is a normal problem and I have accord this quite a few times on my blog. The best way to do that is to submit your sitemap in Google Webmaster tool and get social tweets and social likes on your website and you will see Google will start crawling your website in days!

Hope this helps!

Hello,

One of my clients wants to know what you guys think is the best solution. He sells 100's of templates a month that have a footer link on it pointing to our homepage.

Anchor links are "keyword" & "Brand Name" Some are different than others.

1. Do we update the templates so those are no-follow links in the footer?

2. Do we just make all the links to: Brand Name and have them follow?

I understand Brand Name is the business name but I am also afraid that Brand name is so close to the money making keyword in the industry and Google might think we are trying to game the system.

Looking for your expert opinions!

I dint see any problem with that! Using the same hosting company and a template hoster didn’t make much of the difference on rankings. Only thing you should make sure is that the content for both website shouldn’t be that much similar that I come under the thin content area.

Hope this helps!

Interesting question!

Canonical tags are used to inform search engine about the preferred version of the website when there are two identical pages available on the website and removing anyone of them is not possible.

If the page is not identical to any other page on the website not having a canonical tag or canonical tag of the same URL make sense to me but if the page is identical to some other page that which is preferred then you should include the URL of that page.

For example:

http://www.example.com/543256 is a unique page on the website then not having a canonical tag or having one with the same URL in the code both make sense but if page is identical to another URL let’s say: http://www.example.com/abc and the 2nd version is the preferred version in that case the first page should contain the preferred URL in the code of the first page.

It is kind of confusing but let me know if you need more help in this regards.

--

If the first para of the blog post is available on one page and the whole blog post is available on the different page then in most cases this will not be considered as a duplicate content.

Hope this helps!

It is very important redirect all the alternate versions of your home page to be permanently redirect to the preferred version of the home page. Search Engines ideally consider unique URLs to be a separate page on the website and if two different URLs contain the same content that will be considered as duplicate content which actually can hurt your SERP rankings.

For example:

-          http://www.example.com/xyz -          http://www.example.com.xyz.html

these two URLs are different in the eye of Google and if it displays the same content  that will be considered as duplicate content. In order to stay away from this problem you should set 301 redirects to all alternate versions of your home page.

Hope this helps!

There are two options in my opinion.

1. Use the same Meta description if they are helpful for your audience. I know this will create problem as far as the Google and SEO is concern but the importance of Meta description as a ranking factor is questionable so if it is helpful for user, you can take that risk.
2. Do not use Meta description at all. This way Google will pick any random Meta description from the content and I think as Google is someone who did that so there can be no legal restriction to it.

Hope this helps!

There should be no problem if two wordpress blogs are using separate data bases to and are under different folders but remember when you are making updates or changes in the website that you want to see all over the website and blog then you have to make all the chances twice.

For instance you are installing Google Analytics or any other plugin that you want to use all over the website then you have to make sure that the same GA has been installed on both folders in order to get the data of a complete website.

Hope this helps!

Ok, so this sounds funny to me because all giant search engines are a little different from each other but do not intersect each other which mean if you are optimizing correctly, you probably should get better rankings in all the 3 search engines that are Google, Bing and Yahoo!

If I would be at your place I would have convinced client to understand why Google is more important than Yahoo and at the same time I will do the competitor analysis of the websites who are above me and would have figured why they are outranking me on Yahoo!

Hope this helps!

The best places you can find what your competitors are up to in the adword world are SEMRush.com, Keyword Spy and few more. Another idea is to write your keywords in Google and see what of your competitors are in the ad results and at which position, analyze the importance of keyword (how many competitors are there at which positions) and create your list accordingly.

Hope this helps!