Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can definitely youtube some advice.  Is your hosting provided by a big name provider or do you manage your own server?

-Nick

Hi Edward,

The first thing I would do is sign up for google webmaster tools if you haven't already.  The next step is to submit a site-map to google tools to help get your content indexed.

Also it appears that your content is indexed, try searching for "www.traditional-cleaning.co.uk" or "traditional-cleaning.co.uk", you'll see your content is being displayed by google.  The site looks fantastic by the way!

The next step on your SEO adventure is going to be picking www.traditional-cleaning.co.uk OR traditional-cleaning.co.uk.  Depending on your hosting setup you can have www redirected via .htaccess or change www to a cname record in your dns to point to the non-www version.  The opposite is also an option if you'd like to keep the www but you don't want to use both interchangeably because it will created duplicate content.

That should give you some good things to get started on.  Let me know if you have any trouble.

Thanks,

-Nick

Any keyword that isn't on the main page is going to be really hard to get traffic from.  Think of the last time you went to the 50th page in google and clicked on something?  It doesn't happen.  The trick is to do keyword research and find long tail keywords that you can rank for.  Do you mind sharing which website we're talking about?

-Nick

Signed certificates do cost money but it's relatively low if you stick to providers like GoDaddy.  Verisign and Thawte are sometimes considered a "better certificate" as the companies carry more clout but most users won't know the difference and you'll certainly pay a difference.

https requires more overhead than traditional http because the content has to be encrypted in transit.  If you submit data like checkout details, address, name, etc it also has to be decrypted by the server before it can be interpreted.  The load is really minimal for most modern servers but it's worth mentioning if you plan to use slower hosting on a high traffic site.  It can become a real bottleneck on very high traffic sites as load balancers need to see decrypted traffic which requires the use of an ssl decrypting appliance in front of the load balancer.  -- Again most of this probably isn't relevant to you but it bears mentioning.

Server(website) ---> encrypted data ---> Your browser

-Nick

Hi Elaine,

Here's an article to get you pointed in the right direction.  Be careful with directories though, as I have a feeling google is going to get tougher and tougher on them as time goes on.  http://moz.com/blog/web-directory-submission-danger

Howdy,

I'm sorry to hear about your traffic drop!  Have you corrected the issues that caused the original traffic drop?  Mainly removing the sketchy backlinks and content that got you in trouble in the first place?  It's hard to get google traffic when you're on their bad-list.  Are you tracking keywords with MOZ?  How are you ranking for the keywords that are important to your niche?  If I were you I would concentrate on some keywords I thought I could realistically get into the number 1-5# spot on google with and see if that helps.  What about social pages and mentions?  Are you tracking those with MOZ?  The strong suite of MOZ in my opinion is that it puts all the main things any SEO pro would want to track in one spot.

Best of luck,

-Nick

Howdy,

Why not just make the store store.fireCompany.com and the main landing page just fireCompany.com.  You could keep the bespoke CMS if you don't want to tackle changing the store that way and use wordpress or whatever you prefer for the corporate/service page. 301 the old pages in your .htaccess file to the new address.  Basically you'd just be moving the store content from AwesomeFireDomain to store.AwesomeFireDomain and the less popular service stuff over to AwesomeFireDomain.  You'd have to make sure not to duplicate names with the whole 301 deal.  And your homepage on AwesomeFireDomain might lose some juice temporarily because the content may be less SEO friendly than what was there.

You could also go the other way with this which is even easier by doing corporate.AwesomeFireDomain.com and just leaving the store alone.  I'm always weary of mucking around with a domain and site that is producing.

That's just how I would handle it.  I'm sure some SEO pro will have a quicker, easier answer for you!

-Nick

Hi Daniel,

You are correct using canonical's is for content that is the same or very close to the same. Here's a good video from google themselves if you have 20 minutes to spare https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

-Nick

It sounds like google is giving juice to your domain for the inbound links but google's algorithm values the other page more.  Both pages seem a bit short and generic to me.  Admittedly I'm not a content expert but I would think a little more original text would help.  Also the links to all the different localities at the bottom of your target page feels spamy to me.  I know it's not actually spam but it feels icky that you have essentially a paragraph of anchor texts with 20 something links.

Best of luck,

-Nick

Howdy,

https vs http has no effect on pagerank.  If my site is FunkyChicken.com http://FunkyChicken.com and https://FunkyChicken.com would have the same rank assuming they are identical.  What Geoff said is important though, you don't want to have http:// and https:// with identical content because google will see these as separate sites with identical content.  If you must have http and https with identical content look into rel canonical https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

If you're going to do https make sure you use a real signed certificate so users don't get a warning about security when connecting.  Https isn't just for checkouts anymore it's a good practice if your site presents any semi-sensitive info to it's users because it lowers the chance of a man in the middle attack.  --This is the reason companies like facebook, twitter, etc are switching to https.  The drawback to https besides needing a signed certificate is going to be server performance if you are dealing with heavy traffic your site will require more hardware with https.

Just some food for thought,

-Nick

Hi Linck,

There's really no good reason to delete a 301 in my opinion.  I've deleted them in the past for the same reason and you'll get crawl errors in google and other engines.  Are the 301'd pages still indexed in the search engines.  Do they show up in google webmaster tools reports for crawled pages?  Even if they don't there's really no reason besides minimizing clutter to delete a 301.  A 301 redirect is a "permanently moved" but if somebody is still hitting the old page you'd want them to know that your content has moved, obviously.  Here's quick video from google if you're interested on 301's. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

Good luck,

-Nick

It sounds like google is giving juice to your domain for the inbound links but google's algorithm values the other page more.  Both pages seem a bit short and generic to me.  Admittedly I'm not a content expert but I would think a little more original text would help.  Also the links to all the different localities at the bottom of your target page feels spamy to me.  I know it's not actually spam but it feels icky that you have essentially a paragraph of anchor texts with 20 something links.

Best of luck,

-Nick

Howdy,

https vs http has no effect on pagerank.  If my site is FunkyChicken.com http://FunkyChicken.com and https://FunkyChicken.com would have the same rank assuming they are identical.  What Geoff said is important though, you don't want to have http:// and https:// with identical content because google will see these as separate sites with identical content.  If you must have http and https with identical content look into rel canonical https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

If you're going to do https make sure you use a real signed certificate so users don't get a warning about security when connecting.  Https isn't just for checkouts anymore it's a good practice if your site presents any semi-sensitive info to it's users because it lowers the chance of a man in the middle attack.  --This is the reason companies like facebook, twitter, etc are switching to https.  The drawback to https besides needing a signed certificate is going to be server performance if you are dealing with heavy traffic your site will require more hardware with https.

Just some food for thought,

-Nick

Howdy,

I'm sorry to hear about your traffic drop!  Have you corrected the issues that caused the original traffic drop?  Mainly removing the sketchy backlinks and content that got you in trouble in the first place?  It's hard to get google traffic when you're on their bad-list.  Are you tracking keywords with MOZ?  How are you ranking for the keywords that are important to your niche?  If I were you I would concentrate on some keywords I thought I could realistically get into the number 1-5# spot on google with and see if that helps.  What about social pages and mentions?  Are you tracking those with MOZ?  The strong suite of MOZ in my opinion is that it puts all the main things any SEO pro would want to track in one spot.

Best of luck,

-Nick

Hi Daniel,

You are correct using canonical's is for content that is the same or very close to the same. Here's a good video from google themselves if you have 20 minutes to spare https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

-Nick

Signed certificates do cost money but it's relatively low if you stick to providers like GoDaddy.  Verisign and Thawte are sometimes considered a "better certificate" as the companies carry more clout but most users won't know the difference and you'll certainly pay a difference.

https requires more overhead than traditional http because the content has to be encrypted in transit.  If you submit data like checkout details, address, name, etc it also has to be decrypted by the server before it can be interpreted.  The load is really minimal for most modern servers but it's worth mentioning if you plan to use slower hosting on a high traffic site.  It can become a real bottleneck on very high traffic sites as load balancers need to see decrypted traffic which requires the use of an ssl decrypting appliance in front of the load balancer.  -- Again most of this probably isn't relevant to you but it bears mentioning.

Server(website) ---> encrypted data ---> Your browser

-Nick

Hi Gary,

This is going to sound lame but.. create awesome content!  If your clients don't have a blog ask them to create one and make sure that interesting articles are added periodically.  Google loves original content and freshness.  I don't have any additional suggestions but I do have a word of caution on the paid directory listings.

Check out this fellow MOZers research http://moz.com/blog/web-directory-submission-danger  Seems as though google has something against directories lately.

Best of luck,

-Nick

Hi Carlos,

The best backlinks come from High Domain Authority sources with relevant content.  So if you sell watches, backlinks from a reputable watch company or blog with high DA would be best but links from a car company would mean less.  Basically you want the backlinks with the highest DA and relevant anchor text/content.  Multiple sources also mean more than multiple links from a single source.  While both are helpful, links from multiple sources is a signal to google and other engines that you're the talk of the town.

Best of luck,

-Nick

Hi Caroline,

Can your client 301 redirect all the pages from the other sites to the content on the main site?  Or does she simply want to banish the other sites and their content?  If she 301 redirects the content on the other sites to the corresponding content on main new site most of your hard earned SEO work should be maintained.  But if she's going to do anything that would result in www.website4.com/oldcontent creating a 404 than all your hard work will be lost.

Just my .02

-Nick

Carlos,

The best ratio would be as many different high DA sources as possible.  The first link from a new domain counts much more than subsequent ones.  Google doesn't seem to care as much about repeat links as new sources.  So ideally you would have backlinks from a bunch of high ranking root domains.  Multiple links do still count though, so don't totally abandon multiple links from the same source.  I personally believe building rapport with good sources is a nice bonus that can pay-off in spades down the road.

I saw in your original post that you were talking about pay for backlink services.  Just be careful that they are giving you quality links that are relevant to your content.  And obviously be careful that they aren't doing anything to violate googles terms of service.  Those types of services can come back to bite you later.

-N