Welcome to the Q&A Forum

@pilesofpillows solid tip friend!

@gastonriera calm down mate. We have actually tested this at not seen any negative effect on any site we have done it on. It is the "easiest" option, but it won't cause the death and destruction your comment implies. Good day sir.

My understanding is they do look at H3 tags and valuate them as being higher emphasis than normal paragraph copy, however, they do not have a much "weight" in the on-page algorithm as the H1 or H2s. If having H3s makes sense for your page's content and helps the user better read and understand the content, I say H3s are positive and I would not hesitate to use them.

I would recommend cleaning them up. You can also try https://brokenlinkcheck.com/, which is free to use and crawls your whole website. Having broken links is bad for users and also is a bad signal for Google for your website's helpfulness.

Just took at look a the site and ran a Link Analysis in the Moz Link Explorer.

Technical Analysis: Https= Good, Site Speed is good (under 2 seconds according to Pingdom), 44 pages on the website (not bad for a local business), and 0 broken links found throughout the website according to BrokenLinkCheck.com

On-Site: Meta Titles & Description could use some help. Try editing the Meta Titles especially on pages you would like to rank on Google, the homepage and service pages especially. If you are trying to rank for "New Jersey" searches, ie "SEO New Jersey", mention New Jersey more in the copy, H2s on occasion, etc. I don't see the homepage or service pages mentioning it once, except for the "NJ" abbreviation in your footer address and it being on the back-end of your Home Page Meta Title.

**Off-Site: **The website has a pretty bare link profile as you mentioned, and unfortunately blogging every week is not going to compensate for not having inbound links, unless you are doing some hardcore outreach to get your posts linked to. I would put a focus on this, even if you start with simple high-quality directory or content sharing websites. Use the Moz Link Explorer to see what sites are linking to your competitors, then strategize on how to acquire some similar links.

Hope this helps and best of success to you!

Shorten and Redirect (With keeping the URL keyword-focused). If there is an opportunity for those website pages to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and spend a few minutes optimizing them as well.

You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one, and then re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.

We have seen good results from doing this on our website and it can be an easy win to bumping up rankings for those pages.

If you are on a Wordpress website there is an "All 404 to Homepage" Plugin that you can install for free that makes all 404 pages redirect to your homepage. This is what I have found to be the easiest solution to this, otherwise you can setup individual 301s from each broken URL to a relevant live URL.

Personally, I would still de-optimize the blog, just keep a notes document of before/after changes that you make during de-optimization, that way if the worst case scenario happens and neither page is ranking for your keyword, you can undo the de-optimization and look for another solution.

Also, after you de-optimize the post it may be worth it to utilize Google Search Console's Fetch & Render tool to request Google to re-index and crawl all of the direct links on the product page and blog page. This can sometimes work like a "refresh" to get Google to properly index both pages quicker. I would still wait like a week or so after you de-optimize the post page to see what happens.

Impossible to say for sure Tom, I would give it a go personally, especially if there is another keyword you want to target with the blog post. If Google is currently only allowing one page of your website to rank at one time for your keyword, de-optimizing one of the competing pages for that keyword should lead to more consistent ranking for the other page with all else being equal.

Depending on what type of website you have, usually, Tag Pages are automatically created when the tag is created. See an example of one here- https://seo-kansas-city.com/blog/tag/on-page-seo/, this is a tag that was automatically created via Wordpress when the tag "on page seo" was first added to a published blog post. Depending on how your website is setup you can either choose to not display tags on the sidebar, or condense your tags to be broader, so there are fewer used & listed.

One way to think about Tags is that they represent the "index" of your website, wheres Categories are like the "table of contents". You should also not add a tag page just for the sake of "tagging" it, you should do so because grouping posts by that particular tag will be useful to users on your website.

Hope this helps and best of success!

I would make sure your homepage is in Google's index first by searching "site:yourwebsite.com". If it is indexed, then work on building some internal and external links to it, making sure your Google My Business is linked to it, and then putting your brand name somewhere in the Meta Title and Meta Description of the homepage. This should help your homepage rank more for brand name searches.

Did you mean https://www.gizmocombat.com/? If you did, your website is live, but according to https://ismywebsitepenalized.com/gizmocombat.com, it is penalized by Google. You can get more insights on why if you set up and verify Google Search Console for your website and then look under Manual Actions.

In theory, it should result in your product page ranking more consistently. One way to help solidify your product pages rankings for your target keyword would be to add an anchor text link with your target keyword pointing to the product page within the blog post (which has more external links). This would help "transfer some authority" that the blog post has to the product page.

To be safe when making these changes to de-optimize the blog post, keep track of every change you make just in case you need to revert back to the way it was, and also keep track of the rankings for both the product page and blog post separately.

Hope this helps and best of success!

Hi Ross,

Several years ago we used to use Google+ with a mediocre level of engagement, but today it is mostly a dead social site. Google has even begun deleted profiles that are unused and appears to be showing signs of dissolving it completely in the near future. In my experience, I would advise you make sure you have a filled out profile on it (usually it will be tied to your Google My Business account), but then not invest a ton of time with posts after it is created.

Agree with Miriam, especially if you have a larger company or one that focuses on a national presence.

If you are looking for a local SEO expert, I would potentially be happy to help, as that is more of my specialty.

Another option if you want someone who is located in your city is to see if Upcity.com has a list of SEOs for your location.

I personally would do bulk 301 redirects for this, and would not anticipate a negative impact on organic traffic. If anything, you are shortening your URLs which is a good SEO practice, you could probably look at shortening the "thisistheblogpost" part of the URL at the same time you are creating your 301 redirects to make sure the URL is a short as possible, while still including the blog post's target keyword or phrase. Hope this helps and best of success!

Good to hear. Although this is solved, I did want to say the "Redirection" plugin is Wordpress is free and easy to use.

Best of success to you!

If there is an opportunity for those blog posts to rank for certain relevant searches, I absolutely think it would be worth it to go back in and optimize them. You can shorten the URLs, create 301 redirects from the old to the new ones, and re-optimize the blog posts as a whole, as well as add some internal links with pages you are wanting to improve rankings on.

No problem Neil, on-site SEO often makes me feel the same! It's easy to go from "following best SEO practices" to "over-optimization", and constant testing, checking results, and striving to always be learning what works today is essential. Best of success!

No problem. URL shortening with 301 redirects and making sure it is a keyword-focused URL path is a great way to often get some quick wins and improvements in rankings. Godspeed!

Hi Howard, to answer your question, in my experience 9 times out of 10 the answer is Yes.

An example of this is a page on our website that we were trying to rank for "PPC Kansas City".

Initially, our URL was https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/, but we then changed it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/ and added a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL.

This resulted in our rankings jumping from page 2 on Google to the top 3-5 positions on page 1 of Google. We also still rank in the top 3-5 for "google adwords kansas city" and "google adwords campaigns kansas city".

I would just be sure to be tracking the target keyword rankings for that page specifically before you make the change.

Hope this helps and best of success to you!

Very interesting situation Neil, it sounds like you did the right thing with looking at what the competition was doing, and then just making one change at a time, while using the Fetch & Render tool in GSC to see results faster.

While keyword density is a factor, Google is constantly trying to figure out the "searcher intent", and it is possible that adding this keyword in that seemed like a no-brainer changed Google's perspective of the page's "searcher intent". Just spitballing here of course, as there a ton of potential on-site factors at play. It sounds like you are on the right mindset though and I wouldn't totally throw keyword density out, just focus more on "content depth" and helping solve the searcher intent.

I would recommend Moz Link Explorer, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console. All 3 of these tools show referring domains.

If you are looking for 301 Redirects, use Ahrefs. They will show it on the left hand side of the overview section.

Agree with Vijay, I usually make the file name something like "company-logo.png" and then for the alt text do "Company Name- Keyword". You definitely don't want to be spammy with it though, and it's good to have your alt text be 7-8 words or less and be written so that they make sense if read to a blind person.

Hi Bob! I still consider Best of The Web to be a valid, credible directory that is worth listing your business in.

Although it is a paid directory as Nigel mentioned above, there is a way to get a listing free using a Moz Local Audit.

1. Go to https://moz.com/local/search and run a local listings audit on your business
2. Look For Best of The Web in the "Direct Network" section
3. If you don't have a listing with them and Moz is not having connectivity issues, click "Create Listing"
4. When you do the listing creation process on botw.org it will be Free due to being a Moz referral.

I am a big fan of Lure Creative's- http://lurecreative.com/, as well as https://www.agence-me.com. We are seeing a lot of awesome things done with website design and dev these last few years and it will be exciting to see what new developments come in the next year or two!

As Yaroslav mentioned above Google Keyword Planner is a good place to start. You can also check out or cross-reference search volume data with Moz's Keyword Explorer. I also like to use the Keywords Everywhere extension in Chrome.

This can be done by adding rel="nofollow" to the link's HTML code. See example below-

Before: Some Link

**After: **rel="nofollow">Some Link

Depending on what kind of website you have they may give you a checkbox or ask if you "want Google to follow this link". However adding the rel="nofollow" in the HTML code is probably the most universally applicable way to nofollow a link.

This depends greatly on the search query and what keywords you are targeting, for example, if you are writing an article on "how to eat chocolate covered bananas in outer space", you can probably rank your page on the 1st spot of Google with 0 links, even with a sub-par written article. However, the higher the competition, the more high-quality links are going to matter in my experience.

According to Google's Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the top 3 Google ranking factors- https://searchengineland.com/now-know-googles-top-three-search-ranking-factors-245882. Good content definitely comes before acquiring links, process-wise, but I believe links are just as important when it comes to ranking for competitive searches.

We will never know an exact percentage, but if already have great, in-depth, well-written content, act like links are 40-50% of the ranking equation & your efforts will be closer to being on-target than they are off.

If the blog posts have good user metrics on them (time on site, pages per session, etc.), it should, in theory, help your website rankings over time. The agency I work for has run into this as well, where the website traffic will increase, but leads will remain constant or won't increase near as much.

I say there is a positive benefit as your blog posts could get increase brand awareness, and maybe get referenced and linked to, which helps your overall website authority, but it is definitely a long game, and the short-term benefit will be very little.

If they have an SSL, I would use their https site, or you can just visit their website and copy and past whatever version displays.

Awesome feedback Ed! I have not read it yet personally, but it's on my list of books to get into in the next several months! Definitely a little bit more excited to read it now and appreciate your experience reading and insight on his book.

Kate,

Sorry, I should have clarified, when I say external link I mean a link on your website page that goes to a resource or website outside of your website. For example, you can link to a plumbing tips resource website, a Wikipedia page that defines an uncommon industry term you mention, or perhaps the state website for California, California tourism website, etc. So it is on your website that goes off of your website, but if it is a relevant external link Google can give you a slight boost in rankings.

Building inbound links (links outside of your website that point to your website) naturally with the naked URL is a great way to go. If you have original pictures, videos, or creative web design, I am a big fan of utilizing content sharing websites like Behance, Ello, and Visual.ly to build links. You can also find some high quality directories that are non-paid that provide dofollow links; such as TopRatedLocal, Contractors.org, ResellerRatings, and Company.com.

This resource poll is a little dated (2005), but I believe it is still relevant & is from Barry Schwartz's Search Engine Roundtable, which is considered a credible source in the search industry- https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002785.html.

Pulled directly from the SE Roundtable article, and in no order the most competitive industries for SEO are-

• Real Estate
• Mortgages
• Travel
• Web Site Design & Hosting
• Insurance
• Gifts & Gift Baskets
• Travel
• Pharma
• Porn & Sex Toys
• Any Popular Affiliate-Driven Industry In General

If I were to add one, I would say Home Remodeling/Construction has become fairly competitive in local SEO. Using Moz's Keyword Explorer can give more insight on this if you type in an industry term and then look at the difficulty score.

Hi William, great looking page by the way! Some optimization tests and adjustments I would make are:

• including "New York" in an H1 or one of the H2s on the page.
• Mention New York or NYC one or two more times throughout the page copy.
• If you have a New York address, it may be beneficial to include a Google Map Embed on the page of your location.
• Build Some Internal Links to The NYC page from your blog and other pages on your website.
• Build Some Inbound Links to the NYC page if possible (Use Moz Link Explorer for top ranking competitors sites for link building opportunities)
• Adjust Your Meta Title (It does say NYC, put it could be beneficial to mention New York as well), and you could try testing your meta title as "NYC Video Production Company: Videos For New York Businesses" as an example.
• Make sure your GMB is filled out and optimized with correct business categories.

Hope this helps and best of success!

One way to do it is to enter whatever you are URL you are plugging into the Link Explorer, then go to "Linking Domains" on the left-hand menu. Once there you can do a "Command + F", or whatever the search command is on your computer, and then search .gov or .edu to see if the URL you typed in has an .edu or .gov links pointing to it.

Although I would start with Moz's Link Explorer, this may be a good link search to cross-reference with Ahrefs, as they will show you if the Domain has any .gov or .edu links in the general overview once you enter a URL to analyze.

Posting on Linkedin won't directly affect your SEO or rankings. However, if you have a relevant blog post it is a good idea to share it with relevent hashtags to generate more referral traffic to your website.

For Website Speed: https://tools.pingdom.com/

For Backlink Profile & Authority: https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/home

For On-Site SEO: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

For Broken Links- http://brokenlinkcheck.com/broken-links.php

I would recommend focusing on on-site optimization first. For the example you used- "/california-plumbers", you can include "California Plumbers in the Meta Title and H1, as well as a couple times within the content. It may also help to include variations of your keyword such as "plumbing contractors in California" or "local California plumbing repair" in an H2 and throughout the copy. Adding images, a video, map embed, internal links, and external links on the page can also help to boost its relevance.

Once you feel the page is more optimized, but not spammy or keyword stuffed, you can build internal links to it from other pages on your website. Also, keep in mind that building high-quality links to your overall website and doing technical SEO things like improving your website speed can also have an inherited positive effect on the rankings of your internal pages.

Hope this helps and best of success!

Definitely recommend reading the blog from Dr. Pete above as well! A condensed answer is to write Meta Descriptions to encourage people to click on your listing while giving a relevant and quick, 1-2 sentence, synopsis of the content on the page. You can use a free tool like https://www.portent.com/serp-preview-tool to see what your Meta Description will look like (roughly) in a Google search result.

Yasss! So the past few years I have been a die-hard Ahrefs fan to be honest. However, the new Moz Link Explorer is my new favorite tool for link analysis by far. Well done on this tool and the stout index as well Moz team!

Like most things in SEO, it depends. There was an industry case study that Brian Dean often references, where they determined that shorter URLs tended to rank higher on Google. We have a personal example of this-

When trying to get our https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/google-adwords-campaigns/ to rank for the local term "PPC Kansas City", we decided to shorten the URL and include the keyword in it, with a proper 301 redirection in place from the old to the new URL, we changed it to https://seo-kansas-city.com/services/ppc/, which shortened the URL by about 25 characters.

Granted the keyword now being in the URL string helped us as well, but doing this one change took our Google ranking from the bottom of page 2 on Google to the middle of page 1 on Google, and we still rank on page 1 for "PPC Kansas City".

In summary, I am a believer in shorter, keyword-focused URLs and definitely recommend trying to shorten some if you can!

Hard to say without seeing the website. I would recommend having 500+ words on any page you want to rank on Google (may have to have more depending on competition). Sometimes there can be a misreading if you have written content with a widget that displays on a page vs having it directly on the specific page's content.

It is also important to remember that while the content length is important, I would argue content quality and content depth should be more of a focus. Check out this recent Moz post- https://moz.com/blog/influence-googles-ranking-factor.

While being an awesome free tool, It will take a while for the Moz OSE to show an update in your Root Domains, just based on what I have seen from their Index and Updates. In my opinion, the best option (although it is paid) for tracking improvements in new links/ newly linking root domains is Ahrefs.

I know SEMRush and Bright Local can do this, (not sure about Moz Pro?).

Check out the 14 Day free trial from Bright Local at https://www.brightlocal.com/local-search-rank-checker/, I believe they are the most affordable option, that I know of at least.

A good way to manually check Google Maps rankings for free (although time-consuming) is to sign out of your gmail/google account, then within Chrome, open an Incognito window, which you can do by pressing the three dots at the far right of your extensions section. Do the search from the Incognito window and you can Block or Allow Google knowing your location once you do the search.

I don't imagine it will negatively affect SEO, and in fact, brackets and parentheses have been shown to increase CTR when in a Meta Title Tag. If you implement this I would only do it a few pages to test it, and keep track of the rankings and analytics for those pages specifically. If rankings and Analytics are the same or better, you should be good to implement it on Product Pages.

I would do the Press Release first, then you can change the content around, maybe add a couple paragraphs and add it to your blog if you want. Just be careful not to add many links back to your website in your press release, we usually only do 1 brand anchor link if anything.

Best paid is SEMRush in my opinion, but it is also very expensive. I believe Moz Pro can do this as well, and you can also set up Google Alerts for your brand name for free.

I believe "URL" is the page on your website that is 404ing/Broken, the "Referring URL" is the website someone found your URL on and clicked through to. For example, if you had a broken link on a Facebook post you did, it would show the URL as "yourwebsite.com/examply" (broken link) and the Referring URL would be "facebook.com/yourprofile".