Hi there

This is heavily dependent on the industry and searches done by users historically.

One thing you can look into is Google Trends. Put in phrases or keywords that matter to your business and see the historical performance over the years. You can get the same idea through Google Keyword Planner.

You could also interview the client as well as their customers for seaonalities and get an idea of what they are searching for during peak seasons and off seasons. There may be opportunities there to write content and grow traffic during down periods that will help you for (potentially) years to come. Here's some great tips from experts.

Hope this all helps! Good luck!

Hi there

I added a few more resources - let me know if those work. Sorry, one of those "oh yeah!" moments after I posted!

Good luck!

Hi there

There's no right answer for this. You'll see homepages and sites ranking with little to no content, and some with novels. If you have images on your homepage, talk to your web development team about bring the text out of the images to live on top of it so it can be crawled. Also, mind your image optimization.

I would focus more on your bounce rate - if it's high, maybe you need some persuasion. Your analytics are your best friend here. You can also test different content or layouts.

Quicksprout has some great tips as well that don't discuss the length, but how much it takes you to persuade the user - there's no "best practice" length, it's just what you need to get your point across and what you need to get the user to continue to move through the site - check it out here.

I also highly suggest this resource from SEOBlog.

You should read through this ranking factors study from SearchMetrics where they break down the average amount of text/content on pages for the first ten results, just remember that this isn't universal or gospel, your audience and what they are searching for is a unique ballgame.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

I would ask if the link, and content it's linking from, is relevant to your site? If not, then it's not going to provide a valuable experience for those clicking through. Also, is this guy legit?

From there, I would read Google's link schemes resource. Make sure the link is nofollow and that all of your bases are covered and protected.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi John

Yes, I am not disagreeing at all and sorry if that was portrayed somehow - especially if I gave a "free for all" point of view - this was not my intent. I was just referencing Matt from the perspective of "does it matter?" in Rajiv's question.

I personally like pipes in my titles. As long as it's clean, speaks to the content, and consistent across the site in format, you should be all good.

Be good!

Hi there

This is going to require some research about your audience and what they may be searching for. No one knows your audience and business better than you, so you need to make sure that whatever you are putting in the titles are both the best representations of your user's searches and your website's content. Be natural, be real, and be specific.

When it comes to pipes and hyphens, it doesn't matter. Here's a video from Matt Cutts on the subject.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

I would make sure you mind your canonical tag, but I would also look into opportunities that search engines provide such hreflang and language tags. If you have translated variations of your site, you can also look into country targeting for both Google and Bing.

Here's some more information on international SEO if you need it.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

Rand had a great Whiteboard Friday on this a few months back called Subdomains vs. Subfolders, Rel Canonical vs. 301, and How to Structure Links for SEO. You should also check out Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands?

My first question would be if all the stores fall under the same brand? Or, are they all able to live on their own separate sites with their own branding? Reason being, if you have everything under one domain as subdirectories, everyone can benefit from the domain's authority.

I would review the resources above and see if those can help - there is a ton of great information. Let me know if it doesn't! Good luck!

Hi there

I would look into the following:
SEMRush - You can check out competitors in different regions / countries, how they rank, and what content of theirs in performing best. You can break this down by Google properties in different countries.
Majestic - See what kinds of links competitors are getting in different regions / countries, and what their top linked to content is. This will help you prioritize what content is working best and least for others in different regions.
International Keyword Research - A great webinar from Moz that discusses different tactics and processes for international keyword research. Lots of good information here.

Understand the basics of international SEO:
International SEO - Get the basic understanding of international SEO and how to approach your efforts.
International SEO Checklist - A great checklist with everything from strategy to measurement of your efforts.
Establishing Your International SEO Strategy - A great resource from SEER Interactive discussing different tips and ideas to have a successful internation SEO strategy. Includes content and understanding your audience.

Telling search engines regional targets:
Country Targeting (Google) - Target your region specific URLs for Google.
Geo-Targeting (Bing) - Target your region specific URLs for Bing.
Hreflang (Google) - Helps Google understand your alternate region website variants and how they relate to your main site.
Language Tags (Bing) - Helps Bing understand your alternate region website variants and how they relate to your main site.

Hope this all helps you! Good luck!

Hi there

For my vote, I say no.

The best way to assess potential backlinks are to ask the following questions:

• Does this link help my website?

• Does it send quality traffic?

• Is this link relevant to my website?

• Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?

• Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?

• If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?

• Are the links from directory templates? (example)

• Inspect URLs with blatant spam words

• Free

• Porn

• XXX

• Submit

• Directory

• Paid

• Links

• URL

• Sex

• etc.

• Check for multiple domains and URLs on the same IPs

• This can usually show link farms or spam

• Don't be quick to discount nofollow links - nofollow's do provide value, so as long as they pass your sniff test, don't remove them simply because of this tag

If you have to question a link or if it's worth obtaining, it's probably not worth obtaining in the first link. It's hard to explain, but a good link is something you just know is valuable when you see it, or one that you know is relevant enough to your website and fits perfectly in the content that it's linking from.

Directories like those you linked to here are only built for the reason of gaming the search engines and build mass amounts of links as quickly as possible. Google, and other search engines, understand this and are actively putting a stop to it and deranking sites with backlink profiles that contain fair amounts of these links.

My vote - avoid them - and acquire links naturally, it will benefit you so much more in the long run.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

I wrote a pretty indepth answer for a similar question that you can read here.

TL;DR - Rand also has a great Whiteboard Friday post on this subject called Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands?

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

A lot of this will come down to common sense and research. A couple of things I would point out:

Anchor text - Try and steer clear of exact match anchor text. It can trip spam filters if you have too much of that going on in your backlink profile. Try to make more use of branded anchor text. You can read morehere.

nofollow links - Don't disregard links because they are nofollow. They can be valuable and important, especially if that link is relevant to your business and helps expands your visibility to your audience. There's a great article here about nofollow.

PageRank - Google doesn't update this metric anymore. You can read more here. There are metrics elsewhere via OSE and more below that I list that you can find just as useful.

All in all - the best way to define a bad link is to use your own intuition and common sense:

• Does this link help my website?

• Is this link relevant to my website?

• Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?

• Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?

• If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?

• Are the links from directory templates? (example)

• Inspect URLs with blatant spam words

• Free

• Porn

• XXX

• Submit

• Directory

• Paid

• Links

• URL

• Sex

• etc.

• Check for multiple domains and URLs on the same IPs

• This can usually show link farms or spam

Google views backlinks as who you associate with. If you hang out with shady people, you're probably a shady person. If you hang out with intelligent people, people probably think you're intelligent. Same applies for Google.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Hi there

If you configured this properly, I wouldn't worry about this at all.

Check your internal links and sitemap to make sure that your URLs listed as a reflection of this www. version.

Beyond that, you're all good, no need to block non www.

Hope this helps! Good luck!