Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There are varied opinions with regards to using CDN for media. But the general rule of thumb is to use CDN only if you have a massive number of images or media on your site. In that case, using CDN will certainly increase your site load speed, and as we know, loading speed is a ranking factor for SEO. However, if you do not have too many images in your site, setting up a CDN shouldn't be a priority of yours.

Even if you were to set up a CDN, you should take note of how to set it up properly on a self-hosted sub domain. Here's a guide that will be relevant to setting up a CDN: http://seo-hacker.com/implement-selfhosted-cdn-site-speed/

Hope that helps!

If you're adding a logo for the sake of preventing image theft, it might not be such a great idea. Watermarking your images won't necessarily prevent people from stealing them. Adding a logo to your images serves more to increase the exposure of your brand, when people view your images or share them across the web. Companies creating infographics would be a good example of that.

Here's an article that would be relevant to this topic: http://blog.photoshelter.com/2010/09/watermarks-protecting-your-images-or-damaging-your/

Hope that helps!

Hi Bryan,

There are various reasons to remove a product page from an eCommerce store. Before deciding to remove a product page, you should consider if removing it will in fact help your SEO. If not, you need to look into alternatives such as 301 redirects or informing visitors in the old product pages that the product is no longer available. I'm not sure why performing 301 redirects is not an option for you - you may want to consider trying to get access to do this.

We have written an article some time ago about the different scenarios an eCommerce store will face when deciding to remove old product pages, and how to deal with each scenario: http://blog.referralcandy.com/2011/12/14/how-to-remove-old-products/

Hope that helps!

Hi amitramani,

We have been looking at a couple of high traffic ecommerce websites and picking out common characteristics that make them work. Here's some tips we have compiled that should be relevant to you:

http://blog.referralcandy.com/2013/01/14/ecommerce-website-updates/

Hope the article will help and let me know if you need any further help with optimising your site design!

In fact, I would suggest working on your company blog instead of creating a new one. Even though the content on your company blog may not yet be optimal as an education resource, I'm sure your company blog has a current following which you can count on. If people are already following your company updates, the likelihood of them being interested in information related to your industry is quite high.

Work on creating quality educational posts that would be relevant to your target audience, alongside with your company updates. This would keep existing followers coming back for a fresh set of content, and attract potential customers through the educational posts.

Creating a new blog in this situation wouldn't benefit much. You would end up trying to optimise the new blog for SEO and having to attract the same group of people again, which I believe you already have in the company blog.

With regards to having lots of old unanswered posts that are of low quality, it will affect your SEO as I see it as "diluting" other strong content you may have in other threads. However, before deciding to delete them, you should look through each of them and judge if they are really of no value (e.g. spam posts).

Answered posts with useful information should definitely be kept. As for unanswered posts, if the question is still relevant and worth answering in your opinion, you can perhaps "bump" it up and recommend forummers to reply. It would be a waste to delete thoughtful questions. This way, you can tap on your old content to generate more discussions within your forum.

Hope that helps!

If I were you, I would certainly consider using image posts to generate maximum traffic. Image posts have been proven to generate more engagement than average posts in a study by Hubspot. In the case of a hotel reservation site, an attractive photo of the hotel would certainly catch the attention of people looking for accommodation for their travels.

Instead of uploading photos and descriptions of all 500 hotels at once, you should space out your posts. Featuring 1 or 2 hotels per day would be a good start. This way, you would have enough content to last you for several months and generating a constant stream of content will keep visitors coming back for more.

On top of image posts, you can also consider sharing thoughts and links to travel-related topics (eg. luxury travel since people booking hotels tend to have higher travel budgets). Giving offers for particular hotels or holding contests would also generate more engagement amongst your followers, since people are naturally attracted to deals and discounts.

Hope that helps!

I'd fill them out anyway- Google has been rolling out all sorts of interesting things, and there's probably going to be some sort of benefit to it. I'd assume that it gives you some sort of advantage over those of your competitors that don't take the trouble to do it. It shouldn't take too long, anyway!

Using black hat SEO for a small store is kind of like littering- it seems harmless, but it's a part of the problem.

Please don't do it. It's just ugly, deceitful and everybody is worse of for it. Search engines are getting smarter by the day, and they'll find you and punish you for it. Why not just do it the decent, responsible and respectful way? Don't support these underground industries.

I have to agree with you on making this move. Content that doesn't contribute to the quality of your site and receives minimal traffic should be removed. Besides ensuring the redirects are set properly, you can evaluate if these old content do actually make good material for future writing. It would be a waste to just delete them without any second thoughts. Some snippets of these old content can still prove useful and be spinned into new articles once you elaborate on them.

Using black hat SEO for a small store is kind of like littering- it seems harmless, but it's a part of the problem.

Please don't do it. It's just ugly, deceitful and everybody is worse of for it. Search engines are getting smarter by the day, and they'll find you and punish you for it. Why not just do it the decent, responsible and respectful way? Don't support these underground industries.

Hi Trenton,

If I understand correctly, you are restructuring your site to a product-centric structure, as compared to a location-centric structure? If that is the case, I certainly think this is a better structure. From what I see, you have similar content across each of your city site, which doesn't look good from a SEO perspective since they can be treated as duplicate content. If your company is offering the same range of products across several locations, it will be a good idea to focus on developing product pages as compared to city pages.

You may notice a slight drop in SERP temporarily by when changing your site structure, but with proper 301 redirects and some time, your SERP shouldn't be greatly affected. Consolidating information on your site will go a long way in improving your SERP in the long term.

Hope that helps!

If you're using Google+ to improve client engagement, you might want to consider using Hangouts On Air to interact with your clients. Possibilities to use Hangouts include customer service, webinars, conferences, software trainings, etc. Many companies (e.g. Dell, Cadbury, etc) have started to use Hangouts and met with success due to its easy-to-use nature and ability to share other content while video conferencing.

Changing to another channel for your marketing or customer service efforts may not be easy at the start, but in the long term, using Hangouts can reduce cost and generate more engagement.

Here's a link that might help you get started on Hangouts: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2013/06/24/heres-help-to-get-your-business-started-with-google-hangouts-on-air/

Hope that helps!

In fact, I would suggest working on your company blog instead of creating a new one. Even though the content on your company blog may not yet be optimal as an education resource, I'm sure your company blog has a current following which you can count on. If people are already following your company updates, the likelihood of them being interested in information related to your industry is quite high.

Work on creating quality educational posts that would be relevant to your target audience, alongside with your company updates. This would keep existing followers coming back for a fresh set of content, and attract potential customers through the educational posts.

Creating a new blog in this situation wouldn't benefit much. You would end up trying to optimise the new blog for SEO and having to attract the same group of people again, which I believe you already have in the company blog.

If I were you, I would consider switching to ToyZoo. Having 2 domains will require separate SEO efforts and Google will penalise you for having duplicate content on both sites. It wouldn't be worth the effort to try to make both sites "unique" in content. It would be a better idea to consolidate your SEO juice in just one domain for both your eCommerce and brick & mortar presence.

That being said, the act of changing domain name for rebranding purposes will affect your SE ranking temporarily. To minimise such effects, you would have to 1) Redirect PuzzleZoo pages to ToyZoo using 301 redirect, and 2) Use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster. Here's a link by Google that will help you: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105

Hope that helps!

Instead of using noindex or rel=canonical tags that would redirect link juice away from your page, how about summarising or highlighting important parts of these news articles and congregate them in one page instead? Individual links to the full articles can be placed after the summaries.

This way, I believe you can still achieve the purpose of showcasing good reviews about the company and keep the page ranked and searchable on Google.

If you're adding a logo for the sake of preventing image theft, it might not be such a great idea. Watermarking your images won't necessarily prevent people from stealing them. Adding a logo to your images serves more to increase the exposure of your brand, when people view your images or share them across the web. Companies creating infographics would be a good example of that.

Here's an article that would be relevant to this topic: http://blog.photoshelter.com/2010/09/watermarks-protecting-your-images-or-damaging-your/

Hope that helps!

It depends on how you link your blog posts to your sales pages. If you place a link to your sales page under every post, in the form of a sales pitch, readers will likely ignore it. However, if you write a blog post in relation to one of your products, and embed a text link within your post seamlessly, it is more likely that interested readers will click on the link to visit your sales page.

It would also help to include a link to your sales page in your sidebar, so that readers are aware that it is a company blog. Readers will therefore have greater confidence in purchasing your products if your blog posts are authoritative and helpful.

Synergy between your social media profiles is certainly important, as it makes your brand memorable. A consistent imagery throughout your profiles make it easier for visitors to familiarise with you. Familitarity encourages liking - customers who had a positive experience with you will be more likely to return; followers will recall your brand when they wish to buy a product that you offer in the future.

That being said, you don't have to use the same imagery across all your social media profiles, but colour consistency is a must. If you check out some of the top brands, you would realise they maintain the same colour profile throughout their social media accounts. Repeat your logo as much as possible too - your logo plays a significant role in branding and should be exposed in as many avenues as possible.

For fashion brands, it can be seen from Cath Kidston, Forever 21, H&M, that they are using their logo across all their profile pictures, and the same (if not similar) cover photos throughout. Even if they do use different imagery, they still maintain a constant colour feel throughout that represents the style of their clothing line.

Hope that helps!

Hi there,

As with what Kevin mentioned, I'm not sure why would want to include dummy links in your posts. The only plausible reason I can think of is that your website is teaching HTML or you are creating dummy design pages.

If you would like to ensure your posts are SEO optimised, you may want to include a rel="nofollow" tag in these dummy links, while linking them to actual websites that of irrelevance (e.g. linking to Google or an internal link). Adding this tag will tell search engines not to follow this link, which thereby won't affect your pagerank. This should help you get started if you have not used the tag before: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en