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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
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! 
One good way to start obtaining quality backlinks is to look for blogs or online magazines related to your niche and guest blog for them. Of course, you should be ensuring that your guest posts contain relevant and useful information, not just another method to promote your product, otherwise Google may just treat such backlinks as link-farming.
This article on guest blogging might be of interest to you: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2194396/How-Guest-Posting-Propelled-One-Site-From-0-to-100000-Customers
Another method which can potentially be explored is the idea of "collaborating" with other ecommerce stores that are related to yours. For example, since you are selling equestrian products, you can collaborate with stores that are selling health products for equestrian riders (not sure if there's such a thing, but it's just an example). You can have a mini-entry below your product pages that goes "Looking for health products to go with your training? Check out Shop B to complete your equestrian experience."
Likewise, if Shop B writes the same about your shop, you would be able to receive a backlink from their store. Better still, consumers coming through that backlink will likely fall within your target audience. This becomes a win-win for both stores.
Hope that helps!
Wow, that's a great site that you have! I really love the clean design and font choice - pleasing to the eyes and goes well with your decal products.
If there's one thing I can nitpick, you may want to do away with the carousel on your home page. It took me a while after arriving at your page to realise you are selling decals. Instead, use a photo of your most impressive decal, put a tagline (e.g. "Brighten up your house with our decal") and a large call-to-action (e.g. "Buy one for your house today"). I see that you offer samples, and in that case, your call-to-action can be "Order a sample today!".
I believe this will be more effective than flashing deals on the carousel, which visitors won't be interested in until you get them interested in your products first.
Hope that helps!
My recommendation would be to highlight any differences between this integration and your original app in the new landing page (e.g. feature comparison chart, pricing differences, etc). You can then provide links from the new landing page to your homepage when mentioning features of your original app. This would reduce the chances of having duplicate content, while maintaining a new landing page specific to the integration.
How about guest posting? Asking them to allow you to write a quality post on their site helps to build deeper relationships, which may come in handy in the future if you're looking for support and participation from sites within your niche. Moreover, guest posting lets you tap on the audience of other sites, and gets your name known out there.
Here's an article about how Buffer managed to propel itself to success with guest posting: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2194396/How-Guest-Posting-Propelled-One-Site-From-0-to-100000-Customers. Worth a read!
On top of email marketing, you can consider promoting it on your social media channels, and writing blog posts to promote your white paper. Treat it like one of your products, and market it the same way as you would normally do for your product. Here's a link that will be of relevance to you: http://www.benchmarkemail.com/blogs/detail/online-marketing-branding-how-to-market-your-white-paper
In terms of SEO, it would be preferable if you gave it a web-friendly url, which would help as a ranking factor, and easily shareable as a link. You would want your white paper to rank well on search engines too!
If I understand correctly, you will be writing different unique copies on different pages to promote the same product? It may pull off in the earlier stages, but I foresee it will be hard work to keep all of these pages up and running, without running into the risk of duplicate content. It would be easier to focus your efforts on just one site, and making it exceptional.
With regards to buying domains, it would be preferable to have keywords in them, but try to make it revolve around your client's brand rather than just keyword spamming. Google has been placing more and more emphasis on quality content from authoritative sources, which makes keywords in domains not as important as before.
Just to add on to Mike's response, it depends on how the description tabs are created. If each tab is created on a different page, then naturally Google will treat it as separate pages. However, if all the tabs are created on the same page, but CSS/AJAX is used to display each tab separately, then Google will still consider all the tabs to come from the same page.
Besides Googling, you can also check the page source code. If the content in all the tabs appear in the source code, they will all be crawled as a single page.
You would need to consider in this case, which Google+ page and YouTube channel to use. I don't think you would be able to merge them together, but you would be able to choose which YouTube channel you would like to link with your Google+ page.
If your client is a singer, it would be better to be using the YouTube account that she is currently uploading her videos to and linking it to the Google+ page. If she has not uploaded any videos, then using the channel automatically created through the Google+ page would save you some trouble.
As for the Google+ page, you should be using the one tied to the website. Authorship won't be that important for your client unless she is planning on writing content regularly. Using the one that is already optimised for SEO would be the wiser choice.
My 2 cents worth!
I personally use /%postname%/ in my Wordpress blogs.
Reasons for this:
You can manually edit the permalink of each post in Wordpress now, which makes it even easier to ensure you include keywords, and keep it short (in case you have a long postname).
Hope that helps!
Hi Christopher,
Just to add on to Vadim's suggestion, if you wish to disable attachment pages for your previous posts efficiently, you can install plugins to redirect attachment URLs to parent post URLs. This will reduce the chances of visitors going to your attachment pages unnecessarily.
One of such plugins is Wordpress SEO by Yoast, and the relevant option can be activated under the Permalinks tab. This post should be useful for you too: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-disable-image-attachment-pages-in-wordpress/
In the case of a tourism site, I would recommend having more content on the main pages than blog posts.
Since you are likely to have a fixed set of attractions, you would want to focus on perfecting the content for each of them and providing clear call to actions to attraction pages on your main pages. Blog posts on latest events or news can take up a certain section on your home page, but your main content should still be photos or links to attractions, transport, food, etc that drives visitors to information they require for a trip to St Augustine.
Perhaps a good way to get some inspiration is to take a look at some of the tourism sites for the top cities such as London, Singapore, Sydney, etc.
Hope that helps!
Comments made using Facebook Comments plugin can be indexed by Google, so akin to the default comment box, they are all considered as User-Generated Content and treated as positive social signals towards the SEO of the page. An advantage I can see from using Facebook comments is that users can share comments they made on their own profile, thereby exposing your comments to more people and encourage more people to comment on your page.
I'm not entirely sure if Google indexes all the Facebook comments made, or only the top comments. If the latter is true, it is a good sign since only popular (or quality) comments will be indexed as part of your page.
From a UX perspective, infinite scrolling will only work on certain type of sites (e.g. sites with lots of user-generated content that are short and concise). If users are expecting a never-ending list of info, such as Twitter, Facebook, this will be a good idea.
However, for an ecommerce store, infinite scrolling may not be ideal. What the end-users want is to obtain the most appropriate result, rather than a variety of results. Using infinite scrolling in this case will be counter-productive instead. Users may be put off by irrelevant results and may feel difficult controlling their experience on your store, amongst many other reasons.
There are reasons why Google has not implemented infinite scrolling for search results yet, and you should take these into account. Here's an article that may be useful to you: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/reach-a-definite-logical-end-using-infinite-scrolling/64008/
Hi Rachel,
If you're planning to put an About Us description with relevant links, with the aim of driving visitors to your product pages, I would recommend you putting it somewhere above the fold instead of putting it in the footer. The footer is the last thing the user will see when visiting your website, and is probably a better place to put links which are less important.
An exception to this I can think of is if you are running a blog where the latest posts play a more important role. In that case, putting an About Us description in the footer (e.g. Copyblogger) will be wise.
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 Yotpo to support reviews is definitely a good way to maximise the potential of user reviews on your eCommerce store. Rather than letting your customer reviews sit as secondary content on your product pages, you can share them on your social media profiles since consumers place a lot of trust on user-generated content. Moreover, given the number of "fake reviews" out there, it would be a good idea to verify if your reviewers are actual buyers.
I have recently written a review with regards to harnessing the power of customer reviews, with special mention to how Yotpo can help eCommerce retailers in doing that: http://blog.referralcandy.com/2013/08/13/yotpo/
Hope that helps!
I think it would be a good idea to redirect your select-location page to your new homepage. You will be able to take advantage of the link juice obtained, before Google re-indexes your pages. Moreover, doing a redirect is better than directing your visitors to a 404 page - they will be annoyed with the latter and likely to leave your site immediately.
If I may suggest, start with stripping the date from your URLs and 301 redirect them to the updated URL.
As for your content, ensure you have headings such as "The definite guide to ..." / "The 2013 guide to ..." to signal to visitors that your content is updated. You can also try " ... (Updated Aug 2013)" in your header. Updates should be summarised and listed on the top of your posts so that visitors immediately know that your content has been regularly updated.
With that, the date snippets in SERPs will not appear to be old, and may in fact help to establish the authority of your post, since the post has been created a few years ago and has been regularly updated.
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!
If you are referring to a category page such as the link you provided, I would go for:
H1: Product Category
H2: Product Names
You probably won't need H3 or H4. Header tags should only be used for headings and subheadings, which means fields like product copy and prices should go under
or
.
This discussion over here might give you more perspective: http://www.webmasterworld.com/ecommerce/4292160.htm
Hi pikka,
I believe there is no fixed rule for the name of the subfolder. However, it would be useful to keep it consistent (es-es, en-gb, de-at) and short. There's a question previously on Moz that dealt with this: http://moz.com/community/q/best-url-structure-for-multinational-multilingual-websites
Hope that helps
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!
On top of creating a content page and organising the projects into various categories, you may want to consider featuring the best few projects in the main page. You would want to impress visitors the first thing upon arriving at the portfolio, and having over 100 project links of various types won't be a good idea.
Not to forget, don't overcram the main page with project images. As the saying goes, "less is more". A select few projects images will be enough to attract interested visitors and they would naturally delve deeper into the portfolio through the links and categories.
As of now, using latin characters for URLs is still the popular choice for international sites, as non-latin characters in URLS is still not yet widely supported and recognised. Since we do know that keywords in URL is a ranking factor (albeit not a huge one), it would be wise to stick to latin-characters for now from a SEO perspective. Moreover, it would be much easier to type and recognise a URL with latin characters rather than the one given above.
The best strategy for now is to ensure your page titles contain the keywords (in thai) that you want, since the page titles is going to affect click-through rates much more than localised urls.
Here's an article that might be useful in your case: http://searchengineland.com/should-you-transliterate-your-brand-for-international-seo-130966
Hope that helps!
It doesn't matter whether you use WWW or non-WWW, but what matters is to use only ONE of them, and redirect the other to the one that you are using. Even if you may face a slight fall in rankings, you will want to consolidate your SEO juice in one domain, which will beneficial in the long run.
Yes, pointing the canonical tags on your landing pages or specific campaign pages to your original page which is this should do the job:
If you believe your old site does not have much SEO value and a rebranding of your company would help, I believe it would be a good idea to go ahead. However, you mentioned that you plan on going into social media and content marketing. In that case, roidirectmail.com may not be a good representation of the services you are offering? roisolutions.com or the original site name sounds like a better representation to me.
Even if your old site does not have much search traffic, you should consider doing a 301 redirect of your old site to the new site. You would want any possible visitors to your old site to be redirected to your new site, and not be lost in a sea of 404 pages.
Too many internal links is no doubt a bad thing which should be corrected as soon as possible. While there is no magic number you need to adhere to, you will want to keep your internal links to as small a number as possible. The main reason for this is because the more links you have, the lesser pagerank you are going to pass to each link (read more about that here: http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many).
Find out where does all the internal links actually link to, and decide which ones you don't want to pass link juice to and eliminate those links. If all these internal links are a result of your CMS, you might want to consider changing to another CMS.