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.

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.

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!

Most data found online focus on the general public, rather than a specific group of people. While the general trend of posting on weekdays during lunch time applies, you might want to look into which times are your target audience most likely to be on Youtube.

One way to get started would be to look at what times are most of your followers are active on Facebook (through Facebook Page Insights) and Twitter (several analytics program available). From there, you would be able to gauge which time would be the best to upload your videos for maximum viewership.

Hope that helps!

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.

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!

Sitemaps won't affect your SERP greatly, but it will help to speed up the crawling process on your website. I'm not sure why you have sitemap for only 1 category. For the sake of completeness, why not just have sitemaps for the entire site? Its not that hard to set up a sitemap.

At the end of the day, one thing we know for sure is that Google+ will play an increasingly important role in search rankings. Google's foray into Authorship and how it optimises G+ for SEO are clear signs that Google wants to increase the correlation between G+ and its search engine.

Focusing on getting +1s is like trying to get a lot of Facebook likes, which we know is a factor that can be easily "gamed" by buying likes. Google will surely know better than that to give a disproportionately high weightage on the number of +1s.

The same old adage should still apply: Focus on generating interesting quality content. But don't forget about sharing it and trying to generate a discussion on G+, which will help in your SEO.

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.

I believe Google constantly updates its algorithms "quietly" to detect structured data. While they have listed several schema markups you can use now (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en), they are always finding new ways to detect them naturally (e.g. table/lists HTML tags in this case), without explicitly informing the users.

The best way forward is to format your site's data in the most semantic way possible, which will likely increase your chances of Google picking them up when they update their structured data detection algorithms.

Just my two cents

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.

If you have only just launched the new version of your mobile site, it may take some time before Google indexes it and detects that there are duplicate content with your previous version. Google bot doesn't crawl all new sites instantly.

Just wondering, have you done anything to prevent duplicate content penalty, such as using rel="canonical" tag? Also, why not update your previous version instead of creating a different mobile site entirely?

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

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!

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.

While Parallax design can be a great experience for users, you will have to take into consideration its SEO consequences and page load speed. When implemented for an entire website, using a one page design will be problematic since you can only have one

tag. Flower Beauty's website solves this problem by loading multiple pages in one page, but at the cost of speed as vagish mentioned. You would also have to take into consideration that parallax design doesn't work well on mobile devices, and a separate mobile site will have to be created in that case.

I would recommend using Parallax design for specific pages only (e.g. product features page). It would load much faster if its just a one page design and you would definitely want to captivate your visitors in the product features page.

Here's a link that may be helpful to you when looking at SEO concerns: http://searchengineland.com/the-perils-of-parallax-design-for-seo-164919

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

Hi there,

I've not actually used Pods with Wordpress, but from the plugin description, it seems like the plugin create custom post types for you. I believe Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin works mostly for sites using the default posts and pages, which is why the plugin did not pick up the custom post types that you are using. In this case, you will have have to look into other SEO plugins or actually doing your own optimisation.

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!

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.

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.

I would go for a long post in view of both SEO and user experience actually.

In terms of SEO, breaking up content into very short articles will shorten the length of each page, which may not be seen positively by Google. This can work out if you have a really long article, but with reference to the link you provided, I feel it would be better if it can be all in one page.

From a user experience viewpoint, it can be quite annoying for users to be clicking several times just to read the entire article. You would also have to optimise each page to load quickly (e.g. Mashable gallery posts), otherwise it will drive people away easily after reading the first 2-3 pages.

Hi Tony,

From the way it looks, your domain name looks like an EMD, and it may not be easy for Google to recognise that it is your brand name. Having exact keywords can help in your SEO, but from a marketing perspective, it doesn't sound like a good brand name.

You should consider giving yourself a unique name instead. It doesn't have to be completely without keywords, but you can consider using portmanteaus, or combining a keyword with an existing word. Moz (used to be SEOmoz) or ReferralCandy (we provide a referral marketing platform for ecommerce retailers) are good examples of how keywords can be used harmoniously as brand names.

This article should be helpful to you: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-your-domain-name-will-impact-seo-social-media-marketing/62564/

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!

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.

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.

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

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 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!

Hi Brad,

If I were you, I think my first concern would be to gain control of the collection of websites. Losing the ability to update content on a website and trying to perform SEO on it is like trying to sell an old product. It may work in the short run, but I don't think it will work in the long run if the content is outdated.

Back to your main question, trying to get backlinks in this case can be a tough exercise. Have you considered promoting your content through social media? If you have quality content, it is likely that it would be picked up by your followers. Submitting your website to quality business directories (if your site is a business site) may also help you get some backlinks.

I agree with Chris, it depends on how "closely connected" your subdomains are. If you are sharing a lot of links in between the subdomains, then its likely that all the sites will be affected once detected by Google. However, do note that Google treats subdomain separately. This means that if you ensure the content in each of your subdomain is unique and perform different linking activities on them, it shouldn't be an issue.

On top of SEO concerns, if you are aiming to establish a review community under a common brand name, it would certainly be a good idea to use subdomains. For example, if a visitor looking for car reviews is impressed with your car review site, it is likely that he/she will look for healthcare reviews from your healthcare review site. One good example of this is Tutsplus, which has several subdomains under the giant umbrella of web development.

Hey Guy,

I'm not sure why you are thinking about stopping guest blogging activities. I believe guest blogging is still a great way to achieve greater brand exposure and obtain backlinks from authoritative sites within your niche.

Granted, Google has mentioned before that links in guest posts should be "nofollow"ed. If you are guest blogging in massive amounts for the sake of link building, then sure, you better nofollow your links. But if you write quality content of decent lengths, I don't see why Google will penalise you for linking back to your site.

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/

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/