Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Keri,

You never cease to be able to recall the good stuff. Funny, its been a busy week so am just getting to some of this. Great post here, thanks.

You will occasionally run into this and it could be that there is just a lot of activity at that time. If you keep getting the message contact support at help@seomoz.org

Yep, the good news for me is once i say it, its on to the next mountain to climb. So, climbing away. Thanks Doug,

I agree with your last sentence. My question would be: Is it then incumbent on those of us who are knowledgeable to teach as much as we can to business owners, etc. so that they at least have a better opportunity to make the right decision? 
Don't know if you saw the issues over the last couple of days with Bruce Clay and the PaidLocalInclusion.com, but because good SEO's scratched their heads and started posting info and questions, that site went down in less than 24 hours.
Hey, its like with kids, you have to realize they are going to skin their knees and get scammed from time to time, but if you give them enough info you may way mitigate some of the injuries.
Best to you,

Alan, that was good!

OK, Miriam, you have got to stop this! I only have so many thumbs!

Excellent,  super excellent info. I absolutely did not know this. I owe you a bottle of wine, glass of beer, diet soda, coffee any or all. I hope Robert-o has seen it as it is great.

I am wearing my Miriam rocks t-shirt today!

Best

That is the beauty Rob, they cannot convert our clients. Good point.

Thanks Andrea

I understand that with the Nigerian scams, etc. The difference here is that people in business are good at the business they are in. They do not have time to go out and learn SEO/SEM. They trust the person who seems to know and they hope they have not misplaced the trust. 
My issue is two fold: One, that these directory people do not know what they are talking about re SEO (yes, IMO) and they are trying to sell it by bringing in Johnny phone rep to bang the phone.

The second issue is that if you have an agency that does what we do and insures that the local listings are there for the client, etc. and we make sure the client is on you directory, make sure you don't call the client.

Frankly, all of us on Moz say that these directories are important and we have a whole list of them with their ranking value. http://www.seomoz.org/directories/local

I have even referred others to this list. I do not think it is the fault of the business if they  are not highly funded and are trying to do the best they can and SEO takes longer than other things sometimes to produce a result. They then go ohhh, this person says they can rank me first in Google.

I have never lost a client to any of these clowns and that is not the issue. I just think the client deserves better and so do we as an agency.

William, it must be the first of the month and everyone had the sales speech! I posted my question on Local directory jerks and yours followed!.

On a serious note though, this is a perfect reason we all need to push forward on the certification bandwagon. I am really considering paying the $3500 and signing up with Market Motive for SEO and then doing the same with Analytics. At this point, that seems to be the only thing that will prevent everyone from being an SEO expert.

Best to you,

OK, it'ssssssss RANT TIME!

I am quite accustom to clients sending me emails they have received stating how their site is not optimized and the spammer can get the site ranked number one on Google. They all have @Gmail.com so I am assuming that is a very large SEO firm. Occasionally I send them an email from an anonymous account asking about their site and phone number and they have neither due to exigent circumstances (I assume prison left them broke). But, I am ready to declare war on some local directories!

I have now had several clients call me regarding inquiries they received within minutes or days of local.com or merchant circle or SuperPages etc. having us post a listing for the client. Ten minutes ago, I get a call from a pleasant young fellow who introduced himself as being from Web.com. As he began to talk (or read) he stopped all of a sudden and said, "Oh, I see you do most of what we do....." I stated hold on a minute, now who are you with?" It finally came out that my local specialist had listed our company or changed our company with them a few days ago and they were calling to tell me how unoptimized we were." NOTE: I am always pleasant to the caller as they are just doing a job. I said, understand that what I am going to say is not about you, but about your company.

I sign up multiple clients with you which helps your business and you run around behind my back and tell them I did not do a good job and you can help them. They just need to leave me.

He responded, "Sir, we never recommend anyone leave a company." I said, I am sure you don't. In the end he stated that it probably was not a best practice to mess with people who bring your site business.

So, here is the question: Why do we put up with this crap?!?!?! When are we going to say: If you have a directory, be a directory and not a cover for a web sales firm?

Why don't we start a couple of directories that are exclusive to those who can answer basic SEO questions and have an email address with the same domain as their marketing web site. Why do we keep letting these clowns do this? Imagine, having built my wife a site, she comes in at the end of the day and says: "I got this call from these people who said the site was not optimized correctly and we are not ranking in Google?" That was Local.com, I believe.

My favorite was the rep who called and the more I questioned the SEO and ranking knowledge they were professing, she said: "I think I should let you speak to our Google expert." I said, Great. Three minutes later she returned to tell me he had gone to lunch and would call me back." I am still waiting.

Hope I hear from a few of you, sorry for the long rant. I do feel better now though

Vijay,

I would start with this from Danny Dover's blog on SEOmoz: The Beginner's Checklist for Small Business SEO

I would also have the SEOMoz Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet also from Danny Dover Note: Near the bottom just above the Tweet button is a downloadable PDF icon.

And here is the link for all the juicy SEOmoz information on SEO

These are all great tools.

Best

I would just really have to see the test and the data. Here is the issue as I see it:

First, someone who already knows the name of the site and is going there is a given they are ok with it. They are not searching for it per se (even though many still use search to go to a site), so CTR would be a given.

So, we are speaking of those searching for a given product. Let's say Oatmeal Cookies.

Assuming someone created Almond Oatmeal cookies and there were two people selling them: One bought the Almond-Oatmeal-Cookies.com domain and the other bought the AlmondOatmealCookies.com domain.

If I am the searcher for these cookies my friend, Doug, just PM'd me about, am I going to click on AlmondOatmealCookies.com if it is ranked third over the hyphenated version at two or four? Are most people going to do that for that one reason? I just have a hard time grasping that, but I learned a long time ago that in marketing never assume people are like you.

This also may be one of those that EGOL talks about where it is dealing with the minutiae of SEO that has very little impact on the result. I would allow that your CTR issue is the first time someone has made me think more about the issue. The, its spammy, argument is just not thought out enough for me.

As usual, all the best to you and yours!

Hey Doug, 
Gianluca had answered a question a long time ago using these and I could not find the question again after a 30 min search. Thanks,

Gianluca's point was that Google did not see hyphens as spam and not to worry about it as I recall.

I would personally use hyphens if there was a domain I wanted that was unavailable and the hyphenated version was. If I wanted it, I would obviously believe I had the ability to rank for it in the likelihood someone used the non hyphenated.

I was wondering, is there a nonexpertsexexchange.com?? I can understand getting a discount for having a novice over an expert, but this seems extreme;)

Best

Fabian

I need the url of the page this came from. When I looked at the site, every page I looked at had the canonical correct, but the first time I used mozbar on home page it did not show. When I inspected it, you had it in correctly. I went through 4 other pages and all show canonical is correct. 
I then ran on page report card and, again all is well. If you ran it in a campaign, just give me the url of the page that is not correct.

What it is saying usually means someone did something like inadvertently used the home page url for the canon on another, etc.

Best

Edit: here is On Page Report Card result for http://bbguard.com.ve/      attached as image.

There is no prob with the home page.

QEosn.png

JMarch

Not sure which provider you are using, but I just pulled up a client site and with four buttons (Twit. FB like, FB share,Plus one) we are pulling 112.8 after gzip. Before gzip we get 354.5kb.

If you could provide a bit more info, we will try to assist.

Best

Deng Bo

Without knowing the site it is impossible to tell you the issues or the time to recover. From what we see, it can take months even after you clean things up. Oddly, you state: The link building campaign is almost the same as before.

You don't state that you have changed anything. If it were me and I had been penalized, I would certainly not leave anything close to the same. If you think you have changed it and are following the GWMT guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration and wait. It can take months to get it back.

Otherwise, give us the url and we will all take a peek to see if we can assist.

Good Luck

AIGB,

First we need to know which page? IF you redirected www.example.com/old-page to www.example.com/new-page and you did so in the .htaccess file, then when using OSE, there are a couple of things to consider: First OSE crawls roughly once a month. The next is scheduled for Valentine's Day. So nothing will show up different prior to that. 
Next, once you make the change, it will not be instantaneous. We do this fairly often with redesigns on sites where we are taking over the site and doing the SEO. We just made the switch on one roughly two weeks ago and did a url to url switch (actually to a similar site/ same product). Today I notice that we are up slightly in PA and there are two new links on the new site.
Typically, it will take two to three months to see the majority of the juice on the new url. A law firm we changed in late August shows that all has moved to the new site and the site has higher DA and home page PA than the original. While the old site shows slightly reduced DA and PA (which it will lose over time). 
In OSE if you do the search on the old url, it will tell you that hey this redirects to new url. Do you want this or the old one? You can then look at either.
If you did this and it is showing a PA of 1 there is something not correct. I would need to see the two urls to be aware of what is happening. but you should not be seeing any change prior to the update unless the 301 was placed prior to the last one.

Best.

C Nature Travel

There are a lot of people who wonder about this. First, many of us thought the past year would show a real decrease in exact match domain name strength for SEO and I don't know that it has really changed that much. As to any value, there are simply two opinions: One group says it looks spammy the other says that it is easier to read.

We do SEO/SEM and WebDev/Design for clients. We have clients who have hyphens and those who don't and we do not see any appreciable difference. Frankly, as to "domain value" I do not really think there is a difference for a basic term. If it were branded it might be a bit different. If you have concerns as to value, buy both and 301 one to the other (your call as to which you have it finally resolve to).

In my opinion, neither has more SEO value. It is really up to you and your client. I like the hyphens for readability but, hey, I wear glasses.....

Have fun,

And there is talk about getting you to OJ's anonymous....

Info in the listing itself. So, make sure you have not used keyword stuffing or added city names in categories, etc. Then make sure you have 10 photos and several videos, etc. I always geotag photos, etc. Get some good shots of the storefront/office. Two or three at least.

best

Very well put. (As usual) Thanks so much,

David, hopefully you will see EGOL's reply. Best of luck.

EGOL,

You make a great point. My question is this: David says above that: None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.

I think his assumption is that by changing the url's to something (that appears to be from his example) more query oriented and optimized he will be able to impact this. Given that and given that a 301 will transfer 90% plus of the link juice, do you think he is served in making the change?

Curious as I respect your opinions.

And, 'mornin from Houston where we don't use no C's with our weather reportin' It's 61 (that's with an F).

Nightwing, you may also want to take a look at your overall on page SEO for the site. Every page has the same title tag, meta description and H1. At least the ones I looked at. A good place for you to start is with the Beginner's guide to SEO here on SEOmoz.

Chapter 4 talks about how to set up a page in terms of these key elements.

The Q&A will help you along as you have questions. Good luck.

Ahhh, Juice vs. Rank....

Imagine Page Rank as the orange of the Internet. (The fruit;not the color

So, a given orange (page) only holds so much juice. A page may have as many straws as is possible so long as you understand that the more straws there are the less juice to go through each straw. Soooo, if an orange holds 10 ounces of juice (roughly 300 ml. for my more metrically inclined friends) and, if there is only one person with a straw.... lucky lady gets the whole orange worth minus just a tad that sticks in the straw.

But, imagine a lot of people are needed to make the orange grow and develop juice and they all get a straw. So, now there are ten people with straws. They each get a bit less than one ounce (again, some sticks to the straw).

But wait, there is more to this breakfast time analogy..... Imagine there is one person who is really loved by the oranges! And the oranges each give that person a straw! Well, that person becomes Minute Maid (Big orange juice company) as it has a thousand straws from oranges that hold an ounce of juice to ten ounces. As the result they have the most orange juice in the world. Notice Chris' picture....that is orange juice! Really!!!

David,
First, as to your last sentence, I am assuming you are redirecting 20 urls that are "not optimal" to 20 new urls that are optimized. Such that your example above is one and another would be http://www.dog.com/food to http://www.dog.com/organic-raw-dog-food, etc. for approximately 20 urls.

If these follow the best practices (301's url to url in the .htaccess file) you should have no issue with the change. Understand that if the "poor" url /toys is ranking number 8 on page 1 of Google, and you do the redirect, it does not mean that you will rank for /chew-toys in the same place. For a short while you will likely continue to rank and then likely will fall off quickly.

Your new page will gain the link juice but not the ranking of the old.

We do a lot of site redesigns to bring them to SEO and CRO standards and therefore use a lot of 301's to maintain PA and grow it. We typically see the juice move over two to three months or more in a gradual fashion. An example is a site that we transferred every url for in late Aug. had about 170 links to its home page. Two months later, when looking at the old url there were only a couple showing and the links were showing on the new. So, it will change but not overnight.

Hope this helps

Leeg,

First, Good question. Second, what plug-in are you using?

After digesting your question, I went and looked at several of the plug ins for mobile that are avail for WP. The question is does the plugin serve up a separate page for mobile that has a subdomain different from what your site is? So, as it reconfigs the page for mobile, does it also in some way change the url to a mobile url like m.yoursite.com?(This is a best practice according to Matt Cutts)

From reading about one of them it states it can detect the "Googlebot-Mobile" so, I am assuming it is serving up this as the user agent and not the "Googlebot" as user agent. If this is so, then you should not have a problem with content being considered duplicate.

If there is nothing in the literature, I would ask the help desk depending on which plug in you are using.

Hope this helps.

As to link building, since the Dr.s have travelled, I would explore conventions, papers, etc they have been involved in.

As to my wife, I met her in a very exotic place: Men's Suits at Sax Fifth Avenue. She was in Dubai two years ago coming back from Syria or Egypt. Said it was...hot.

My best,

Great Russel,

First, I would improve the English on the site. Being a person who speaks some Spanish along with English and having a wife who is fluent in Arabic - read/write/speak - I know how it is easy to mess up grammar and syntax (or the structure of speaking). 
On this site, that would likely help a bit with conversions.

On the SEO, you have a page load problem and need to do some work on that. The easiest way to tell you is that you should download YSlow which will show you what is slowing the site down. For a site like yours, I usually test in Version 2.

Your on page SEO needs to improve and a note here (take out all the meta keywords in your WP - they are not necessary). Your alt text has a lot of image 1, etc. and icon is used a lot. This should be where you describe the image (don't load in a bunch of keywords).

You don't have a rel=canonical and you need that for each url so that you can avoid duplicate content issues, etc.

As I look at different pages, they have poor page titles: All services, VIP Services, etc. Inner pages lack H1, H2, etc.

One thing to look closely at is your meta descriptions: These should entice the customer to click on your page in the SERPs. Speak to the customer. There is no need to speak to the search engines as they are not listening....meta description is not part of the algo. But, if you are not getting a good CTR due to poor ones, it does IMHO effect the rankings.

Hope this helps,

Before I do, a quick question: Who is your main client: native English speakers who are in Dubai on business or travel or others who speak Arabic, Farsi, etc. but have English as a second language?

I think what you are asking is: What are considered the most important elements of SEO by search engines? Since the search engines don't necessarily print this, SEOmoz has surveyed the World of Moz and come up with a list of search engine ranking factors.

With slight variation, I agree with the community on most of these.

Good luck

Russel

I think you may need to check your premise: He is ranking because he has these back links.

I have learned that looking at someone who is a competitor and assuming they are ranking well just because of a certain set of links is not a good use of my time. I am better served using my time to insure I have quality links, have quality on site SEO, am learning every day, etc.

If he has reciprocal links, it does not matter as they are devalued by Google.

Without the url for your competitor and you it is hard to compare one to the other. OK, it is impossible.

Your question is very similar to the: "How is this site ranking for ______?"!!

If there are good links your competitor is using can you farm some of those yourself? Is your anchor text working for you? Etc.

Hope this helps a bit.

Matt,

If I knew that AOL labeled an IP address as a spam oriented IP, I would move my sites TODAY. In my opinion, if AOL has an issue with a site, even though AOL does not have the prominence it once did, I have to believe Google and Bing do too.

If you have a lot of spam coming from one IP they can block the entire IP. Even though your site was not spamming you are down.

Diane,

That was a nice bit of assistance from Ennovation so I thumbed it up.

One note here is that for some reason, someone has made all of this too difficult for you with your CMS. We use Joomla, our clients do not have these problems. (We have one client with 6 Joomla sites who can hardly turn on his computer) Somehow you are having to deal with code when you should not be.

Even if today you decided to put in a new logo image, change page titles, create new meta descriptions and change content, you should be able to do that without the need for the developer.

As it is, you are on Joomla 1.5 when 1.7 is out. You are using a program that cleans up urls when 1.6 took care of any issues. You are a publisher and you should be worried about publishing. Even in my firm, my people stay after me to do what I do - no, not SEO which is what got me here - clients and strategy which is what builds a company. I only do SEO about half as much as I did even a year ago. Publishers publish.

Talk with your developer and find out why you are having so many issues. If you cannot get it worked out in a few days (yes, I am serious), find a different developer. There are a lot of good developers on SEOmoz that actually reside in the U.K. (remember they do talk a bit funny). Read the ones that sound great and PM them. Engage a quality developer and make life simpler for you. 
Yes, if you like learning SEO, hang around with us and learn, but simplify first.

All the best,

On the picture of Demi Moore, you could have: Demi Moore, picture with article on breakup with Ashton Kucher. Is she seeing someone else?

That is fine. Just don't put a bunch of keywords in here.

Best

Off the top of my head I cannot think of a plug in that will categorize a name like King Kong and allow you to have a small icon with more on King Kong. Then when you mouse over, there would be 4 or 5 links to recent articles, etc. That would be a good way to do what you are thinking of.

If you have the seomoz toolbar, use the links tool to find internal links. Open the page analyzer and look at the top right. You will see icons: first is magnifying glass then a highlighting pen. Click on the pen and you will see followed, no followed, internal and external. On any page, click on internal and see what shows up. That will help you. Then when done do same and click on no highlighting. All is gone.

Hope this helps,

Diane, 
That is not a component we use, but I will try to be of assistance. I looked it up and read about it, but the info on SEO is entirely unclear on the demo. Have you looked at Global Configuration in your control panel? Could you send me a screen shot?

If you would prefer to PM me that is fine.

Vijay

First and most importantly is you have a huge problem with page load times. Huge. 
In YSlow you are grading out at a D. I have attached an image as the problems are too numerous to list. Your issue is because on home page you are close to timing out and on others you are not resolving at all. As I ran test, it was taking your Vimeo feed a loooonnnngggg time in the test. Don't know if that is part of problem or not. 
Given the issues and the title tags, etc. I don't see how you were ranking that highly. With a page load time of at least 10 seconds, you are not going to rank.

You need to add expires headers, need to move java script to the bottom of page, need a CDN, need to get rid of all the cookies, etc.

Even after the site was cached on my machine (new macpro 17 with solid state drive, 16 gigs of sdram, etc) it took over 8 seconds to load. This is the problem.

Keri had a great suggestion with checking in the main browsers for compatibility. I noticed in Chrome the video got to where it was hesitating a lot but not in firefox.

Another thought is since this in on a WP platform, did you by any chance change anything in the coding on the theme? Can't think of other reasons for page load problem and the absence of pages all together. I know that the only url I got to resolve was the home page.

Hope it helps.

rGlRy.png

Brett

I did not mean tell client you will do anything for free.

What I meant was, assuming your client has an associate in city X where there is no presence by client otherwise, you get your client to agree that you will go to their associate with a proposal to do the local for the associate in city X for no charge. The client would pay you for doing the work, the associate will now have a quality local presence in city X, and your client will be the main portion of the Places, Bing Bus.Port, etc in the city.

So, your client is BigMoneySvc.com, in city X their address would be that of the associate in X. You can name the associate in the listing. If the assoc. has their own website, that would be a problem, unless you agree to have a landing page on client site that links to assoc. site. (Assoc. gets link juice). So BigMoneySvc.com/xcity-associate-site.

If you use subdomain, you will get no push from the main site. If you use sub directory you will: Mainblog.com/Charlotte. With this, links to Charlotte will help root domain over time and links from root domain will help Charlotte.

If you buy exact match domains with or without hyphens your only issue is starting at level zero. Soooo...... that you have to figure out. Start at zero with new domain or sub domain, crate a page on main site that could be helped by mainsite DA, etc.

Hope I was helpful for you.

anything with should be empty. You do not need keyword meta tags in SEO today. (See my note below regarding all the coding)

For your meta description I am not sure who is telling you how to do this, but it is simple with a CMS like Joomla. You should have a place to put the meta description in without any need for coding. If you will use your SEOmoz tool bar and click on analyze page (use Firefox as Chrome picks up the twitter button), you will see that for this page, the following meta description is being sent out (bold is mine):

**  Soap Gossip.  Coronation Street fans will be shocked after evil Frank is found not guilty of raping Carla. The evil factory boss has his...**

Instead simply have Soap Gossip: Coronation Street.....Note:  after Carla. You can put something that is a call to action instead of evil boss line.... eg. Carla. Read the latest here at in2Town.co.UK!

As to the second url for the Female First: You should do better than them; here is what I would do with their meta description:

Instead of: Katy Perry is being comforted by a hunky dancer following her split from Russell Brand.

I would have: Is Katy Perry being comforted by a certain hunky dancer?? Read about Katy after the split from Russell Brand.

Also, I failed to mention earlier that the favicon on your site is a joomla favicon. Download a favicon plug in and have one that works for your site. (A lot of people are using the Joomla one.....even Joomla

I will answer the others shortly.

Best

Dogflog,

As to ranking regionally, as of this moment I know of no way to rank regionally per se. So, you could set up an East Coast Financial services page and try to rank for that term....probably not a lot of queries though.

As to your local, you may want to check your Bing listings if they were set up a while back and insure they are ok with Bing Business Portal change.

On the Suggestions for 8 states where we have no physical location? Since it is a financial services firm, do they have any associate relationships in these states? I handle a firm in equities/investments/etc. and they have about 50 associates. Those associates are in different cities and, if they do not have their own Places/BingBus.Portal, etc. pages, you might convince them that you would do their local for free if they let you set it up under you...

As to 2.a. At the end of the day, if you have no way of having a local listing you will have to optimize it as much as possible and live with the "7 pack" issue. Hopefully you will rank right after it. One question is how much effort will go into the blog, how much info, etc. If it is a quality site, you might be amazed at what you could do.

As to 2.b. If you don't have it as a mere extension with the same content, but allow it to be its own "regionalized" blog with regional issue content, I don't think it will detract from main. Obviously, without knowing url, etc. this advice has a caveat or two.

3. I am going to choose not to opine on the**"it has been documented that Google is now using the same algorithm for local, personal and personalized,"** and, instead will answer your question regarding linking: I believe especially in the vertical you describe that insuring your clients are getting and using reviews in the citation sites locally is paramount. That is where I would focus. I would make sure they were in at least 10 to 12 directory/citation sites and that the reviews were being posted.

Good luck, sounds like a fun project.

If you do not want to have two pages, one singular and one plural, I would set up my SEO for the one with the most queries if I thought I could handle the competition and rank for the term. If I felt I would have more chance of ranking and converting with the lesser queries, I might set it up for that.

One way I look at this is to do broad and exact match to see what the difference is on each term. As an exact match (see Andrew's response) Custom cases gets more than double the queries, but the broad match custom case wins 165K to 135K. My guess is that I would go with custom cases and I believe I would be served up more times in broad match. Just IMO.

With either case, I would also insure there was the opportunity to rank for both by including say an H2 on the secondary, etc. (also use that keyword within context in the page).

You, obviously, could set up two pages if you felt one would not dilute the other. I always worry about dilution on plurals though.

Best

Alan,

I love it when someone says "I don't know." It shows they are freakin' smart. You are. Good answer.

Diane,

I am going to try and help and hopefully some other mozzers will join in as there is a bit you need to deal with. First and foremost is that Joomla is a CMS that often causes problems with Meta Descriptions. Probably the most overused duplicate meta description on the web today is Joomla! - the dynamic portal engine and content management system. If you do a site:in2town.co.uk and look at the pages that are returned, you are going to immediately see two big issues in terms of those who are searching for lifestyle or gossip info: The Joomla! issue and the famous "lorem ipsum" issue. These are the pages where you have a page that has no content that should not be showing up and, unfortunately, are.

Since these are structural we will deal with them first: For the Joomla meta description: It is likely that you are set with the meta description being set globally (site wide) and in the article. If so, and if you do not set it in the article you will get the Joomla! meta description. I thought there was an issue with version 1.5 and found something on this: http://antezeta.com/news/joomla-seo-useless-meta-tags (look at mets descript.) If you update to version 1.6 this may help you.

Beyond that update, you should know that each article (page) needs its own meta description. This is NOT a place for saying lifestyle magazine over and over and should be limited to about 155 characters. When creating a new page, you want to insure a quality meta description is there: Think what would you want to read on the SERPs that would make you want to go to this page? If I look at yours, where it is not Joomla, it appears someone is trying to say Lifestyle Magazine over and over which is not a good meta description. NOTE: The meta description does not influence SEO with the exception of any influence that CTR has. CTR - click through rate -  is influenced by the meta description. Look at what some of your top competitors have and you will see why someone would click on them.

When we set up sites with Joomla as CMS, we set the meta description only on the article (page) level. There are many SEO plugins for Joomla and depending on which you are using, there could be additional settings there. Make sure you have all for setting at page level.

The meta description is what a searcher sees when they put in the term lifestyle magazine. As it is yours is not good and you are at number 10 currently on Google.co.uk on non personalized search. Your click through rate may be part of the reason why.

For the Lorem Ipsum, have your webmaster remove the template pages that are empty or sample pages. Have him do a site:url to find them.

Ok, sorry but part two is the duplicate content. I know that gossip mags pull from one another, but with the changes the last year at Google, you may need to stop if you want to rank. I took random pages and articles and found you and a lot of others using the same first sentence or first two sentences. If you want it to be fresher than the others and have the option to rank higher, you may want to invest in a good copy writer.

Also, you have pages with literally hundreds of internal links which if of no use to you. You need to keep them under 100. You have listed every city or township in the UK in the footer and it looks spammy and does not serve a purpose in SEO.

Alt. Text is not a place to play games with hidden advertising. Use alt text to describe an image as if you were describing it to a person who cannot see it. You have roughly 35 images on page one. The alt. text is for vacations, plus size dresses, etc. of which none reflects any of the images. Don't play keyword and SEO games if you want to succeed today.

Lastly, some of the best advice ever given (look at what the Oracles and Gurus, etc. say) on this site is about the quality of the content on a site/page. Why be just any lifestyle magazine? Be THE lifestyle magazine by not following the crowd. Develop your own content, minimize the ads but make a profit. Make it so advertisers want to buy from you because you have the most traffic, because you have the cleanest lifestyle mag with the best content.

I did not mean to devote this much time, but it is an interesting study in what is happening today with the changes at Google. Status Quo is no longer working.

I sincerely wish you the very best and hope you rank number one on page one forever.

Edit: added lorem ipsum advice.

Good response Kris.

For me, SEO is alive because there are SEO pros who are able to deliver a quantifiable result. Think about this: When Google comes out with Search + your world, who are the first people to explain it? When Google or Bing or Yahoo make any changes, it is the SEO s of the world who dig in to find what it means and what it will take to impact a site given the change.

When a site does not function as it should or when a business cannot get the marketing result they need, they can call a web developer, a marketing company, or an SEO/SEM who gets it. Yes, there are a few web devs who do and I know of several marketing firms that have true SEO pros, but in the end it is the SEO who brings sites back from the dead in most cases.

When I think of all the changes in the last year, I think of every person who really got what was going on and the ones who made sure they learned it. SEO's for the most part. So, is SEO dead? Maybe for some, but we are taking on clients almost daily and having fun. So, if this is dead....I must be in HEAVEN!!!