I'm working on creating pages to target local SEO. I've created pages for example 'wedding band london' with useful content and optimised them with title tags, alt tags etc and will continue to do so for major cities and queries where there are significant search volume. However, I also want to pickup longtail local search queries such as 'wedding band camden' etc... Will adding a list of towns somewhere on the page for each city or county help drive traffic to the site from such queries? Is so what's the best way to structure the page?
Posts made by SamCUK
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Local SEO - Rich content and list of towns enough?
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RE: Duplicate titles got me stumped
FYI the urls shown above are just examples and not actual URL's.
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Duplicate titles got me stumped
Webmaster tools is showing duplicate titles for example:
http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/
and:
http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire%20/bands-in-lincolnshire/
What's the %20 all about? I didn't create that page and it is a duplicate of the first. I'm also getting them for some pages with capitialisation? Eg:
http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/
http://www.musicliveuk.com/Lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/
I have also installed buddypress on another site I work on (I use wordpress) and have since had duplicate title issues for members that have signed up:
/members/admin/activity/friends/
/members/admin/activity/groups/
/members/admin/activity/just-me/
These pages are all showing duplicate titles? How can I fix this?
I use all in one SEO pack and have <a title="Click for Help!">Canonical URLs checked.</a>
Any help much appreciated!
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Setting a geographic target in webmaster tools
If a site is targeting traffic from around the world should I set the geographic targeting in webmaster tools under 'settings' or leave it? Any help would be much appreciated!
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RE: One page website SEO
Thanks for your reply guys. That all makes perfect sense. I want the site to be as useful as possible so seperate pages will help that cause.
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One page website SEO
Can a one page website rank well with the right SEO? I am building a new site so it is best to put the content related to two or three related items on one page or create seperate pages? Surely by creating just one page I can put all my link building efforts into improving the authority of that page as opposed to spreading my time over 3?
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RE: Strange traffic - panda, penguin? Screenshots attached.
In webmaster tools I have 5 access denied to urls that end in /feed/
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RE: Strange traffic - panda, penguin? Screenshots attached.
I am using Wordpress and have analytics code installed in the header. Is that right?
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RE: Strange traffic - panda, penguin? Screenshots attached.
Thanks for your reply. I suppose it could possible be the 3rd April update. However that wouldn't explain how the traffic returns even stronger in July.
The site was offline for about 10 days. I do see search terms related to the click and have been receiving enquiries which leads me to believe the traffic sent is genuine.
All the pages are indexed in google but as of this morning I am getting no traffic whatsoever. As you can see apart from the site downtime I have always got a few clicks every day from long tail keywords. (just to confirm the site is up and working fine today but no traffic).
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Strange traffic - panda, penguin? Screenshots attached.
Hi,
I'm unsure if I've been hit by penguin/panda. I've attached screenshots below. The first one is April 1st to today. The second is all of April and the 3rd is 1st June to today. The site was offline at the beginning of July which explains no traffic. My traffic took a dip though on April 6th which as I understand it wasn't a panda/penguin roll out? I then got hardly any traffic for May to mid June. Then the site was offline due to a server problem but when it came back on traffic was the highest it has ever been. Today however I am getting zero search engine traffic?
I can't figure out what's going on. Can anyone shed any light on the issue?
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Access denied errors in webmaster tools
I notice today Ihave 2 access denied errors. I checked the help which says:
Googlebot couldn’t access a URL on your site because your site requires users to log in to view all or some of your content. (Tip: You can get around this by removing this requirement for user-agent Googlebot.)
Therefore I think it may be because I have added a login page for users and googlebot can't access it. I'm using wordpress and presume I need to amend the robots.txt to remove the requirement for google to log in but how do I do that?
Unless I'm misunderstanding the problem altogether!
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.gb.net domains good for SEO?
I've found a .gb.net domain with a highly competitive exact match term for sale. Do .gb.net domains rank well within google? Or are they considered not as authorative? Is it worth purchasing one?
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Navigation causing too many links
If I add pages to my site to cover major cities/towns/counties in the UK where I offer wedding bands and link them from the navigation using drop down menus/categories ( I believe this is the best option to allow users to find what they are looking for) I get a'too many links on page' flag. How can I best get around this problem?
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RE: Should I diversify internal anchor text
Thanks for your reply. All that makes sense - looks like I have a lot of work to do!
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Should I diversify internal anchor text
In the post penguin era should I diversify my internal anchor text? I have exact match links throughout my site that point to my important pages so should I look at varying the anchor text?
I also have exact match terms in my sites navigation such as 'london wedding bands', 'edinburgh wedding bands' etc... I read somewhere that I should remove the 'money term' so that they become 'london', 'edinburgh' etc...Is that they case?
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Any value in link building to local pages on my site?
If I'm trying to rank for the term 'wedding band' with my url:
http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-bands
will linking to local pages such as:
http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/hire-wedding-bands/wedding-bands-london
help the main page to rank?
I added the 'local' pages to try and pick up any traffic from long tail search queries but my main focus is on getting the main page to rank as the traffic from long tail queries is so small.
So is it worth me spending time building links to these local pages in order to try and help the main page rank?
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Should I change wordpress urls?
Should I change my wordpress permalinks to include the keyword? For examples at the minute my url is http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is it better to be http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-bands/wedding-singer. 'home' is not relevant so surely 'live-bands' would be better? If I change the urls won't I lose 'link juice' as external links will all point to a url that no longer exists? Or will wordpress automatically redirect the old url to the new one?
Finally, if I should change the url as described how do I do it on wordpress? I can only see how to edit the last bit of the url and not the middle bit.
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Changing Wordpress Permalinks Bad For SEO?
Hi,
I have various pages set up such as http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is there any benefit in SEO terms to changing it to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer? I would presume that a keyword would be better for SEO than 'home' which is irrelevant? Also if I were to change it would all the links external I have on other sites pointing to http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer be lost as the url no longer exists?
I suppose I could set up a manual redirect from http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer or would wordpress automatically redirect from the old to new? By redirecting I understand that some 'link juice' is lost along the way so is including the keyword in the url of enough benefit to warrant losing some link juice?
Finally if I do change the url to include the keyword how do I do it in wordpress? I can only see how to change the page title using the 'edit' button when editing a page?
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Anchor text diversity - post penguin.
Hi,
It seems that achor text diversity is hugely important post penguin but what's the best strategy? What kind of anchor text should I be going for? As I understand it more that 60% of links with the keywords in trigger a google flag. For example are the following good examples for the term 'wedding singer'?
local wedding singer, best wedding singer, wedding singer website, hire wedding singer.
Would these cause triggers in google as all contain the keyword 'wedding singer'?
Or should I be going for:
click here, visit us, listen now, view a profile
Obviously these words don't contain the anchor text 'wedding singer' but with a few exact match #wedding singer' anchor texts and good on page SEO will this mix give better results?
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Site Downtime - Will pages be reindexed?
I recently had site downtime of about 10 days for a site I'm working on which is about 6 months old. There were naturally many page not found errors in webmaster tools as google had tried to crawl the site during the downtime but I've noticed that google has now dropped some of the pages. Are they likely to be reindexed? Google has crawled some of my pages today but as yet the ones that have been dropped from the index haven't reappeared. (the site has been live again for a week). Should they reappear when the pages are next crawled?
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RE: Penguin or something else?
Yea no messages in there. Totally confused!
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Penguin or something else?
Mid April my site www.musicliveuk.com lost almost all its rankings. I'm still non the wiser as to why and it seems a little earlier that the penguin update. I wonder if any of you guys could take a look and offer any suggestions as to what might have happened? I'm relatively new to SEO and have worked on my own site myself? If I've made some mistakes how do I fix it?
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Robots.txt 404 problem
I've just set up a wordpress site with a hosting company who only allow you to install your wordpress site in http://www.myurl.com/folder as opposed to the root folder. I now have the problem that the robots.txt file only works in http://www.myurl./com/folder/robots.txt
Of course google is looking for it at http://www.myurl.com/robots.txt and returning a 404 error. How can I get around this? Is there a way to tell google in webmaster tools to use a different path to locate it? I'm stumped?
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RE: Have I been penalised?
No messages in webmaster tools.Do google always inform you? All the pages are still in the google index if I enter site:thenmyurl. It's just not showing in the top 100. In terms of link building I've posted in directories, used forum signatures, some reciprocal linking and I have set up blogs on high authority domains and posted content on them however I did post some of the same content on several blogs with links pointing to my site so that could look unnatural. The reason I did this though was I noticed a competitor that was ranking in the top 10 had used that strategy. It seems odd if I have been penalised because of that as they are still in the top 10.
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Casino SEO
I'm considering entering the online casino arena with an affiliate site. These keywords such as 'online roulette', 'online blackjack' are massively competitive with high page and domain authority sites on page one. Does anyone have any experience of this area and is it possible to compete in it? Apparently long tail keywords don't really convert in this area so I may have to go for these highly competitive keywords. Any thoughts?
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Have I been penalised?
I recently set up a site (3 months ago). After a couple of months I was on page 1/2/3 for all my main keywords. However on friday all the keywords except for 3 dropped out of the SERPS. Today only 1 keyword remains in the SERPS!
I'm an amatuer SEO and remember with my 1st site I worked on (this new one is only my second) that it occassionally dissapeared from the SERPS for a few days and came back. It's now been 4 days though and I'm beginning to think I may have been penaslised.
This second site is more of an affiliate site but I do try to include lots of relevant unique content even so. Could it be because it's an affiliate site? All the affiliate links are no follow.
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Should I invite people to guest post?
I'm a little confused about the benefits of inviting people to guest post on my site. I've just read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-passive-link-building-to-build-links-with-no-budget which suggests that by inviting people to guest post on my site I can build a relationship with them and eventually ask them to post a guest post of mine on their site.
If both posts have a link back to the owners site doesn't this amount to reciprocal linking? Or am I missing something? Is a reciprocal link only classed as such if the link points to the exact page where the article is or can a reciprocal link point to anywhere on the site and still be classed as reciprocal?
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RE: Choosing Domain Name
I spent 6 months getting top 10 rankings for a site without the keywords in the domain. I've just recently built a site with the exact match keyword in the domain and am stunned to see the site in the top 10 after 2 months and minimal link building in a highly competitive industry. I personally believe that the domain name has played a part in this. My advice is wherever possible include your main keywords in the domain.
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Text Link vs image link?
Which passes most link juice a text link or an image with the correct 'alt' attribute? Do the pass the same amount or is one more valuable than the other?
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How accurate is google analytics?
I have a new site that has just entered the SERPS so I'm tracking stats pretty carefully using google analytics. Yesterday according to my affiliate stats I had 10 unique visits with 2 sign ups for one of my products but google analytics only shows a total of 5 visitors yesterday on my site? ( A 20% conversion rate 2 out of 5 also seems ridiculously high). I'm guessing there were also a number of users that visited my site but didn't click through one of the affiliate links and just browsed the site so the visitor number could be higher? I'm not sure where this huge discrepancy comes from?
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Good Google SERPS but poor bing and yahoo rankings.
My site has some good google SERPS but yahoo and bing don't rank it well at all. I know of course they have different algorithms to google but I would expect there to be some correlation. Why does google appear to consider my site valuable and return it for search queries and yahoo/bing don't?
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Community site for link building?
I'm considering the following in order to get users to stay on my site and make it more useful to visitors. At the minute we list live bands for hire and have a blog - that's it. I'm looking to build a sense of community where users can build a profile, chat, list their gigs, upload demos and chat in forums.
Firstly I want improve the user experience and gain dedicated members but my second reason for doing so it to gain backlinks. My theory is that if the site is more useful it will gain more links. Does anyone have any info on how implementing 'community' features on a website helps with backlinks and whether this strategy works?
These changes would mean my site has evolved considerably but i don't see that as a problem. My long term aim is to monetise the site through classifed ads and spot ads. Would anyone advise against adding advertising to a site and if so why?
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Soft 404 problem
I have a soft 404 problem in webmaster tools for http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/feed and I'm not sure why. I read on here that if it is a main content page it should be fixed but I don't know how. I've tried to 301 redirect the page to http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/ but the redirect doesn't appear to be working? how do I fix this?
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RE: Should I redirect secondary keyword page
Am I not better off building links to the homepage using the right anchor text as it has a higher authority? I have a muchbetter chance of ranking highly with that page don't I? My reasoning for choosing to optimise the homepage for the internal keyword too is save myself some work. In order to get the internal page the same authority as the home page I have a lot of link building to do so I thought optimising the homepage for the keyword would kind of be a "short cut" id there is such a thing in SEO!
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RE: Ranking strategy -which pages to rank?
I've jsut had the same issue. I had seperate pages for my keywords and I had a lot of work to do link building etc... to build the authority of those pages. I have a strong home page so have moved the most competitive keywords to my home page and am hoping after some more link building to the home page these will rank better. Watch this space!
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Should I redirect secondary keyword page
I have a reasonably high authority home page and have decided to optimise the home page to target a competitive keyword that previously had a specific page that was optimised on an internal page of my site that I have spent time building links to.
The internal page has over 200 links to it so should I 301 redirect this internal page to the home page. Will that increase the auhority of the home page further? Or should I keep the internal page as a 'secondary' page for that keyword?. If I do have two pages don't I risk confusing google?
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RE: Should I outsource any SEO work or can I do it all?
I did it myself and have landed on page one for all my search terms but it's taken a year with several hours a day and is a lot of work. I looked at outsourcing but I'm glad I've done it myself as knowing what I know now I wouldn't trust anyone else to do it for me. If your business relies heavily on internet sales then when hiring an SEO you are putting the success of your business largely in their hands. Personally I wasn't prepared to do that. I've just written a blog post on SEO Moz about my SEO journey so hopefully it will be approved by the moderators and might be worth a read when live.
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Should I remove footer links?
I added footer links to my site some months ago as I figured that any authority my home page had would be distributed to several of my other most important pages on my site helping them to rank. Would I be better to remove them and would that improve the authority of my home page as less 'link juice' is being distributed.
I did originally set up a page per keyword on my site and start building links to each one but as my home page has a good authority I am going to target several keywords on my home page instead as I have some way to go to improve the authority of my other important pages and think this would be a better solution.
It would reduce the number of links I have per page however I did see Matt Cutts say that the no more than 100 links per page rule doesn't apply any more. Do footer links add any SEo value?
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Page Authority Issue
My home page http://www.musicliveuk.com has a domain authority of 42 and page authority of 52. However I have set up other pages on the site to optimise for one keyword per page as I thought this was best practice. For example http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-bands targets 'wedding band' but this has a page authority of 24 way below my competitors. Having used the keyword difficulty tool on here it appears that is why I am struggling to rank highly (number 9). This is the same problem for several of my main keywords. I am building links to this and other pages in order to increase their authority and eventually rank highly but am I not better off optimising my home page that already has a good page authority and would probably out rank my competitors? Or am I missing something?
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Duplicate description problem in Wordpress.
Webmaster tools is flagging up duplicate descriptions for the page http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts. The page is one page in the wordpress page editor and the web designer set it up so that I can add new live acts from a seperate page editor on the left menu and that feeds into the page 'live-acts'. (it says under template 'live-acts-feed'. The problem is as I add more acts it creates new url's eg http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/page/2 and http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/page/3 etc...
I use the all in one SEO pack and webmaster tools tells me that page 2/3/4/ etc all have the same description. How can I overcome this? I can't write new descriptions for each page as the all in one SEO pack will only allow me to enter one for the page 'live-acts'.
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RE: Good start to campaign but suddenly getting nowhere fast
Thanks for the detailed reply. What you're saying makes sense. I made a mistake in the early days of the site building links for all keywords to the home page and then realised I needed dedicated pages for each keyword which I'm guessing is why the home page has good page authority and the others lack. Since then I've built links to the other optimised pages but when I look on OSE at the url http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/cover-band for example it says linking root domains 1 and 202 links. All the links listed are pages from my site. Why aren't I seeing external links from my link building efforts?
I obviously need to improve the page authorities as I'm some way off having the same as the top results and I guess the only way to do this is through links?
Some interesting ideas about interviewing influential bloggers. I hadn't thought of that and it seems obvious now!
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Good start to campaign but suddenly getting nowhere fast
As an amatuer SEO I was really please with the results when I optimised my pages and starting link building. I've managed to get myself to the bottom of page one for almost all my main keywords over a 6 month period. However since then I've been building links for the last couple of months and have seen very little movement in my SERPS positions at all! I expected it to be harder on page one but not this hard! According to SEO Moz campaign tools my on page results are all A so I dont think I can optimise any more. I'm beginning to think it's not links I need and I'm missing something like not enough social media mentions etc however many of my competitors on page one don't appear to engage with social media much at all.
I'm at a loss really as to wether to just keep building links through guest posts, articles, forums, directories or try a different approach. i wonder if some of you more experienced SEO's could take a look and offer any ideas. My site is http://www.musicliveuk.com and I'm trying to rank for
Entertainment Agency
Entertainment Agencies
Wedding Band
Wedding Singer
Function Band
Cover Band
(I have optimised pages for each of these keywords in the footer)
I've also noticed that a lot of my competitors have links on lots of blogs that I can't seem to get links on. I would normally contact them and offer to guest post but I can find any contact details. I'm beginning to think my competitors have set these sites up as well for link building purposes. Is that ethical?
Please help!
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Is google all over the place tonight?
Is it me or is google all over the place tonight? Whilst checking my rankings I came across a site with a page authority of 29 and 23 links from 5 domains ranking at number 6 for a competitive keyword! This site came from nowhere and I'm getting different results every time I search! Weird....
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RE: No Follow and reciprocal links
So as the link juice is only flowing one way does that mean I will benefit from adding no follow to such a link?
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No Follow and reciprocal links
I just wondered by adding no follow to a reciprocal link (one link only not the link on both sites) does it become a one way link? I have some reciprocal link partners who are more interested in traffic from my site than link juice which is irrelevent to them. Am I better adding no follow to those links at my end?
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RE: SEO Moz crawl has 3 missing page title errors when they are clearly there.
I have just added H1. I have lots other pages that don't have H1 tags though and it's not flagged them so I thought it was talking about the page title that appears in the webpage tab in your browser and not H1 tags.
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SEO Moz crawl has 3 missing page title errors when they are clearly there.
My SEO Moz crawl today has highlighted for errors where page titles are empty missing. For example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/hire-wedding-entertainment/wedding-entertainment-kent
This page clearly has a title as do the other 3. Is it a bug in the system or am I missing something?
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Competitor doing very well through reciprocal linking. Should I adopt it?
I've always heard that reciprocal linking is dead but my main competitor who is at number one for both my primary keywords has a link profile built up of mainly reciprocal links. Should I adopt this practice? I've only valued one way links up to now.
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How to best promote this content via social media to gain backlinks
I have created this content http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/the-worst-function-bands-and-wedding-bands-ever in order to promote it via social media. Ideally I want it to be shared across the web in order to gain backlinks. My question is how can I best do this? I know I can post it on twitter, facebook, google plus etc... but is that it? I'm new to social media and don't really understand how to use it to good effect. By posting it on social networking sites am I risking people copying the content and duplicate content penalties? Any help would be much appreciated!