OK...that makes it more difficult.

I was hoping that you might have some files whose filenames would be retained and would only need to move from one directory location to another within your new site structure.

Since it is possible to redirect the entire contents of a directory to another directory with a single line of code, this would have made it easier.

Sha

Hi Garry,

Everybody else pretty much covered the other bits.

As to where I'm coming from - my background is in journalism and advertising. As such, I believe I have a fairly good understanding of how readers interact with text and what affects them both positively and negatively.

Some examples of errors:

"Our Qualified internet marketing experts are available to improve your company's fortune online using many different online based marketing techniques. We have proven results from years of work in Internet marketing and have a wide range of clients in many different industries."

"Our service is geared towards providing small to medium sized UK businesses an affordable solution to SEO."

"Contact us today to gain an insight as to how we would manage your company's SEO campaign."

"Plus more importantly help deliver your company a good return on investment."

There are quite a lot more and a lot of poorly constructed sentences that stop the flow of your message ...every roadblock like this that you put in front of the reader will reduce comprehension. If they don't understand the message they are unlikely to convert.

Hope that helps.

Sha

Hi,

I would say that the biggest problem you have is the significant amount of what appears to be duplicate content on the site. Those articles which appear on hundreds of other sites will make it very difficult to achieve decent rankings. If you want to feature the information in them, then you need to write your own original version of the story. Don't just try to change some words to make it different...take a unique approach, find related articles and write something original that talks about the relationship between them...there are lots of options.

Develop good, engaging content. Tweet and Facebook post about the competition on the site, deadlines, prizes, cool entries etc, unknown facts about prototyping, invite questions and provide answers. Let your imagination run wild and build a following.

Hope that helps to get you started,

Sha

Hi James,

First, you don't need to delete your campaigns.

You can archive a campaign that you are not wanting to actively check. If you should wish to make it active again, you will need an empty campaign slot, so can archive something else that you don't need and activate the old campaign again.

To Archive, just go to the campaign in question, click the blue Campaign Settings link at the top. Scroll right to the bottom of the page and click the Archive button (next to delete). To make an archived campaign active again, go to Campaigns, choose Archived Campaigns, then click Activate for the campaign you wish to restore.

On your other question

I think the Social analysis you are referring to is that included in the Open Site Explorer tool. When you are logged into your SEOmoz Pro Account and use Open Site Explorer, you can see social data for your site. There is a button in the Open Site Explorer interface (right below where you type your URL) that allows you to load additional sites for comparison. The information that appears in the Competitive Analysis section of your campaign is drawn from Open Site Explorer, but the tool itself provides much more powerful options for analysis.

Check out all of the different Filters and the Advanced Reports section while you are there.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Rand spoke about this subject in a recent Whiteboard Friday What is Google's Pagerank Good For?

There are some key takeaways here.

Sha

Hi Garry,

Sorry to be late to the party, but just caught up with this post and took a look at your site.

Since you talked specifically about bounce rate and conversions, there are a few related issues that jump out at me, so thought I would drop them into the conversation.

• First, the very first sentence of text on your homepage is likely to disengage visitors. (BOUNCE!)
  If you read it carefully, you will see that it is a very impersonal third person statement which reads like a rather detached review. The very next sentence works to engage the reader more, by speaking in the first person and evangelizing your work. Unfortunately I fear that most people will have glazed over before they reach the end of the first sentence. Also, the second sentence has some problems of its own with redundancies like "a wide range of different". I would suggest a rewrite of the intro paragraph. Keep in mind that short, succinct sentences are better for engaging your audience. Also much better for comprehension.

• The majority of the black on white text in your site is in a bold or heavy face font. This is very poor for reading comprehension. Bold or heavy type is great for emphasizing or highlighting, but when used without a break, interferes with the reader's ability to process and understand what they are reading. This is unlikely to help with conversions. I would use a cleaner font and use some bold and italic emphasis to introduce a little light and shade to the content.

• Lastly, your text contains quite a lot of typographical and structural errors. Whilst there seems to be a developing trend toward ignoring this as an SEO issue, I will once again climb on my "word nerd soapbox".
  For some businesses, errors in text may seem trivial, but when you are in a business that is built upon the delivery of information - errors could be the difference between winning a customer and having them bounce before even reading your message.

  I wrote something on this in the first part of another Q&A thread recently. Errors are a conversion issue   I think perhaps it might be of help.

Hope that is of some use.

Sha

First, the correlation data is something I would pay attention to.

Second, since the longtail exact match and the majority of the other breakout terms from that very long URL appear to bring little or no traffic to the table - why would you bother to go against the data? (OK, the single word head terms have what looks like great traffic, but going after those is not a "new site" proposition in my view).

Hi,

Ryan has given a great answer there.

On the subject of what you will see in the search engine result pages, it does not have to be an either/or situation. It is quite common to see multiple pages in a site appear in the same results.

The most important thing is that by optimizing specific pages for keywords that are relevant to their content you have more chance that visitors will arrive on a page that gives them what they are looking for. This is much better for the user experience and likely to help with conversions.

Congrats on the new job, sounds like you're a natural!

Sha

Hi there,

You can do what you want to do as long as the keywords are loaded in your campaign. Its just a little hidden

If you go into the On-page tool you see the Summary view. If you look right above the big heading On-page Optimization, there are two blue text links. Choose Report Card.

Now you will see a selector which allows you to choose any keyword from your campaign list and enter the URL of any page in the site.

Click Grade my On-page Optimization and voila! Roger will fetch your Report Card!

Hope that helps.

Sha

Hi Ryan,

It appears that Google indexed the non www version of your page before you put the redirect in place (I am assuming that it is a 301 redirect you have used).

The problem with waiting for Google to correct the index via the 301 is that the likelihood of it being crawled very often is extremely low. There are two reasons for this

1. There is only the one page accessible. No internal links leading to other pages in the site and only one link to an external site from that page.
2. There is absolutely no text on the page for Googlebot (or Roger Mozbot) to crawl (the bots can't read what is written in the images)

Basically, the lack of content is providing no evidence that the bot should return very often. The bot is pretty much seeing an empty page.

The redirect is working fine, so as long as it is a permanent redirect (301) then you are good, but the main reason for using it is to consolidate all of your URL's into one. This avoids duplicate content issues and makes sure that search engines don't get confused and treat them as different sites. Both are Still valid and will work.

As to wanting Google to adjust the index so that it appears as www,funtranslator.com, if you have set it up in your Google Webmaster Tools account, go to Site Configuration, choose settings and set the preferred domain name to the WWW version.

That is the best you can do to send them the signal that you wish to use that as the preferred domain. If you don't have webmaster tools set up, then you will need to add and verify the site first.

I can't see that this will be a problem for SEOmoz, since Roger Mozbot crawls the site directly. He doesn't need Google to tell him what to do.

If you want to check this for sure, just email the help team - help [at} seomoz.org and ask them to confirm.

Hope that helps.

Sha

Hi,

Since this is really about the way that the tool works, the quickest and most accurate way of getting the correct answer would be to email help@seomoz.org.

That being said, avoiding special characters would be our company's preferred option. This thread from Google Webmaster Central would be worth a read.

Sha

Hi Jesse,

First, I'm going to assume that the three n's in the URL you posted was a mistake?

So, having made that assumption, I think the philosophical debate is largely a moot point.

Generally, the intent of developing an exact match domain is to rank for the term or terms that carry exact match traffic volume.

The image below pretty much tells the story I think.

If you haven't yet found it, the tool is the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool

keyword-difficulty.gif

I would agree with Ryan's approach and take it a step further ... in this case the company is missing out by just trying to be different things to different people!

I see some great opportunities to create new content that can interest and engage people, not to mention help retain customers they are in danger of losing because of a simple geographic relocation.

Some suggestions:

• Tell the Story

Create a page that cleverly explains how your product came to have two identities. Did it assume another as part of some global mayonnaise espionage effort....? or was it the result of a company merger? Make it interesting. write it as an example for other companies, create a "dueling logos" video presentation ...the list goes on.

• Create answer pages designed to help out the people who are missing their favorite product because they don't know it is there.

• The "can't find Hellmanns" page

• The "where to buy bestfoods mayo" page etc

There are lots of ways you can turn the potential disadvantage into a marketing advantage and all the while creating new content which could provide good opportunities for links and traffic.

BTW - Great to hear that you are all working together to get the best result for your client.

Hey Jen,

Its so good to see you back!

Hi Ryan,

The problem I believe is that you are trying to track the specific page, rather than the entire domain (Of course I understand why in this case), but the feature is configured to track the domain and will therefore not accept a URL that includes the path following the trailing slash. Basically, it wants you to just enter http://en.wikipedia.org

I am not sure if SEOmoz staff will have any suggestion on solving this issue for your campaign, but you should email help [at] seomoz.org explaining your problem. Since it is a holiday weekend, you may need to wait a little while for a response, but I know that SEOmoz staff constantly surprise people by responding to enquiries when we don't expect them too, so give it a go. A direct email will definitely be the quickest way to let them know you have a problem.

In any case, while you cannot pull the information into your campaign, you can still obtain it using the  Open Site Explorer tool. I ran your Comparison URL in Open Site Explorer , but there is insufficient data for this particular page so you will only see the domain information at present. You can find all of the information that is returned in a campaign using this tool. To compare with your own site, just click the "compare sites" link below the OSE search URL input, enter your own URL and then run the search.

You can also download the comparison report from OSE and run advanced reports if you wish to do so. Export to CSV and you will be able to utilize the information in Excel, or generate a PDF.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

One of the things I notice when I look at the articles on your home page is that it feels much more like a "News paper" site than a personal blog. With a brand like "gizmocrazed" I'm expecting something a little more personalized and maybe even quirky in the text of your articles.

If your aim is to make it to the top in blogging, then you need to really think about what sets the top bloggers apart. What makes them stand out from the crowd?

I will tell you what I think the key ingredients are, but I would suggest that you spend some time really reading the work of some of the most popular bloggers out there (especially within your own space) and see if you see these things, or maybe something else that makes people want to follow their posts.

So, in my view there are some important ingredients that are common to the really popular blogs out there:

• They are real (not invisible people, always ready to "own" what they write)
• They are engaging (usually written from a personal standpoint and directed at the reader)
• They are authoritative (authority comes from "analysis & research", "experience" or "reputation")
• They are opinionated (even guest bloggers openly convey their own opinion on the subject)
• They write about things that other people don't, write it from a completely different angle or viewpoint or, write about it before anyone else does.

Now, I would suggest that you go out and read blogs like Techcrunch, Boing Boing, Engadget, and a few dozen others. Read each post twice.

1. Just read it and see how it makes you feel
2. Read it with a critic's eye (pick it apart and understand how the writer achieved their effect)

When you understand what is happening with these top bloggers and what about them makes 400,000 people a day want to know what they are saying, start applying what you have learned to your own writing.

The changes you have made are already making a difference to the "feel" of your site.

Thanks Keri,

Happy to help where I can.

Actually, I think a little taste of TAGFEE could lead to addiction!

Have a great weekend

Hello again,

First, I have to say that I think part of the problem here may be expectation - as Dunamis already mentioned, 2000 uniques a day is not bad for a site of this age.

After taking a look at your site there are a few things I see that may be negatively impacting your search traffic and visitor behavior:

• The first thing I see that would be of concern to me is the "Link Exchange" page. Using this term along with the text on the page that describes the trading of reciprocal links is sending a signal to search engines that this site is openly engaging in link trading.

  Search engines (Google in particular) can see this as a manipulative practice aimed at artificially improving rankings. The ongoing message from search engines is that they want to see linking based upon the real worth of a site (the value and relevance of its content). I would remove the "Link Exchange" page and work on finding ways to provide reasons for other sites to naturally want to link to your site. The added bonus here is that a natural, relevant, one-way link is much more valuable to your site than a list of unnatural looking irrelevant links. Russ Virante wrote a nice blog post on the link profile and what would be expected from a good quality site that is achieving links based on its value and relevance The Wikipedia Model.

  There are a ton of great posts and Q&A answers here on SEOmoz that will give you a never ending source of ideas and tips that can help you to improve links to your site. I ran a quick site search for link building and came up with an awesome reading list. Some of the ideas I've found in these are just plain FUN too!

• When I looked at your home page I felt that the amount of information there has actually tipped over the line into being a little overwhelming. While I was blown away by the recycled tire sculptures, I'm kinda glad they were there to grab my attention, because I was starting to feel a little like I was drowning in a sea of text, ads and well, empty ad spaces

  I would look carefully at how many articles you keep on the home page all at once, try to ensure that the images loaded for the posts are as eye catching as possible (like the tire sculptures) and make sure that your home page does not become one big category page rather than the home of great content that provides a "hook" to draw your visitor further into the site.

• Although you said that the intent of the site is to "be a leader in Tech Gadget niche" the message your pages are sending (both to a human like me and to search engines) is that your real intent is to earn money from advertising. So, there are a few things to consider:

  If you really don't want to earn from advertising - Do you really need all those ad spaces on your site?

  If in fact you are about earning money from the advertising - what is the best way to make that happen?

  Given that you have 2000 unique visitors a day - Why are you not already earning enough dollars?

  Since the last answer would be that they are not converting - How can you convert those daily visitors to sales?

  Personally, all those blank "Advertise Here" banners seem like a waste of space on your page and as a user seem to say to me that selling advertising is more of a priority than providing me with good information. I would definitely reduce the number of those. After all, you can place one or two of them and when you have sold those spots, add a couple in other positions.

• Lastly, when I went to the Tire Sculpture page (god I want one of those!) the floating cell phone ads seemed to be really slowing the page down (Latest version of Firefox). There are two issues here. As a user, if it had been anything else I was trying to look at other than those awesome sculptures, I would have left the page quickly. Second, Search Engines know this and use page load speed as an important signal for rankings. Google has made it clear that they are very sensitive to this, so anything that is negatively impacting your load speed will be doing the same to your ranking opportunities.

  The thing to keep in mind is that "cool" ads are not selling anything if nobody sticks around long enough to actually look at them.

OK, that's a fairly long list, but I think some things you can definitely take a look at and work on. Overall, if you are wanting to earn from the advertising on your site, you should be really happy that you have 2000 Unique visitors a day and focusing all of your energy on converting as many as possible from visitors to customers

As to "What am I doing Wrong?"

You've done an awesome job getting this far in such a short time! One of the things to keep in mind is that the world of search and online marketing is constantly changing. That in essence means that as long as you follow ethical practices, there is no wrong answer - just the solution that is acknowledged as best practice for today.

Pay attention to what is best practice, listen to the important people in the search industry that work hard to help us discover and follow it, then just take it one step at a time and enjoy the ride!

Hope this helps,

Sha

Hi Kyle,

Actually Nicholas is right on the money - you just have to use the right plugin to get a much more comprehensive and useful feature set than just editing page titles.  There are several around, but by far the best I have found (credit to Alan Blewiss for the tip some time ago) is Yoast SEO.

The plugin allows you to enter your chosen keyword(s) and then indicates keyword usage for Title, description etc. If you have already entered a Title it will analyze and report on keyword usage. You can choose to either ignore the analysis and keep the existing title, or edit it along with description etc. All of these options and a whole lot more are available at post and blog level.

Yes, Google will grab something off the page, but I would always prefer to at least offer it a description that is written for conversion - that is what your description is for ...to help "sell" the site to a user who sees it appear in the SERPs as Stephan also described.

Nah...the cool stuff is courtesy of my Boss whose brain can be kinda scary at times - I'm just soaking up the awesomeness he spreads around

We have this little reciprocal thing that is improving us both (although I don't think he's ever going to hunger for SEO the way I do! But then, that would make him kinda nuts! hehe)

(since you said "non-server side guy" I'm thinking that I probably should have mentioned that you can basically think of each IP being related to a card similar to a network card in your computer)

That whole owning and renting story is pretty common in that world, but is only a problem if you don't strike someone who knows what they are talking about.

We run our own client servers and I have to admit that I shudder when a client comes to us with an existing account from a couple of specific companies. 8(

No probs, always welcome.

Hi Robert,

I think I've picked up on all of the questions here (there's a lot going on!) and have borrowed some awesomeness from my Tech Wizard (Boss) to fill in the exciting bits, so here goes:

I'll start with the easy one first... well actually, none of them are that hard

As a part of our ongoing SEO we check page load speed for our clients. A few days ago a client who has their site hosted by the same company was running very slow (about 8 seconds to load without cache). We ran every check we could and could not find a reason on our end. The client called the host and were told they needed to be on some other type of server (with the host) at a fee increase of roughly $10 per month.

OK, basically the answer to this one would be that your client's site was being throttled back by the host because it was using more bandwidth than was allowed under their existing plan. By moving them to the next plan (the extra $10 per month) the problem is resolved and the site speed returns to normal. Throttling it back gets the client to call... 8(

OK, 1 down and 2 to go...

About 4 months ago we realized we had a group of sites down thanks to monitoring alerts and checked it out. All were on the same IP address and the sites on the other IP address were still up and functioning well. When we contacted the support at first we were stonewalled, but eventually they said there was a problem and it was resolved within about 2 hours. Up until recently we had no problems.

and also

Yesterday, we noticed one group of sites on our server was down and, again, it was one IP address with about 8 sites on it.

OK, you know already that there can be up to 8 IPs on a box and at times something in the network will go bad. There are some variables here as to what is wrong. If you are on a Class C Network and one IP goes down then it means that the Switch or Router has gone bad (whether it is a Switch or a Router is determined by how the host has their hardware set up). If you are on a Class D Network and one IP goes down, then the problem is one of 3 things, the Card, the port, or the cable connecting the two, related to that IP.

The trick is that the person on the phone needs to realise what they are dealing with and escalate it to get the hardware issue resolved (A recent interaction with that particular host for one of our clients indicated to me that the realization part might be a little hit and miss, so good to have an understanding of what might be happening if it happens again)

Phew! Nearly there, last of all...

**On chat with support, they kept saying it was our ISP. (We speed tested on multiple computers and were 22MB down and 9MB up +/-2MB). We ran a trace on the IP address and it went through without a problem on three occassions over about ten minutes. After about 30 minutes the sites were back up. **

Here's the twist: we had a couple of people in the building who were on other ISP's try and the sites came up and loaded on their machines. Does anyone have any idea as to what the issue is?

OK this one is all about DNS caching. That particular host (the one that likes lady racing drivers) has a fail-over system in place. This means that if an IP goes down, the domains on that IP will automatically fail-over to another box.

So, if you have looked at those domains on your machine, it will be cached. When you go back to check the site you are still looking at the cached version. The other people in the building are coming to the domain fresh and through a different ISP, so they see those domains because they are back up on the new box. 

When the host reps were telling you that it was your ISP, what they really meant was that it had failed-over to a new box and you were still seeing the cached DNS location.

OK, think I covered it all so....that's all Folks!

Have a great holiday weekend!

Sha

Hi,

Without seeing the site it is a little hard to say exactly what is happening and how things could be improved. Perhaps if you could tell us these few things:

1. Is that 2000 Uniques per month or per day?

2. What is the intent of the site? Are you trying to sell products, earn from advertising, be a leader in your space? etc

3. What is the URL for your site (if you are happy to share it)

4. Do you know how many backlinks you have?

With a little extra information we can better understand the problem and suggest some solutions.

Sha

Hi Deanna,

I'm happy to take a look and help you get set up.

Normally I would suggest you give the SEOmoz staff a call, but HOPE with a holiday weekend happening they will be out and about enjoying some relaxation til Tuesday.

No need to worry about hiring - I'm happy to spread a little TAGFEE and help get you started.

If you go to your SEOmoz profile and check your Private Messages I left one for you.

Catch up soon,

Sha

Thanks Keri,

Yep, it was the Db I was searching for, but the site was a GoDaddy install and was moved to different server because of software install issues. So, having checked Wayback, Google cache and searched through the files without finding a Database, I think I can just refill my mug and settle in to write some new content.

To be honest, that's not really so bad - I'd rather start from scratch than rewrite bad copy any day! Less than a dozen pages, so its all good.

Most importantly, I now know that I am still sane and not as stupid as I was starting to fear, so thanks for helping resolve that!

Have a great weekend!

Sha

Hi,

A client's site was previously built in Joomla and he wants us to reproduce content that was in there, but the Joomla site is no longer live and has come to me as an archive containing all the files and folders that were included.

So, I am looking at the files and folders without Joomla installed.

Can someone tell me quickly how to find the where the actual page content was stored?

I started looking, but there are some folders I cannot open and nothing that looks as I expected.

Would appreciate a hint or two from someone who knows Joomla well.. Life is too short!

Thanks

Sha

Hi Dan,

There are a couple of simple ways you can deal with this problem. Basically all you need is the ability to edit a .htaccess file. So simple even I can do it!

Our head of programming wrote a blog post to explain both methods for you. Take a look here Don't Steal My Images!

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Rafael,

On the subject of updating content, there are a couple of basic things you could think about that will help send a signal to the search engines that tells them the content on your site is kept current and therefore more likely to be relevant.

• Take a look at your existing pages and see if any of the content can be updated. There is an old blog post from Rand which talks about this and is still very relevant

Headsmacking Tip #11 - Refresh Legacy Content for a Rankings Boost

Paddy Moogan also talks about this strategy in a post from earlier this year

Actionable Link Building Strategies

• The second option is to look for opportunities to build new content (which can serve the dual purpose of helping to build more of those back links you want)

On the subject of building more links, yes, that will help improve your PA & DA, but be clever and thoughtful about the way that you do this. Don't just go for every link that crosses your path - work to get better quality links rather than just going for quantity.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Just to clarify what you are doing here, a couple of questions:

1. ... am I correct in assuming that you are wanting to use the same domain, but the site structure will be changed?
2. Also, will there be ANY pages within the new structure that might simply be moved to a different location within the same domain (for example move from root directory to /sub directory), but retain the same file name?

These things will make a difference as to how you can approach the issue.

Sha

Hi,

I would recommend reading the recent blog post from Kate Morris eCommerce Syndicated Content: How to Win

I know the feeling of being faced with a couple of thousand product descriptions with this problem (and unfortunately it gives me no joy to think "I told you so"), but all you can really do is take it one product at a time 

Hi,

You are not the only one experiencing issues at the moment.

Best to report your problem direct to support [at] seomoz.org with details of what you are seeing. The Rankings system is in Beta at present so far as I know, so just need to let the Moz staff know ASAP.

Sha

Hi Brian,

I believe the recently introduced SEOmoz Ranking process is currently in Beta (I am in the Beta group) and Casey did specifically ask for feedback on any apparent anomalies during the Beta testing phase.

Just caught up with Casey and the answer will be slightly different depending on whether you are a member of the Beta or not, so just a correction to my original comment:

• If you are not in the Beta then you should email support [at] seomoz.org
• If you are a member of the Rankings Beta and forgot - email the Beta team!

This being the case, it would probably be a good idea to email him direct to bring the issue to his attention.

Sha

If all you are doing is creating a different architecture without making significant changes to the actual content (so giving each existing page a more SEO friendly category +/or file name) then you just need to make sure that every individual page is correctly redirected to its new URL using 301's. External links will remain in play and search engines will eventually recognize the redirects and update their indexes.

As long as you build the new structure in parallel so that you never take a page out of circulation you should be good.

If, on the other hand, you plan on altering content, removing pages completely, or doing something that will make existing pages unavailable for any period of time, you are likely to see some impact on rankings that might not be ideal.

If your concern stems from the fact that you are maybe not sure whether the new structure will actually help, then you will want to start slowly as Nicholas suggested.

My approach would be to do exactly as Nicholas described, but to start with pages that are ranking poorly.

Happy 301'ing

Locate and correct 83 outdated and incorrect or mismatched citation sources, ensuring that all of them now use the same exact Business Name as used on the Google Places profile and all profiles are claimed and completed.

Hi Jorge,

I have not noticed this problem in my own campaigns.

If you click the F from the first screen it should show you all of the icons, but only the F icon should have reports showing next to it. There is a manual selector at top of this page too so you can change the letter to get a different set of reports.

There is a great explanation of how the On-page feature works if you click the Help link at top of the page and go to this help page.

If yours appears to be malfunctioning, best thing to do is click the link at top of that Help page to Submit a Request and ask Moz staff to check out your campaigns. Be sure to tell them which specific campaigns it is happening with to make it easier to track down.

Hope this helps,

Sha

That's great Kieran!

Chew slowly and savor your progress at it happens

Just a couple of things I thought to mention in case you hadn't caught up with them yet...

• On-page reports in the Pro App show you the on-page elements you can improve, including things like keyword usage, amount of text etc. The trick with these is that you have to load the keywords you want to optimize for in the campaign. Don't worry if it seems to want to apply keywords to the wrong pages, just use the manual selector at top of page to choose keyword and then type in the URL you want.

• Not sure how the timing works for you, but there is a Weekly Welcome Webinar for Pro members every Friday morning (Seattle time). When you sign up for it on the Webinars Page there is an opportunity to tell Aaron if there are particular things you would like to learn more about.

Of course, if you already knew about these things, just ignore my ramblings

Have a great day,

Sha

Awesome! Last I heard the new version was due sometime this week.

Thanks for that

Hi Benjamin,

I believe the way GA tracking works is that the the click to next page can only be registered when the visitor arrives on the next page with a tracking code.

This is the first thing to check before you go tearing your hair out over the Bounce rate and fiddling with the site...

I recently discovered that a client's very high bounce rate in GA was actually the result of the developer having omitted the GA Tracking code from 60% of pages on the site!

I would eliminate that as a possible issue first.

Sha

OMG! I'm gonna lose my mind!

I had not realized it was there and of course right now I have no MozBar for FF due to the update problem, or are you by chance using Chrome Ryan?

hmmm...all good comments, but have you thought about the possibility that you may have a problem with keyword stuffing?

I count 58 instances of "Tampa" in the home page code, 172 instances of "DJ" and 18 instances of "Tampa DJ"

What is perhaps more important from the Search engines' point of view is that the reason I noticed the over use of these terms is that the text flow and usability has been quite severely impacted.The text doesnt flow naturally when you read it and by the time I got to the end of the footer menu I really didn't want to ever see the word Tampa again 8(

It is a very easy thing to get so caught up in finding ways to use your keyword terms that you lose track of how many times you have already done it. There are a couple of tools you could use to help sort this problem:

• If you have a campaign running for the site in the SEOmoz Pro App, make sure you have your chosen keywords loaded and then use the On-page feature to identify and correct problems. (If you don't have paid Pro you can always check out the SEOmoz 30 Day Free Trial)

• OOPS! Scratch that next bit - Ryan just pointed out that the highlight feature is now in my beloved MozBar...YES!! One less bar I need to keep installed 8). I keep the SEOBook Toolbar for Firefox installed so I can use its Use the keyword highlighting feature in the MozBar (Check Ryan's post below for how to find it). Basically, you type your chosen term into the toolbar, click the highlighting pen and UH OH!! now you can see that there might be a few too many instances of your term on the page...  This is actually a tool I find really handy and easy to use - it's actually the only thing I wish was in the Mozbar (HINT, HINT Mozzers!!)

Hope this helps,

Sha

Hi Link

All of the comments above are on the money, but the qualification here is that there are two types of competitor.

1. Competitors for Search (includes Wikipedia and other authority sites, but has no effect on your business unless the information there either endorses or disendorses the type of services you offer)

2. Competitors for Business as addressed by Brad.

As to whether you should analyze Wikipedia back links, the answer is absolutely yes. One thing to keep in mind is that we now have evidence that linking out to authoritative sites is correlated with improved search engine rankings. This is discussed in the Free Webinar Video Ranking Factors 2011 and Blog post Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011. Before watching the video you might find it helpful to read Rand's Blog post New Edition of Ranking Factors for 2011 is Now Live! and watch his explanatory video in that post.

Since Wikipedia is an authoritative site, but not seen as a business competitor, it is highly likely there may be business competitors who link to Wikipedia as a benign information source. Therefore, analyzing Wikipedia backlinks can identify other competitors in your market.

Hi Keiran,

After reading the comments here and taking a very quick look at your site I would say just a few things (since I am playing hookey from a project to recharge with a cuppa and really must get back to meet a deadline

1. Please DO NOT ignore the text errors on your site. While many view this as a minor issue, there are some other things to consider. You are in the web design business. Errors are NOT an SEO issue, but a conversion issue!

   First, there is a typographical error on your home page which has completely changed the message you are trying to convey to potential customers "You do need any technical knowledge". While those of us in the business understand what you are trying to say and will read over the mistake, potential customers with little or no knowledge of web design may at the very least find themselves questioning whether it is a mistake. Some will even take it to mean that they need technical knowledge if you build their site!

   The other very significant problem with errors in your text is that you are sending a message to potential clients. Remember you are selling a service which requires you to build pages full of text.  If your own website is full of errors, the message you send is that the websites you build are likely to also be full of errors. That is without even considering the secondary message that there may be an issue with attention to detail in your company

   Having read a blog post I am surmising that part of the error problem may be your reliance on an editor to catch the errors. While it may be alerting you to obvious spelling and typos, it is not letting you know when you have repeated words etc.

   Yes, I'm a self confessed word nerd so I'm always going to be sensitive to the error thing, but in this case it is all about the sales message you are sending.

2. The home page feels a little unfinished with the 3rd column and service sections looking empty and to be honest I would be looking to get some more text into the page. I would also make sure that text adds some more local emphasis (not just the county name, but some more specific references to your location). Have you claimed your local business profiles in Google Places, Bing and the best known citation sites? The links in these profiles will provide some trust signals and increase your chance of moving that page 1 keyword above the fold.

3. You are missing out on some nice keyword inclusion opportunities with your Blog Titles which also appear on your home page via the feed. Consider perhaps - "If I Had A Hammer - Could I Create Your Website In A Day?". Two things here actually. First, including some relevant keywords and second, talking to your prospective client in the first person. The text and images on your site are your first face-to-face meeting with your client. Speak directly to them and you have a much better chance of engaging them - that is the first step to converting them

If I were you I would keep the Pro account a little longer, do all the reading Stephen suggested and use the Q&A forum to learn and ask for help. Don't forget your monthly private question where you get to ask SEOmoz staff and Associates for specific help too.

Also - when the problem seems insurmountable, remember two things ...

• The heart of this community is TAGFEE and that means help is close by.
• Best way to eat an elephant - one mouthful at a time!!

Oops ...back to my deadline!

Hope this helps,

Sha

Hi there,

If you are referring to Press Release information which you submit to online services, they are not an issue for you because they should not be on your site.

The intent of a press release should be to put your product or business in front of journalists etc who are likely to take the information and write a good quality unique article that talks about you.

A press release should be carefully constructed to increase the chance of having it picked up, so if you used the exact same content on your site it would not be likely to inspire visitors to convert. If you want some ideas on how to write releases, do a quick search for "how to write an online press release". Most of the services provide guidelines on their sites too.

As long as the information on your site is unique then any duplicate problem is only an issue for the sites your release is listed on and not for you.

Ouch! Don't do that ... it hurts! (the kicking I mean)

Just 3 things that ever present significant issues that I am aware of

1. Most obvious is the time required to do it properly, which will depend how large the site is. If the page structure has changed significantly then you may need to point some redirects to a category page or something else relevant. I set up a simple excel file for the site with Old URL, Content, Category, Redirect URL, Redirect date and Check date. Once I've added the old URL and content info I then assign it to a category and Redirect URL, then use the list to set up the redirects. I generally spin through and do a manual check once the 301's are in place and use the check date column if there are a lot of pages and I need to come back and finish checking later.

2. I would also add a 404 catch-all just in case - all 404's go to home page or another appropriate page to make sure no old links are lost.

3. When choosing your redirect URL, think about the user and relevance - For example, if I click a link to buy an item which no longer exists, there is probably more chance I will look at another product if you send me to a store page full of products than send me to home.

Have fun!

Sha

Hi Doug,

301's are the right way to go as they pass link juice from the old domain and will preserve the traffic from existing external links.

The key here is "301's" (plural). Redirect each page on the old domain to the corresponding or relevant page on the new domain and also notify in Webmaster Tools that you have moved the site to the new domain.

There is some discussion of moving sites and using 301's in this SEOmoz Q&A post where I added a link to a Google Webmasters video that explains the process.

Hi Robert,

Search engines seem unwilling to define a specific time period and of course that is reasonable as there are a number of factors that can affect the process.

Am I correct in assuming from your words "used a 301 for the old to the new" that you have used a blanket 301? (to the homepage for example)

If this is the case, I believe it is likely to take longer for search engines to recognize the change as a "move".

If you redirect specific pages on the old domain to relevant or matching pages on the new domain, search engines are more able to recognize that the pages have moved and over time transfer link juice and update indexes. Using a blanket 301 leaves a question mark for the search engine as to whether the old domain may simply be used for its SEO value to feed traffic to a page which may not be relevant to the end user.

Matt Cutts explains his reasoning for using specific page-to-page 301's to move a domain in this video (with a reminder that 301's happen at page level, not domain level).

I'm quite passionate about page-to-page 301's, which drives my Tech people a little nuts, BUT I just bite the bullet and do them myself nowadays. Although it can be a huge amount of work to do this correctly, my goal is to do it in the best way possible and to have some small measure of control over external factors wherever possible.

In the end, I am the person who will have to answer the client's questions about what is happening with the site because right or wrong, "SEO" seems to translate to "responsible for everything" :).  I like to be able to tell my clients that we took the trouble to go the long way around something because it was better for them (and less likely to damage conversions on the new site).

Also - signalling the domain move in Webmaster Tools should help the process along, but I have seen several Googlers, including Matt Cutts qualify this as a "hint', so we shouldn't assume that it solves the problem. (BTW "Webmaster Tools" refers to both Google and Bing)

While this is not a definitive answer, hope it helps

Sha

Hi Jonathon,

Rand talked about a slight change of approach in the latest Linkscape update in a blog post earlier this week. Here is a link to the post: Linkscape Updates and Wireframes/Feedback on New Task List PRO Feature.

He did mention in the post that SEOmoz would welcome feedback on the change, so If you are experiencing issues it might be worth dropping a comment on the post.

No worries, glad to help

Hi Jason,

I have not noticed an issue with the rankings in my campaigns (except that a couple slipped a place or two :).

If you are thinking that something is not right then i would suggest you create a support ticket at the SEOmoz Help Desk so that they can take a look for you and see if there is an issue. Make sure that you provide information on a specific campaign or campaigns where you are seeing a problem so that they can be easily checked.

Hi Mont,

I think maybe you are thinking of Clicktale or similar.

Here is a quite comprehensive blog post on analytics tools which includes a short review of clicktale. There are a few around like it, but this one does actually have a free account which, while limited, does give you a little ongoing insight. (Look for the text link toward the bottom of the pricing page for free account)

Hope this helps,

Sha

I also checked Whois records, but interestingly, the record I found using domaintools does not mention DMedia, but much more significantly for the site owner, it actually provides details of the Aussie registered company Lockstock Technology Pty Ltd  ACN 113992322. Between the contact info that Robert provided and public records for the company, I would:

1. Attempt to contact them in person and see if you can come to a good faith agreement to resolve the issue (either get the link in place or return your payment)
2. Failing resolution, write direct to the company, making it clear that you are in possession of sufficient information to make it possible for you to pursue them, request that you require them to resolve the issue and that the consequence of ignoring your correspondence will be that you make a complaint to Consumer Affairs Victoria and to ASIC about their business conduct. It is amazing how quickly the involvement of Consumer Affairs, or even the threat of involving them, can suddenly improve a company's customer service in this country
3. Run a quick search to find any citation sites where they have a profile and add an accurate review.

If none of that gets you a resolution then I would  chalk it up to experience and not spend any more time, effort or energy on it.