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H1 tags are pretty important as they are meant to be the header of what the entire pages is about. Every page should have 1 and only 1 H1 tag and should definitely contain your most targeted keyword.

It's OK to have multiple H2, H3, H4 tags though. Although they don't count as much as an H1 does, it's still important to include your keywords in these tags when applicable too. Make sure that you're not "keyword stuffing" either.

So to answer your question, yes, if you don't have H1 tags on a page, and then add them in with the appropriate keywords, they will def help your on page optimization!

Hope that helps!

It's all about the way the page is coded. Most tabs use JavaScript but many of them will simple add a display:none; style tag on the hidden content which is bad. That basically tells Google, that you're not planning to show this content to users even though you may. In return, that content won't give you much "SEO juice" because it's hidden.

Even though this topic is controversial, I have ran some tests that show that when all the content is visible at once, you'll get more "SEO juice" from the content.

hope this helps!

The new flow player is quite impressive. It's feature rich and supports all browsers. It even had a flash fallback for really old browsers.

As far as format goes, different browsers support different file types so your best bet is to encode the videos in several html5 formats and let the player decide which is best for your users.

Virginia,

I don't see your website as ranking 5th. Make sure that you're not logged into Google+ when you're checking your rankings as it will modify your search based on what pages you frequent and like.

This looks like a pretty competitive keyword to rank for. It will take a lot of effort and time to get your page ranking where you want it. Make sure that your on-page optimization is A+ with the SEOMoz on page analyzer, and then focus on building dofollow external links. You can do so through things like article submissions, directory submissions, blog commenting, forum discussion etc...

There has a been a persistent, infrequent bug in the management of merged Google+ Pages for local where the owner of the page is unable to access the management of the page and receives a 500 Error from Google. Google knows about the bug but has been unable to quash it as of yet.

They are working on it though!

Here is a link to some more discussion about it... https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/business/47j8yzCbLA0/kOgBJWs1fOUJ

Hope that provides a little clarity!

Clarkie6,

There is no solid statement from the search engines that proves that nofollow links do provide SEO value. There is evidence, however, that shows that having a certain percentage of your backlinks as nofollow helps with rankings.

If you think about it, right now, spammers don't spend time with nofollow links as the officially don't pass any value. So the people that do have nofollow links must be generating content and partaking in real discussion.

Bottom line...They probably don't care as much weight but that must certainly carry some.

Hope this helps!

hey there!
To be sure that you don't get dinged for duplicate content, you can specify these parameters under the "URL Parameters" in Google webmaster tools. This tells Google that these values don't change any of the pages content and therefore only count 1 of the pages.

Hope that helps!

You should be using hyphens.

Google treats underscores as word joiners, while it treats hyphens as word separators. In other words the hyphen is like having a space between the words and tells Google and that they should be treated as two separate words.

Matt Cutts explains it in more detail in this video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AQcSFsQyct8

Hope this helps!

• Matt

Your website seems to be pretty image intensive. Google takes a snapshot of your website after a short amount of time whether your site is finished loading or not. It looks like the page hasn't had a chance to completely load before the preview has been generated.

I would look into optimizing all of your images for web with Photoshop, minifying your JavaScript and CSS. That would be a great start in fixing your issue!

Hope that helps!

Because H1 tags are meant be explain what the page is about, it's good practice to have them at the top of the page. If you absolutely want to have a friendlier title, make it an H2 that is styled to be bigger than your H1, and style an H2 for that main header of your page. Does that make sense?

I would worry that Goggle may find these pages to be duplicate content if there's only a 10 to 15 word difference. I would recommend re-writing each page from memory without looking at the other in order to help make differentiate the content.

ReferralCandy,

When optimizing your page for a set of keywords it's important to keep in mind that exact matches are most powerful. With that in mind, think about your customers and the order of the keywords they type into the search.

Are your customers more likely to google "gift set organic soap"

or

"oganic soap gift set"

In my opinion, the second one is more natural and probably a more common search query.

With that being said, the second URL makes most sense.

Hope this helps!

• Matt

dofollow links pass "SEO Juice".

nofollow links do not pass "SEO Juice".

If your curious as to whether or not a particular blog allows for dofollow links, you can view the source code of the webpage using any common web browser. Find the link in question, and look to see if it includes "rel=nofollow". If that tag doesn't exist, then the link is dofollow.

Hey there,

If each page has unique content, you don't want to use canonicalization as you wont get the "SEO Juice" from each individual page.

What I would do is modify the page title for each page.
For example, "Green Widgets - Page 2 | Cheapwidgets.com"

Does that make sense?

All you need to do is sign up for a Google places account, register and confirm you business, and you find yourself included in those listings.

I would highly recommend the All In One SEO Pack. This plugin is feature rich, and adds a "page 2", "page 3" or whatever you'd like to additional pages so that you don't get duplicate page titles and so on.

I've been using it for years and have it on over 20 different blogs. A definite A+

If your client wants to have an exact copy of the article on their blog without getting penalized by Google, all they need to add a rel=canonical tag to the header of the page that points to the original article on the Huffington Post blog.

This tag tells Google that the original content is elsewhere and to pass all "SEO credit" to that page instead of yours. It's also good practice to link to the original article at the bottom. Something like "View the original article at www.somedomain.com".

You can learn more about the rel=canonical tag here... http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Hope this helps!

• Matt

If I'm understanding this right, you need to update your canonical tags with the pages the 301 is redirecting to.

MissVe,

you can change your permalinks. You just need to set up 301 redirects from the old permalinks to the new. This not only forwards users to the new location but tells google that you've moved the page as well. This is the best way to handle your situation!

Hope that helps!

There doesn't seem to be a real definitive answer to this question. back in 2008 Google talks about exploring new and improved ways to crawl pages including some HTML forms. It's been almost 5 years since then so I'm sure they're doing more than before. I would still however include some text links on pages if you're looking to send web crawlers there. Also make sure that you have a solid sitemap to help the crawlers find your content on these pages.

Your rankings not only have to do with the freshness, quality and links pointing to that page but the same for all other competing pages. I would use the open site explorer to see if the pages that are taking your page's place are getting new backlinks that are helping to drive them up.

A lot of SERP movement has to do with your competitor's pages. That's why it's extremely important that you're always building new quality links and keeping your content fresh and updated.

Your resubmission of the sitemaps for a new website is a perfect explanation for what you see in the graph.

It looks, however, like Google decided to exclude many pages of that spike soon after. If they are product pages that show different content based on query string values, you should tell Google that using the URL Parameters section of Webmaster Tools. This will help to ensure that Google knows these aren't all the same pages and should all be indexed.

Hope that helps!

Oh if webmaster tools is showing 404's for those pages that is most likely why Google has removed them from the index. It's hard to dig in without accessing your tools but here's what I would do.

1. Find out what urls are returning a 404. It could be an error in the sitemap due to a change in the website?
2. Set up 301 redirects for these broken links to point where the content actually is.

I wouldn't say that they are treated exactly like text but are close. Since web crawlers cannot understand what an image actually is, it's important to make sure that you include alt tags on all your images to help with your on page optimization.