Bingo. That was it. I should have know better :}

Updated website from Magento backend to Wordpress and since the redeploy, my bounce rate has dropped from 40% to 4%. I did check to see if there was duplicate GA tracking code but only one call. I checked reports under "visitor flow" and one page visits seem inline with the previous bounce rate.

Weird. Never experienced this before.

If anyone else tries to figure a way to organize twitter followers into lists AFTER the fact, here's what I did....

I DO NOT work for socialbro.com nor social oomp.

I simply signed up for the socialbro.com service and the tool provides the ability to filter twitter followers (and people you are following) by search keywords (across bio and tweets), geolocation, and several other fields. This capability made it easy for me to search for users and then apply to specific lists we've recently established.

Moving forward we are using social oomph to assign new twitter followers to lists as we acquire them. In  Social Oomph, followers can be assigned automajically based on keywords or through manual selection.

Thanks for the link Chris. I did see that earlier but didn't quite address Twitter lists specifically. I did end up trying this and was successful in downloading the data, but there's nowhere to update lists specifically that I can see. Will keep trying.

I have a list of about 3,000 Twitter followers and would like to segment my followers into separate lists for "emergency preparedness" and "travel." Is there a tool that can help me automate this without reviewing each profile one-by-one?

We have a particular blogger that provides lots of links to our website every day. Can you recommend tools that provide data/analytics about other sites that might be similar as compared so we can partner with them as well?

Thanks.

https://www.facebook.com/help/271607792873806

How do I change my Page name?

You can only change the name of a Page with fewer than 200 likes. If your Page qualifies, follow these steps to change its name:

1. From the top of your Page, click Edit Page 
2. Select Update Info
3. Change the text in the Name field and save your edits

You can't currently change the name of a Page with 200 or more likes.

Changing your Page's name does not affect its username or Page address. Learn more about changing your Page's username.

Did you test on the rich snippet tester? I would but no link to example provided.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Should Meta descriptions and meta keywords be different on every page?

Meta description tags should be as unique per page as possible.

Is it bad to have the same meta data repeated on the site?

Yes

If it has to be different does it have to be totally different per page of just slightly different?

Slightly different at a minimum. Common examples might be a service that is done in multiple locations and you tweak the description to highlight the different location, but the service itself is the same.

Should the description contain keywords is there an advantage to that?

Absolutely, just don't stuff words in a way that is, well, disgusting. Remember that "meta description" may be used as the summary of the page in your search result for the given page.

Don't use meta keywords tag.

1) Search engines don't really pay attention and 2) your announcing to your competitors the keywords you are trying to opitimize for.

Referencing this post, I also recently added this code “_gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 100]);” to my Google Analytics script in order to track page load on all page requests instead of 5% (roughly). I may not do this permanently but for now I'm getting tremendous feedback from Google Analytics regarding Page Load time using the report I just sent you

http://p.barker.dj/sitespeedtips

If you are using Google Analytics, check under Content >> Site Speed >> Page Timings and you can sort by the largest load time first.

Here's a directory theme with 572 purchases and over 350+ comments to review http://themeforest.net/item/directory-portal-wordpress-theme/3840053

Double slashes only hamper SEO if there are links connecting to that content. If there are no links then its a non issue.

Here's some code to place in .htaccess (if applicable)

Prevent double slashes in URLs, e.g. //Blog and /Home//About

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.)//(.)$ 
RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]

Here are the links in the site footer. Missed them: Site Map | All Cities

They've obviously optimized a page for each service in each town.

I am not seeing them show up #1 for various services within towns but I'm in Maine so not sure what affect that has on local search.

Looks like the "?all=categories" forces a different display in the content region of the page. The default homepage does not include this information as you noted.

"?all=categories" is basically a landing page that drives the google bot to town-specific pages dedicated to their services. If you note the copy they've customized each page to drive local SEO to the specific town.

Don't forget to log out of Google or use an alternative browser that you never log into to see anonymous results for your search. I sometimes have to remind myself of that.

There sitemap.php file is empty so not sure how that ?all=categories" link is getting indexed as I can't find it in the navigation either.

Competitor kind enough to share keywords he's trying to optimize for:

  <meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" content=" <a class="attribute-value">Snow Removal,  Sanding Services,  Roof Raking Services,  Fall Cleanup,  Lawn Mowing Service,  Fertilization Services,  Dethatching Services,  Tree and Shrub Care Services,</a>" />

Tools like PRWeb can definitely drive traffic to your website and potentially drive conversions. However, garbage in, garbage out so the content of the PR you are sending is EVERY bit as important as the conduit itself.

Your copy must be compelling enough for users to read and hopefully publishing editors to post on their news/blog websites to get you the most traction. Use best practices of content marketing to write high quality, compelling copy. Many great examples here at seomoz.org, hubspot.com &  copyblogger.com.

Hope that helps.

Hi Dana, in case you are using a platform like Magento, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. this functionality may all ready be built in to your theme without having to reinvent the wheel. Can you share a URL and I'll see if I can help you?

The link building/PR tactics provided by Takeshi Young are excellent as well as Agents of Value content marketing suggestions are both excellent.

I've been in your shoes before and it's certainly different developing something for the start vs. something in progress.

I'll offer a third and different perspective. In evaluating social media, analyze the most recent posts of competitor(s) and follow some of the users that might meet one or more of the "marketing personnas" you are trying to target (I try to create twitter lists with friendly names to organize these users). Begin to monitor their conversations and chime in when you can add value to the discussion. While monitoring, pay attention to the hashtags that these tweets include.

Hashtags are a GREAT WAY  to acuire new followers, conversations and potentially....customers.

This is one of many tactics and could similarly be utilized with Facebook, but not quite as easily. Don't want to be creapy.

Hope that is useful. Best of luck.

Martjin, I did find that answer early this morning and tested, then went to bed. Just woke up and, indeed, after changing to integers, it worked fine.

Now it's just my ecommerce vaules that are not displaying. I can't imagine the integer value would apply to ecommerce in ga as rounding is not expected.

Thanks for your feedback.

Tim

A second set of eyes is greatly appreciated. Thanks for responding and  a good point actually. here's the code from the page I referenced:

<a <span="">onclick</a><a <span="">="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Buy Now', 'www.rei.com', 'Freedom Portable Water Purifier',119.95]);" href="</a>http://www.rei.com/product/824898/steripen-freedom-water-purifier" target="_blank">title="Buy SteriPEN Freedom at REI.com" src="data:image/png;base64,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" alt="Buy SteriPEN Freedom at REI.com" />REI.com

Right now my GAC is just beore

A second set of eyes is greatly appreciated. Thanks for responding and  a good point actually. here's the code from the page I referenced:

<a <span="">onclick</a><a <span="">="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Buy Now', 'www.rei.com', 'Freedom Portable Water Purifier',119.95]);" href="</a>http://www.rei.com/product/824898/steripen-freedom-water-purifier" target="_blank">title="Buy SteriPEN Freedom at REI.com" src="data:image/png;base64,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" alt="Buy SteriPEN Freedom at REI.com" />REI.com

Right now my GAC is just beore

Just relaunched website and since then specific event tracking has zeroed. I copied event tracking directly from old site so it should work. Overall analytics are fine. Only variable I can think of is where google analytics code is placed. Does GAC code need to be on HTML header or at end of body specifically for event tracking to work? Example: Steripen.com/freedom/... When user clicks "REI" icon, this tracks an event that a user clicked on one of our"retailer links." Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Use if it truly is a point of emphasis in the context of the copy. Another reason not to do it has been mentioned in several recent posts.....It gives away the keywords you are trying to optimize to your competitors if you are too obvious.

Thanks Gerd, Marisa & Nakul. All good feedback. I asked this yesterday with another layer pertaining to mobile and I think it complicated the question too much for anyone to understand or answer.

product.com/shop is the ideal solution and that will require the investment in a new "product.com".  Forgoing the SERP for buyproduct.com is likely the best option anyways considering it will be gone once investment is made.

Appreciate your responses.

Manufacturer product website (product.com) has an associated direct online store (buyproduct.com). the online store has much duplicate content such as product detail pages and key article pages such as technical/scientific data is duplicated on both sites.

What are some ways to lessen the duplicate content here? product.com ranks #1 for several key keywords so penalties can't be too bad and buyproduct.com is moving its way up the SERPS for similar terms.

Ideally I'd like to combine the sites into one, but not in the budget right away.

Any thoughts?

I have a website that has two issues related to SEO: 1) the main website (product.com) is not mobile-friendly and 2) I have a shopping cart site (buymyproduct.com) using Magento that basically duplicates our product pages that exist on the main marketing website. Uses click "buy now" on a product page and are sent to the checkout at "buymyproductnow.com".

The company cannot overhaul product.com website right away and our shopping site (buymyproduct.com) uses a responsive theme and works well for iphone and iPad so I am thinking of making buymyproduct.com the mobile-friendly version of our website by using a sniffer on product.com and forwarding users to the mobile friendly version.

If I add canonical references from the shopping cart product pages and articles back to product.com associated pages, will this lessen the blow to any seo issues? What other factors am I missing/need to consider

Complicated and painful. Maybe doing nothing right now is best.

Thanks for any feedback.

I've set up a new online store and prepping to roll out. I've implemented Amazon Cloudfront to host all of my static files:  images, style sheets, javascript files and small template related images to assist in speeding up this Magento site.

1. Any reason not to do this?

2. What are the SEO implications of having images that arent' stored on the same domain?

3. Does it make a difference if I refer to these files from the amazon cloudfront domain vs. seting up a subdomain like cdn.mywebsite.com?

Thanks for any feedback.

Yes, we have experienced this with our product SteriPEN as well. For our product/brand this is more noticeable in Google Shopping Search rather than Google search. To your point it does appear that these Sears listing are being aggregated from Amazon.com retailers. On the Sears website, OnlineSuperSeller is selling our Journey product at $270 and the retail price US for this product is $99.99.

Don't know where OnlineSuperSeller is getting our product from as we don't sell product to them.

Let's see what others post.

Elias and Himanshu,

Himanshu's and my response are indeed not the same but similar. Himanshu is suggesting actually creating a second profile in GA that requires a second GAQ call.

The way I suggested using a filter would not require a second GAQ call. Either way, you'll have to set up the filters.

My apologies for the discrepancy.

SteriPEN is a portable water purifier that kills viruses, protozoa, e-coli, etc.

Because of the technical and safety requirements nature of the product, our website has much documentation of testing, organisms affected, and more. These are in pdf form and can often be found through google search (and through links on specific pages).

Because of the keyword-richness of these documents pertaining to microbes SteriPEN kills, etc. does it make sense to convert these pdf's into html text and images?

Then I was thinking perhaps writing a blog post AND generating key links on important landing pages to these documents (as html).

Removing pdfs may be harmful? Not a clue as to the cost/benefit.

Thanks Shelly. My bad...2 different questions in the same question :}

My current CMS where steripen.com is, doesn't provide me ability  to integrate wordpress or any other blog tools. It's a standalone 3rd party cms platform.

Unfortunately the blogging tools are antiquated so short-term I am forced with subdomain. I decided to look at it that "I can provide my users with the best presentation and utility of info about SteriPEN by using the subdomain (and WordPress)." I'll have to live with the seo consequences for now until we overhaul steripen.com soon.

In terms of posting to the microblogs, this to me is like whoring content. Unless I can build the blogs in such a way that they are non-SteriPEN branded niche blogs focused on a topic, I just don't see it. And I don't have the time/money to invest in that right now.

Tim

Himanshu is right. Depending on your use-case, you can create a new profile (we'll call it profile-B") and I don't think it was mentioned, you can create a filter on that profile that will only include analytics for pages that make it through the filter resulting in "Profile-B".

I may be too much stating the obvious here but these are a few examples of filters I use with my clients for the exact purpose you mention:

• filtering to INCLUDE OR EXCLUDE content based on site path
• filtering to INCLUDE OR EXCLUDE content based on country
• filtering to include content based on search engine visits only
• filtering to INCLUDE OR EXCLUDE content based on ecommerce transaction visits
• filtering to INCLUDE OR EXCLUDE content based on goal success visits
• filtering to INCLUDE OR EXCLUDE content based on ad campaigns

Possibilities are endless depending on use case. I'm happy to help with filters given the parameters.

before moving to pure ecommerce/digital marketing this year, I worked in digital news publishing for 15 years previously. During that time I was exposed to: Drupal, WordPress, home grown Cold Fusion CMS I built in the 90's (may it rest in piece), Ning, Tumblr, TownNEWS Bloxx CMS, the very expensive platform Clickability and Blogger.

I am in agreement with Ryan that WordPress is probably the simplest and easiest to get up and running quickly. Just set this up in 2 weeks: http://community.steripen.com

If all you need is to post content: text, images & video with some social media push capabilities, then you can be in business very quickly.

I loved Drupal but had a very difficult time getting it implemented live as customizations were time consuming/complicated (for me anyways) and outsourcing quality Drupal help was expensive. It's great for community building but might be overkill for blogging. Acquia has some great use-case builds that you might find useful to check out if you need more than basic blogging. Basically from a programming perspective it was over my head. That is just as much my limitation as the product. I also didn't find the blogging tools to be very robust. As I recall it required a lot of plugins to do some of the most basic things that wordpress does out of the box.

Three years ago I walked into a job where there were 5 Joomla installs pumping content for 1 newspaper in Utah. It was a nightmare for me. Joomla seemed like a big step backwards. to some degree though, these products have unique feature sets that are geared towards certain product dev groups so this is a very opinionated discussion for sure. By the time I left we had moved off Joomla to something called TownNews  Bloxx CMS which is overkill for you.

As I recently learned, be careful about setting up a new blog. All best practices here at SeoMoZ point to keeping your blog in a subfolder of your main site. Due to limitations of my cms, I wasn't able to do that short term.

I've read a lot of info here in the Q & A tonight and there was a thread that stated it's potentially a good thing to post content on multiple blog platforms such as:

1. blogger.com
2. posterous.com
3. wordpress.com
4. tumblr.com

I've also been trying to figure out how to deal with my blog as a subfolder instead of a subdomain. That research in Q & A clearly indicates that Google treats subdomains basically like separate websites and links from my blog to my main website will not be as valuable if i stay the course with my blog on a subdomain short term.

Given that, if the 4 blogging tools above all require the use of a subdomain, then how am I actually taking advantage of the seo value of blogger,posterous, tumblr?  In my case my domains would be:

• steripen.blogger.com
• posterous.tumbler.com
• steripen.wordpress.com
• steripen.tumblr.com

Just not adding up to being viable given what I read states these would be treated as new websites, not to mention I worry these posts, even slightly differentiated, would be suspect. Who am I truly benefitting by doing this? Users?

These are all great responses. In the coming months, we will be integrating the following URLS

steripen.com (custom cms), community.steripen.com (Wordpress blog) and buysteripen.com (Magento store) into the core domain of steripen.com.

Unfortunately we can't fold our GetSatisfaction implemention under the domain as well. will have to keep subdomain for that.

Not looking forward to the potential effects of this but all this feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks to all for the great feedback. I only wish I had read this last week. Unfortunately I created a subdomain. Unfortunately our primary domain is fairly antiquated and not conducive to blogging/social sharing, etc. (legacy to my arrival) so I guess in the  short/intermediate term I had no choice until we overhaul the website next year.

Great feedback. thank you so much Sha.

Thank you so much for your reply. Your info about page authority was telling. Holding technical issues as a controlled variable, If I can have an "add to cart" button on a page authority of 44 instead of page authority 1 and be able to control the content for a "best case scenario" for my users, I've got to believe that is a win-win for both the user and SEO.

To your point though, I worry we will lose our strong page authority on our product pages if we switch platforms (even if I am able to keep the URLS exactly the same).

THanks again for your help.

My favorite golf ball is the Srixon Tour Yellow ball. Srixon has a product detail page here  (www.srixon.com) AND there's also a product detail page here at shop.srixon.com.

Is there any sort of SEO penalty here because there's some duplication? Does the fact the store is a separate subdomain make this more allowable?

Many branded manufacturer websites work this way but it just doesn't make sense to me to have two product pages that you have to manage content when you can have just 1 with a call to action.

I also work for a branded manufacturer and am considering rebuilding our website from the ground up with the online store and the main/marketing website blended into one to eliminate this duplication. We have this same duplicated marketing/store setup as well.

any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Confused.