The role of an H1 influencing rankings has certainly diminished, but I would still say it's worth having a keyword in there.

What it sounds like to me is that you're designing your page around the user first, and SEO/H1s second and that's exactly how it should be.

Now, in theory, the higher up you can have the H1 tag the better - as search engine crawlers do crawl linearly from top to bottom - and it is has been said that the crawlers sometimes do not crawl the entire page. For that reason, you'd want it nearer the top as possible.

But I'd certainly not want to skew the flow of the site just to force an H1 tag to appear higher - certainly not in this day and age where the H1 is less of a ranking factor.  I'd be confident that by having it in there somewhere in the of your site is more than good enough.  If you want, visit the site that's linked in my profile - we actually use an H1 tag that's lower down the page as well and not had any worries over it thus far.

Hope this is some use to you!

I agree with you Neil.  Design the navigation for the user, not a search engine.  It makes more sense to have simply "pricing" then to try and chase the algorithm and include some keywords like "web design pricing".  Furthermore, the added benefit of using a navigation like that really would be negligible.

Internal links can help your site, but I think it would be better to use the text around the site as you say, rather than the navigation, in order to utilise these.  The navigation is more for the user than the Google crawler and thus should be designed for the user.

Just my 2p!

Not only can that easily look like a link network - which will get you penalised by all the search engines - but I don't see the point in doing such a thing.

Why would you not want to build authority directly to your website - post that sort of information and product reviews to your main domain.  If the content is useful to people, they will link to it and perhaps share it on social networks.

That means all the "strength" from those shares and links will be going straight to your domain, not some sham micro-site.

The SEO companies you've spoken to are just promoting the idea of setting up a website to get some authority so it looks like you have an authority "link" to your site.  Why you wouldn't want to build authority directly to your site to begin with is lost on me.

Unless they're talking about setting up a micro site with relevant content that they can spam the hell out of with some unsavoury tactics that you wouldn't "want to risk on your main site".  So you're micro-site acts as a buffer in this sense.

Do you really want to rank in that way?

I'm much more interested in doing things in an open and tangible way.  Produce the best content that you can and promote it as much as you can.  Get legitimate authority straight to your site.  That's not to say that marketing your content won't be easy - it can be a long and difficult process to get traction.  But the rewards are infinitely better if you do.

Hi Chris

First and foremost, in my mind you don't need to change a thing.  It's working well - and here's why:

Think of a canonical tag as an instruction to Google to treat that URL is the top dog, the be all and end all - the one that you want Google to index and rank.

Any other page or URL that has the same canonical tag on it is basically your way of saying - "see this page? Don't worry about that page, it's a variant of this page that might look the same. Ignore it and rank that other page!"

Now, why would you want to do this?  Well, if Google thinks that your website has duplicated content and it believes it is being done to manipulate or game the algorithm, it might hit you with a penalty (often a Panda penalty).

Ecommerce sites often have this problem with their product pages and, while not usually intentional, Google has been known to put penalties on these sites.

Your site, in my mind, counters all of these problems very well.

Google can and will index URLs with query strings on them (anything with a "?" after it) and treat them as separate pages.  That means, theoretically, Google would have tried to index all of these URLs of yours:

http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=2_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=3_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&order=price_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price_

Now this would be a problem, as you'd quite likely have similar looking pages being indexed where products appear in multiple URLs.  This duplicate content could lead to a penalty.

But that's where the canonical tag comes in and does a great job.  Your tag is telling Google "ignore all versions of the http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html URL with a ? on the end of it - that's just to help the user and I'm not trying to duplicate content to try and rank higher. Ignore them and treat http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html as the main page"

So you're avoiding the problem of duplicate content and your canonicalisation is working well.  Very well, in fact.  If you do a site search (check it out here) you will see that only one version of the URL has been indexed and noted by Google - and that's the canonical version.

So keep it just as it is in my eyes - it's set up very well indeed!

Hope this helps.

Hi Gavin

I hope Zoopla is big enough for you!

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/sitemap.xml

And here is a downloadable version:

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/sitemap.xml.gz - found from within their robots.txt file. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/robots.txt

Hope this helps!

Hi Ramesh

There's two clear choices here:

Either you redirect all of the URLs to one main URL and try to rank that website.  This will result in only one site ranking, but no risk of duplicate content and Panda penalties.

Or, you give each website its completely unique content.  And that doesn't just mean rewriting the written content of the main site - you should try and give each domain as much unique value as possible, so it is quality content in its own right.  In doing that, you will stand a much better chance of ranking all 5 websites.

Also, take care that you do not link the 5 domains together on every single page.  A few links might be OK, but having too many links could constitute as a link-wheel, which would also see your site penalised.

Hope this helps.