I am having the exact same problem, however Google webmaster tools is able to crawl the site just fine.
Posts made by Webformix
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RE: I'm getting a Crawl error 605 Page Banned by robots.txt, X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header, or Meta Robots Tag
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Can't remove "insights" section from report.
The items in the "insights" section of the Moz report have an "x" which can be clicked in the designer to dismiss this data from the report. However, these items still shows up in the report anyways. Buggy. How can we work around this bug?
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RE: How to "on page" seo a small local service business - particularly headers
Thanks for the response! I realize now that I actually asked a few too many questions, and didn't do a terribly good job of separating them out clearly.
1. Is this how I would optimize the titles? I understand your answer. Thank you.
2. Do people expect the title tag to be the same as the menu option they click? I'm afraid this isn't really the question I intended to ask. I agree that people don't normally expect the title and menu option to match. I'm actually pretty comfortable with the titles. My concern is about the header. When you click on "Rates" on the nav or menu bar, when you arrive at the page, what do you expect the H1 header to be? Most people would expect it to be "Rates" not "Dog Walking Rates in Anytown", or "Dog Walking Testimonials in Anytown" etc.
3. Should I not optimize the titles? (Question should be: Should I not optimize the headers?) I understand that it's pretty easy to optimize the titles, and using your convention above makes sense. Again, my bigger question is about the H1 header. Should I put keywords in the header of every page, or just the home page?
4. Should I not use the same keywords on every page? My keywords do fall naturally into most of the pages body content. Again, my biggest question I guess really has to do with the headers. Assuming I do need to put keywords in the H1 header of the other pages, would I continue to use "dog walking" as my primary keyword, or would I need to come up with a variation that I haven't used in one of the other headers?
5. Should I use a brand domain instead of a keyword domain? Makes sense. Thanks for the answer.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond. Sorry I didn't make the questions clearer from the start.
-Matt
p.s. I updated the title of the original post, when I realized that most of my questions are actually about the H1 Header.
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How to "on page" seo a small local service business - particularly headers
First off, let me apologize if this question is posted elsewhere, worded differently. I've looked around quite a bit and have been unable to find the answer.
Basically, we are a small web design firm just getting our feet with with SEO. Most of our clients, especially initially, will be quite small, local, service businesses.
For example: and electrician, a pet sitter, a retail printing and map store, a surgeon etc. Almost all of their sites will follow a basic "business card on the web" format...
Home Page - About Us - Testimonials - Rates - FAQ - Contact Us - Etc
So, from what I've read about on-page optimization, making sure my keywords are in the title, header, body, and meta description is one of the easiest and quickest things we can do for our clients. This is a straightforward concept for me when applied to the homepage. For example, take the local pet sitting business. Her keywords are: Pet sitting, Dog walking, and the city we live in, Anytown USA. So, I've used those keywords in all the appropriate places on the home page:
title: Dog Walking and Pet Sitting Service in Anytown USA
header: Dog Walking and Pet Sitting Service in Anytown USA
first sentence of body: We are a professional Dog Walking and Pet Sitting Service in Anytown USA
meta description: We are a professional Dog Walking and Pet Sitting Service in Anytown USA. At Business Name your furry friends become a part of our family.
So, my question is:
Do I also optimize the "about us" page? I've changed the title of all the pages to follow this format:
Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - Home
Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - About Us
Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - Rates
Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - FAQ
Dog Walking and Pet Sitting in Anytown USA - Etc
Easy enough so far. Also pretty easy for the meta description, and the body. However, how would I add keywords to the header without making it look ridiculous? We use wordpress with the genesis framework, and child themes from studiopress. The header is always prominently visible at the top of the page. Most people would expect to see the header be the same as the link they clicked on the nav bar: for example, on the "about us" page, people expect the header to be: "about us" Not: "dog walking and pet sitting in Anytown USA - About Us"
Do I just not worry about the headers on the other pages? For that matter, I'd really like people to "land" on the home page, not any of the other pages, so should I not optimize them at all? Does optimizing the rest of the pages help the home page to show up higher in the SERPS? If I do end up optimizing the rest of the pages, should I use slightly different spellings of the keywords: like Dog walker instead of dog walking? Or pet sitter instead of pet sitting?
I've repeatedly seen people talk about not using the same keywords on more than one page... but for most of these businesses there are really fairly few keywords. There just isn't that many different ways that someone is going to search for an electrician, or a plumber, or a pet sitter. By the second or third page that I optimize on one site, I imagine I'll start running out of different variations of the keywords.
I recognize that a lot of what we'll do that will be most helpful to local clients has nothing to do with on page optimization (setting up google places, google+, yahoo + bing local, etc). I'd just like to make sure that I'm doing the on page stuff as perfectly as possible.
Thanks for your time and responses!
-Matt
p.s. while I'm at it, let me ask another question about domain names as well. Right now the pet sitting client mentioned above is using:
www.petcare_Anytown_.com
After operating her business for the last year she realized she is much more interested in dog walking than pet sitting. We are in the processes of redesigning the site, and when finished, are considering moving it to:
www.dogwalking_Anytown_.com
My assumption is that as long as we use permanent redirects from the old site to the new one, we shouldn't lose much SEO value. Is this thinking correct?
On a related note though: another article I read mentioned that using a brand name in the domain may actually be more useful than the keyword rich domains above. However,
www._businessname._com happens to already be taken by a pet sitting business at the other end of the country. We could however use:
www.businessnameAnytown.com
Which one do you think would work better? The keyword/location domain, or the businessname/location domain? Thanks!