Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Recently i got into a discussion with someone regarding the use of headings on an e-commerce website.

i had used headings whenever a heading was used in the design, they all marked the subject of the given section.

For example: The sidebar contains items for filtering products. Each filter had a

containing the name of the filter, like colors or brands.

The discussion i had was about whether the use of headings was appropiate because the words contained within the heading had nothing to do with the main subject of the page (Soccer in this case).

The advice from the SEO agency was to replace the headings with a different html element like a div or span and style this so it looks like tge heading in the design.

What do you guys think?

Hi Tom,

The php server request uri way would be a good option except that the URLs are different on the different domains.

For example:

• www.example.com/about-us/
• www.example.nl/over-ons/

Therefor i really need a way to define the correct url on a page by page basis. Manually doing this in Wordpress is going to be a pain.

Thanks for the response! Do you happen to know how to properly handle this in Wordpress? Can't find a good plugin for implementing this.

Hey there fellow Mozzers,

I'm currently performing some work for a webshop which is located at two different TLD's.
example.com and example.nl.

In the head of both websites the hreflang tags have been added to tell Search Engines which site is targeted at which country. That's good

However, the hreflang links are pointing to the homepages of both websites from every page on the websites. Isn't example.nl/blog/ not supposed to link the hreflang tag to example.com/blog/?

It is very difficult to tell you something if you don't tell us where to find your website.
If you could post the url here in the following format: domain (dot) com then we could give you an accurate answer.

My first guess is that you haven't set up a proper rel=canonical.
In the eyes of a computer the following URL's are all different pages.

www.domain.com
domain.com
www.domain.com/index.html
domain.com/index.html
www.domain.com?sessionid=1
etcetera...

If you're not canonicalizing your pages or redirecting them properly then a computer such as a search engine will see it as different pages with exactly the same content.

As i mentioned before, this is just a guess and i can't give a proper answer without knowing the URL of your website.

Hope my answer will be useful to you.

This should give you faster improvement than with a completely new domain.

If you only have a physical location in Suffold than your local search result efforts will be focussed on Suffold and the immediate area through your citations, reviews etcetera.

This does not mean that you can not rank in the normal search results for queries about other areas such as Cambs and Herts. Your website could state that these areas are part of your service area as well.

Hello Mark,

This could potentially lead to duplicate / thin content issues on your site which could harm your ranking.
At the end you mentioned that you choose three paragraphs like this to mention the keyword three times because the Moz Page Grader told you so. The tool is merely a helpful hint towards an optimized page.

You should always write the content for the user and not for the search engine. A good piece of text about a certain subject will naturally contain the keyword several times. Three is a good average which is indicated by the Page Grader.

Writing your own descriptions of the content is a good idea instead of the Amazon ones even though it sounds like it's gonna be a lot of work to do so. Whenever possible try to write a fully unique piece of text of 300 words or so for each product. This is a pain to do, but in terms of SEO it will do wonders above standard templates.

Redirecting the old URL with a 301 redirect will send the users to the new URL. All the link juice from links pointing towards the old URL will also be pointed towards your new URL.

Google will keep the old URL in the index for a while, but it will disappear from the search results in a matter of weeks.

One thing to not though, make sure that users searching for the old product end up on a page that is useful for them. If i'm looking for a blue bicycle and i get redirected to a red bicycle page than it might be a related product, but it's not what i'm searching for.

This harms the user experience and will give users a negative association to your brand.
For each product that you retire you should make a decision between

1. Redirecting the page to a different URL
2. Giving them a custom 404 page

By customizing a 404 page you can help users in a tremendous way if done right. Depending on the situation either of these two choices can be the best one.

Personally i prefer to go for the longer url because of the breadcrumbs and the easier url navigation structure. A lot of people delete part of the url to get back to a previous step in the website architecture. Your 1st way allows that to be done fairly easily and the url explains exactly where someone is on the site.
When someone sees your url in the SERP's this would also indicate that they are finding a product in the proper category.

The problem with this is that if the webshop has a product in several categories. I build a female clothing webshop a while back and they had categories for top-wear, bottom-wear, specific clothing articles(blouses, jeans, shoes etc) and for each brand. This meant that a product would be in at least 3 different categories within the site.

For this reason i chose to set the canonical to: http://www.domain.com/product/ in this particular case.

If your webshop does not have this problem and will not get this problem in the future i would recommend the longer url's.

Ben Morei stated the difference between HTML4 and HTML5 in using heading tags already. His answer is therefor completely correct.

What i would like to add to his answer is that you should look at H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 tags as if the webpage is a book. In a book the chapter-title is a H1 tag. All the subchapters have an H2 tag. If these subchapters have another sub-area then this would be marked up with an H3 tag and so on.

Having a clear hierarchy in your heading tags will make it more user friendly. Search engines might also understand better which parts of the content are connected to each other and which are separate because of this.

Hope i answered your question and if anything is still unclear feel free to ask more details.
We have three answers to your question here now and the question is still on marked as 'unanswered'.

If your question is answered could you please mark the answer which was most helpful as the correct answer so this question is no longer on the bounty page for no reason?

Hello Rob,

In order to improve your local SEO you would need to claim (or create) your company's 'local listing' pages across platforms. A lot of websites out there list local businesses such as Google Places/Local, Yahoo local, Foursquare, Hotfrog, Yelp and much more.

Many of these platforms allow you to claim the page where they give out your company details so you can fill in the information about your company yourself. Once you've done this you need to make sure the information there is correct.

Enter your company name, address and contact details everywhere in the same way. For a computer it's very difficult to understand that avenue is the same as 'ave' in an address.

Fill in a good description, add photo's/video's if you have any and make sure the listing describes clearly what your company does and what it is all about.

The most important one of these is your listing on Google Places/Local. This page will actually rank in the search results as you described. Make sure you fill this in as good as you can. Google will use this information and compare it to other listings of your company. If they see that the information is consistant this would indicate to Google that the information is correct and they will trust you more and more. This would help you rank better in local SEO for related search queries.

Another good thing to remember is that reviews help you rank too. If you've got loyal and satisfied customers, ask them to write a review for you on your Google Places/Local page.

Note: Don't pay people for reviews or anything. It's against google's guidelines to buy or sell reviews just like links.

Some resources to get you started:

• The definitive guide to local SEO

• Free local SEO tools that belong in your toolkit

• Local SEO tips for 2014

Hope i answered your question. If anything was unclear or if you have any more questions please let me know and i will do my best to answer or explain more.

It is very difficult to tell you something if you don't tell us where to find your website.
If you could post the url here in the following format: domain (dot) com then we could give you an accurate answer.

My first guess is that you haven't set up a proper rel=canonical.
In the eyes of a computer the following URL's are all different pages.

www.domain.com
domain.com
www.domain.com/index.html
domain.com/index.html
www.domain.com?sessionid=1
etcetera...

If you're not canonicalizing your pages or redirecting them properly then a computer such as a search engine will see it as different pages with exactly the same content.

As i mentioned before, this is just a guess and i can't give a proper answer without knowing the URL of your website.

Hope my answer will be useful to you.

Optimizing the page with geographic long tail keywords is still best practice.
Google does display local search results based on IP adress when they have access to the location data of the given person.

I would still recommend using the location based keywords as long as you don't keyword stuff your texts.

Hope i answered your question

Ah i had this same issue before. Perhaps you made the same mistake as me.
If you go to your campaign and click on the top right button 'Campaign Settings'. Here you should have a look at the page crawl limit. There is a 50.000 limit on this in the trial version and on my first campaign i selected 50.000.

If this is the problem for you as well you can just edit it and create another campaign

Google tends to scramble the title tag and description tag up if they think that it will serve the user better based on the provided search query.

Sometimes Google changes title tags so they'll contain branding purposes.

Anyway nothing is wrong with Google changing your title and/or description tags. Google always serves what they think is best for the users. I've noticed that they were scrambling my things up too and they actually helped me improve my title tag.

Root domains i suppose. Where exactly do you see RDs?

First off you should go to webmaster tools and make sure that you have verified that you are the owner of both the www and non-www version. After this you can tell Google your preferred version of the page under the site settings within webmaster tools.

This by itself will tell Google that it should index the preferred version. Furthermore you said that the non-www redirects to the www version now. Google will pick this up in time and will start indexing the www version.

Your question about why only one got indexed is hard to answer like this. If it's not the robots.txt than it could be a link rel="canonical" pointing towards the non-www version?

Think about the user experience when implementing a solution like this.
If your user expects to find a blog post about a certain topic make sure they are redirected to at least something which is connected to that.

On a webshop selling clothing articles it would make sense to redirect a deleted shoe article to the category page for shoes or to show them a custom 404 page which helps them on their way to find more content.

If redirecting them to something relevant is not possible i would suggest creating a custom 404 page which explains that the page has been deleted but that certain pieces of your content may be interesting for them. (Link to those pieces of content.)

Just redirecting users to the homepage or other pages which are not relevant only annoys the user and gives them a negative association with your website.

Hello Denis,

To your first question: Schema.org is indeed much more specific than Google's data highlighter tool.
To your second questions: If the client has a footer with their contact details and address location than this would be a good place to use the schema markup and then it would be included on every page.

You're talking about 'manually marking up every page'. If the contact information is in the footer this would only have to be marked up once? Don't really understand that part of the question.

**Conclusion: **It's not necessary to mark up local business information on every page, but if the client has the local business information on every page because it's useful for their users than this is a perfect opportunity to mark it up with schema information.

Hope i was of assistance and if you have any other questions please let me know