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I won’t be producing good closely related content to somebody else’s website, especially after reading the example,  the quality article which your competitor to give. He effectively give ammunition to his new and ultimately more powerful enemy, you

I think I’ll try a little guest blogging but it will only be to websites loosely connected to the subject of my website not directly in competition and see what the results are.

Okay C- PhD sounds good advice to me thank you.

I think I am going to dip my toe was into guest blogging because you never know of the results unless you try it yourself, I just wondered what other people’s experience was on the subject. I presume given your advice you’ve had good results with this in the past.

One of the things that put me off was I have limited time and the effort of searching and reading other websites to try and find good places that might take my content always dissuaded me from trying. I never liked the idea of approaching people building a relationship with the long-term motive of them being more easily persuaded to take my content.

I think I might trying to find loosely related subject websites that might take a good article and see how things go regarding traffic and links.

I appreciated your quality advice Egol when I first joined Moz just over a year ago and bringing my attention to the importance of quality articles, it was a subject I was new to at the time and I was wondering if I was wasting my time spending so much effort producing content for the website only to find out I wasn’t spending enough time!

Don’t you think that Tom’s opinion about guest posting can be useful for online relationships between websites of a similar subject, bringing over people are interested in the subject you’re writing about finding your content and may be linked etc. It sounds like you’ve never gone down this route yourself.

One of the arguments that seems to be in against guest posting recently is that with the real authorship attribute coming in maybe Google is not as keen to reward this kind of activity regarding links in the article but I’m not sure if that’s true.

Thanks a lot Tom totally get the positive aspects that you are pushing forward regarding guest blogging,and I’ll take your tips on board to try and get approval from some good websites

Quite a while back Egol commented to one my questions when I was writing articles for directories that he thought it was not the best way to spend my time and I felt the same in my bones;

I don’t think as far as I’m concerned I could produce is good quality content to somebody else as I could from our website because the incentive would not be as great.

I once spent three days writing a review of a local tourist spot, filming the area with an HD camera and taking photographs to produce the best article I could and that’s always been my most successful in every respect. The video is still three years later having high volumes of traffic from YouTube and the article has been my most popular on the website so is a prime example of if you put the effort in one of Google’s quality control team hopefully see the content I think and push that forward.

The only reason I thought of guest blogging to a small degree recently was because I haven’t actively been link building in any respect some time but I have found my social media efforts to be fruitful so I was thinking along the lines of like you say producing a little bit of content hopefully for some quality websites for the main reason of bringing attention to my website and its contents to people who are genuinely interested in its contents. The only reason I’ve hesitated is because of limited time, I have had a list of projects I intend to do myself from my old website.

I think I’ll try a little bit of guest blogging just to see if the results produce any meaningful traffic and possibly a few quality links.

Guest blogging is one of the activities I’ve never undertaken only because I went down the avenue of thinking if you go to the time and effort of producing great content why would you want it to be on someone else’s site when it could be on yours. The only reason I’m thinking about undertaking guest blogging now is because with social media becoming more prominent and indeed I found it to be very useful, I can see the logic that if you have got a niche of expertise to write about and you find good quality websites that will accept your guest blogs maybe that is a productive thing to do by attracting relevant traffic and also producing quality links to your website

Have you got any experience of Guest blogging recently?

Would you spend your precious time writing for your own website or spend some of that time guest blogging on good quality related websites? And if so what you see the main advantage is being?

The website is mainly just about reading text are looking at pictures there is a service using a data blocker for a provisional booking. I’ve never heard of dynamic serving so I’ll look into that.

I did notice that there was a comment asking somewhere else why the new design on Moz was not responsive, I’m surprised I wonder why this wasn’t used.

I recently started a social media campaign and notice an increase in the percentage of mobile users, in comparison to general Google search users which is slightly lower percentage. I must admit I’ve not checked in fine detail how user-friendly my website is on my android phone, it seemed quite easy to navigate between pages and even to book using a service called data blocker but I will do some research because I can see that even sleights increases in usability regarding mobile users would probably make the  process of searching the properties and booking easier and more attractive.

Also check out the competition and see how their websites are performing on mobile.

I never use my mobile to search on the Internet personally set something up not deeply considered and I was just putting out the question to see what the people’s feelings were regarding the subject and make their own experience of responsive design from their websites.

Thanks for your detailed response and I understand.

The percentage of traffic using mobile at the moment’s seems to be almost 50% of the total traffic and they seem to stay slightly less time on the site. The site seems reasonably okay to navigate on my mobile but obviously I can see to compete with the competition I’ll have redesign at some point.

I wonder how many of our Moz members' websites have invested in a mobile version are a responsive design version of their business websites..

One of my new businesses is letting holiday cottages and on a few occasions expert web designers have suggested that I should have a redesign because my Dreamweaver website is looking dated and maybe not the best navigation system. The website started off a couple of years ago with one cottage owned by me and I designed the website and I’m certainly not the professional by any means. http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/

The only reason I have not invested in a redesign ( although I’m thinking of it once again seriously at the moment ) is because the website has developed into a small letting agency now with eight properties and it’s doing okay with reasonably good search engine listings achieving good occupancy rates on most of the properties.  The feedback from people booking cottages is often complimentary regarding how they visualise the properties.  I  get the feeling this could be because the subject of this website is old world cottages in at old characterful fishing port and possibly the people booking holidays like the personal unpolished website approach, rather than the larger faceless but professionally designed agencies websites,  if you get my meaning.

In the future of the company grows I can see how will have no choice but have professional template and navigation structure that maybe at this stage it’s just not worth doing?

I’ve attached a snapshot of my analytics which shows that when social media like Facebook traffic look at the website there is slightly more people are using mobiles and desktop computers but they seem to stay a similar period of time a look at a similar number of pages so there must be finding site navigation reasonable.

What do you think would you go for a redesign at this stage and if so what would be the major advantages?

analytics.JPG

Hi Mark

Yes I got all my Google plus score back  log into my account or not,  so it seems like things are back to normal, like you say it musts have been a bug !

Best Alan

Isn't one of the important questions to begin are you are trying to rank for local searches in weight loss your area or alternatively vastly more difficult high-volume short tail keywords to do with weight loss which will be the opposite extreme very difficult.

Also like any of the business I think you've got to start somewhere and example is my company target particular well known brand of wireless security alarm installation and we completely miss out the other brands which would involve a great deal more work. So now even though this particular brand Is sold  throughout the UK my company tends to appear as the leading specialist but only in this one particular brand.

You've just got to be totally knowledgeable and produce unique work which isn't easy it's back to the usual hard work gets results and as always you want the results most and so are probably  the best person to get stuck in rather than employing somebody unless you're particularly bad at content writing.

Hi Rand

I think that your whiteboard Friday videos are very informative and enthusiastically presented along with all the other experts I am becoming familiar with and I can definitely see why professional SEO marketers can find this website must have.

Also I really appreciate all the interesting answers from everybody.

If I were perfectly honest I think that even though I am an amateur SEO I probably will continue with my subscription to Seomoz because I do market my own holiday cottage, and I'm just starting a holiday letting agency. And I also market my own alarm and CCTV installation website so a big percentage of my spare time is now spent on Internet marketing. My only reservation has been that to be perfectly blunt I have managed by just applying common sense and hard work to already get pretty good results considering my SEO technical abilities are not that extensive.

My holiday cottage is appearing fairly high on Google search results, managing first page for most of the main heavy traffic short tail keywords like "Whitby Holiday Cottages" and seems to be competing against a large established letting agencies who advertise throughout the UK with a great many more cottages than I have on my website currently.
I also have a website for my main business which is for the installation of CCTV and wireless security alarm, but I found that very easy to be very prominent on local searches because  there is not much competition regarding installation companies in one particular town.I moved up a gear by trying to appear in Google search results for just the brand name of a security alarm system that is sold by some of the largest retailers in the UK and I am once again getting reasonably good results, so it looks like it is doable for a one-man band like me.

So I guess what I'm really thinking is how important is it to get a great deal more technically informed, but obviously if I do I'm assuming I should get better results that will justify the time and money spent.

I'm looking at it this way that if I had to pay for the number of organic hits I get on Google search just for my cottages website through some service like Google ad words it would probably cost it about £1000 a month which makes the time and effort well worthwhile.

I think I probably will dig deeper into the technical aspects and hopefully try to become a valued member of Seomoz.

Absolutely an internal blog on your website if it is related directly to the subject of the website is a great asset.

I'll admit originally with one of my websites I produce a blog solely to get better search engine rankings and some of my articles were indexed quite high on the search results which produced traffic to the website all interested in its content.

I now produced  blogs on my websites and find it more fulfilling because I enjoy spending my precious time working on it and know that it will hopefully be of interest and also it scratches my back in return by getting the articles indexed and also to some degree producing brownie points for my website rankings.

If you produce an external blog obviously there's a very definite chance that Google will not associate your work to your website, and not improve your search engine ranking.

It certainly puts things in perspective, people take much more for their names in the small businesses, an exact match.com is so much better than having to extend the domain. Things are moving along with the purchase of the domain name, I did send out quite a few push e-mails worrying that there was some kind of con going on, with it being sold through intermediate company. Progress is happening now I will be a little bit more patient

I just want to ask the people who subscribe to Seomoz on a regular basis, I just paid for my first  month subscription but to be perfectly honest I'm trying to work out whether
somebody who is not rolling in cash and trying to make a living can afford to
pay the fee each month.

I'm not a professional I just have two business websites and I'm learning the subject and finding it interesting. The tools do seem very good but I just wondered how people see this service on which aspect is the most important of them.

I like to continue, I have been impressed the quality of the forum topics and discussions

I just wonder whether I can afford to justify the fee.

I had to laugh at EGOL he did not waste any time, short and to the point..

I'm not an expert like him but from my limited experience he is totally correct you don't want to go down any kind of attempts to hide keywords pop in the black hat on. I think if you want to rank for a keyword you've just got to go through it competition will always be there.

I have done, it's actually now functioning the domain is live and there will be a website there later this week thanks for the encouragement