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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

I thought my Google Plus score on my business page had dropped dramatically, only to find out that when you’re logged into your Google account score is lower when you are not logged out, does anybody know why?

Thank Alan

Thank you I got the same 8 and 12 on G.com using hidemyass.com  but not on the Rank Checker ...not good if it’s inaccurate

Because the rank checker on SEOMOZ is temporarily down for upgrade,  I followed the link over to the other suggested rank checker on seobook.com which installs a plug-in to Firefox and it seems to be working fine….BUT my question is when I check out my two highest traffic keywords which are “Whitby holiday cottages” and “Whitby cottages” against my website www.endeavourcottage.co.uk it tells me I'm ranking position 2 on both Google.com and Google.co.uk but I don't think I am.

When I do the same check using a proxy server called hidemyass.com to check my rankings again on Google.co.uk and .com I appeared to be lower down the rankings like position 8. Does anyone have any idea of which is the accurate reference to my rankings? What do you do to check your rankings ?

And one last quick secondary question is when I searching Google chrome using same key words again I come at the top position A on the Google maps listing but using Firefox or Internet Explorer there is no Google maps visible ways that?

At the end of the day out rankings are important but where are working towards more traffic......

Cheers

This is just the little frustrating question nothing important but I’m sure somebody will know the answer. In the white board Friday this week Rand suggested at one point that when you’re searching for results links to your website if you put a - followed by site followed by your url like –site:yourwebsite.com you get the results of pages with links on other websites but excluding your own webpages but it just doesn’t work I get no results just an error message, any idea why? If I remove the - I get tons of results but there on my own webpages……….

Excuse my lack of knowledge EGOL but don't understand what you mean about promoting cottages on other domains?

Thank you Dana  for your points, and was discussing a few weeks back with a web designer the idea of making the site completely compatible with mobiles and the other small devices, but thanks for reaffirming this idea. The website is working as it is at the moment so there's no rush but I do understand your points about tidying up. I was just asking if other people thought I should make the website look more businesslike and streamlined even at its small stage of representing only several properties. I personally at this moment in time felt I didn't want to make it too cold and impersonal like some of the larger companies website,  until I become one of those larger companies

Yes I can see the logic of the quick company statement making a first impression but I'm not sure about the side links, I'll think about it.

Its been suggested my holiday cottage letting website maybe could do with a professional polish up and maybe restructure and navigation and if it would improve bookings I wouldn't hesitate. My only thought pattern is that this particular website is certainly not high-tech (this website was designed by me in Dreamweaver) I have a great guy working for me which is much better web design than me and technically more capable of producing a professional standard website, but with this new sideline I'm presently a small home-based company currently only letting eight old cottages. My thinking was keep the website simple, personal and homely for the moment.

http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ 

The website tends to be competing against large agencies which have often hundreds of properties on their books and you have to go through their filtering system to find the small number of properties that might be of interest.

I can see that if I was selling large quantities of electrical equipment or something similar you just in a very polished well-designed website.

The feedback I get from customers is that like the website and they like to know they can get hold of the person behind it.

Which direction would you go? polished professional company styled WordPress website or simple design website with lots of pictures and descriptions.

If I ever hit the big time and have hundreds of cottages I would have to join the design and more complicated navigation of the other agencies websites but whilst I’m small maybe not?

Thanks for reading Alan

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.

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.

Of course I wouldn't and except any kind of links if there from a good source, cheers

Hi Brad  Yes you're totally correct, I sometimes forget that things should look natural, focusing on trying to obtain some good quality link juice. I'll keep it in mind in the future

When I was checking my back links in Open Sight Explorer I was surprised to see that because I have asked three questions recently here on the forum about my business website www.endeavourcottage.co.uk and they are now listed near the position 3 to 5

Of course I was not putting my business website link on their with the motivation of gaining some SEO benefits but when you get these no follow links do they have any usefulness in that direction?

I read that say no follow links have no link juice so is any beneficial aspects? I

It wouldn't be the ideal situation to encourage that kind of activity, but if they have no value at all why does Open Site Explorer list them?

seo.JPG

I have two businesses which I own outright 100%. I promote these two businesses over the Internet and my observation is that every single time I produce some very useful, interesting content which is taken time, honesty with the aim to be useful, it is judged by Google to be worthwhile listing is one of my most prominent pages.

My long tail keywords bring in lots of traffic now and I while it's great to be approved by links from prominent websites,  at the end of the day the actual content of your website has got to be the most important thing. Mr and Mrs Google I think are looking in the same direction.

I need to change my old Dreamweaver website www.endeavourcottage.co.uk  into a responsive website that can be viewed and used easily on mobile phones. Four years ago when the site was originally built it was one cottage on one basic website but it's grown into a small letting agency with several properties, so I think it's time to invest in a fully functional website.

Looking at Google analytics around the fifth of the searches and now done on a mobile phone each month on this particular site, and obviously that's going to become a larger percentage in the future. Does anybody know of a particular company that can produce good quality responsive websites? Or alternatively used a particular responsive website template which was good. One of the guys that work for me is quite a good web designer if we got the right template.

The old website is grown into quite a large beast with a blog so I think the idea would be to change the main pages with the properties on, just linking back to the old websites quite extensive blog / historical interest pages which I've built over the last few years.

I need to keep the old blog webpages indexed because they have hundreds of back links coming with longtail keywords producing traffic.

Have you gone through the process of changing your main business website for a resonsive redesign recently and how did you approach it?

Hi Igor

I totally get what you're saying people are not interested, unless they are interested..

It's my focus at the moment Twitter,  so I'm going to try to build up following is in each category that into that category.

I was listening to the SEO called Kelvin Newman on his podcast and he a suggested that you should concentrate your efforts on one particular twitter account to build up your followers and save time etc , but it doesn't make sense. I like the guy and his advice usually but not on this occasion.

I actually have control of another twitter account for a celebrity and that's building up more followers than all the rest of my accounts put together, but unfortunately once again I don't think the celebs followers will be generally interested in my holiday cottages or CCTV! At least I'll put a small ad at the top of the account for myself just in case

Thank you for your clear punchy advice

Yes I know about TweetDeck I'll definitely take a look at that one thank you Davinia

Just starting to use twitter and can see its potential but I have a personal account, one my holiday letting business and one for my CCTV installation business. Obviously the problem is I have to login to each account separately and post relevant tweets. I like the idea that people following because they're interested in the subject but the downside obviously is that I have to split my time and my total followers across three accounts.

What do you do with your twitter presence focus on one account or have separate accounts?

I think I've fallen into the trap of staring at the powerhouse short tail keywords and chasing the top positions on Google and forgetting about the long tail friends, time to read and rethink I think. Thank you for the link and the suggestion of the book I'll certainly take a look.

Hello Kevin

I should have invested in longtail keywords I did know there are useful but I didn't think that useful for traffic.

Yes I can see your point longtail keywords are more specific and so far more likely to get the conversion

I'll have to start writing some blog posts quickly thanks for the information.

I was listening to a podcast on site visibility's website and they were discussing www.hittail.com which is a piece of software which analyzes lists your
visitor stream in real-time and provides actionable list of precisely which
keywords the website should be targeting to dramatically grow your organic
search traffic using long tail key words.

The say they can come up with a list of long tail keywords which the
website could easily rank for hopefully straightaway in the top five positions
on Google and other search engines by creating a blog post are some relevant
content. Or you could use the information to form some anchor text links etc

They say it's possible to produce up to 80% more traffic organically
once you are aware of which keywords are being overlooked by the website and
then produce the relevant content.

The theory is that most people focus on the high traffic short tail
keywords and overlook the long tail keywords and I got to admit I actually fall
into that category unfortunately.

Anybody uses particular website? And what is your experience of targeting the
longtail keywords have they produce good results ?

Yes I've seen results suggesting that social media represents 5 to 10% of your search engine rankings if you're particularly liked. But the bigger question is not are you producing or social results just because you want to influence your rankings. If you are genuinely behind a product that you're selling you'll enjoy the social into reaction because it becomes a individual personal representation of your product. And if you think about links, the most powerful links will always be from websites that you like to form

some relationship with. Quality websites, quality content, quality relationships, quality results. Have a look at me, Mr Google

I didn't know about the pay per click relevance of having the exact domain name match to the product being sold but I can see how that could be very important if you are heavily into Google ad words, but for a smaller company it wont be of great benefit becouse I'm not intending of spending much in that direction, but thanks for the information.

That's what I find slightly hard to understand, there are a reasonable number of
online retailers with good levels of stock, like this one which has a bricks
and mortar shop in a prime location in town where they pay around £1000 a month just for the rent, this is their website http://www.whitbyjetjewellery.net/ So why don't they jump at the chance of getting the exact match domain? Do you think it's purely down to lack of knowledge by their SEO person! I realise some of them won’t actually invested much in their online marketing but surely some of them have. Easier to understand if the domain retailer had beenasking  $5,000 for the domain, but like you pointed out at $300 it was peanuts.

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

Marcus I don't want to be picky but if I decide to go with your suggestion could I have to domain name without the hyphens?www.Iwantedwhitbyjetbutthiswasallthatasleft.com might not be as readable but it would be better for my SEO wouldn't it?Anywhere nice little story and I'm glad you got the domain name you wanted eventually, I bet they thought it was going to  be a bowler hat retailer the eventually slapped the cash down

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

Thanks a lot Ryan I was not at all worried about the price of the domain I was just surprised it was available, and I know exactly what you mean long-term the benefits of an exact match.com domain name far outweigh the costs even for a small business. Somebody was trying to sell www.whitby-jet.co.uk /for $1600 so I'm very pleased with the price. In this particular business of WJ there are quite a few prominent sellers you'd think they'd wise up by the right domain name to do the job properly, can it really be that they are SEO ignorant? I can only think it is the case.

Well I agree with everything that everybody said I have already purchased www.whitbyjet.com to be perfectly honest if it hadn't been for Ryan last week who took the time to check the domain name and pointed out it was the sale, I would never have looked to see if it was available, assuming it must be taken by a company. Whitby Jet isn't the biggest business in the world but there are many jewellers trading it on the Internet, and businesses in the town itself with some of the pieces selling in four figure numbers so it makes you wonder why these companies have invested that small amount of money from the advantages they would get? Whitby jet became extremely popular after Prince Albert died 1870 and Queen Victoria wore Whitby jet with it being black, for many years in mourning and increase the products profile. At one time this small fishing town had over 1000 workers, exporting over £100,000 worth of the products in 1872 which will be millions of pounds in today's money.

I thinking very similar to yours EGOL I am aiming to be "the Man" Whitby jet on the net, I was very excited at the prospect of building the website round that domain, it certainly given me a lot stronger incentives to make the product sales high quality, aiming to establish "the brand"

I  wasn't asking the question from a complete lack of experience but I put this question on the forum here last week…How much would you pay for a key rich domain name with the correct extension?

I'm setting up a new website to sell Whitby Jet and one of the members of this forum suggested I should buy the domain name www.whitbyjet.com it was for sale for $300 or £200 in UK money and they thought it was a bargain.  I thought it was worth the cost even though I've never paid anywhere near that amount for a domain name.
.
There is a company offering www.whitby-jet.co.uk or £1500 ?!!!!

I have bought key rich domain names before, which were very descriptive also but only paid the registration fee with no additional costs
.
I just wondered how much members of this forum have paid for domain names. And why they thought it was worth the cost... SEO Branding etc.?

By the way the company that was acting as the intermediate for my new doaminis is an absolute pain. They didn't perform the transfer process quickly until I bombarded them with emails

My new domain is still not working one week down the line. In the past I bought a domain cheap and it has been working within 24 hours directly.

I bought the domain whitbyjet.com for $300 and I'm pleased that I've got such a specific domain name with the two main keywords. Thanks for the help

Absolutely over the years I bought lots of different domain names, and I always thought I would never pay for one which was held for profit, but when you consider how useful it could be I think 300 American dollars is not bad at all, I presume they often suffer much more than this? I've never really studied the subject

Thank you everybody for the good advice, I agree jewellery is not a good word to include in the domain, I was considering whitbyjetuk.com But I just wanted to say thank you to especially Ryan because I never checked I just assumed that whitbyjet.com would be taken by a company selling the product, how stupid of me! I think you are very much correct just for the fact that it's the perfect two words.com it's worth the money, I would never previously thought of buying a domain which was held and just for sale, but when you consider it is not a great deal of money and long-term most definitely be worth the cost. I'm going to buy that particular one, once again thank you Ryan.

I'm starting a new business selling Whitby Jet and I want to buy the best domain name which will help me in the search engines, I want to use the keywords in the domain name because it think it will help when people link to the website, but whitbyjet.com and whitbyjet.co.uk have both been taken. I could be wrong I think .com is generally thought of as the best and I don't really like the idea of .net or .org

So maybe I might have to choose the third word which tends to make the doamin a little bit longer like

whitbyjetjewlery.co.uk.

Any suggestions would be greatly received.

The 301 redirects was quite easy to set up, but I've actually found a better solution using Dreamweaver for my problem. I replaced all the old pages where I'd broken the template in the sub folder with new versions which are attached to the template with the correct copy and paste the content and title tags. So all the pages which are indexed and now the new looking version.

The one thing I've learnt from this episode is that if you don't know how to operate a particular piece of software and you can't get the answers you require immediately, be patient until you know how to do things correctly.

It saves time in the long run..............

I have no idea what htaccess files are, but I guess I will have to learn.

If a  301 redirect can simply transfer the old webpage directly through to the new one that surely must be the simple answer. Along of course within the incoming link juice.

Is that the case and if so that it will be my project for tomorrow morning as it's 2 AM in the UK