Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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?

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

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

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……….

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

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 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?

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 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 ?

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.
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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
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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'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.

I paid somebody to build my website using Dreamweaver, and at one point I didn't know how to use the template which automatically updates every page in the menu section so I stupidly broke the template on every new page when I made the websites blog and put the pages into a subfolder. I realised this was a silly thing to do and now and I now know how to use the template correctly I've copied every single page over from the subfolder and put it into the main template. Now I can update the template menu and every page changes automatically. The only problem is I've now got two versions of every page of my blog on the website. For some reason when I do a sitemap it comes up with a links to the old blog pages I, don't know why when I've removed the links from the blog page?  and also the new copies also. I have basically got a copys of all blog pages. Do you think it will be a good idea to delete old indexed  blog pages off the server so that when Google spiders the site it will pick up only the new links to the copy pages?

A couple of years ago I bought a holiday cottage in the UK and I couldn't afford to have it stood empty which lead me to get into search engine optimisation and marketing and now I'm hooked by most of the people on this forum and it's become a hobby and a way of life. I'm getting good search results on Google for terms like Whitby holiday cottages, which is one of the major search terms traffic wise and I'm appearing above the fold on page 1 of Google along with some of the big boys. http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/ I've managed to get somewhere in the region of 95% occupancy throughout the year for my own holiday cottage so I decided I would like to branch out into small letting agency represent the peoples properties. Over the 12 months I've managed to acquire four clients on my new letting agency website but I found the hardest bit is getting new customers for the website. The main holiday letting agency in Whitby has well over 100 cottages on their books and they according to various sources do not  provide high occupancy rates and this is probably down to the fact of the sheer number of their clients. My idea is to just manage a small number of 10 or 20 properties in a more personal way and provide a good service for each client. The four clients I now represent only came to be because I physically met the people in the town and got to know them personally and they are getting much better occupancy rates from my website and marketing campaign. If I could get a few more customers I could spend more time and money on my marketing campaign and make the business hopefully an intimate successful affair for all parties. I lived 80 miles away from the seaside resort and I very rarely stay there is my cottages mostly occupied so the chances of meeting people is quite slim at the moment. You can e-mail people till you're blue in the face but they don't seem to want to trust you and give you their property to represent as an agent when you've never actually met them and you don't have a physical bricks and mortar frontage or a history in this type of business. Basically the town is full of holiday cottages with very low occupancy rates, and even though I'm advertising to take on new clients with no red tape and contract I have attracted no new customers from my website.I also tryed the local paper and just
the same nothing, you are advertising againt big agancys. Anybody got any ideas, or been in a similar situation and found some practical solutions? Cheers alan

Not asking about specifics of money, but this is just a general question to see what kind of return people get for their Internet marketing time investment.. I would say I'm getting  over 40,000 hits per year for one business which is holiday cottages but I only own one cottage and act as an agent for three other clients. Because the campaign is working well for me at the moment I get probably 95% occupancy throughout the year, which you would have no chance of accomplishing without SEO intensive input. If I had to pay £0.50 a click approximately obviously it wouldn't be worthwhile, especially when you realise that a percentage of the traffic and not related to your product. I also have a second business which is installing wireless security alarms over the Internet and once again approximate traffic at the moment is almost approaching 40,000 again per year. Now I'm sure there are some big hitters out but my general question is how productive, is you're organic results and Internet marketing for your personal business in comparison to what it would cost you if you had to pay per click? I'm kind of wondering how well the Internet is working people on this forum for their particular businesses? Good, Bad ? whats your story ? Cheers alan

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.

One of my domain names is not showing on Google's search results, when I type the URL in nothing appears. I notice something to do with blocked, but I couldn't find the message again. When I type in the actual URL in the search box it comes up  with the message that the domain is up for sale for $32 the year, but the strange thing is it is still registered to me and it's definitely not up for sale? I find this very strange has anybody got any ideas whatbn could be happening? I sent in what they call a trouble ticket to the domain parking service, so I'll see what their replies is This is the doamin www.whitby-.uk.net