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Category: On-Page Optimization

Explore on-page optimization and its role in a larger SEO strategy.


  • We are just about to re-jig our main category pages and have found that different leading sites have taking different views on short and sweet url structure vs. repeated keywords1. For our website we have two options. We have two options: mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants-in-birmingham or mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants Someone like opentable have gone for short and sweet (opentable.co.uk/birmingham-restaurants) whereas people like Time Out have gone longer with multiple matches in the url (timeout.com/london/food-drink/londons-top-50-restaurants). Is there a consensus on which is better?

    | HireSpace
    0

  • Mozzers, I got a question for all of you. Recently (about 3 months ago) I launched a renewed website for a costumer of mine. Since then rankings have been improving and some decreasing a little but overall it went quite allright. _Still, we now have some issues with some new pages and I really don't know what to do any more. _ The Case:
    For starters lets say the company sells vacuum cleaners. We now make pages for specific product ranges e.g. Miele Diamond vacuum cleaners which in turn tells something about this product range and has links to different pages of that series, for instance the Miele Black Diamond Silent Vacuum Cleaner. Why did we do this? We already ranked for specific product pages but also wanted to rank for more general terms and thus product ranges. What happened? We now rank perfectly well for the product pages itself but for some reason the Miele Diamond Vacuum Cleaners page doesn't rank at all or not as it should. Why is this strange? Because we applied the exact same tactic for some other product ranges on the same website and it worked like a charm (part of the reason why we started to do this for all product-ranges). I could really use some help here. If you want I can message you the pagelink in PM but I won't post it here for several reasons. The Vacuum Cleaners in this example or not the real products though but used as an exemplar. I really do hope to hear from you with some advice or request for more information. Regards
    Jarno

    | JarnoNijzing
    0

  • Hi, hoping someone might help me with some answer(s) as to why our site no longer shows up in Google search results. Even when we type the full name and city into Google, the site is absent. Our Facebook page, LinkedIn and some backlinks show, but our site is missing. I can no longer find it in Google places. I'm sure I've done something wrong since moving from a static (flash-based) site to Wordpress. But the robots.txt file looks okay to me and the sitemap.xml file is present. Anyway, this is what happens when you ask a network technician handle website design... We know just enough to be dangerous! Here is the site in question: www.newfrontiertechnologies.com located in Shoreline WA. Any advice is much appreciated.

    | NFTECH
    0

  • I've been working my way up SERPS with some fairly uncompetitive keywords and have been comfortable with them in the 5-10 range. This week I have watch a number of them drop back to the mid 50s. Why?

    | Zippy-Bungle
    0

  • I was wondering if the H1 for this page was alright even though it is below the fold: http://www.seniorplanning.org/assisted-living-phoenix-arizona/. Any suggestions/comments would be very helpful. Thank you!

    | JacobEdward
    0

  • My website is performing well, but I have a couple of popular Brand pages that no matter what I do will not rank organically, they are being indexed, but will just not perform or improve. The rest of the pages throughout the website all seem to be fine, can anyone advise if they have experienced a similar problem or advise why this would happen or even suggest what I should do to fix the problem, we have even gone as far to create a new page and delete the old one, and it still hasn't worked. I have used various tools to test the page and variations of search terms and although it is appearing in Google it is not ranked, although it is  ranking and visible in Yahoo and Bing. Any help and advise would be appreciated. Jacqui

    | EurekaSolutions
    0

  • My site is split up into sections about different services my company offers. My problem is, when someone does a search for one of those services, My site's main page comes up rather than the page devoted to the particular service they were searching for. What can I do to make the pages about a specific service rank above my main page?

    | bradgmo
    0

  • I am building a website for a client and i am in a dilemma whether to go for an image slideshow with HTML content on the slides or go for a static full size image on the homepage. My concern is that HTML content on the slideshow may not get crawled by Google and hence may not be SEO friendly.

    | aravinn
    0

  • Hi, Just a quick question. How important are the signals received by Google on a websites user behaviour? For example: Bounce Rate, Avg Time on site, # of pages viewed, Geo of user etc Thanks.

    | followuk
    0

  • After crawling I am used to getting a lot of duplicate content messages in Moz, which are High Priority. I do not know what to do with them, since I believe we tackled all the issues. Main point being the advise to put in a link rel=canonical. An example of a page that accordeing to the report has a duplicate. I do not see how. Can you help with that? http://www.beat-it.nl/4y6hctr24x7wdmr-ml350-p-ic-procare_moz/svc.html duplicate sample http://www.beat-it.nl/modu-hp-a5800-acm-for-64-256-aps.html

    | Raymo
    0

  • I was curious about the implications of Infinite scroll homepages on SEO, and more specifically, no-indexing subpages of the homepage (ie  www.homepage.com/page/2/ ). I know its often a good practice to noindex subpages of archives, but in this case, would it be a bad idea? Thanks!

    | stackstreet
    0

  • Do the title tags have to be exactly the same, or can they have some of the same keywords but different context? Hypothetical example: Home Page = Raising a Kitten, Tips & Tricks for a Healthy Cat Sub-Page = How to Cat-Proof your Home when Raising a Kitten Since both title tags has "raising a kitten," "cat" and "tips" would this be considered a "Duplicate Title Tag" even though the pages have completely different content in them? Thanks in advance!

    | Scratch_MM
    0

  • My client purchased over 500 URLs for targeting various customers and ranking for different keywords. It is for the same business though. What is the best strategy to deal with this kind of approach in your opinion. They use different meta data for each of the URLs starting with brand name in meta title. Are there any other points to keep in mind when developing strategy for all those URLs. Is this  a good approach?

    | alicaomisem
    1

  • In this scenarios we have multiple different URLs but the page content is rendering same (containing Oops message) due to which content duplicate's issue arises.As soon as content for these URL,s are available then those pages duplicate issue will removed. So we want to remove duplicate issue not the page & Page URLs.

    | surabhi6
    0

  • We had a 10 pages website that was doing great with very competitive keywords, ( Vancouver Landscaping, Surrey Landscaping, etc)  than we added 90 more pages to the website in order to target long tail keywords. Our traffic grew a little bit, but we lost all high competitive keywords, instead we got more traffic for our long tails like ( Yard clean up Burnaby). Is it a common rule in SEO? If yes, should we de index or even delete "long tail" pages that not receiving any traffic? Would it give us bigger chance to get our high competitive keywords back? We are looking for a SEO strategist that can help us, so suggestions and audits would be greatly appreciated and could lead to business with us. website- www(dot)beaverlandscape(dot)com Thank you!

    | vadimmarusin10
    0

  • I am new here and am would love some constructive community feedback about a website I am working on: 
    Things like tags, serps, content, loading time, design, functionality, and anything that will improve.... The site is www.aranislands.ie  Thanks!!

    | paddyaran
    0

  • I recently removed about 600 'thin' pages from my site which are now showing as 404 errors in WMT as expected. As I understand it I should just let these pages 404 and eventually they'll be dropped from the index. There are no inbound links pointing at them so I don't need to 301 them. They keep appearing in WMT as 404's though so should I just 'mark as fixed' until they stop appearing? Is there any other action I need to take?

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Just went through a big redevelopment for a client and now have fresh images and updated content but now all the resellers have just grabbed the new images/content and pasted them on their own site. My client is a manufacture that sells directly online and over the phone for large orders. I'm just not sure how to handle the resellers duplicate content. Any thoughts on this? Am I being silly for worrying about this?

    | ericnkatz
    0

  • I asked this question before, but with a different scenario.  I upgraded my plan to a more advanced cart and all of my URLs changed about 1.5 years ago.  I knew nothing about redirects and such, so none of that was done. Basically, let's say my site was: http://www.abc.com, but when people actually visit my site, they are directed to https://www.abc.com/. I have asked my host about redirecting and she that it is not possible.  In the past, the link shared has been just www.abc.com .  Will this hurt my ranking? My second question is ...let's say I have a link  http://www.abc.com/blog , but now, the link is http://www.abc.com/blog/ . Will I be affected, since all my old links omit the slash?

    | tiffany1103
    0

  • Hi everyone, I have a quick question about our WordPress webpage InternetNearMe.com/xfinity-Internet. The site is still a work in progress, but I'm starting to notice that when viewing the page in FireFox or Internet explorer, there is a large white space at the top of the page that is not there when you view it in Chrome. This is most likely because we used to have two graphics in that space that we have since removed. I cleared the Cache hoping that would solve problem but it has not. i've included screenshots of the different browsers below. Any suggestions? Thank you! CHROME

    | PlanetDISH
    0

  • Hi all, I am currently working with a company formation agent. They have a list of every limited company spread over hundreds of pages. What do you guys think? Is there a need for Canonicals? The website is ranking pretty well but I want to make sure there aren't any problems in the future. Here are two pages as examples: http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=MULLAGHBOY+CONSTRUCTION+LIMITED&next=1# http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?start=%40a+company+limited&next=1# Also what about the actual company pages? See an example below http://www.formationsdirect.com/companysearchlist.aspx?name=AMNA+CONSTRUCTION+LTD&number=06630333#.U8PW6_ldX1s Thanks in advance Aaron

    | AaronGro
    0

  • Easy on-page checker idea feedback Some script I wrote. Is this handy for someone? Try the script yourself like most things I like the Moz on-page grader (a lot!) but it does not do everything I want it to. So sometime I write my own little checks and other times I want to see list for of example all images without ALT tags. For this I wrote some code for myself the last few weeks. Now I bundled them for a handy little checker that is as is and not meant to make money with. It's just my handy work so to say and I would like to hear some feedback on the very simple but I think effective method of checking anchors on a front page against the page they link to. This is a very basis page checker for some important on-page ranking factors. If you type links in the option field then all links found on the page are listed Per link anchor quality check: The idea is very simple: if we assume for the simplicity of this method that the anchor text found first linking to an other page on the website this anchor text determnines the keyword with which the page is indexed. In made the links found on the page clickable. When clicked it starts the same scan but then only for the anchor text provided with the link clicked. If the on-page checks are ok I reccon your doing alright. idea is to start with the front page of any website and click the followed links, The page linked to is graded for match with anchor text as keyword. Try the script yourself Gr Daniel

    | DanielMulderNL
    0

  • I uploaded the .htaccess file with the below, and now my website won't load at all? Then I deleted the htaccess file and it still won't load?  But then it would load on my phone when I took it down, not on chrome, or explorer? Then I put it back up and looked again on my phone, wouldn't load on phone. Then deleted file and it still won't load on my phone? What is going on? RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^http://freightetc.com$
    RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.freightetc.com/$1 [R=301]
    RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
    RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.freightetc.com/$1 [R=301]

    | dwebb007
    0

  • We are looking at doing a major change with our website. Upper management is wanting to have our home page be our store page, instead of just a landing page. So basically we would be eliminating our current home page, and replacing it with our store page. This is a very large site and our current home page gets a lot of traffic. Issues to deal with will be ranking of the current page content; Internal links to both pages; external links (backlinks) pointing to the two pages, and of course, a potential drop in rankings and traffic. Any ideas on how to best do this? Or not do it at all. 301 redirect? Thanks, Brad

    | tdawson09
    0

  • Hi, can someone tell me why my meta titles looks different in SERP? I use Prestashop CMS and meta title in many pages looks similair to this one: Puodų Rinkiniai | Puodai | Iki -40% Akcija | ŠefoSvajonė.lt And in SERP it looks like this: Puodų Rinkiniai - sefosvajone.lt. sefosvajone.lt Why can this be? Its freshly indexed. Rather than set Meta Title text it shows just name of the Product or Category and then shops adress twice or sometimes once. Thanks!

    | Absurdus
    0

  • Hi all, I've just come to learn that a client has been cross-posting their blog posts to other blogs (on higher quality domains, in some cases). For example - this is the same post on 3 different blogs. http://thebioethicsprogram.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
    http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2014/06/29/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
    http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/06/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experimentand-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing.html
    And, sometimes a 4th time, on an NPR website. I'm assuming this is doing no one any favors and Harvard or NPR is going to earn the rank most every time. I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree? Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog? They are going to move their Wordpress Blog to hosting on their real domain soon:
    http://www.bioethics.uniongraduatecollege.edu/news/ The current set up is not adding any value to their domain. Thank you for any advice! Ketan

    | ketanmv
    0

  • I've not a site whose home page that is #1 for a popular keyword. The page is 1200 words, plus comments following.  It's a clean page with no popups, and has one large rectangle Adsense ad above the fold (lots of text around this ad, and a very high percentage of page ATF is text), and another large rectangle Adsense ad that is midway down the article (after you have to page twice to get there).  So, it's a very low ad to text ratio and ATF looks very clean. I have room for one more Adsense ad closer to the bottom of the article, which would be about five page downs through the page.  My question is, will placing another ad way down the page affect my ranking in any negative way?  I'm so pleased with my #1 ranking I hesitate to add it.  But the page converts in Adsense so well, and heat maps show a large number readers do read all the way down the page, so I'd like to pick up some more ad revenue.

    | bizzer
    0

  • While I have found many good sources of information for naming images for SEO purposes, I'm having trouble finding an up-to-date, exhaustive and authoritative source for image names, alt tags, etc. For instance... Max characters for image name? Max hyphens? How descriptive should you be? "ice-cream-flavors-icon_._jpg" or "ice-cream-flavors.jpg" or simply "ice-cream.jpg" How similar should the image name, alt text and page title be? At what point are you overusing a keyword? Rules to follow? So much more, but you get the idea! Anyone have a good reference or an answer to all things related to images and SEO? Thanks!

    | OSD
    0

  • I believe there is a difference between http://www.abc.com vs https://www.abc.com I also know that it shows security and whatnot, but how do you treat it? Do you submit both? Do you re-direct one to the other? What if you have had the non-secure site for years and the links are mostly crawled? My second question is similar as my report shows these two as different: http://www.abc.com/blog vs http://www.abc.com/blog/ I didn't think it made a difference, but when I submitted the links to Google it would not accept them without the slash at the end. Again, the same questions as above in regards to how to treat it. Do you submit both? Do you re-direct one to the other? What if you have had the non-slash site for years and the links are mostly crawled? -What about http://www.abc.com vs http://abc.com ? They go to the same page, but are they treated the same?

    | tiffany1103
    0

  • Hello! I hope my question is self-explanatory but let me give you an example. Suppose I have website X selling A, B and C and I have a dedicated page for each of those products. For SEO practises, Is it better to have the same webpage structure for all product pages (i.e. the same headings and sections) or is it better to vary the structure of the page? Or is it really not important? Again going back to the example, is it better for product page A, B and C to have the same sections in the same order (i.e. Pricing, Product Details, Product Reviews) or is it better to keep it as a flowing content page (product page A has same information in B and C but all those pages are different with different headings and questions asked depending on the product)? Many thanks!

    | MarketingDude
    0

  • Is it advisable to remove "category" from "slug"?

    | Shalin.TJ
    0

  • Hi Everyone, I'm wondering what to do with form and thank you pages. I asked a question a long time ago about the contact page as noindex and was told by people that its better to leave it and write content for it and thats what we did. Now I have a client that does self storage and they have 4 locations and each location has a reservation page with a basic form but no content. Each page also redirects to a thank you page with tracking codes. There's a total of 6 "thank you" pages with different codes (this was done by yellow book). 4 "reserve your storage pages", 2 pages to pay for storage with iframes to 3rd party payment portals. I was told to noindex these pages but I'm not sure so I'm asking here. I was also told to nofollow and remove them from sitemaps. Thanks Aron

    | aronwp
    0

  • Does having a post in too many categories have a negative effect on SEO? I have some posts in around 15 categories on my site.

    | SamCUK
    0

  • Hi Moz community! I have a question about a local client in Raleigh, NC - http://paragonbuildinggroup.com This client came to us from another agency who had previously not done such a great job with the design/development of the site, or with the marketing of it, so we are somewhat limited in terms of what we can do on design, user experience, etc. But, the SEO is all still easy to tweak and we've been working on it for some time now. As of July 5th, their keyword rankings have dropped dramatically (we're talking from first page rankings to nothing, according to Authority Labs), and they've fallen completely off the map in the SERPs. Their local listing doesn't appear in search results anymore, and WMT is showing a drastic drop in impressions (from 457 on July 3rd to 92 on July 5th). There have been no manual penalties on the site, no recent major development work done, and from what I can see, no signs of hacking and no bad backlinks. The only thing I can see is that Mozcast showed an 83 degree day with some clouds and rain on July 5th, the day that our rankings dropped off, but I can't find any documentation showing what might have changed. Any insight as to what might be going on? I'm completely stumped!

    | TriMarkDigital
    0

  • Hi guys, I'm working on a project and I need to identify any on-site issues that may be affecting this website: http://www.jerseystamps.com/ If anyone has any thoughts, I would be more than happy to hear them. Thanks guys 🙂

    | AAttias
    0

  • How do I redirect www.entrepreneurhandbook.co.uk to entrepreneurhandbook.co.uk The latter is an existing site. Thanks James

    | entrepreneurhandbook
    1

  • Hi guys, I have a website that has 23 pages with duplicate content. These pages serve the same function, which enables customers to upload their images. There is not much content on each one but we require a different page for each of our products, here is an example page: http://www.point101.com/giclee_printing/upload#/upload I don't think it makes sense to use a canonical tag as each page is for a different product and I think its going to be difficult to differentiate each page. I was wondering: 1. If this has a negative effect on the ranking of our homepage and other main product pages or if its an issue we do not need to worry too much about. 2. If anyone has any other ideas as to how we can resolve this issue. Thanks,
    Kerry

    | KerryK
    0

  • Hi guys, I'm an Italian Web marketing and I'm studying SEO since some moths. First, sorry for my bad english.... 🙂 Second, the question: My Italian blog is going really GREAT in terms of popularity and incomes and know I want to bring it in english language with the help of a professional translator. The choice that I have to take is about the future domain of the english blog. My Italian blog has as url mynameandmysurname.net I don't really like to make the english blog appears like myitalianblogurl.net/english because I think it's a little bit confusing and not professional. I have also thought the idea to make a sub domain like blog.myitalianurl.net. What about the WPML plugin? Do you think it's a great choice? I don't like it because it's confusing and it affect my italian blog. Or maybe is it better to create a new branded blog with different domain? It can be an idea but I think that If I chose this way I will lose all my seo efforts of the last years 😄

    | Italianseolover
    0

  • I have moved my wordpress blog from a subdomain to a subdirectory /blog/ on my site. What is the best way to setup a redirect from the subdomain to the new /blog/ directory? Or should I just delete the subdomain blog and wait for google to index it on /blog/. I need to do one or the other so as not to run into duplicate content issues.

    | SamCUK
    0

  • When it comes to backlinks. Does it matter with or without WWW? For example my website is without WWW and I backlink with WWW, will it still affect my website rank?

    | Japracool
    0

  • For example my company website on Google Search Engine... Web Design Company & Digital Agency in Jakarta
    coriate.com/
    Coriate is a website design & Internet marketing firm in Indonesia. We offer the best web solutions, digital advertising, and SEO Services in the industry. Can I do backlink to it, but different keywords? Like Social Media Management or Facebook Like?

    | Japracool
    0

  • Hi, I'm have a sport event calendar website.
    It presents events that may have multiple races.
    The event has its own page as well as the races. example :
    Event: /event/edinburgh-marathon-festival Races:
    /race/emf-half-marathon
    /race/emf-10-km
    /race/edinburgh-marathon
    /race/emf-5-km The pages may have a lot of information in common (location, date, description) and they all link to each other.
    What would be the best practices to avoid having the pages considered duplicate content by Google? Thanks

    | ahotu
    0

  • Hi, I am trying to investigate why I am getting 384 description duplicates on my ecommerce store (www.doggie-diva.com)? When I download the CSV file from MOZ, the majority of the pages they refer to are pages from my Word Press blog, which is hosted on a different server (blog.doggie-diva.com). I do have a link from my website to my Word Press blog and vice versa. Can you please explain to me why this is happening when I don't have duplicate content? Example of a page flagged from www.doggie-diva.com with duplicate content (http://blog.doggie-diva.com/tag/dog-gymnastics. Thanks, Rachel <colgroup><col width="549"></colgroup>
    |   |

    | doggiedivalicious
    0

  • Hi, I've read articles on the MOZ blog, which stress the point for unique product descriptions. I think this was even mentioned in one White Board Friday. Now I am in the process of writing them. How many words should they have at least in your opinion? Best, Robin

    | soralsokal
    0

  • Is this still an issue? Of any importance?

    | nans
    0

  • Hi Mozzers will navigational links in dropdown menus carry the same weight for Google, just as navigational links that are always visible to the user do? Thx, Chris

    | Diderino
    0

  • http://themes.lpd-themes.com/123medicine/product/nutritional-pills/ http://demo.jawtemplates.com/goodstore/goodstore03/product/black-t-series/ http://template-demo.org/woo/WCM01/WCM010002/product/quod-mazim/ Which theme is good for health product website?

    | JordanBrown
    0

  • I have a site that has most of it's traffic from reasonably competitive keywords each with their own landing page. In order to gain more traffic I also created landing pages for counties in the UK and then towns within each county. Each county has around 12 towns landing pages within the county. This has meant I've added around 200 extra pages to my site in order to try and generate more traffic from long tail keywords. I think this may have caused an issue in that it's impossible for me to create unique content for each town/country and therefore I took a 'shortcut' buy creating unique content for each county and used the same content for the towns within it meaning I have lots of pages with the same content just slightly different page titles with a variation on town name. I've duplicated this over about 15 counties meaning I have around 200 pages with only about 15 actual unique pages within them. I think this may actually be harming my site. These pages have been indexed for about a year an I noticed about 6 months ago a drop in traffic by about 50%. Having looked at my analytics this town and county pages actually only account for about 10% of traffic. My question is should I remove these pages and by doing so should I expect an increase in traffic again?

    | SamCUK
    0

  • I have question regarding the use of keywords on title tag and meta description. I will take my website as example... Title Tag: Web Design Company & Digital Marketing Agency in Jakarta Meta Description: Coriate is a full-service website design & Internet marketing firm in Indonesia. We offer the best web solutions and SEO service in the industry. My questions: Is it good? Because I followed Blue Fountain Media. They don't use same keyword on title tag and meta description. You can see on title tag I use "web design" while on meta description I use "website design". Or should I use "web design" on meta description too? Blue Fountain Media doesn't use their company name on title tag. But when I search "Blue Fountain Media" on Google, it only showed their company name. How? Their title tag was "Website Design Company & Digital Marketing Agency in NYC | BFM". Is it necessary to use H1? Because as you can see on my company website Coriate there's no H1.

    | Japracool
    0

  • Got a quick sitemap question. We have a clients site built in opencart and are getting ready to submit the sitmap. The default sitemap setting generates urls right off of the root. For example site.com/product. These urls are also accessible through the site itself. We prefer to give the site some depth and have structured the products so the urls are site.com/category/product. All of the product pages have canonicals including the category so we should not have to worry about duplicate content on the /product page vs the /category/product page. My question is both types of product pages are included in the sitemap at the moment. Since we don't want google to index the /product urls should we leave them off of the sitemap even though they are readily accessible from the frontend(though not linked)? Or just leave them and let the canonical tag be used in directing google as to which urls to index. Thanks in advance.

    | Whebb
    0

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