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Category: On-Page Optimization

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

  • MattBarker


    Hi folks, I've been dealing with an online travel agency who came to me looking for content marketing services. One look at their analytics & GWT was all I needed to see they have some serious site cleanup to do before they can start spending money on our services. Their search traffic floored with the first Panda update back in Feb 2011, and they've gone through all sorts of turbulence with the Penguin updates too. There are no messages in GWT, but I suspect their previous SEO guy might have deleted them to cover his tracks. I did a quick look at their link profile and there's all kinds of junk in there, they have dupe content all over the place and the whole thing needs cleaning up. In other words, it's a mess. I'd like to win some business from them, but first they need to talk to a Panda/Penguin recovery specialist. If you're interested, drop me a private message and I'll put you in touch with them. Thanks, Matt.

    | MattBarker
    0
  • tdawson09


    This morning I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools that my internal links to my root domain (Home Page), dropped from 428,000 to 58,000. It appears that this could be my header or footer links back to the home page that Google is not showing any more. My programmers claim they have not made any changes over the last 30 days. My rankings and traffic are normal. Any cause for concern?

    | tdawson09
    0
  • TSDigital


    We have a sub-domain that is hosted by a third party. These pages are highly dynamic (change daily or more often) as they are product search results. Unfortunately they are raising several errors and warnings including duplicate page content, title missing or empty, long URLs, overly dynamic URL Would putting nofollows on the links to this sub-domain help, hurt or not affect page rank? As an example: Links in the middle of this page (prices) http://targetvacations.ca go to a page such as this http://travel.targetvacations.ca/cgi-bin/resultadv.cgi?id=16294922&code_ag=tgv&alias=tgv which is then redirected to a dynamic URL and presents the results.

    | TSDigital
    0
  • Aggie


    We have photo galleries that load new URLs with new content/photo on each page, yet I'm still seeing "duplicate meta description" in GWT for each separate URL in the gallery.   Will rel="next" rel="prev" take care of this?  Just want to confirm as it requires a CMS upgrade/release.

    | Aggie
    0
  • Ganesh34


    I have my own blog which is 6 Month old with Page Rank 1, and my fiends has a blog with page rank 2 which is 6 Months Old domain as my. I used to work hard on content and Link Building. Following every webmaster guideline spending 3 to 4 Hours on my blog, but my friends website is just crazy, 3 Website links to it with no PR, no Facebook, no twitter shares and nothing. I want to Know How my friend website has High PR than me, Does Page Rank Really matters in SEO or my friend is performing some black hat magic on his website. Best answer will be appreciated thanks

    | Ganesh34
    0
  • blinkybill


    Hi Just joined. Crawl states that I am getting a lot of errors, looks like the spider is getting confused and looping back on itself ? Is there a way to see where the crawl was formulated (ie where from) ? It is generating urls like: http://www.wickman.net.au/wineauction/wine_auction_alert.aspx/auction/auction/auction/auction/auction/auction/Default.aspx from http://www.wickman.net.au/wineauction/wine_auction_alert.aspx

    | blinkybill
    0
  • TP_Marketing


    Hello, I am working on a site with 1,000's of product pages, some of which do not have inventory in them. Should be blocking these pages in order to reduce bouce rate? How could i manage so many pages efficiently? It would takes weeks to comb through pages to determine which have inventory and which do not. They are also time sensitive as they are live events so dates are always changing. Thanks!

    | TP_Marketing
    0
  • mattylac


    Answered.

    | mattylac
    0
  • raywhite


    To SEOMOZ Developers: All my pages score A's in the On-Page Report Card, yet most are not indexed in the top 50 positions for Google!!!  Don't you think there are other factors you're not considering when giving out A's? In other words, a page should not be awarded an A when it's not in top 50 ranking positions.  That's seems to be a flaw in the Optimization Reports.  There must be something my page is missing, but you are not pointing it out.  Shouldn't your "A" requirements be more aligned with Google's ranking algorithms? In other words, most pages awarded A's should be found to be ranked in the top 50.  And, most pages not ranked in the top 50 should recieve F's because they don't meet Google's ranking requirements. In other words, you should model your report card more closely to Google's ranking. Here's an example: Keyword: "enterprise time management" Page: www.stdtime.com/enterprise-time-management.htm

    | raywhite
    0
  • Paul78


    I have just ran a report on SEOMOZ and it's came back saying I have over 1000 pages on my website with duplicate content, I thought wow that's not good, however when I looked at the report it was counting duplicate content because I have used more than one tag on a blog post, for example the blog post: www.example.com/blog-post/ Has the tags example 1 example 2 example 3 Meaning I have these URLs www.example.com/blog/tag/example-1 www.example.com/blog/tag/example-2 www.example.com/blog/tag/example-3 All 3 URLs above have the same content as www.example.com/blog-post/ because of the tags, is this a problem? Thanks

    | Paul78
    1
  • umk


    Hello Guys I am bit confused on how to write good content. I have read so many articles where they are mentioning you have add your keyword in the first paragraph,the last paragraph and use latex words etc I am confused ! I want to create reviews that rank on the first page and stay their. Please could someone point out what are the basic guidelines for writing good content for google & users ?

    | umk
    0
  • ksbnok


    Hello guyz do you think that , **or **tags still help you in ranking better for some keyword or this method has become obsolete?****

    | ksbnok
    0
  • Kwilder


    Can adding multiple locations on a single page be confusing to Google? Is using "LocalBusiness" with "branchof" the proper way of doing this? Does anyone know of any resources that go into this type of thing in more detail? I've read everything Google, Schema and SeoMoz seem to have on this topic. Thanks.

    | Kwilder
    0
  • jez000


    Hi guys, I'm using the on-page report card for a particular page which is returning 22 instances of my term, however when I check the source of the page, I can only find 6 instances across the whole page, let alone the body. The site is www.sportsbet.com.au, and the term "horse racing". I'm sure I'm missing something, would appreciate any explanation for this apparent discrepancy. Cheers, Jez

    | jez000
    0
  • TP_Marketing


    I have an E-commerce site that sells events, and tickets.  By default it shows 10 events per page, each event with its own "View Inventory Button" which leads a customer to a list of tickets for that particular event. My question is that by default ea event page has 10 listings all with View Inventory buttons, should I just remove ALL alt tags? For example if it was football game with Detroit lions, and the Detroit lions page shows 10 events by default, should each of my View tickets buttons say EX. "Buy Lions tickets"? I am so confused, i have an understanding of how and what alt tags do, but I am afraid to "over optimize the pages? I am just not sure how many times to have this alt tag visible with keywords in them, as the rest of the page is optimized in my descriptions and I would want to avoid keyword stuffing. Currently all that I can see how is "view tickets" view tickets" 10times as alt tags. Any help would be MUCH appreciated!!!! This was a response in the past from someone in the forums 'Depending what language/CMS your website is built on, you will be able to insert a bit of code that dynamically creates a suitable alt tag depending on the product. So whatever page/product template currently instructs the alt tag to be 'buy now', would instead instruct a dynamic name to be generated along the format of 'buy button for"

    | TP_Marketing
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, Does the use of one google font slow down a website enough to effect load speed and thus rankings? Here's the ones we're choosing from: www.google.com/webfonts How do we know if the one we choose is too slow? Thank you.

    | BobGW
    0
  • InRakeLLC


    So here's the scenario... You own the exact match domain for "Acupuncture Intake Form" and want to create a page that targets the phrase, "Acupuncture Intake Form Template"... In terms of SEO, which of the following permalinks does a better job targeting the term "Acupuncture Intake Form Template" : A) www.acupunctureintakeform.com/template/ B) www.acupunctureintakeform.com/acupuncture-intake-form-template/ From a user-friendliness perspective, I can definitely see why the /template/ is more ideal. It's more memorable, easier to link to, and logical. I'm just wondering whether there is some edge that the /acupuncture-intake-form-template/ has that I'm not aware of, or if there's some gray area. I can also think of scenarios where the longer version might be better. For example, if there were several different kinds of acupuncture intake form templates. If that were the case, then /template/ might be too vague (e.g. is it the normal "acupuncture intake form template" or is it the "acupuncture intake form template with diagram"). So in that respect, the longer one might be less concise in certain situations, but in others provide more clarity. (Note: I'm looking for answers to this situation as it applies to any website. I just chose this extremely small niche exact match domain because it's an example that illustrate my questions). Thanks in advance for any answers, insights, or comments! I'm not sure if there's a specific answer, but I'm sure there are some key points to discuss. Michael

    | InRakeLLC
    0
  • stephenfishman


    I have a brand name "Smith and Jones". I am looking for the current best way to refer to the name in titles and text on my site. The manufactureres website is smithandjones.com . The H1 on their home page uses Smith & Jones. The 2 versions are used throughout their site. In a prior thread (http://www.seomoz.org/q/and-vs) the answer was to use nothing ie "smith jones". I was thinking that a "-" might be better since google says it tends to show a strong relationship between the 2 words. What do you think? Thanks Handcrafter

    | stephenfishman
    0
  • JaneVO


    It seems I've been reading about 301 for hours now, but I still didn't find an answer to my question, so I'm hoping someone can help me out here. I'm starting a new webshop which is relaunching a semi known brand within its specific niche, say kids toys. Now my question is - since the brand name is relatively known and it is only 5 letters short, the website will be www.xxxxx.com. However the brand name itself doesn't say anything about the products we sell, so I was thinking to buy www.xxxxx-toys.com and 301 redirect www.xxxxx.com to this new site, but still use the shorter version in all marketing material since it's a lot easier to type and remember. Apparently Google doesn't give extra juice to sites with keywords in the domain name anymore (?) but it would still say something about site to new customers unaware of the brand name. Any advice? 🙂

    | JaneVO
    0
  • zeepartner


    Hi everybody! We have an ecommerce site with product overview pages, where sometimes there are hundreds of products listed. Usually, we just display 30 and have a button where users can click to see 30 more - or all products listed at once. This is the overview page (as indexed in google): http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html
    And this is the view-all page: http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html#all What should I do here? The product overview page will hardly generate more traffic by listing all products (because the overview page will rank for generic keywords, while the product keyword searches will be referred to the specific product pages themselves). I was originally thinking of using rel=canonical pointing to the view-all page. But this would just lead to longer load time. Should we just leave those overview pages or is there a best practice for how to deal with such pages? Thanks for your thoughts on this!

    | zeepartner
    0
  • reddogmusic


    We're working hard on improving our website right now, and would love to get the community's examples of the best eCommerce sites out there, from an SEO and a general customer-centric design perspective...

    | reddogmusic
    0
  • Dante13


    I am basically trying to cut down the amount of links on my home page to make it less eye boggling and move stuff around. So i have of my Urls on my home page that lead to pages that rank very well within google. My questions is can i remove those urls to a separate page to group them together and then showcase that one link to that page on my home page. Is that a good idea or i am going to loose my link juice and position in search? The physical urls on those pages wont change at all.

    | Dante13
    0
  • FLEAR


    hey guys, just joined seomoz. was wondering is someone could take a quick look at my blog and see if it is fine to start hitting SEO hard? my top bar title has a few of my targeted keywords, is that a good idea or? http://www.onestopmuscle.co.uk

    | FLEAR
    0
  • ofuente


    Good morning, I am developing an application that searches offers in the press. The problem I have is the follow one:
    When I find an offer that I have already post, I cant use the same URL because it generates duplicate content , as the URL is generated from the title. If I find two offers in different stores (for example Thomson TV) I am studying two options. The first would be to add a number at the end of the URL
    http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson
    http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson1
    http://www.offertazo.com/televisor-thomson2 Another option I propose would be to add semantic data to provide value (such as the date). For example:
    http://www.offertazo.com/01-12-12/televisor-thomson I appreciate your help.

    | ofuente
    0
  • mj775


    I know that creating original product descriptions is best practices. What I don't understand is how other sites are able to generate significant traffic while still using duplicate product descriptions on all product pages. How are they not being penalized by Google?

    | mj775
    0
  • MerilynL


    Hey , I recently landed a client and his website has a lot of pages. After running a diagnostics in SEOmoz it seems like a lot of them dont have titles and descriptions. Also the ones that have titles and descriptions are not well optimized. I want to change/create titles and descriptions of this website but the problem is it has got 1000s of pages. So I was wondering is there an automated way of doing this? Thanks a lot in advance. Regards

    | MerilynL
    0
  • Tony14Aug


    Hello, I wondered if somebody could give me some advice. The problem of various iterations of the clanedar page coming up as duplicate content. There is a large calendar on my site for events and each time the page is viewed it is seen as duplicate content . How can I make it so that the various iterations (pages) do not come up as duplicate content ? Regards

    | Tony14Aug
    0
  • rching


    Do the search engines rank based on the meta title tag or the title tag? What if you have a different meta title tag from the title tag? Edited: I have edited to clarify my issue. Having a different meta title tag from the title tag. Thank you for those who have answered the question so far.

    | rching
    0
  • Ganesh34


    I want to  Know, for how much year i should buy a new domain for optimal SEO Results. Should I Buy it for 3 Years, 5 Years or 10 Years

    | Ganesh34
    0
  • webdynamics


    I am working on optimizing a website that was built with an CMS program. I searched for what pages are indexed on Google using "site:url" command. For some reason none of the pages are indexed on Google. What is the best way to index these web pages?

    | webdynamics
    0
  • cbielich


    My question is this. I have a scrabble dictionary site and I list a ton of words on the page. I removed then as links just in case Google might be thinking i am spamming, but could there be a difference in listing words like this word1, word2, word3, word4, word5 and instead like this word1 word2 word3 word4 word5 could the first way trigger Google that I am spamming?

    | cbielich
    0
  • Aggie


    We are a news media site in which much of our content is third-party, and already published by several other sources.  Our current version of our CMS doesn't expose head tags, so I can't canonical to the original and avoid a duplicate content penalty. Is it ok for news sites NOT to use canonical, or do I have to NOINDEX until our CMS is fixed?

    | Aggie
    0
  • MichealGooden


    We are currently trying to rewrite our product descriptions and I'm afraid some of the salespeople that are writing the descriptions are plagiarizing one-another's writing. Is there a content duplication checker that will allow you to check a piece of writing against a specific site rather than all of the web?

    | MichealGooden
    0
  • stereo69


    Hello, So far I always follow the recomendations of the chocolate donuts example of Rand Fishkin on the Blogpost:  How Do I Build the Perfectly Optimized Page? I also think that the onpage grades follow this rules. Do you think this is still all true after pinguin? Personally none of my websites have been afected by the update and I have an A grade on all my landing page. What do you think about the image alt text. Is it still a good idea to use the keyword? Are there any newer resources here on SEOMOZ  (I didn't find any with my search)? Thanks for sharing your experiences.. Regards

    | stereo69
    0
  • inhouseseo


    I read this blog post: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/let-onpage-optimization-change-your-life The author claims they have increased the visitors 50 fold doing on-page seo ONLY. So they just added content, and optimized the site structure. Anyone have seen similar results? Not outreach whatsoever, just adding content to site. Technically, this should be true, article directories has tons of visitors and they were giving out links.

    | inhouseseo
    0
  • Zoolander


    I have noticed that sometimes posters will talk about a site without mentioning what it is.  I assume this is because it one of their clients so there is confidentiality, is there any other reason I should be aware of? its just that as I am new I am usually cautious and am considering posting my own site and mentioning all my keywords to ask for people’s verdict for my on-page SEO.  Still working on it, will be ready soon, thought I would ask in advance. Regards,

    | Zoolander
    0
  • JohnWeb12


    I do allot of work for small businesses with around 15-20 total pages.  What is the best site architecture?  For example if its a landscaping website, should there be a services category page and pages under that (domain.com/services/lawn-mowing.html) or should it be flatter (domain.com/lawn-mowing.html)  They offer about 10 different services.

    | JohnWeb12
    0
  • Scratch_MM


    We are going through a clients blog history as they are entering a redesign phase for the blogs. We are trying to determine how far back we need to optimize past blog posts so that they can be found easier on search engines. Is it better to optimize the past years? 2 years? 6 months? only the top posts? Does anyone have any suggestions?

    | Scratch_MM
    0
  • absoauto


    For one of our most important keywords we have several pages ranking highly on the second page of search results in google. Yet none on the first page, is there anyway to concentrate our rankings to bump one to the first page? We would rather have even just one link on the first page than the 4 or 5 we have on the second now.

    | absoauto
    0
  • greenjoe


    So I merged my wordpress.com blog to my wordpress biz site and I now have a lot of 404's and way to many pages popping up. SEOMOZ crawl shows 290+ pages but my sitemap is only 95 pages...  It is also showing on my webmaster tools for having a lot of new errors. Any ideas?

    | greenjoe
    0
  • reddogmusic


    Hi all, We run an eCommerce website at www.oursite.com plus a blog (including news / articles / reviews / how-to guides etc.) at blog.oursite.com (those aren't really our site URLs, BTW ;-). For SEO reasons previously discussed on here, and for ease of use for our customers / browsers, we now want to integrate the two more closely. This will mean: Our blog will move to www.oursite.com/blog We will try to feature the blog content in places where it is relevant to customers (so e.g. news and blog posts about shoes would appear on our shoes category page, a review of some Adidas XL1000 shoes would appear on the Adidas XL1000 shoes product page) The blog is currently run on a wordpress.com site, so we'll need a new CMS (or wordpress.org) to get more control of the data. My issues are that, although it's good from a users point of view, having blog articles appear in lots of different places on the site might cause issues with duplicate content from a search engine's point of view. Has anyone got any pointers on how to integrate the two in a way that will make most use of the good original content coming out of our blog, while not "watering it down" by spreading it around too much? Can anyone point to examples of shops that do this well? Is there any software (other than Wordpress) that people would recommend using? As always, any help greatly appreciated! Alex

    | reddogmusic
    0
  • Richard555


    Hi, I 've pages like this: A) www.example.com/file/ B) www.example.com/file Just two questions: Does Google see this as duplicate content? Best to 301 redirect B to A? Many thanks Richard PS I read previous threads re the subject, it sounded like there was a bug in SEOMoz but I was not absolutely clear. Apologies if this is going over old ground.

    | Richard555
    0
  • aidanlawlor


    Hi SEO Heads, I have another question if someone would be so kind in answering What page title of the 2 below is better for SEO (i) Chocolate Cake|Chocolate Cake Recipe|Xmas Cake or (ii) Chocolate Cake | Chocolate Cake Recipe | Xmas Cake As you can see (ii) Page Title has a space before and after the | (vertical bar) I know the second page title looks better to human eyes but on some pages I had to forego the space so i could fit my keywords in the page title. is this a good idea? Can anyone help me? Cheers Aidan

    | aidanlawlor
    0
  • mommybu


    What is the most recent report you have for  "factors" that impact SEO --- you guys had one a few years ago and I don't see a recent report. This was based on a panel of experts I believe.

    | mommybu
    0
  • CyrilWilson


    For some reason we wanted to change the default page of my site from example.com to example.com/default.aspx. We will be using 301 redirection to get the back link benefits. Do we need to make any changes in webmaster tool and sitemap too??

    | CyrilWilson
    0
  • cakelady


    I work with Afternic.com and they are restructuring their website. The current search results pages generate tons of duplicate content, but it's not so clear to me what the best solution. Navigation links to all of these pages which are exactly the same and do not generate content on the specific url indicated. The results all display on variations of the url names.php http://www.afternic.com/names.php?feat=1 http://www.afternic.com/names.php?cls=1 Then they have this page with categories: http://www.afternic.com/categories.php And when you select a category, it generates sort results of names.php Now because there is no real content on names.php I'm wondering if all these url variations ought to have a rel canonical tag for names.php or if they should be blocked. If blocked, it seems we're stuck with a page that doesn't display any content. Thanks for any suggestions.

    | cakelady
    0
  • rohanarora536


    My website is related to education. We have created sub domains for all major colleges, universities & Entrance exams like Gre, Toefl ETC. for eg:  amityuniversity.abc.com (Amity is Name of University ) Now if have to mention city name in URL as well (college is located in multiple locations) amityuniversity-delhi.abc.com
    amityuniversitydelhi.abc.com Now my Q is can we use hyphens in sub domains if we have to add city name or shall we create without using any  hyphens. In Directory  structure we can always separate words with hyphens, can we follow same practice in subdomain as well Which is a  best URL for subdomain amity-university-delhi.abc.com
    amityuniversity-delhi.abc.com
    or amityuniversitydelhi.abc.com

    | rohanarora536
    0
  • ojwilliams8


    We have a competitor who has listed all the local villages and towns in the area that he wishes to target. these are listed in his footer and appear on every page. I understand that ideally, each location targeted would have it's own page with unique and relevant content. Is this competitor's approach a good one even though the names are essentially duplicates?

    | ojwilliams8
    0
  • novellseo


    We are getting reports that there are too many links on most of the pages in one of the sites we manage. Not just a few too many...  275 (versus <100 that is the target). The entire site is built with a very heavy global navigation, which contains a lot of links -- so while the users don't see all of that, Google does. Short of re-architecting the site, can you suggest ways to provide site navigation that don't violate this rule?

    | novellseo
    2
  • KimCalvert


    My understanding is that a URL should be as short as possible and also match the title tag, but in order to keep the URL shorter, can you abbreviate it? For example: Title Tag: Eat Your Way to Beauty with Superfoods URL: websitename.com/sbeauty-with-superfoods

    | KimCalvert
    0

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