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Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • Hi there, I recently stumbled upon a strange phenomenon in the SERPs. Here's the situation: A customer’s website is ranking for a keyword with the root domain. Strangely the actual meta description (as implemented in the source code) is not shown. Instead Google takes the H1-Header and a part of a short element from a contact form. Any clue/hint, how this could have happened and can be changed? Sorry, that I can’t name the domain and the keyword (in German), but I hope, the above explains the problem. Thanks in advance and cheers from Germany Sven

    | targi42
    0

  • I am working on a dental website. Under menu item "services"   lists everything he does like.. Athletic Sports Guards
    An athletic sports guard is a resilient plastic appliance that is worn to protect the teeth and gum tissues by absorbing the forces generated by traumatic blows during sports or other activities. Digital X-Rays We use state of the art digital x-rays and digital cameras to help with an accurate diagnosis of any concerns. Digital Imaging On initial visits, and recall visits, we take a series of digital photographs to aid us in diagnosis as well as to give you a close-up view of your mouth and any oral conditions. Smile Makeovers
    We offer a number of different options including bleaching, bonding, porcelain veeners, and in some cases, implants and/or orthodontic care is utilized in our smile makeover planning. Nitrous oxide for your Comfort Would it be better to break these services up into individual pages?  I was thinking I would because then I could add more pictures and expand on the topic and try to get an "A" grade on each page. I'm not sure how I could rank a page if I have 35 services listed on the page. That would be an awfully big H1! Suggestions?

    | Czubmeister
    0

  • Bonjour from 23 Degrees C hot & sultry Wetherby UK, I find again and again clients find jumping into an active volcano easier than addid fresh content. I want to try another tactic to prompt / scare them into adding content and here is my idea. I want to track a competitor site for a target term and monitor if they are adding content over time specific to that term. So my question is please: "Is there a reliable method to do this?" Ideas i had was doing a good old Google Title operator at the beginning of the month and then at monthly intervals to see if anything changes. Any insights welcome 🙂

    | Nightwing
    0

  • A client of mine's site is currently sitename.com. www.sitename.com redirects to the non-www URL and the canonical is using the non-www URL.  This is a fairly new site and there aren't many existing inbound links. Is there a benefit to switching this?

    | BostonWright
    0

  • We've tried everything and just can't get our ranking back up.

    | absoauto
    0

  • Hi Guys. I have been sorting out title tags for a photography site. I have given each page within the website a different title tag but now Im unsure as what I should do with the blog. Blog title tag is currently "Portrait Photographer London | Company Name Blog" This is fine however wordpress combines the homepage title tag with the title of each blog post and imo makes for a long & cumbersome title...such as : "The Obamas Family Portrait | Portrait Photographer London | Company Name Blog" I'm pretty sure I could do better and should do better but Im at a loss, what do you guys think?

    | RankStealer
    0

  • The new company site is almost finished, and I've just learned that instead of the home page linking to a few internal pages (it's a tiny site), they are just using modal windows instead of deeper pages. Is that bad for SEO and what can I do to optimize with this setup?

    | UnaRealidad
    0

  • Hi I am developing an ecommerce site and want to place text on all category and home page. The challenge is that 300 words of text for the pages does not fit into the design appropriately especially on the home page. If I were to use a show/hide element with javascript would this be seen as spam or a trick to the search engines. I do not think it is spam as it will be actual content for the site and the visitor can view it if they click on the show button. Would love to hear your thoughts?

    | VivaArturo
    0

  • Ok help me out here friends. I’m working with the warnings and errors for my site. I have two problems that relate to each other and I want to know if you had to choose what problem what would you choose. I’m running into some duplicate content and title errors because under categories for my products there are so many products that it creates more than one page and with each new page it has the same title or same content on the page. I tried to make this less in some cases by showing more products per page like 100 items and in most cases per category it will only show one page now. Now some times there’s still more than one page and also this creates too many links now on that category page. So I think I can get rid of all the to many on page links but it will make more pages and duplicate content and title tag. What would you guys do?

    | Dataken
    0

  • The following question is for an eCommerce site: We have a home page title that has been the same for a few years. I would like to keep the keywords that already exist, but move them into different positions based on seasonality. Format will be (company name) | (keywords). Current format (company name) - (keywords). Rest of the page titles onsite are formatted (keyword)/(product name) | (company name) I think having the same keywords, but in a different order wouldn't hurt us in the SERPs. What are your thoughts?

    | kennyrowe
    0

  • Should I use the same email address for two offices in two different locations for google places registration or am I better off using two different email addresses?

    | VivaArturo
    0

  • I recently began re-optimizing my title tags site wide. Could this cause 301 redirects and the loss of backlinks?

    | BeautyStop
    0

  • I understand the importance of having the keyword in the URL (at least now I do).  When I created my site (www.enchantingquotes.com), I was completely ignorant about SEO.  So....question is...how do I go about adding keywords to already done pages?  Do I create a new section and then redirect - or do I have to basically recreate pages?  Thx much 🙂

    | enchantedgirlz
    0

  • A while back we were schooled on "Link Silos" a reputable SEO source.... and one suggestion was to create links from our product pages (bottom of link silo), back up to it's higher category page. So for example... Home > Tools > Hair Dryers > "Product" On the subject product... we chose to link back to "Hair Dryers" and then "Andis" (that product's brand page. You can see this at the below product page. We added the links below "Related Categories" in the product description. http://www.beautystoponline.com/Andis-Colorwaves-Tourmaline-Hair-Dryer-Blue-Green-p/an1dry0295.htm We are now thinking this may be just too much as there is already a "bread crumb" trail at the top of the product page. These are in essence links back up to higher categories. Any input on these types of links would be appreciated.. Thanks!

    | BeautyStop
    1

  • Ok maybe im missing something. I signed up 5/2 I got a complete crawl within a few days. Good information im all excited to work on the changes. I made a bunch of changes to improve my site. Like I had to many on page links. I made a bunch of changes to fix that problem and some title tag problem. So now im waiting and waiting to see the changes that I made updated in my campaign and nothing. It said it was running a new crawl last thursday no changes show and then again this thursday now it says may 24 and last scan on the 12th. My title tag for my home page still shows the old title and I got the links way down I believe under 100 and it still show 200 to 300. It seems like im just not getting up to date information fast enough. To pay 99 bucks a month and after 2 weeks no changes seems odd. Maybe im doing something wrong can someone tell me if this is normal? I like the data but its not updating. I want to see that my changes are working and keep making changes and i cant keep waiting and waiting. Thanks for any ones help. Ken

    | Dataken
    0

  • WE are adding a  module to our site that will add a glossary. It is going to add a link to the glossary where each word is used. Should we add no follow to those?   Or is there any other implication seo wise using this?

    | Stevej24
    0

  • howdy guys, I am helping my father out with his SEO for his company. I am taking over the SEO helm so to speak and have to do a complete on site make over( offsite as well eventually soon) He has on every page meta keywords that are just stuffed with "money keywords" and they are the same on every page, Should i just delete them entirely and leave that attribute blank? Hope to hear back soon, thanks.

    | david305
    0

  • I'm about to do a site audit, and as part of it I need to download all the metadata so that I can see what is ok, and what needs to change. I've seen tools that allow you to do this a million times, and even used a few.   But today for some reason I'm drawing a blank.  Can someone help me please? Best case scenario, the tool is free, but I'm not opposed to paying if it's going to save me a lot of time.

    | ZephSnapp
    0

  • I have ~ 45 posts that I wrote 2-3 years ago that need to be updated with current information and I'm wondering if I should: Just update them Update them and change the date published to present day Publish the updated info. as a completely new post other? ... and why. I've read so many conflicting thoughts on this, really curious to hear what other Pro members think (or would do if it were them). To give a little more background, the topics of the posts are various retirement communities. Things that may have changed could be they added new amenities, new home types, prices, number of homes still available, etc. I have one page of my site that acts as sort of a directory linking to an article(post) for each community, but worried if I add all the updates as new posts I'll have to link to separate articles about each community which doesn't really make things too friendly for the reader. They want to know about what's going on with each community now...not back 3 years ago. Thoughts? Suggestions? Many thanks! Ryan

    | ryanerisman
    0

  • I am working on a website that got hit by the penguin update. Didn't get hit terribly bad, but dropped from number one to number 9. As I'm going through the pages, the theme and content is a mess. To give an example, say the site is about custom colored marbles. The main page content covers custom colored marbles, custom promotional marbles, custom glass marbles, etc. Custom colored marbles is mentioned and covered on all pages, which I am going back and trying to make each page theme specific. There is also a custom page, so I am at a cross roads on how best to employ the focus of the custom page and the home page. I am thinking the home page should emphasize colored marbles, and the custom page should emphasize custom colored marbles. My fear is that making such a drastic change will bounce the site completely off front page and that it will take time for the custom page to come up in rankings. AS it stands now I am confused as to how it even ranks on first page as there's two pages with custom colored marbles emphasis. Id like to clean this up as much as possible so there are no big hits with future google updates, but I don't want the site to drop off either as that would be hard to explain to the owner. Yeah, we are cleaning up your site and making it google compliant and in so doing you no longer rank on first page. That won't put food on the table. Thanks for any advise on this.

    | anthonytjm
    0

  • crawler shows following links as duplicate http://www.mysite.com http://mysite.com http://www.mysite.com/ http://mysite.com. http://mysite.com/index.html How can i solve this issue?

    | bhanu2217
    0

  • Hey guys quick question, when I am analyzing/ doing word count for a particluar key word and I want to make sure that i am no where near Keyword stuffing, does Google consider the alt and title tags keywords of images as part of the KW count when looking for on page Keyword stuffing. For example. let say I have a page that i just created with 1000 words. and Only 2 of the words are my target Keywords. Then, if i add a picture and add the keyword to both the alt and title tag and description of the image, does google now consider the "page" to have a total of 5 keywords? Also, a lot has changed recently since penguin and panda, is there a good rule of thumb for what ratio to stay under as far as keywords to text.?

    | david305
    0

  • Hi, we have about 6500 products, almost all with descriptions.  SEOMOZ is showing about 2500 of them with duplicate content.  The reason for this is that only one or two words are different for each product.  For example, we have 500 award certificates.  All are the same size and have the same description. But one is swimming, one baseball, one reading, etc, etc. Apparently the 1 word difference is not enough to differentiate.  We have the same issue with our trophies - they are identical, except for figures.  Does anyone have any good tips on how to change the content to avoid this issue and to avoid making up content for 2500 items?  Thanks! Neil trophycentral.com

    | trophycentraltrophiesandawards
    0

  • I understand the growing importance fo content freshness, but I have some questions about how to incorporate content freshness components into an existing SEO strategy: Here are some specific questions I would love some help with: If I have a specific "product or services" page that is properly optimized, and getting a decent amount of traffic, would I benefit from updating/modifying the content on a routine basis to improve rankings? In general, should I be considering an occasional re-fresh of content on my site even if I don;t necessarily have anything new to say? For my homepage, if I am pulling in headlines from various news and events sections within my own site, and those sections are updated pretty frequently, is my homepage going to be viewed as fresh when the site gets re-crawled? In other words, is updating my homepage via rss feeds that pull from content areas from within my site keeping my homepage "fresh"? Thanks!

    | AmyLB
    0

  • i ran the on page test and i got the avoid keyword self-canabilzation alert one example is for http://www.deporvillage.com/shimano maybe is because a'm not a native speaking english person but i do not understand what it exactly means the targeted keyword for this page is shimano and the alert i got for the links like the one below that i have in my page http://www.deporvillage.com/ciclismo/zapatillas-shimano which has a anchor text like zapatillas ciclismo shimano

    | deporvillage
    0

  • howdy guys, I am tryign to help my dad out with his SEO for his existing LP. its been created for "conversions" however not really made for SEO. Anyways, he has all these images that have abs no title,alt, or desc tags on ANY images. some of the images are part of the header and some are images of people etc. there are about 30 images. and the site is all in html. Would it be a good idea to change EVERY image or just a few and target some branding keywords? thanks again guys, hope to hear back soon

    | david305
    0

  • howdy guys, after panda, and penguin, i wanted to know if anyone has any good references for a cheat sheet that has ALL the on page SEO factors like title tag, image tags, H1-H6, etc, the basics, but since the zoo got loose I dont know if things have changed for on page SEO. For example what is the optimal KW density we should be using etc. i found this list : http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm but it seems to be a bit outdated, if someone can share something similar to this list but something more recent, like a few weeks old, i think that would help the community out a great bunch! thanks guys

    | david305
    0

  • How long (how many words) can a description tag of a rich snippets code?

    | seoflorida
    0

  • Currently planning our site architecture and little confused over the management of our global navigation To benefit from the maximum link juice to our 50-100 most important pages we are going to incorporate links to these from our homepage as part of the global navigation. Now I understand we want nice, flat architecture; however; on these sub pages we may one day want to place another 100 of so links on these to another category level. The problem I see arising is if we already have a bunch of links as part of our global navigation we are going to dilute the links on any sub category pages. Now Im guessing the solution to is nofollow the global navigation on all pages other than the homepage? or do the bots recognize a global navigation as such and is able to handle this issue already? Thanks for everyones help.

    | jg100
    0

  • Hi there, Web Address:  www.websitedesign-miltonkeynes.com Okay I stared my own web development business about 8 - 9 months ago and decided that I was going to target a small number of local keywords that were relevant to my business and geographical area. So I decided to target the keywords below and and started to get good traffic, I never have bought links and have not copied any content although I know i should try and add more content to my website. mk web design, software Milton Keynes, web design Milton Keynes, web design mk, web designer Milton Keynes, web designers Milton Keynes & website design milton Keynes However recently my website has dropped massively in the SERP's and wanted to know what has caused this (i know Penguin) and what I can do to improve. I have listed below my rankings to show you the drop: 24th April 2012 15th May 2012 mk web design 3 11 software milton keynes 1 8 web design milton Keynes 12 50 web design mk 5 53 web designer milton keynes 10 0 web designers milton keynes 6 37 website design milton keynes 3 21 I decided to change my homepage Page Title a week ago to make sound less spammy but this has made no difference and wanted some help on what has happened so i do not do this again and what I can do to improve. Thanks in advance. Darren Bowden

    | Tarqs
    0

  • Hi Hi, I'm using the Plugin "Wordpress SEO by Yoast". Unfortunatelly, this plugin generates a sourcecode looking like this: name='description' content='XXXXXX.'/> Seomoz can't read this and tells me, that my pages have no description. Google doesn't matter and reads it correct. Is there anything I can do about this? Many greetings André

    | waynestock
    0

  • When I use Site Explorer to find our Top Pages there are a whole series of pages like this: http://www.nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/mybestbets/mybestbets-culture.html which I think were created when we had a Bulletin Board on the site. Although they are showing in the Top Pages results when you visit the page you get the following error message: HTTP Error 404.0 - Not Found The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. What implications result from these pages still showing in results and what action should we take without messing up our search rankings? Any advice would be gratefully received.

    | NileCruises
    0

  • A customer of mine has a site with lots of articles and they are all quite spammy. They have not been affected by penguin yet so they asked what to do. I suggested losing the articles directory and 301 redirect to either the home page or another important page. Would a 301 redirect on the entire directory to a single page be the way to go or add redirects from each page within the directory and spread out redirects to various pages in website? Or do you have a better suggestion?

    | anthonytjm
    0

  • So as of late I have been on something of a mission to mark up my news website with as much accurate and detailed Schema and Open Graph data as possible, in order to not only allow the search engines to understand my content properly, but also to ensure everything appears in the most ideal fashion when linked to from Facebook, Google+, etc. Here is an example of a typical article page: http://www.nerdscoop.net/technology/video-games-459 As you'll see I currently have news posts marked up as article because that is essentially exactly what they are, but is there a better way to emphasise that they are news rather than just generic articles? My second question is regarding the category pages and the home page. How would be best to mark these up? With OG the task is fairly simple, because I can specify the homepage as being a website, but not so with Schema from what I can see. Either way, this is an interesting subject to me and I look forward to any discussion as a result. Thanks for looking.

    | HalogenDigital
    0

  • Being new to seomoz Im not sure if I understand the crawl test completely. You setup a campaign, enter all your info, rogerbot goes out and crawls your site and gives you results as to what your doing right and what is wrong or could use looking into. So once I get my results, I make edits to my site pages. In my case Im getting lots of duplicate content and duplicate titles. So I go back and make adjustments and then submit a crawl test to see the change results. In other tools Ive used in past I was able to re run crawl immediately and fine tune results on the fly. seomoz crawl test is still pending after three days. is this normal? or is there another way to make changes and run reports to see results instantly? If your working on many sites and making changes, having to wait 3 or more days to see how your changes were received seems like a long time.

    | anthonytjm
    0

  • Hi I'm a little bit confused about my on page report. I prepared 2 version of on page seo report for the same targeted keyword and the same URL, but one of the url with www. and the other without it. In the one that i entered the URL with www. the report came with warning about the "Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization" we suggest staying away from linking internally to another page with the target keyword(s) as the exact anchor text. As I see on my webpage there is no anchor text at all pointing to another internal page using the targeted keyword. I'm sure that I didn't use my targeted keyword with any link . Thanks in advance for anyone If can help or explain what is that ? If I have to write the URL and the keyword no problem for me. Thanks

    | seomoz59
    1

  • We currently have a scroll bar box at the bottom of our page with information in but from what I can see scroll bar boxes at the bottom of websites looking a little spammy (a lot of over optimized websites using them) would we be best in using a strategy like this site www.solopress.com/ which implement a show more link that drops information down would this be read as good information for Google or look just as spammy?

    | BobAnderson
    1

  • Hi there I'm setting up a landing page for an exclusive offer that is only available (via a link) to a particular audience. Although I've got some specific content (offer informaiton paragraph), i want to use some of the copy and content from one of my standard product pages to inform the visitors about what it is that i'm trying to sell them. Considering I'm going to include a noindex on this page, do i need to worry about it having some content copied directly from another page on my site? Thanks

    | zeegirl
    0

  • When we create client websites the urls are client.oursite.com.  Google is indexing theses sites and attaching to our domain.  How can we stop it with robots.txt?  I've heard you need to have the robots file on both the main site and the dev sites... A code sample would be groovy.  Thanks, TR

    | DisMedia
    0

  • One of my client tags image-links with nofollow if those links are before a regular HTML link in the source code, e.g.:
    .
    .
    .
    Check our page aboutreally cool shoes. They do this to "better pass anchor tags" to the page /page-about-shoes.html. My question: Is this a good practice to do? Thanks Sebes

    | Sebes
    0

  • Hi! We recently re-designed our home page in early March.  After Google panda, we re-tweaked it again, before we take it live, we really want to get some expert's opinions.  We would be grateful for any comments/suggestions/feedback, particularly in the following area (you will need to click a few times to get the page to real size): is the bottom content ok? please scroll down all the way. 2)  We used semantic keywords for 5-6 anchor interlinks to the same page to promote core products from the home page.  Is this too much? 80% links on the footer is a repetition of header navigation links, do these footer serve any SEO value or is it over - optimization? Here is the URL: https://www.dropbox.com/gallery/36547134/1/WebDesign?h=109d4a Thanks a lot!

    | ypl
    0

  • Its it fundamental nowadays renaming images for SEO? Many photos are on top positions without being renamed like: mykeyword.jpg but can be 9876986.jpg instead. Doesn't itcount much more the contest in which they are such as text around photos, descriptions and context from internal and external linking pages? Renaming everyphoto, in every gallery can be considered over optimization? Is there any study showing the impact the single factor of renaming a photo in a page? Thanks

    | holidaysempire
    0

  • I have a page on a site that is targeted for "men's custom suits." Using the on-page analysis tool from SEOmoz it gives me an F for "mens custom suits" but an A with the apostrophe. Even though the apostrophe is proper English grammar, does it affect rankings either way?

    | cgray01
    0

  • Is it ok to put your domain name in the meta description if that is the name of your company?  so if my company name is BlaBla.com and I want to have a meta description like Shop for your next Widget at BlaBla.com.   We have Widget in 30 colors.  Free shipping for orders over $50. and I am obviosuly promoting the widget page is this ok.  I am concerned that Google will not like the domain name in the meta description.  After Peguin I am paranoid about my shadow.....LOL

    | freestone
    0

  • Some of our top search performing competitors do NOT limit their titles to 70 characters. How important is the 70 characters or less guideline in getting excellent search positions? Does having titles greater than 70 characters hurt our search engine positions?

    | lbohen
    0

  • Hi, I have two pages that are identical on my site: http://www.absolutepower.nl/creatine-monohydraat and http://www.absolutepower.nl/CREATINE/creatine-monohydraat Should I use the canonical URL tag in this case? Thanks, Jasper

    | Japking
    0

  • We run a site that contains many catalogues aimed at different markets. Products can appear in one or more catalogues. The product copy etc will be on the whole similar maybe even identical across those catalogues. So I'm assuming these will be flagged as duplicates? If so is there a way to fix this other than completely re-writing the copy for each catalogue?

    | TTS_Group
    0

  • Whenever i enable Canonical URL through the 3DCart Control panel I get this Critical Factor error when running the on page report card: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Canonical URL</dt> <dd>"http://rcnitroshop.com/Nitro-Monster-Truck"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd> </dl> Now if I disable Canonical URL then run the on page report card again the critical error goes away but I get this Optional Factor error instead: Canonical URL Tag Usage Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Number of Canonical tags</dt> <dd>0</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page.</dd> </dl> So basically I disabled it because obviously a Critical error is much worse then an optional error. Is there a way I can get rid of both errors?

    | bilsonx
    0

  • We just got a new client because of recent Penguin/Panda changes. A national "SEO"  firm decided it was a good idea to set up a page for each service town or county they serve with nothing but duplicate content. Needless to say, on the week of the 23rd, their rankings tanked from 1st page (it's not a competitive niche) to 4th. I'm not bringing this up to brag, but rather because it got me thinking... How are your geographically targeted "service area" pages doing? Have the recent changes caused you to rethink your geographic targeting in any way?

    | BedeFahey
    0

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