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Category: On-Page Optimization

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

  • Stevej24


    We do have javascript menus on each page.  These are used by a visitor to contact a specific office in a specif city.  Could this be where all these links are being counted?  I don't see them elsewhere? What about links that are in the footer?  They actually link to the same pages as the menus, but are just  straight links.

    | Stevej24
    0
  • RoyMcClean


    We're seeing "Duplicate Content" warnings / errors in some of our clients' sites for blog / event calendar tags and category listings. For example the link to http://www.aavawhistlerhotel.com/news/?category=1098 provides all event listings tagged to the category "Whistler Events". The Meta Title and Meta Description for the "Whistler Events" category is the same as another other category listing. We use Umbraco, a .NET CMS, and we're working on adding some custom programming within Umbraco to develop a unique Meta Title and Meta Description for each page using the tag and/or category and post date in each Meta field to make it more "unique". But my question is .... in the REAL WORLD will taking the time to create this programming really positively impact our overall site performance? I understand that while Google, BING, etc are constantly tweaking their algorithms as of now having duplicate content primarily means that this content won't get indexed and there won't be any really 'fatal' penalties for having this content on our site. If we don't find a way to generate unique Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions we could 'no-follow' these links (for tag and category pages) or just not use these within our blogs. I am confused about this. Any insight others have about this and recommendations on what action you would take is greatly appreciated.

    | RoyMcClean
    0
  • jeff.interactive


    Will the the transfer to a new registrar hurt my domains in the SERPs if all contact information for the domain stays the same and DNS stays the same and site hosting remains the same?

    | jeff.interactive
    0
  • YannickVeys


    A client of mine is introducing a new and improved bookingsengine. They're launching it on a different url than the existing one. The existing one needs to stay online a little bit longer for affiliate purposes. The old engine url has a sitelink in the SERPS and ranks well on a few terms. I'm wondering what you would do in this case? They want the new url to rank as quickly as possible also as sitelink of course. Any help greatly appreciated. I have some thoughts of my own of course... 🙂 But to keep the discussion as wide as possible... I'll wait a bit to add m thoughts.

    | YannickVeys
    0
  • MirandaP


    What is everyone's opinion on this? < 100 at all times? 100 -200 Okay? 200-300+ A little much?

    | MirandaP
    0
  • brian.james


    Hi guys, We are in the process of optimizing the pages of our new site. We have used the 'on page' report card feature in the Seomoz Pro Campaign analyser. On several pages we got the following result No More Than One Canonical URL Tag Number of Canonical tags <dl> <dd>2</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>The canonical URL tag is meant to be employed only a single time on an individual URL (much like the title element or meta description). To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, employ only a single version of this tag.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Remove all but a single canonical URL tag</dd> </dl> I have looked into the source code of one of the pages http://www.sabaileela.co.uk/acupuncture-london and can see that there are two "canonical" tags. Does anyone have any advise on which one I should ask the developer to remove?  I am not sure how to determine the relative importance of either link.

    | brian.james
    0
  • ilyaelbert


    We have a blog related to computer support, and we have been using guest posts and promotion of those posts to boost freshness and rankings of the blog. We have been restricting outbound links to prevent words such as 'computer repair, 'computer support' etc, because we were under the impression that if we want to rank for those words, we should only allow INCOMING links with that anchor text, and that outbound links from the page, would rob the other parts of the site of the link juice this page provides. My question is, is this wrong? Should I freely allow outbound links on my blog page that contain anchor text that I my self am trying to rank for? Or was I correct initially? Current the anchor text is in 'related' industries, such as mobile apps, technology news, etc...things that google might think are 'related', but not exactly what the site is about.

    | ilyaelbert
    0
  • NoahsDad


    At one point in my SEO journey I had noticed some duplicate issues going on in Google webmaster tools (I could have been reading it wrong.) It looked like WMT was saying I had 2 versions of some of pages...it looked like pages that ended in a '/' ranking differently than pages that have no slash at the end. So I downloaded the redirect plugin and redirected many non / pages to the page that end with the "/".  This was probably a mistake. but I'm trying to clean all of that up. (I'm also noticing that SEOMoz tools tells me my site has many, many redirected url's. I'm not sure why. I was looking at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/pages?site=noahsdad.com%2F this morning at my top pages and it shows 2 versions (one being redirected) of the page about my son who was born with Down syndrome. (Noahsdad.com/story and Noahsdad.com/story/) I don't know if I've built rankings for those pages separately and it would now hurt me if I did away with the redirect. I'm not sure why I did the redirects (I must have read something online somewhere.) I'm wondering if someone wouldn't mind looking at the report and letting me know what the best way to 'clean' this stuff up...Should I go into the redirect software and delete all of the redirects where the non / page is being redirected to the / page? Thanks.

    | NoahsDad
    0
  • onlineforequine


    Hi there So I have a main navigation, It includes 5 categories Each category contains 4-6 sub categories Within these sub categories, there are 6 - 10 sub sub categories Its a rather complex navigation but allows the end user to land exactly where they want without much mooching. Now my issue is the use of keywords.  Should I be feeding the keywords used in the main category through to the sub category and the sub sub category as they are all linked or should I use unique keywords for each sub/sub/sub category? I have added an image of the nav layout so you can see how it works. I hope that makes sense? Could love some help! dHve8.jpg

    | onlineforequine
    0
  • DanSerpico


    Hello all, What are good on-page SEO practices for the search result pages on our own sites? For instance, what page titles do you use? Do you include page numbers? Meta-descriptions? Headers? Keyword utilization? This is a consideration for us as we link to some popular search results on our sites. Thanks!

    | DanSerpico
    0
  • apmgsmith


    I first apologize for the lame question title - didn't really know how to word it...  I'm having a bit of a conundrum and cannot figure out whats going on, but in the mean time I thought I would ask to see if its hurting my ranking. My site at www.ap-mg.com is built on WordPress using the Thesis them by DIY (just a little upfront info).  I am very careful to make sure that all my links are in a particular format i.e. http://www.ap-mg.com - on my site, as well as other sites I have my profile on.  My site also used to be hosted on the /home directory until about a month ago. My problem is that when I click on the DA MoxBar link while at my sites homepage, it takes me to Open Explorer, but to ap-mg.com and shows no results - I then add the www to the front of the address and vuala - results. But then the second issue I'm having is then it tells me that my site is redirecting the the /home directory, which its not and I'm still trying to figure that one out. So with all the craziness with my site, www, no www, /home....is this killing any chance of real ranking?

    | apmgsmith
    0
  • mrlolalot


    Hi, I have a question regarding SEO for ecommerce: Do you guys think it could be a bad thing to display non-linked short product descriptions of products on the home page and category pages? Can that cause cannibalism between different pages and non-optimal keyword targeting? I have a shop of which it's homepage tend to rank for some unintended phrases. Thank you, E

    | mrlolalot
    0
  • tanlup


    Hi guys. On my website I have an action that will only perform if you are logged into your account, otherwise you are redirected to the login page causing a 302 redirection. When SEOmoz crawls my website, it gets all these redirections to the login page, but I really can't do much better so what is the best way of fixing this? I've thought of using rel="nofollow", but I want make sure this change will fix my issue, both with the SEOmoz crawler and any other search engine crawler. Thank you guys so much!

    | tanlup
    0
  • filarinskis


    On our homepage, would having 8 randomly selected products from your catalogue (some of which contain keywords) be good, bad or have no effect on rankings? The proucts change with every refresh. Some may remain the same, but just change position.

    | filarinskis
    0
  • FreightBoy


    I'm trying to get rid of my Rel Canonical links and use the 301 Redirect instead.

    | FreightBoy
    0
  • idv


    Hi My website http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk is now ranking on the 1st page of Bing and Google for phrases such as Chartered Accountant Swansea and Tax Planners Swansea But the phrase 'accountants swansea' is still performing poorly - as it is near the bottom of the second page? Would I be better placing more accountant swansea phrases on the homepage of the site or would this have an adverse effect on the current 'Chartered Accountants Swansea' ranking as would this be classed as keyword cannabilisation? So would it be better to further optimise http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/accounting.htm and include the phrases Accountants Swansea and Auditors Swansea or would this act against the homepage? Sorry for the questions I am just looking for the best route forward to further boost the ranking on additional terms as the majority of the 1st page listings seem to weak?

    | idv
    0
  • Pherogab


    Hi, One of my clients has a big duplicate content issue on his site. He has two domain, on for each language (FR and EN) but each domain propose the two languages! Meaning you can reach every page with two URL. Example: http://www.brand-realestate.com/en/luxury/index.html (home page of the default site in english)
    http://www.immobilier-brand.com/en/luxury/index.html (home page of the default site in french after clicking on the english link) Each of the two site has a default language and a link to the other one. When you click the link the page you are on just refresh and the URL stay the same with an added language parameter (ie:http://www.immobilier-brand.com/luxe/index.html?lang=english), then all the link in the navigation switch to the other language. So my question is, is it better to: Keep the two domain and instead of having the two languages on each send the traffic to the domain which has the targeted language by default (on the right page of course) Have both language on one domain and redirect all the pages from the other domain to this one (each page to the corresponding one) Just add a canonical URL on each alternative version of each domain Let me know if I'm clear. Thanks for the help. GaB

    | Pherogab
    0
  • Dirty


    I have a site where I have 5,000 new products each year, I never waned to deleted the old pages due to links pointing to them and keywords.  But I now have 20,000 plus pages, does having that many pages spread out my link juice or does it effect me in any other ways over having a site with 5,000 pages or should I keep not deleting old pages so I dont loose any links? Along with that I currently do not link to my old pages from my site so Im guessing google does not get to them very often if at all, if you agree to still keep them should I link to them somewhere? Because the products are not that simiiar and they do bring added value I dont think canonical would work here

    | Dirty
    0
  • soltec


    We are currently adding some performance improvement to our websites, to improve user experience. One of the things we are looking at is splitting of images over several sub-domains, to increase the number of images that can be downloaded at the same. We have seen that using key phrases within image names has an improvement in rankings. So, the question is should we create sub-domains as key-phrase.example.co.uk or as i1.example.co.uk? K

    | soltec
    0
  • WhiteHat12


    I am working with a site right now and they are ranked #1
    for many keyword phrases based on their location and service. Their service is an
    Insurance agency, so they rank #1 for many keywords like “Miami Insurance” or “South
    Florida Insurance Agency” (their not actually ranked for Miami
    just giving an example). I also include their address on every page of the site
    (maybe that better helps Google maps?). Problem I am having is when searched
    just the keyword phrase they rank number 1 but when searching say “insurance”
    while being logged in to the area they rank for they do not come up. I hear that
    there might be specific ways to optimize for this. What I would like to know is
    what would I have to do to optimize for Google maps and what’s everything I possibly
    can do. I am good with search engine optimization but have never really dabbled
    much with Google Maps, I always thought they just ranked you based on your
    address.

    | WhiteHat12
    0
  • donford


    We are working on redoing our site and I read the article from rand about how to properly format title tags, here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tactical-seo-how-many-termsphrases-should-i-target-on-a-single-page He showed how he could take 6 keywords and use them all in the title tag: The title Tag:
    Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008 | Sartorialmoz.org The keywords:
    Ted Baker
    Ted Baker London
    Ted Baker Clothing
    Ted Baker Mens
    Ted Baker Mens Clothing
    Ted Baker Mens Collection So what I am wondering is the keyword Ted Baker Mens Collection actually getting found. In this case we are dealing with a contraction (men's) and a plural form of a keyword (collections). Is it plucked out from the title tag above?
    Like this? Ted Baker London - Men's Clothing Collections 2005-2008 | Sartorialmoz.org In his article he goes on to say the biggest mistake he sees is, unfortunately exactly the way our site was built 6 years ago. That is people doing this: Ted Baker, Ted Baker London, Ted Baker Clothing, Ted Baker Men's Clothing, Ted Baker Clothing Collection - Buy Online Now at Manamialameseo.com Our site does just that, while we are PR 4 and get decent traffic for the business we are in, we are doing a huge update with new pages, information, and most importantly trying to get all the SEO the best as possible. I want to make sure before we make these what could be huge impact changes that search engines do in fact Pluck the keywords from the title tag, and they are not required to be together. Thank you for any thoughts, answers and most importantly your time. Example following this formula: Our Top 3 Keywords:
    Molded Rubber
    Rubber Molding
    Custom Molded Rubber Our Old way:
    Title: Custom Molded Rubber, Rubber Molding, Molded Rubber
    The new way:
    Title: Custom Molded Rubber - Molding Services | OurSite.com

    | donford
    0
  • paulinap1983


    I just want to copy my content on the page and use the first or as well the second sentence of the content self for my meta description tag. Is that OK? Or should the Meta description tag be different?

    | paulinap1983
    0
  • jkundrotas


    Hello seomozers! Today I've come to one interesting question about Title Tag lenght in UTF-8 coded content. It's relevant to description tag lenght too. So, as we all know SEO best practices recommend that my Title tag should be under 70 (or 75) characters. Now, we have a website which is UTF-8 coded. That means that our special characters (some lithuanian letters) at the end gains +4 or +5 characters in length. So Google Webmaster Tools in our case report that some Title Tags are longer than they should be (exceeded by those +4 or +5), but in SERPs we see clear and not trunctated Title Tags (which means that our title tags are displayed correctly in UTF-8). The question is - should I believe in SERPs and don't take any action or maybe should I notice Google Webmaster Tools recommendations and shorten those tags ? Well, I do believe that at the end it's not so important, but I'd like to hear some more opinions on this simple situation.

    | jkundrotas
    0
  • xverticle


    How many post  a day should i post on my website to look natural ? first website is 1-2 years old second is 7 years old, i bought aged domain third is about 3 weeks old Thanks

    | xverticle
    0
  • Spyre


    Hi, My website - www.thepartyhouse.com.au is showing as having too many on-page links for over 4,000 pages. Take for example the homepage which is showing as 188 links, but I don't understand this because I've used SEO tools to display the links and I am showing around 90 links on this page. How can I see what all the links are? Thanks

    | Spyre
    0
  • Wales


    Both another consultant and my first seomoz test stated that I have two websites and that confuses the spiders. .  One is www.mystore.com ( example) and the other is mystore.com.   Yahoo states that's how they role and I can not delete one.  I can do a 301 redirect and redirect one site to the other but they do not have a recommendaation as to which one to redicrect. Which one should I redirrect?

    | Wales
    0
  • smokin_ace


    I have a website http://www.versaillesdentalclinic.com with 20 pages in Total, but i need it to be  on the top page of Google by 65 keywords and may be more. How many keywords per page shall I use? Currently I am promoting around 12 keywords  high competitive for main page? Is it ok? I will appreciate a good answer 😉 Thanks, Russel

    | smokin_ace
    0
  • mollykathariner_ms


    I see that Ryan Boots answered a similar question for Mark Skidmore (http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-using-parentheses-affect-the-crawlers), but I'd like to dig a little deeper. If I use a key term with a parenthetical phrase in the body copy with either or tags, will it still hold the same weight as it would if I used the same key term without parentheses? Further, would the same answer apply to key terms in the meta description? Thank you. Joe Donohue

    | mollykathariner_ms
    0
  • minutiae


    I think my homepage and basic product listing page may be competing.. We have a very old domain with lots of links w/ generic anchor text ( click here, etc. ) That page is http://mybrand.com which Google ranks for our "widgets" search term. We have a page http://ourbrand.com/widgets that lists the 5 or 6 basic widgets we sell. This page is indexed also, but doesn't have nearly as many links since it is new compared to the age of the domain. After reading this.. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization I I'm not really sure I can remove all "widgets" links from our homepage, since that's a core part of our site's menu / hierarchy. So maybe my best effort would be to reorganize the page so that the homepage focuses on Our Brand Name Widgets .. and let the product page focus on the widgets keyword. Is having those two pages serve to represent those two separate but similar keywords feasible? Thoughts?

    | minutiae
    0
  • ClaytonKendall


    Over the last couple of weeks the organic traffic on our site has fallen pretty significantly. With the latest update from SEOmoz it went down 25% this week. I know this can happen from time to time, but we have been pretty stable with our traffic for the last year or so for this particular site. We haven't spent a ton of time on it in the last month so the lack of fresh content could be a factor. I can't think of any reason we would be getting penalized. Is there even a way to tell if we are penalized?

    | ClaytonKendall
    0
  • soltec


    Hi, When Google is counting internal links on a page and it comes across two links to the same url, do both of the links count towards Excessive Internal Links? The reason I ask is that on our website we allow users to navigate through the website in different ways (either by dropdown menus or side menu or through breadcrumbs); which cause some links to appear multiple times on the same page. Any thoughts? K.

    | soltec
    0
  • Bmeisterali


    Hi, I have been working on an e-commerce site and have been wondering if i should add the meta robot tag with no follows, on pages like delivery , terms, returns and the html sitemap? From what I have read this seems a good idea, but i am a little confused as what to do with the html sitemap. I can understand that having this on the homepage will allow crawlers quick access to the deeper pages within the site. But would it be better to guide them down the natural route of the category navigation instead? Thanks

    | Bmeisterali
    0
  • akhilendra


    Hi all, I am getting 403 error for my site where it is throwing error for the following url http://www.topuniversityforum.in/members/member id/ignore and it is showing 7 similar url for 7 user ids. I want to know how can i resolve it and if it is going to have any negative effect on its ranking.

    | akhilendra
    0
  • prunarevic


    What shood i improve on this website : themovies2012.info ? 🙂

    | prunarevic
    0
  • mozmonkey


    Hi Mozers, I have a question about the duplicate content warnings I am recieving for some of my pages.  I noticed that the below pattern of URLs are being flagged as duplicate content.  I understand that these are seen as two different pages but I would like to know if this has an negative impact on my SEO? Why is this happening? How do I stop it from happening? http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html?sef_rewrite=1 http://www.XXXX.com/product1234.html Thanks in advance!

    | mozmonkey
    0
  • lgrozeva


    We have the following case: Site A with domain authority 65 and 2,750 linking root domains (139K total links) and Site B with domain authority 68 and 1,336 linking root domains (38K total links) There's a suggestion to move Site A as a folder of Site B so it becomes something like this: domainB.com/domainA using 301 redirects for the existing domain A. We'd like to better understand what such move will result in. I imagine at first Site A will drop in rankings, but after that will it be better for it to be under Site B domain? Also, moving all the pages a step behind in the URL path may slightly affect their rankings. What do you think? Would you move Site A or leave it as a separate domain? I understand there can't be an exact estimation what will happen, but I'll appreciate your thoughts.

    | lgrozeva
    0
  • RiceMedia


    A client has a load of duplicate page titles on their site.  However, to cut a long story short, most of these pages are pointless and therefore we don't need ranking for them. As such, I'm not concerned whether any of the pages with duplicate content on them are ranked or not..... unless having duplicate page titles / content on these pages could mean that other pages on the site, like the homepage, don't rank as high because of this. Do I need to worry about duplicate titles on these pages, or can I ignore duplicate content on pages that I don't want to be ranked? Hope that makes sense!

    | RiceMedia
    0
  • MarkBolin


    We  did a website for a local landscape company.they are in the outskirts of a major city of Dayton. Most people search landscape company Dayton area. I'm finding landscape companies coming up with lower moz trust and moz ranking. Some of them had no keywords or page titles. I am signing up on all of the local directories. the site is www.scarffs.com

    | MarkBolin
    0
  • ScratchMM


    Hi, My Client is facing pushback from her company on separating assets into different pages (webinars, press releases, by-lines, etc) vs lumping them all together in one page. We need to define the SEO benefits of doing this in an organized fashion vs one big lump. Can you help? Thanks,

    | ScratchMM
    0
  • mancmusicman


    In the SeoMoz report generated, it recommended removing the meta keywords tag as it was no long relevant? why is google no longer considering this?

    | mancmusicman
    0
  • Dirty


    do you think google counts the H1 of the landing page from an anchor text, for example if the anchor text of my product is .  blue sexy X, do you think its good if the h1 of the landing page says the exact same thing

    | Dirty
    0
  • seoug_2005


    The site http://goo.gl/bQkCF is displaying a strange description for keyword "taxi software" in google.com (second position ). Instead of description, text "logo" is being displayed. I understand that there is no description on the site, but still why this text. I would appreciate if you would let me know if anything is wrong with the site.

    | seoug_2005
    0
  • PlasticandFoamPackaging


    I have a ecommerce site.  I am trying to figure out the best layout for my directories.  Here are my two options. Option 1. - Each directory in root domain. Carrying Cases - plastic.com/carryingcases/
    Case Type -  plastic.com/casetype/
    Specific Product - plastic.com/sproduct Option 2 - Put them in subdirectories Carrying Cases - plastic.com/carryingcases/
    Case Type -  plastic.com/carryingcases/casetype/
    Specific Product - plastic.com/carryingcases/casetype/sproduct I know this is a very basic question but I am looking for the right answer.  I keep getting conflicting answers from different sources.

    | PlasticandFoamPackaging
    0
  • Dirty


    Should they be different

    | Dirty
    0
  • tuckjames


    I have created a Meta Description for a page that is optimized for SERPS. If I also put this exact content on my page for my readers, would this be considered duplicate content? The meta description and content will be listed on the same page with the same URL. Thanks for your help.

    | tuckjames
    0
  • Dirty


    General title tag questions how important is it not to change your title tag, I own a prom dress site and I'm always changing them between prom and homecoming' Is it bad to have title tags that are only different by one word across thousands of pages on your site.  I have thousands of dresses so each title tag only varies by the style # I have always had title tags that are for example black prom dresses, well i recently discovered that just black dresses is googled 10 times the amount so im debating changing them to black dresses so that the word dresses is closer to the front of the title tag, am I over reacting or is that a good idea or would it be bad to put black dresses, black prom dresses, black homecoming dresses I also put the year in almost every title tag 2012, is that bad, I ranked great for 2012 stuff but could it hurt my homepage domain rankings on major broader keywords

    | Dirty
    0
  • adriandg


    I know that it is important to have your primary keyword target as the first word or two words of your title tag.  But what about your meta description tag? does it matter where they keyword is in the description tag?  I see a lot of other sites stuffing their keywords right at the front of the description tag and it looks somewhat unnatural.  What's your take? do you put the primary keyword as the first word or two words of your description tag?

    | adriandg
    0
  • foonista


    If i want to rank highest for one specific keyword (virtualization management, for example) and use that keyword in all the titles on my website, will that negatively affect my search rankings? SEOmoz is telling me that i should use unique titles for my different pages to ensure that they describe each page uniquely and don't compete with each other for keyword relevance.

    | foonista
    0
  • Jock


    Firstly sorry if this has already been answered - I did look I promise.
    Secondly sorry if the answer to this is blatently obvious! In the process of trying to optimise my landing pages, I am using On Page Optimisation reports.  I have several (ok lots) with F grades which is not surprising as the landing page is not the landing page optimised for a certain keyword.  If I change the landing page to the one that I have for a certain keyword then hey presto A or B grade (clever me)! Now here's the thing - presumably the landing page that is listed by default is the one that Google "sees" for a particular keyword.  How do I change this if I can or do I have to be patient or am I just being plain daft?! Many thanks

    | Jock
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, One of my clients has repeat customers. All of his surface level categories are optimized. None of his 2nd or 3rd level categories are optimized at all. Is there any harm in optimizing these 2nd or 3rd level categories. Is there any way it could cause a problem with repeat customers? I didn't think so but I want to make sure. Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0

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