Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: On-Page Optimization

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


  • Hi, I recently ran a campaign and got 3 4XX (Client Error) My question is how do i find the links that are causing this errors because it seems that are no broken link on the site in question? I have tested all the links on the site Will appreciate your help thanks.

    | esuleman
    0

  • I run a static website with a wordpress blog attached (www.example.com/blog). I'm thinking of allowing guest to post to the blog mainly just to get some fresh content on the blog instead of my own rantings. Is this a good idea from an seo perspective? I do know that I will get mostly people promoting their own sites but if the content is topically relevant and it's of some quality this should be okay, right? Any links in their post would be no follow so I wont loose there. If this is a go, how do I promote it so I get more people to posts? Am I thinking right on this? Good idea?

    | leaseman
    0

  • I know in the past footers have been seen as a bad idea. I need to get up to date. Does having footer links that point to your own site with anchor texts keywords create problems? or is it safe to have? Will it do anything to our google rankings? Is it going to penalize us? As well, how many is acceptable, do I want all 77 links or have 15 with sub-categories?

    | HCGDiet
    0

  • When I add a site name to my title tag with long-tailed primary and secondary keywords the title tag is longer than 70 characters. I need to include all three parts, so what should I do? At 70 characters the site name is usually partially cut off. I do not want to get penalized by Google, but I need to include the site name to have consistency. I am using the format Primary Keyword-Secondary Keyword | Site name

    | lwilkins
    0

  • How useful is it to have links in the bottom navigation bar? I'm considering to putting a mini site map in the bottom navigation bar but was told that these links carry virtually no SEO value and could actually hamper it as it would bring the total number of links on the page over 100.

    | walidalsaqqaf
    0

  • I'd like to know your views on the best approach for title tags for category pages for ecommerce sites. 3 examples A) Category name | Free delivery on $50 purchase | Brand name B) Discover best "category name" on brand name C) Category Name | 1st Keyword, 2nd keyword | Brand name Thanks!

    | walidalsaqqaf
    0

  • So - being photographers, we have our main website, but also, we use a hosted service for all our client galleries (www.zenfolio.com) So, in effect, we have two websites: Our main informational website Our client gallery/proofing website The client gallery has back links to our main website - so, when people are viewing their gallery, they can easily get back to our main site. We also have thrown a few of our preferred keywords in there for SEO purposes. The gallery has thousands of pages which link back to the main site. So.. the client gallery URL can either be: http://ourbusinessname.zenfolio.com OR we can have it so it uses our own domain, such as: http://gallery.ourbusinessname.com The question is, which domain name will benefit the back links more? Our custom subdomain (which links to our main domain) or, using the Zenfolio domain (which is external to our site). Or, is there no real difference either way? Or.. do I make no sense?

    | blitzna10
    0

  • So on the homepage, should all the links like privacy, contact us, etc...be rel="nofollow" ? I want to get a better handle on passing as much link juice on homepage to important internal pages as I can, and want to get it right. Thanks in advance.

    | azguy
    1

  • On my site I have a top nav drop down menu but once visitors go to one particularly large subsection, that menu is repeated on the left for easier viewing. As a result, I shoot over 100 links on page. Can I put nofollow or noindex tags on the left side links and reduce my "official" on-page links count or do I have to actually eliminate some of the links? Thanks, Oak

    | CSA-231671
    0

  • How important on site/page contents are for ecommerce site. Keeping in mind the page layout. Its not that important to have page copy/content at all for ecommerce sites If yes, does position of content is an important factor? if putting page copy/content in upper fold of a page then the most important thing which is product itself will have less exposure if putting near the footer of the page, does that seem like doing just for the sake of SEs and ranking. How important internal linking form that content would be compare to left panel links or links at the header of a website Thanks Rick

    | RickGa
    0

  • Is there a search engine that reads a title tag longer than 70 characters? What is the harm in writing a title tag longer than 70 characters?

    | rarbel
    0

  • I work for a retail company that is highly segmented. We have a lot of categories to cover the types of merchandise we offer on our home page, and way more than the recommended # of links on our homepage because of it. Has anyone ever attempted (successfully or not) to consciously reduce their amount of links (and categories) in order to improve their search engine rankings? If so, can you walk through your process and your advice on whether or not reducing links on a site like mine is a good idea?

    | reallygoodstuff
    0

  • A news website I'm working on has pages for various sectors, much like any major news site  (in this case for example - defence, energy, trade & finance etc.). I've been asked to add content of 150 words or more to each sector, containing keywords we're targeting. I can see the value of this SEO-wise but can't see how we can write anything that adds value for the user. I don't want to add some rubbish for the sake of keywords, I want the information to be useful.The best idea I can come up with is to write an overview of the challenges and topics making the news in each sector, perhaps a bit of historical detail - but I don’t think this will add much value from a user-perspective, and it's not something where there will be the resources available to update often (or to provide some 'best on the web' type info). Any other ideas? Or do you think my idea is a great one? ;-)The pages in question are like the majority of news pages; each item with a synopsis and the usual extra things like a poll and 'most read' box. I've looked at other news sites and can't see one that has any extra content in the way we require.Thanks.

    | Alex-Harford
    0

  • Hi, I would like to save space in my website and do not want my other products to be pushed down below the first fold. In order to do that, I have decided to add content inside inline javascript or using collapsible. For collapsible, I may be using "show/hide" button or "read more" button to show the whole content. So does content in Javascript and collapsible considered hiding from Google? If it is, then I have to think of other options. Thanks.

    | globalsources.com
    0

  • Hi, I'm getting a crawl error and it complains about there being missing meta description... But, the errors are all for non existent index files in directories that only contain pdf files and some thumbs of the front page... Just started trying to learn this stuff...! Cheers Rod

    | DrWho
    0

  • Our ecommerce site is currently set up with an SSL on each page.  My understanding is that these would need to be removed on the pages that I'd like a 301 redirect to be placed on.  As of now, we have 302s due to the SSL. Do I need an SSL on every page or just the checkout pages?  Any real benefit to having the SSL on every page?

    | NiallTom
    0

  • Hi everyone My question is regarding trailing URLs in Wordpress A designer setup a site and made the URL structure something like: www.website.com/description/ but I want to change it to www.website.com/description as this is more SEF A trailing / was added to the permalink structure in Wordpress, if I change this will google see these as new URLs and will all the current URLs become 404? Or should I just leave it? Thanks in advance

    | webseoservices
    0

  • Our marketing team is debating how many times the key phrase on each of our web store's product pages should include the word/phrase we are trying to be competitive with. Can you advise?

    | Glynlyon
    0

  • Ecommerce site. I am optimizing for each producer of products on a separate page. Atm my provider does lack some functions(i cant put in H1 , title and can put text only product pictures) on the product pages - like here http://www.epleskrinet.no/smafolk/M_23 . The are updating within 1-2 months to allow me do this. This has led to actually some of the products themself ranking higher that the producer page. what Ive been doing is to put anchor text and link back to the producer page for all 9 products on this page. Is that a problem or should i just do it like this ? thanks

    | danlae
    0

  • After a page is crawled, how much time does it take to be included in Google's index ? Immediately ? after few days ?

    | seoug_2005
    0

  • I use premise for landing pages. I have some extra domain names that are fantastic in my industry. I'm wondering if I should use those domains for these landing pages? The header, nav, footer, would be the same as my main site,  the body and content would be totally different. will google penalize me if I have the same header and footer on a landing page?

    | homebizsmart
    0

  • Hi All,
    Sorry if this question is too specific but I have exhausted all other options. I am optimising a site (www.sandafayre.com) for the key words 'stamps' and 'stamp auctions'. I get grade A for on-page, and off page shows we have way more links than the 2 sites who are beating us on Google UK. One of the sites who is beating me has the keywords in the URL, but the other site doesn't. Would anyone have any ideas as to what might be going on here? Thanks in advance for your help.
    Nikki

    | SandafayreStamps
    0

  • Hi I didnt quite know what I was doing in start when I started linkbuilding. Links were spread btw epleskrinet.no and www.epleskrinet.no . A couple of the strongest links were to the non www. version. So that one was ranking highest atm. I got it redirected 2 weeks ago. All links that are added know goes to www.version still the non www. is ranking highest. Should i worry about this or will simply the otherone overcome it in time ?

    | danlae
    0

  • To improve SEO on a particular keyword, should you use that same keyword in the title tag of multiple pages within your site?  Will that help or would it actually hurt by causing pages within your site to complete against each other for that keyword?  Does it make a difference if that keyword is truly used on all those different pages?

    | KHCreative
    0

  • We all know that site loading speed is important for google ( and getting more important), and currently we are considering moving to a dedicated server.  But I would like to measure pur current loading times and compare them to our competitors.  I know that webmaster tools shows you your loading times, but its seems a bit random with its results, and I know analytics also now records speed, but the sample sizes seems to be too low. When I googled website load times, I got a load of different free tools but they seem to give conflicting results  e.g one said that our avg kb load time was 0.02sec and our competitor was 0.01, but a different site says our sites loads in 1.7 secs and our competitor loads in 11sec (our home pages have similar total file size for our homepage. ) Also what would be useful would be a way to monitor of website loading speed to see when it slows down, so we can figure out why. Does anyone know of any good reliable  programs or sites that does this?

    | eunaneunan
    0

  • Hi, we have been developing our new site and improving the internal linking for 2 reasons, 1 to improve spidering and 2 to up sell more to customers.  The error reports from SEOMoz are showing our biggest problem is too many internal links from 2000+ pages.  How much of an impact does it have by having say 180 internal links compared to say 99 on a page? Our website has been moving up the SERPs so should i worry about it or should I ignore the warnings and continue with the menu system and internal linking we have in place already? Thanks

    | PottyScotty
    0

  • Some companies have a lot of sites covering various topics, for example, http://ninemsn.com.au/. Each category also have dropdown menus where there are more links, taking their pages to well over 100 links. Should these headers be implemented in javascript? Is there a list of best practices somewhere when dealing with a lot of network sites? I'd prefer to reduce the number of links, but sometimes company policies don't allow this. Any suggestions or tips would be helpful.

    | bigpond
    0

  • We are adding product rapidly to our website but this requires allowing duplicate to exist on our product pages of furniture-online.com.  From an SEO standpoint do we need to make this content unique for each product.  Since we aren't link building to specific product pages and we don't anticipate product pages being found in a search result, are we ok leaving the duplicate content in place and spending our dollars elsewhere?

    | gallreddy
    0

  • I have a furniture´s ecommerce. When searching for "site: movstore.com.br" returned 1080 results, but if I search for "site: movstore.com.br / Product" returned 1020 results. I mean, that 1080 indexed pages, 1020 are products pages and the other 60 pages are irrelevant. Where are the category pages? "site: movstore.com.br / Categories" - 0 results
    "site: movstore.com.br / Departments" - 0 results
    "site: movstore.com.br / Marks" - 0 results What might be happening?

    | maisempresas
    0

  • Hi guys, I'm about to launch a new site for a friend who is an accountant in a specialist field. He's already bought 2 domains: **www.[keyword]-accountants.net  ** **www.[brand]accountants.com ** We have made the decision to use the brand domain to host the site but what can we do with the keyword domain as exact match domains still seem to be ranking well in the serps? e.g. build keyword links to the keyword domain (heavily seo'd content) and build brand links to the brand domain (conversion-optimised content) then after while 301 the keyword domain? Any new suggestions will be gratefully received!

    | Tman3
    0

  • The following example is exactly analogous to our situation (site names slightly altered😞 We own www.business-skills.com. It's our main site. We don't own, and would rather avoid paying for, www.businessskills.com. It's a parked domain and the owners want a very large sum for it. We own www.business-skills.co.uk and point it to our main site. We don't own www.businessskills.co.uk. This is owned by our biggest competitor. We also own www.[ourbrand].com and .co.uk, and point them to the main site. My question is - how much traffic do you think we may be missing due to these nearly-but-not-quite URL matches? Does it matter in terms of lost revenue? What sort of things should I be looking at to get a very rough estimate?

    | JacobFunnell
    0

  • We're working on some changes to our site and want to add a site map file to give some hints to search engines on our member profiles. Our site has millions of member profiles. I want to ensure that Google indexes them. Is there a benefit to submitting millions of profiles across multiple site maps? Is it better to pick a sample of those and submit them? Most member profiles have links to other member profiles. Is there any benefit to taking a single site map of 50k links and then changing it at some frequency so that all of the member profiles are eventually indexed? Thanks.

    | JoeCotellese81
    0

  • Hi is there a tool that will spider my site then find similar text on external sites?

    | adamzski
    0

  • I am creating a blog and want to know if I should noindex archives for categories and tags. I changed the format of my blog to excerpts to prevent duplicate content, but I want to make sure I also need to noindex those pages. Please help!

    | lwilkins
    1

  • SeoMoz is reporting duplicate content, title tags, and other meta information and seems to be showing that my mobile site (located on m.website.com) is a duplicate of website.com I was figuring I could add "Mobile SiteName" to the title to avoid the duplicate title but am a little confused as to how to approach the duplicate content side of it

    | Check_City
    0

  • Hi everyone, I've spent a long time trying to figure this one out, so I'm looking forward to your insights. I've recently started having our videos transcribed and keyworded. The videos are hosted on youtube and already embedded on our website. Each embedded video is accompanied by an existing keyword-rich article that covers pretty much the same content of the video, but in a little more detail. I'm now going back and having these videos transcribed. The reason I started doing this was to essentially lengthen the article and get more keywords on the page. Question A. My concern is that the transcription covers the same content as the article, so doesn't add that much for the reader. That's why when I post the transcription (below the embedded video), I use a little javascript link for people to click if they want to read it. Then it becomes visible. Otherwise it's not visible. Note that I am NOT trying to hide it from google by doing this - and it will still show up for people who don't have javascript on - so I'm not trying to cheat google at all and I think I'm doing it based on how they want it done. You can see an example here: http://www.healthyeatingstartshere.com/nutrition/healthy-diet-plan-mistakes So my first question is: do you think the javascript method is a good way of doing it? Question B. Does anyone have any insight on whether it would be better to put the transcription:
    1. On the same page as the embedded video/article (which I am doing now), or
    2. On a different page, linked to from the above page, or
    3. On various other websites (wordpress, blogspot, web2.0 sites) that link back to the video/article on our site. I know it's usually best practice to put it on the same page as the video, but I'm wondering from an <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> point of view if I'm wasting a 500 word transcription by posting it on the same page as a 500 article that covers the same topic and uses the same keywords, and I wonder if it would be better to use the transcription elsewhere. Do you have any thoughts on which of the above methods would be best? Thanks so much for reading and any advice you may have.

    | philraymond
    0

  • I have a wp site that has a negative rank, how bad is this? and is links the only way to convert this to a positive? If its relevant the site is http://rnblog.co.uk Results following websitegrader tool. Website Grade 70 Moz Rank -1 Indexed Pages 255 Traffic Rank 10,932,429 Blog Grade Not Graded Linking Domains 2

    | robanewman
    0

  • Hi, I'm noticing two strange things in search results recently. Often I find that if I search for a client's company name, I see just the company name in SERPs where the title tag would normally be displayed. Examples: 'aci northwest' 'lanz heating' As strange as that is, I'm tempted to assume this is just Google's way of "getting smarter" and showing more relevant results (though I'm not sure exactly where it's pulling from). But it gets stranger. For the first example, 'aci northwest', when search that key phrase on Bing/Yahoo!, etc. I'm not only not seeing the title tag where it would normally be, but I'm seeing the H1 in it's place: "When your projects demand more, demand ACI." Any idea what's happening here? Thanks in advance!

    | VTDesignWorks
    0

  • Hi, I'm just going through my latest crawl since my new site launch and havce noticed almost all of my websites pages are listed under the notices rel canonical section, Why is this? All pages have the unique pages titles followed by the site name in the title, for example: Product | Site name All pages have unique meta descriptions and content (although we only offer lots of differt varients of the same product). Is this something I should be worried about?

    | EclipseLegal
    0

  • I am optimizing my webpages according to suggestions from the On Page Report Card. Should I have more than one keyword for a page or should I make separate pages for each keyword even when they are similar? Will Google penalize me for making similar pages? Imagine selling, bargain milk chocolate peanut clusters. Keywords examples could be: Bargain chocolate Bargain milk chocolate Bargain milk chocolate peanut clusters Bargain chocolate peanut clusters Chocolate peanut cluster bargains Milk chocolate peanut cluster bargains Etc. Will one page called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolatepeanutclusters.com be OK or should I have one called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolate.com and one called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolatepeanutclusters.com and one called http://mycompany/chocolatepeanutclusterbargains.com , etc.? Thanks for your advice.

    | KSHAYY
    0

  • I am designing the structure of a large travel webiste and have the following problem. The obvious structure from a users perspective would be to structure locations as follows: Home/Hotels/Country/County/City i.e. Home/Hotels/UK/Lancashire/Preston The problem is, it is the cities that I need closer to the root directory, instead of countries and counties. If I did Home/Hotels/City or even Home/Hotels/Country/City There may be too many links on one page and google may think they're spammy. How can I get the cities closer to the root directory as they are the most important pages on the site. Even if I did a text based sitemap I would encounter the same problem. *scratches head! Thanks in Advance, Nick UPDATE_________________________________________________________ Sorry I may have phrased the question wrongly. I should have said that I need the city pages to be less clicks from the root directory, as opposed to their actual URL structure. Ideally, I want to be able to access the city pages before the county and country pages on the site, as they are more important. Thanks A Bunch

    | Townpages
    0

  • I have seen a few different types of landing pages. I am trying to figure out which style works best from a SEO perspective. 1. The cram everything possible onto the page approach ala nyt.com? 2. The fill your home page with a ton of links approach like cnn.com? 3. The put just a small sample of your content approach like seomoz? I see 4 blog snippets, a "Go To My Campaign" call to action and that's it. 4. Pages like Groupon.com which have 100% focus on a call to action. I also notice many focused pages like Groupon remove the header and footer on their landing page. Does that help the page retain it's PR better?

    | KevinPatrick
    0

  • Hi guys, I have a new website in the recycling bins sector called recyclingbins (dot) co (dot) uk. We are building it as we speak and just wondered if the below would be a good choice for our category pages? office recycling bins kitchen recycling bins outdoor recycling bins school recycling bins home recycling bins What i am particularly interested in is whether having the keyword recycling bins at the end of every category is too much? Thank you Jon

    | imrubbish
    0

  • Previously the company had created some .HTML content pages around top shoe styles and top manufactures. One or two of these pages used to rank but have been neglected over the page 18 months. I want to build out new content round our top styles / top manufactures and I am wondering if I should use the existing HTML pages or create new pages that use our content management system. The .HTML pages can contain keywords in the URL, using our content management system, all URL’s are www.site.com/content/home/contentid=1234abcd. If we use the .HTML pages all content is managed manually. If we build out 6 to 10 pages, this can become a resource issue and may result in a bad experience for the website visitor. From an SEO perspective, does the benefit of having the keywords in the URL outweigh the manual management hassles? And if not, should we 301 all the HTML pages to the new content pages? And from a linking standpoint, I want these content pages to point to the new version of the top style. From a navigation standpoint, we also want to provide access to all styles from the manufacture. Should we nofollow the links to all styles?

    | seorunner
    0

  • Although meta description tags have no impact on rankings - can there be a negative effect from having many duplicate meta title + description tags with just 1-2 words switched out?

    | qlkasdjfw
    0

  • I've seen it a few times where you should have less then 100 links per page to help crawling unless your a massively authoritative website. But what happens when your a large ecommerce website with categories and sub categories, you could have a category called 'computers' with a drop down list containing lots of sub cat links. Whats the solution to this? Cheers

    | activitysuper
    1

  • Background; selling childrens clothing (for norwegian market). main page is being optimized barneklær (children clothing) which is most used term. We ve been online for around 3 months and have gone from unranked to 25th spot on google for this term. We are selling clothes from 8 different producers which all have their own 'page' - were all their products are listed. e.g http://www.epleskrinet.no/dundelina/M_13 . This page i am optimizing for the producer which is dundelina. For this term i show up in spot 24, 25 and 44. My problem is that its not the producer page that show up but the 3 most popular products. The producer page isnt ranked at all. What ive done so far is to have to producer link to my page from their site and blog (a week ago) - they were linking to my home page earlier. Ive put anchor text dundelina --> takes me to producer page on 4 out of 7 products. This was also done about  a week ago. I am planning a blog about dundelina pointing to the right URL. From our blog I am using. Ive posted a couple of pictures on facebook pointing to right URL. Do i just need to be patient for this to be picked up or is there anything else i should do ? Thanks ... Dan Lærum

    | danlae
    0

  • we have www.mysite.net, www.mysite.se, www.mysite.fi and so on. all of these domains point to the same physical location on our webserver, and we replace texts given back to client depending on which domain he/she requested. My problem is this: How do i configure sitemaps in robots.txt when robots.txt is used by multiple domains? If I for instance put the rows Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapNet.xml
    Sitemap: http://www.mysite.net/sitemapSe.xml in robots.txt, would that result in some cross submission error?

    | nordicnetproducts
    0

  • Does the anchor text "more information" hold any additional weight than any other anchor text? My suspicion is no, but just wanted to confirm.

    | nicole.healthline
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.