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Category: On-Page Optimization

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

  • activitysuper


    Hi, A lot of talk about EMD's lately not just here but all over SEO and affiliate forums. I've dabbled in emd's but have decided to go against the grain and use a non emd. I think I can optimise hard enough to rank and at the same time build a brand, which is where most emd's fail. But my question is this: If you are targeting lets say the term 'running trainers' and the domain is runyoursocksoff.com would it be more beneficial to rewrite the root domain to this: runyoursocksoff.com/running-trainers/ It does look messy to me and more then likely I would not use this but I have seen it a few times and was wondering if its a work around for non emd's.

    | activitysuper
    0
  • PMC-312087


    Hi there, I have a lot of pages set up on my site but most have no content. If I add the correct meta description tags to those pages, will that help rank for the root domain? I am slowly getting the content added for each page but wanted to see if I could boost rankings in the meantime. http://www.petmedicalcenter.com Example: most of pages under "Services" are blank. Thanks for the help!

    | PMC-312087
    0
  • ieremyhenry


    is it always possible to use the Hreview ? is it always usefull ? is there another review system u can suggest me ? thakns a lot Jérémy

    | ieremyhenry
    0
  • imrubbish


    Hi Guys, I have a network of EMD sites that currently use a homepage and then we have a blog page which has 5-6 posts on. Is this the best way to do it with sites under 10-20 pages? Or should we create say 3-4 new pages/categories and drop the posts relevant to each page/category in there? Thank you Jon

    | imrubbish
    0
  • Essentia


    Hi, we have this products page, for example of a landing page:
    http://www.redwrappings.com.au/australian-made/gift-ideas and then we have the link to page 2,3,4 and so on:
    http://www.redwrappings.com.au/products.php?c=australian-made&p=2
    http://www.redwrappings.com.au/products.php?c=australian-made&p=3 In SEOmoz, they are recognized as duplicate page contents.
    What would be the best way to solve this problem? One easy way i can think of is to nominate the first landing page to be the 'master' page (http://www.redwrappings.com.au/australian-made/gift-ideas), and add canonical meta links on page 2,3 and so on. Any other suggestions? Thanks 🙂

    | Essentia
    0
  • altecdesign


    We are getting ready to launch a site that has great navigation for users, but it is not so great for search engines. As long as we are ethical about it, does anyone see a downside to detecting a bot user agent and displaying different nav to it? I suppose some could consider it cloaking, but I noticed amazon uses this strategy and they don't seem to be getting a big penalty lol. We are not going to do anything shady with it, just offer the bot a different way to access our content. Any thoughts?

    | altecdesign
    0
  • walidalsaqqaf


    Hi Guys, I'm trying to decide whether or not to have a bottom navigation bar. I'm thinking of putting a mini site map at the bottom of each page. This mini site map will change depending on the page the user is on. I'm curious on the SEO value this will bring as I understand that there is very little SEO value from links this far down the page but also it could potentially bring the total number of links on that page to over 100. What do you guys think? To have or not to have a bottom navigation bar and why? Thanks, Walid

    | walidalsaqqaf
    0
  • PEnterprises


    I am currently building the site architecture for a very large ecommerce site. I am wondering how I should build it out if I have products that I want to include in multiple categories within my site. For example: Lets say I sell fitness equipment and I have categories for things such as: Treadmill, Exercise Bike, Stair Stepper, Weight Benches etc. But then I also have specific brand category pages such a: Precor, Life Fitness, Hammer, Body Solid So my question is how do I structure this so I am building this correctly? If I sell a Precor Treadmill I will want to include that product under the "Treadmill" category page as well as under the "Precor Equipment" category page. Can I get some advice for the best way to structure this? It's obviously something I want to avoid at all costs of doing improperly and having to fix later. Thank you Jake

    | PEnterprises
    0
  • ResslerMotors


    I'm the Marketing Director at a car dealership that is trying to break into online shopping.  We have had an internet sales team for about 4 years handling online leads.  These leads were generated by forms present on our website.  However, I'm trying to step up our production of leads online (we are currently at 1-2%). Here's my problem: The current method that car dealership website developers use, at least the 4 I've utilized, makes all the search pages have duplicate content, and many of the product/car pages have duplicate content (Title, etc.).  Is there a way to stop all of these search pages from coming up as duplicate content? My other question is: Our inventory completely refreshes about every two months, what would be the best option for our product web pages? Should I no-index them? 301 redirect to a similar vehicle? Any better options? Thanks

    | ResslerMotors
    0
  • walidalsaqqaf


    I’d love some clarification on what would be the best title tag for a shopping category page. The category page is “prams” , the brand is Baby Huddle and the top keywords in order of importance are pushchairs, strollers and buggies. Here are the options I suggest: Buy Prams | Pushchairs, Strollers, Buggies | Baby Huddle Buy the best prams, pushchairs, strollers and buggies on Baby Huddle Buy prams with free delivery and great prices on Baby Huddle

    | walidalsaqqaf
    0
  • dbuckles


    I have an existing site that is currently utilizing a structure that is like this: http://www.mysite.com/Ohio/City-of-Cleveland-PRODUCT-NAME Should I restructure it like: http://www.mysite.com/Ohio/City-of-Cleveland/Product-Name We are doing very well with very specific searches already but are sometimes coming in 2nd and 3rd place. For example: If I search for CLEVELAND PRODUCT NAME I always come up in the top three and about 60% of the time I am #1. I want to make it better. We have only launched in 4 states but plan on launching an additional 4 states over the next few weeks and I want to make sure we are building things properly. Any feedback would be wonderful. As usual, thanks everyone!! -Alex

    | dbuckles
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  • lzhao


    We want to use an inline linking tool (LinkSmart) to cross link between a few key content types on our online news site. LinkSmart uses a bot to establish the linking. The issue:  There are millions of pages on our site that we don't want LinkSmart to spider and process for cross linking. LinkSmart suggested setting a noindex tag on the pages we don't want them to process, and that we target the rule to their specific user agent. I have concerns.  We don't want to inadvertently block search engine access to those millions of pages.  I've seen googlebot ignore nofollow rules set at the page level.  Does it ever arbitrarily obey rules that it's been directed to ignore? Can you quantify the level of risk in setting user-agent-specific nofollow tags on pages we want search engines to crawl, but that we want LinkSmart to ignore?

    | lzhao
    0
  • Jordanrg


    On my site, www.myagingfolks.com, only a small number of my pages appear to be indexed by google or yahoo.  I have thousands of pages!  Is that due to not having an XML sitemap, keywords, or some other problem?

    | Jordanrg
    0
  • dignan99


    Can someone please clarify whether hiding tags behind the image header is an accepted best practice or is frowned upon by Google? I was doing some competitive analysis and noticed some websites were doing it, but it certainly wasn't egregious.

    | dignan99
    0
  • IoanSaid


    Hello again! The other day I was asking about my blog which is on http://cheshireweddingphotographyblog.co.uk/ Based on the answer, I decided I wanted to move it within my website. So I emailed Photobiz saying I wanted it to become: http://www.celynnenphotography.co.uk/blog They want me to make it: blog.celynnenphotography.co.uk They say the benefits (re: SEO) would be the same but that there would be more downtime if I wanted it done my way. Are they right in saying the benefits would be the same for blog.celynnenphotography.co.uk as it would for http://www.celynnenphotography.co.uk/blog ? Thanks!

    | IoanSaid
    0
  • TrevorJones


    Hi I am looking for an FAQ system that is seo friendly, naturally 😉 , so wondered what other people use or would recommend for a website that's isn't using a cms like wordpress etc. Basically looking to add the question as the title and the answer as the page content to get the pages indexed. Thanks in advance. Trevor

    | TrevorJones
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  • AarcMediaGroup


    We have a site that based on your research tools, holds its own in almost all aspects in regards to # of links, # of different linking domains, quality of links, mozrank, moztrust and all that stuff.  Compared to our top competitors, we do very well based on your tools via our campaign monitor. The issue is we seem to be dropping like crazy every month in our rankings and traffic despite this fact, and we can't get our head around the cause.  I do have a couple of ideas, and I wanted to run them by you guys to get your opinion. Domain:  bonitaj.com My Thoughts On Possible Issues... 1.  Text Content & Panda Update I know one of the big things with the panda update was quality of content.  I know one thing we have for sure is a lack of "text-based" content.  Sure, we have home page, main cats, sub-cats and product pages, but they are mostly just windows into the product pages, and don't have a whole lot of good copy.  THIS IS MOST EVIDENT ON OUR PRODUCT PAGES, where each product page is loaded with content, but only 3-4 very short paragraphs of text.  Do you think this is hurting us?  THE ONLY ISSUE IS THAT our competitors also don't have a whole lot of text-based content on their pages. 2.  Too Many Category Pages & Same Products Featured Somewhat on them I think another problem may be that on each category page, we do have a lot of the same products featured.  I don't think its crazy duplicate content or anything, but I do think that back in the old days we got a little crazy with creating "niched out" category pages that pretty much feature the same products as some of the more important and base category pages.  Do you think this is hurting us? I've pitched a solution to this that involves trying to tone down the amount of sub-cats we feature that were originally geared towards attracting long-tail traffic.  In the end that really isn't working anymore anyway, so maybe we're spreading our site thin by going to deep with some of these niche category pages? 3.  Lack of a sitemap? We used to use an xml sitemap, and really don't anymore.  We have nothing on file with google webmaster tools.  I've recently read in one of your blog posts that a simple thing like adding a good sitemap could help our 600+ page site or so get crawled a bit deeper allowing more pages to rank? IN THE END, MY QUESTION IS SIMPLY, IF THERE IS ONE OR TWO THINGS I CAN DO TO GET OVER THIS HUMP, WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST?

    | AarcMediaGroup
    0
  • inhouseninja


    Hi there, We have a content  database as part of our site and I noticed that the way the database is loaded with new content, it means that the URL’s for these pages are really long, around 100 characters or sometimes more http://www.xxxyy.org/knowledge-base/documents/word1-word2-word3-word4-word5-word6-word7-word8 Is there a suggted maximum character length for a URL?  Kind of like for title tag where I max out at 69… Should I truncate the URL’s or at least reduce the numbers of words in them to something less spammy?  Does that make a difference? Thanks!

    | inhouseninja
    0
  • findachristianjob


    I have a number of SEO focused articles that I would like to post to our site to help with content and rankings.  I am wondering the advantages of posting the content as a page versus a post within Wordpress.  Or even vice versa. 
    Any thoughts on whether I should do as a page or post? Thanks.

    | findachristianjob
    0
  • MarieHaynes


    I was checking out a keyword today and I noticed several listings on Google that had a line underneath that said, "Jump to keyword".  The "keyword" was an href name anchor on the page. Is this new?  Should we be including more anchors on our pages now?  It makes sense as it helps the reader to navigate the page. Here is a photo of an example: 7XwaQ

    | MarieHaynes
    0
  • ydop


    Do ampersands in the title tag hurt your site's ranking?

    | ydop
    1
  • tylerfraser


    Hello, I have a facebook badge in my footer. Is it okay if I make the code call on https. It makes the page secure for IE. I have also have done this for images. These secure urls are also being called on non secure pages. But I don't think that matters does it? Code below. Thanks Tyler

    | tylerfraser
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  • Anest


    On certain sections e.g. Top Level Brand Pages i would like to include history, images of products in use, videos, and possibly even a timeline of the manufacturers history. Being that its a store this would push the products quite a bit lower on the page. Can i still have a great positive effect if its below the product listings?

    | Anest
    0
  • jclubb


    In building my strategy I want to check how well my competitors rank in country specific searches, for example in Canada or the UK vs. the US. Can someone help me by pointing me in the right direction? Thanks

    | jclubb
    0
  • BobGW


    Hi, Matt Cutts says that 301 redirects, including the ones on internal pages, causes the loss of a little bit of link juice. But also, I know that keywords in the URL are very important. On our site, we've got unoptimized URLs (few keywords) in the internal pages. Is it worth doing a 301 redirect in order to optimize the URLs for each main page. 301 redirects are the only way we can do it on our premade cart For example (just an example) say our main (1 of the 4) keywords for the page is "brown shoes". I'm wondering if I should redirect something like shoes.com/shoecolors.html to shoes.com/brown-shoes.html In other words, with the loss of juice would we come out ahead? In what instances would we come out ahead?

    | BobGW
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  • RoyMcClean


    We tend to put a a lot of links in the footers of some of our websites (e.g. www.AlohaWhistler.com). Our CAMPAIGNS report is showing that several pages on such sites have "too many on-page links". We understand the logic that having more than 100 links per page is "too much". Does this also apply to footer links?

    | RoyMcClean
    0
  • EricPacifico


    One of my sites is getting a major refresh on the home page, which is good and bad. The legacy homepage was very long, and had a lot of text (thousands+ of words) in the body, with about 450+ links (internal/external) on the page. A ton of graphics, etc etc. Yuck. The revamped homepage is much improved. Very short, visual, fast, and SEO optimized.  It's more of launching pad into the rest of the site. But, the text in the body is much less, perhaps a 100 words or so. The worry is that with so little text, matching the target kw count will appear as stuffing. The 'solution' was to include a visible text box at the bottom of the page, with about 300 words, basically what would typically appear in an 'about' section of a site. But instead, its located on the bottom of the homepage to beef up the pages content, and to avoid looking too 'stuffed'. Visually, its unattractive IMHO and while the text is good and informative, its under the fold and will likely not change that much going forward. This all seems very 10 years ago to me, but I'd like a second opinion. Is this box of text a good strategy?

    | EricPacifico
    0
  • mastermindtoys


    seomox is telling me that I am getting a page that is not being indexed or crawled and since the crawl status code is 200 and there are no robots the meta-refresh url must be the problem. the meta refresh url is different than the on page report card url as it's the nojavascript url which my developer says should be ok. see his comments below. The is redirecting to http://mastermindtoys.com/store/nojavascript.html only in case if the JavaScript is disabled in the client browser. This is the right way to do it, I don’t understand  why this might be a problem, otherwise MM has to implement Noscript pages that have a real content. I didn’t get what’s wrong about accessibility. The code 200 means it is accessible, and yes there is nothing to access if JavaScript is disabled on browser. I think there are no modern retail sites that would do any sensible business with the scripting disabled in browsers.The H1 is really present 2 times and second occurrence can be removed, though I highly doubt about importance of this change.Regarding duplicates – what URLs are considered duplicates? Can you please send me examples?I am not aware of canonical URL problem for MM site unless we consider old .asp links as duplicate links of the canonical product pages. I would appreciate if SEOMoz gave us an example what they mean.I suspect that the page is not getting indexed as a result of this or I'm just not getting a good score. Which is it?

    | mastermindtoys
    0
  • debeenus


    I am running a dating site, I am trying to focus on 5 keywords on the index page. My Search page is one of the 4 other pages on the site. My question, is it wise to target different keywords on these pages or am I better off focussing on the same 5 keywords as the index page? Thank you,

    | debeenus
    0
  • IoanSaid


    I have a website: http://www.celynnenphotography.co.uk I also have a blog which I put there because I thought the URL would be useful: http://cheshireweddingphotographyblog.co.uk/ Should I: Move my blog within my website's url? (i.e: http://www.celynnenphotography.co.uk/blog ) Make a NEW blog within the website's URL? or leave it as it is? My interest is raising the SEO of my website. Thank you!

    | IoanSaid
    0
  • azguy


    Sorry for all the questions. I have dozens of article pages that are not cached by google. How can I get them cached?

    | azguy
    0
  • mastermindtoys


    I am getting a page nt accessible to search engines error and I believe the reason is that the meta refresh is using a java script reference in the url. meta-refresh: 0;URL=http://mastermindtoys.com/store/nojavascript.html is it possible to tell the robot to use the java script or turn it off or something? or should the meta refresh be changed?

    | mastermindtoys
    0
  • danlae


    Here is the background. My wife has a website selling childrens clothing. All the basics of this webshop is through a  company that have some 300 other sites. 2-4 times a year arond 100 products have to be added to the shop. Pictures are of course highly important. Some pictures are supplied by producer of clothes some we have to take ourself. Pictures supplied by producer is not tagged. When we are adding a product; avail sizes,prices, product description, which folder it is to be shown in etc is added. Pictures are added but there is no functionality for adding alt tag to the pictures. Is there any way i can incorporate the tag into the picture file eg .jpg before its added here or is it impossible is this impossible ? Thanks for all help. Dan

    | danlae
    0
  • azguy


    I am reworking some content that is deep in my site. What is the best way for google to find it? Some of the pages were cached about 3 weeks ago, but I don't want to wait too long to get them to see the new content (and links).

    | azguy
    0
  • BostonWright


    I've read blog posts stating that encoding special characters in title tags is both ok and not ok. Any definitive answer out there? Do the extra characters from adding encoding count towards the total number of characters that Google displays in SERPs? Or do they just count as one character?

    | BostonWright
    0
  • azguy


    My first campaign is nearly complete and I have like 40 - 404's. How can I find where these links are on my site? We recently moved over to WP from html and that's what happened.

    | azguy
    0
  • shrikey


    On seo elite brad callen made the statement that only 2% of a websites ranking is based on on page optimisation now i know this statement might not be right but does off page optimisation matter a great deal more than on page.

    | shrikey
    0
  • emmas


    Hi - I'm working on a site that was set up with 6 bios on one page, with markers jumping to each person's name. I was thinking about separating those into 6 different pages, but not sure if that's the right thing to do. Advice about keeping the bios on one page vs splitting them up? (Am I more likely to rank for those peoples' names if I have a unique page, or is the one page url with each different marker in it, just as good?) Ranking well for those names isn't a huge goal of the site, but it would be nice to make the choice that would help with that rank. Thanks for your input Emma

    | emmas
    0
  • shrikey


    I'm very new and not to sure about seo, but i want to know what on page factors are important and what are not important (example: meta tags and meta descriptions) are they important or not, a small list would be greatly appreciated of both thanks.

    | shrikey
    0
  • Ventura


    I always thought that there was no difference in value between a .com and .net, also that hyphens have the same value as the keyphrase without the hyphen. But I have heard Rand lately saying hyphens are spammy - whats the go? Is CarParts.com better than Car-Parts.com or Car-Parts.net etc?

    | Ventura
    0
  • azguy


    Is it bad to have html pages on a blog? I converted a completely HTML site to wordpress, but havd hundreds of article pages that are still html.

    | azguy
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I recently took over the SEO work for a website that has a limited budget.  I'd like to use the resources to get as much as I can for a few pages on the site (keyword  research, on-page optimization).  Are there pitfalls to not optimizing every page on a site?  If so, what are they?

    | EricVallee34
    0
  • NicB1


    Just curious on how sites do this? If you search for a video (perhaps Green Lantern Trailer), you'll see the YouTube results in Google/Bing listed as YouTube - ‪Green Lantern Trailer but when you go to the page, the actual title tag displayed is ‪Green Lantern Trailer - YouTube I've seen other sites do this too.  I'm just curious what they are doing (I don't see any other title tags in the html)?  I thought your title tag is what is displayed in SERP? Thanks,

    | NicB1
    0
  • semvibe


    I have a question about Keyword Self Cannibalization.  I have a web page which is targeting the main keyword as "sarees". But this same page has internal linking from the keywords Benarasi Silk Sarees, Silk Saree, Traditional Sarees, cotton sarees,etc to their respectve pages. We are optimizing those pages separately for their respective keywords as well. When I run on-page report card for these web page from seomoz tool, I got an error says "Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization". Is this due to the internal linking from these keywords? Can anybody recommend a solution for this problem?

    | semvibe
    1
  • azguy


    Okay, if I write 10 different articles on my site that are related to one of my products. Can I safely have a link in every article to my product?

    | azguy
    0
  • danlae


    Hi I am learning SEO from scratch and am only a couple of weeks in. My wife has just started a website selling children clothes. In the left bar there are links to the different producers. Clicking it takes you to the products from that producer. In the body text om the main page ( epleskrinet.no) the same producers are mentioned. By time i need to opitmize for all of these. Is there any point in making them anchor text - taking them to the same URL as is given in the side bar ? Or will it get discounted ? Dan Laerum

    | danlae
    0
  • DevonIntl


    For one of our sites (fastcubes.com) I noticed our landing pages were ranking and getting a few organic visits. Considering they were made specifically for PPC, I thought maybe we should create landing pages that would not be present in the navigation of the site but for the purpose of optimizing for keyword variations. For example work station cubicles vs office workstation. We have a page optimized for office workstation but having another optimized for work station cubicles is redundant. Would it be a good idea to create this as a page that is not present in the navigation for the sole person of hopefully being ranked and getting traffic for that specific keyword? Thank you in advance for your help!!

    | DevonIntl
    0
  • wedmonds


    Hi People, This may have been covered before (i am sure it had) but I was wondering if people use the same SEO tactics for blogs as they do for other sites. Really wondering if there are any tips for blogs specifically ?  🙂 Thanks all

    | wedmonds
    0
  • mosby


    Do separately bolded words (for example: red and bike) increase the SEO value of a compound bolding in the code like red bike? I’m a rather inexperienced SEO. Thank you in advance for any feedback.

    | mosby
    1
  • Mandy_Cochrane


    Still got my SEO learner plates on, but I'm trying to help a small e-commerce site which makes and sells baby products . They have upwards of 150 independent retailers also selling their products. Mindful of the fact that many of these retailers are copying the same product descriptions to use on their own web sites, I wondered if there was any value in creating separate sets of product descriptions, one for our web site and one for all their trade customers, in order to minimise the amount of duplicated content devaluing our site. In theory Google ought to know that ours is the original source of the content, but some testing has shown customers ranking higher for the same product descriptions. We have a separate area on the site for trade, which contains lots of media information they can use, and we could include a set of product descriptions in this area for trade customers to download, keeping a unique set of product descriptions for ourselves. We won't stop duplicate content entirely, I realise - but do you think it's worth the effort of trying to implement? Our web developer thinks it's a total waste of time and not worth bothering with for the miniscule benefit he thinks we'll gain. Grateful for any pointers.

    | Mandy_Cochrane
    0

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