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I am using Wordpress and Genesis and I cannot figure out how to give my header image a keyword. I can't do an H1 on my homepage because it would look terrible. I was thinking about putting it in my sidebar but would that cause problems with my category pages that target other keywords? I have gotten some errors for self-cannibalizing. Thanks for your help!

Yeah, I noticed the graph was cut pretty short after they gained traffic back. They must have forgotten to knock on wood before they posted about their recovery.

Hi Ritchie, Thanks for reaching out to us! I apologize for some confusion with how we handle redirects from http to https for the same subdomain. Technically we are seeing two versions of the same site which is why the on-page analysis will show keywords twice. Your secure site is already ranking higher in SERPs for your keywords thanks to the redirect you have in place. It will take time for the reports from the http to drop over leaving just the https keywords. You could try a root domain campaign as a workaround for just backup-technology.com (without the www) which might remove the duplicates. I would definitely like to follow up with you and see how this works out. I hope that makes sense.

Excellent that you're using WordPress. That's a good start You can get rid of the categories section by using This fantastic plug-in then clicking the do not show categories http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ Another tool that his help me a lot to get other pages to write very well is Scribe content by copy blogger here's some info http://www.copyblogger.com/scribe-4/ http://scribecontent.com/ If you're able to use HTML5 please do it. The schema will improve your rankings dramatically and the size of your page will shrink dramatically. I would also highly recommend using manage WordPress hosting WP engine, ZippyKid, web synthesis and Pagely. a managed word press host is all going to help you immensely with word press problems that most hosts will simply tell you I'm sorry your servers up these guys will actually solve the problem for you it is well worth the small extra fee. The backups, security and site speed would be almost impossible to replicate on other systems for the small price that you pay with these systems. Here's an honest review from a friend of mine who is using a VPS and had a very fast server in place however now uses manage WordPress hosting http://www.gregreindel.com/wordpress-hosting-zippykid-giving-it-a-try/ Advanced WordPress SEO and duplicate content Once you’ve done all the basic stuff, you’ll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy: date based category based tag based Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author/<author-name>/</author-name>, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs. In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages _outside_of the single page where it should be available. We’re going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things. 3.1Noindex, follow archive pages and disable some archives Using the WordPress SEO plugin, make sure to prevent indexing (or even existence) of archive pages that do not apply for your site. You do this under SEO → Titles & Metas, where you’ll find the following options on the “Other” tab: [image: Titles-Metas.png] The settings above are the settings for my site. As you can see, I’ve completely disabled the date based archives, as I don’t use those. Any date based link will redirect to my homepage because of this setting. I’ve left the author archives untouched, but I have checked a checkbox on the General tab, which makes the subpages of those archives be noindex, follow by default. So you’ll never land on page 2 of an archive on my site from the search engines: [image: noindex-subpages.png] On smaller sites it might make sense to noindex either the category or the tag structure, but in my experience noindexing those on yoast.com does little to no change at all. There is one type of archive that is noindex,follow by default as well in the WordPress SEO plugin: the search result pages. This is a best practice from Google for which a setting is left out as you should just have that anyway. A lot has changed in how Google handles paginated archives recently when they introduced their support for rel="next" and rel="prev" links. I’ve written an article about that: rel="next" and rel="prev" for paginated archives, which is a bit too technical to fully list here, but suffice to say my WordPress SEO plugin takes care of _all_the needed changes automatically. 3.2Disable unnecessary archives If your blog is a one author blog, or you don’t think you need author archives, use WordPress SEO to disable the author archives. Also, if you don’t think you need a date based archive: disable it as I have. Even if you’re not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO… 3.3Pagination Thirdly, you’ll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts… There’s an easy fix, in fact, there are several plugins that deal with this. My favorite one by far is WP-PageNavi, maintained by Scribu, one of the best WordPress developer around. If you have the Genesis Theme like we do here on Yoast.com, you can just enable numeric navigation under Theme Settings → Content Archives. 3.4Nofollowing unnecessary links Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. WordPress SEO automatically nofollows all your login and registration links, but you really shouldn’t have a login link in your template in most cases. 3.5Canonical In february 2009, the major search engines introduced the rel="canonical" element. This is another utility to help fight duplicate content. WordPress has built-in support for canonical link elements on single posts and pages, but it has some slight bugs in that. It doesn’t output canonical links on any other page. With my WordPress SEO plugin activated, you automatically get canonical link elements for every page type in WordPress. 4A site structure for high rankings Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They’re diluted by one simple thing: comments. 4.1Pages instead of posts You’ve probably noticed by now, or you’re seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually… not a post. It’s a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a “daughter”-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that’s where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density. That’s why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you’ve changed. 4.2New wine in an old bottle If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following: create a new page with updated and improved content change the slug of the old post to post-name-original publish the new page under the old post’s URL, or redirect the old post’s URL to the new URL send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you’ve updated and improved on your old post wait for the links to come in, again; rank even higher for your desired term as you’ve now got: more control over the keyword density even more links pointing at the article the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it’s content and ranking Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you’d lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone’s benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that’s exactly what you got! 4.3Linking to related posts One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts. There are quite a few related posts plugins but I tend to stick with the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin or custom code in my own theme. A very good alternative isMicrokid’s related post plugin, which lets you manually pick related posts. This might cost a bit more time before you hit publish but might very well be worth your while. There are also a lot of plugins that will automatically link certain keywords to certain posts. I do not like this at all as I find it to look very spammy. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf I hope this is all talk to you sincerely, Thomas

There is a way to check. http://www.w3.org/WAI/RC/tools/complete http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/intelligent-site-structure-for-better-se/ http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#permalink-structure http://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-theme/ http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ http://moz.com/learn/seo/url However like the others I agree completely. If it is pointing at the same URL you should not have to change anything is simply navigation. I hope this is going to help, Thomas

OK I see. Well I am using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast and he says the plugin takes care of this problem so I don't know why this is happening. I am using the Genesis Theme.

In my opinion what you should really consider is that what page (either home or internal page is working well for you in terms of conversions... If home page is offering you more conversions then probably you should go for it! And direct your SEO strategy to get results from home page but if the inner page is offering your better conversions then you should prefer redirecting the angle of your SEO strategy towards inner pages... I think there is no need to delete any internal page for this! But all you need to do is to build some great links so that your rankings can get stable positions against your key phrases.

I agree Ben there is an art to creating catchy blog titles. Its extremely important to craft a unique, attention-grabbing title to get readers to click- through to the blog posting. A good title is the key to enticing more readers! Viewers don’t have time to read every blog post if they’re looking for content on something specific. They will want to know exactly what the content will tell them from the title. If the title doesn't have a promising deliverable, viewers will move onto a blog that does promise exactly what to expect in the content. Viewers aren't going to click on the posting unless they have already been hinted at how reading it will benefit them. I would suggest search for some useful tips to how to make the most of a blog title, try http://www.eyeflow.com/8-blog-titles-that-encourage-a-click-through/ and let me know if you are seeing any increases in traffic!

it works for TLDs and different country tlds so in you company.com your header will be : and you can self reference

Hi Rachel, Thank you for clarifying that for me. If you are creating multiple categories and they only have one keyword to separate them would be considered duplicate content by Google my answer would yes it would. That's why you have to make your descriptions much different than the existing descriptions for any other categories. I know it is hard using a different description when one might be the perfect fit. However Google does care about this thing and it would lead to duplicate content issues. I hope this has been of help sincerely, Thomas

Great, many thanks

Thank you again Alan. Typo fixed.

You would know you are flagged. When Google would send you actually a message to whatever account is linked to Google + account. They would also take down Google plus account. So you would be able to find out if there was anything wrong with it right away. The key to this is making the change to your real photograph that you have in this right away. I hope this is that of help to you, Thomas

Wow - thanks! I found a plugin for now but I will definitely save this info. I appreciate your help!

This should work: Disallow: /product/search* Test it out in GWT just to be sure.

Adrian, You are on the right track and are trying your best to advise this client with SEO best practices. Pat yourself on the back for that one. I've had this similar situation a few times and instead of using an image I used either an iFrame or a script. An image might work as well. This is not spammy or blackhat or anything like that. It is quite common for site-wide text like terms of service, privacy policy, FAQ, shipping policy, etc... to be shown on every page of a site in this manner. It is especially common on eCommerce sites with regard to shipping, return policy... No matter what just make sure it is all viewable from the major mobile devices. An easy way to test things out is to just choose a few location pages, remove the boilerplate copy (replace it using the method of your choice), write your unique content and give it a few weeks/months to see how it competes in the SERPs. For better or worse this should give you the answer. In the long-run, however, these doorway pages you described are obviously a bad idea so they should have a plan in place on what to do if when those pages fall from the rankings.

I haven't used a specific WP plugin which I could recommend, but I did a quick search and found the following which may work for you: http://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-301-redirects/ As for whether it's alright to link some to your homepage, certainly.  My recommendation would be to redirect to the page that is closest in topic to what your old page was about.  If that's your homepage, that's fine.  If you have category page that is related, that's better.  If you have a page that is covering the exact same topic, that's best.  Just choose the best option available. The other consideration is time.  If we're talking about thousands and thousands of redirects, then you may just be best off redirecting to your homepage and saving hours and hours of work.  Either that or outsourcing the work. Good luck.  If you find a good plugin that does what you need, let us know what plugin you used.

Thanks! I'll explore html some more.

Hey Google will rewrite page titles when they believe the rewritten title provides a better or more accurate description of your site. This may be due to what they see as poor page titles or that the revision makes the title closer to users search query so they would be more likely to click through. Some stated reasons for doing this are: Titles are particularly short Titles are shared across large parts of your site Titles appear to be mostly a collection of keywords Here is a quote from Google on why they do this: "If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through." In your case they are showing the whole page title but adding the brand onto the end as they are not seeing the "colourpages.com" bit as being the brand. Now, there is no way to directly control this but I can think of a few things to look at straight away. 1. Google use lots of brand signals and ideally all listings of your business should be consistent but, they are not. In fact, there are lots of mentions of your old brand. So, if we search for the old brand, your postcode and remove listings from our own site we find lots and lots of listings: "hull colour pages"  -www.colourpages.com "HU1 3RE" "hull colour pages"  -www.colourpages.com I would claim and tidy these for starters. 2. I would make a small change to your page title as well and change the brand to "Colour Pages" and use a different seperator to show this is not just a "collection of keywords". Something like: Plumbers in Hull - Reviews | Colour Pages Here we have a clearly branded page title that is easier to understand and it includes part of the "Hull Colour Pages" so they may be happier with it. We also clearly differentiate between the keywords and branding with a different separator. 3. External Links Other folks have mentioned external links so certainly run your backlink profile through OSE and see if you can locate sites linking back and get that updated. To sum up here Google is not seeing your "colourpages.com" as being the brand so first up make the change to the URL to use "Colour Pages" and separate this from the main part of the page title with the horizontal separator and then do an audit of all old brand mentions and get them claimed and updated so all brand signals are consistent. To put this into perspective, even your Facebook page uses the old brand so you just need to identify all of these old references and start cleaning them up: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hull-Colour-Pages/104140679621054 No promises here as Google is a fickle mistress at best but these tips would certainly be where I would start with the title changes done first as that is a quick tweak and then work on the brand mentions and get them all updated so you are consistent on and off site. Hope that helps! Marcus References: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624 http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023139.html

Thank you, gentlemen, for your responses.