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All absolutely valid responses - we currently just write copy for our users and optimise HTML for the search engines, seems to be working well thus far Thanks guys!

Target a variation of the keyword by adding on a additional modifier. You should first target this longer tailed keyword before targeting the more competitive one. For example, I created a site targeting "law firm seo"… since this was very competitive, I started targeting "law firm seo services" first and reached #1. And, now the site also ranks #1 for "law firm seo" as a result of the quality content, marketing and social engagement.

I understand your concern. If I had the domain for a similar size town in the USA where I lived I would give it a shot.  In addition to directory pages I would have a lot of local content and it would grow over time.

Hi there, I tried to look into this issue in your campaign and I am not seeing that you have any On-Page reports being run for the same keyword with different capitalization, so I was going to run test reports for the specific example you gave and I also don't see the keyword "air freight" with different capitalization in your keyword list, so I wasn't able to test exactly what you mentioned within the campaign. I did run the test for Air Freight and air freight against the /air-freight/main-carriers page of your site in the stand-alone On-Page tool (http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization) and I am seeing both versions of the keyword receiving A grades with exactly the same metrics counted for both, so they are being treated the same regardless of capitalization. I was able to test within the campaign for the keywords Freight Consultants and freight consultants against the URL /air-freight/air-compliance/air-freight-consultants and those keywords also both return exactly the same reports with an A grade, so we are considering both versions of the keyword. I'm not seeing a bug for capitalization of keywords in our system, so it would be really helpful if you could provide me with screenshot of the pages of where you are seeing this issue so that I can investigate further? Thanks, Chiaryn

Depending on the amount of pages you have on your website depends on the way in which you should look at generating your meta descriptions. If possible and ideally every page should have a completely unique page title and description. Obviously, if your website has thousands of pages and products then you might find that an auto generated title and description is necessary for the "parent" product and then a variation of for the "child" products as you stated above, this should not really be used for a search engine ranking however if they are just product variants you would only SEO the lead or parent product and have the variants removed from the search engine crawls to prevent duplication. This is how all major e-commerce platforms work and why Magento and even the likes of Amazon operate to avoid duplication of data. Basically they create a master / lead / parent product and "no follow" all of the child products. Hope this helps.

'a user may remember a number easier than a url which is descriptive' - true. Tho, if you look at it from a search engine angle, CTR is a crucial factor - and even if the title of a page itself is a good discriminator, many people still do look at URLs. Imagine a page title like 'We give away gold for free' and a URL path saying 'this-is-just-a-scam.html' . While this is an extreme example the analogy should hold up. And while 12345 probably does not mean anything negative to anyone (or only to very, very, very few people) it is not really meaningful. Thus I don't agree with your premise and I'm with Heather when she's saying that your user should be the prime focus and her implication that Google's interest is in the user and will do what it takes to make them happy - and that's not just for commercial reasons. I however completely am with you on your 'this depends on the size and nature of your site' comment! General rule: keyword duplication is BAD: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-is-good would very likely be considered as SPAM short title are preferred (as per early 2012 and I've not heard anything else about that since then) - as Michael said before targeted landing pages are GOOD. I'd say that if you plan to have the category in the URL just for the URL's purpose - leave it be. But if you plan on making e.g. - digital-marketing/index.html a targeted landing page with additional content (i.e. not just a plain listing of the articles) the you can gain real value try to make all pages reachable from the homepage within 4 clicks or less. Category offer you a perfect way to do this - on top of providing good landing pages What I'd do: 1.) Check if you and/or your team has got the time to provide and maintain bespoke content for category pages, e.g. digital-marketing. If not, then I'd tend not to bother with changing the URLs 2.) If you decide you have the time - GO FOR IT. Check how many duplications you'd really have for each of your designated categories. Might be best to manually change the title and/or have a script check your database for such duplications. Cheers, Charly

underoptimizing is the new optimization strategy rather than over optimizing. I agree with Beardo.

thank you, Tom. I appreciate the information you have provided! great references as well.

So, meanwhile I have found out that the Nginx isW3 total  cache but I do not understand what is the problem with it:-( why is it redirecting my website content?

I would go with the latter. Remember that the keyword, meta title, description and h1-tag on the pages should be as distinguishable as possible AND be as descriptive as possible. Also, you should consider if the page for the brown leather bag is more or less equal to the page for a black leather bag. If the only difference is a couple of words I would consider a canonical link for each color to the "main color" page. Duplicate content would make it hard for you to rank. Hope this helps! -Rasmus

I'm sorry, there was a typo in my question.. When I used the term "subdirectory" what I was actually referring to was a product page. So, essentially what you are saying is that for my lowest URL depth where the website homepage is found, the only files there are going to be index?

Yes, you are correct. EGOL and I are "poking fun" at one another.

I thought this was happening to me too when I first signed up.  If you are trying to use the page grader from "within the campaign" it will only update weekly after the initial grade. What you do is click research tools in the very top navigation, then go to the page grader from there.  It should look identical but it lets you run reports against any keywords, not just ones from your campaign...from here your grades will update instantly, and you'll have an option to add it to your weekly on-page reports.  Hope that helps!

Thank you!

Hi Mike, Thanks for the tip. I checked and our .xml sitemap has 55 pages and Google is indexing 53. not sure what the 2 missing pages are or how to find out, but I imagine the difference may have to do with blog archives or something along those lines. At any rate, I'm reassured by this. Thanks again. Gina

Yes, my website  was hit pretty hard (again), and it is pretty weird considering we begun a big cleanup of duplicated contents 5- weeks ago, and we actually expected to have some good results from this last update!

I want the same as everyone else the best position in Google. My campaign is set up as sub-domain. I am trying to get an understanding of what make the improvements to the following. What are the most important metrics and if I can work to improve them what makes those improvements.  Currently I have a good position in Google for my most productive phrase but feel I need to make improvements to ensure I keep that position.  I am adding regular unique content and looking for relavant quality links but it does not seem to be making much difference to the metrics below. | Domain Authority | 16 | | Domain MozRank | 2.83 | | Domain MozTrust | 0.86 | | External Followed Links | 16 | | Total External Links | 55 | | Total Links | 668 | | Followed Linking Root Domains | 8 | | Total Linking Root Domains | 9 | | Linking C-Blocks | 3 | | Subdomain MozRank | 2.95 | | Subdomain MozTrust | 1.73 | | External Followed Links | 15 | | Total External Links | 54 | | Total Links | 667 | | Followed Linking Root Domains | 8 | | Total Linking Root Domains | 9 |

Nice cheers Irving, I can see how LSI could open the doors to other variations showing up in the SE's. Do you think a search engine such as Google makes the connection between terms such as 'PC Screen' and 'PC monitor' and do you think this is a factor in rankings? For example, if a page was targeting the term 'PC Screen' but the page included the word 'Montior' a few times do you think that word would benefit the term 'PC Screen' in relevance/rankings. Thanks for your time, it's something im trying understand more.

Nice come back. Don't really have anything else to say, your argument won me over on the first read. Thanks.

Certainly no issues for Bing, they're actually hitting us more than Google. | 2 | 102718 | 7.22% | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) | | 3 | 75772 | 5.33% | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) |