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Hi Gavinn, I personally would try to rank on the home the best / more popular / generic / most searched service on your business, or maybe 2 or 3 of them. And I also would keep those keywords on their respective service page. And the rest of keywords just on their service page. Normally is the strategy that I use. Good luck!

Thank you Gaston and Serge for the comprehensive response!  I really appreciate the help - never encountered code quite like this before so I was a bit out of my element. Have a great day & know that you've helped me very much.

Hi there, I've got a few thoughts to drop about this, but I want to make sure I answer your specific question first, then answer what I think are the lead up or follow up questions that are either on your mind or that you'll land at in the end anyway. There are specific instances where you may favor one URL structure over the other. For example, our landing pages are similar to your current structure, and the rest of the website is more similar to your vendor's proposed structure. Folders are a great way to categorize your content and help both Google and users navigate and understand your content. However, you do not want to lose the hyphens. That can make it difficult for users to read in search when they're deciding on a page to view and it can be difficult for Google to read. Let's say your URL has an acronym in it - maybe you're writing about basketball and NBA is in the URL. So your URL becomes: website.com/sports/hownbaistakingcharge Or website.com/sports/baskteballnbakobe. Are either of those readable? You have two stakeholders, Google and Users and your URL structure should support both. Compare the above to website.com/sports/how-nba-is-taking-charge or /basketball-nba-kobe. That's much better for Google because they can clearly read the different words and make sense of it, and it's much better for Users who are trying to quickly scan the URL on Google. I would push back on the vendor that the hyphenation is necessary. I've listed a few other questions below that I would have for my vendor and team if we were proposing a major restructuring of the site's content. A new URL structure means a few other things will likely change. 1. Have you thought about creating a redirect map for every page that is going to move? 2. How will the new URL structure interact with breadcrumbs on your site? 3. If you move to folders are you going to need to create head pages e.g. website.com/sports/how-nba-is-taking-charge is located under a main "sports" page that maybe doesn't exist yet. You WILL have users that attempt to reach the head page whether it exists or not and they'll be sent to a 404 instead.   4. Will changing your URL structure alter your main and sub navigation elements on the site? (in almost every instance, it should) And then my final question, knowing how much work it is to take a healthy site and improve it by changing the URL structure alone is this: what is the expected value? Why are we doing this? Sometimes there's a legitimate reason and sometimes it's pure vanity. The SEO upside to a major restructuring like this isn't normally enormous, but the effort involved can be titanic. So be sure your expectations are realistic going into it and get the details fleshed out as much as possible ahead of time. Best of luck, let me know if I can answer anymore questions.

Yes including copy would be beneficial. Plus Title and H1 obviously. You could write an additional blog post about it and internally link to it with decent anchor text. A social media drive would also help an infographic to rank. If you can post it in relevant facbook groups and google groups and get it to be shared by interested parties on twitter and facebook (include some good text) then this will also help it to rank.

Hello Alexander! What a cool business you have! And barn doors have definitely become the "in" thing. I'm looking at your website right now. I'm going to recommend that you hire a very good SEO company to do a one-time audit for you, Alexander. If two years of effort have not resulted in you seeing the rankings you believe you deserve and know you need, then you are almost certainly falling behind in your profit goals. While I can't match here in the forum what a real audit could do for you, I want to give you a couple of first impressions in case they are of help. Your products are really beautiful, but I see some things I'm not liking on your website, including: The moving masthead, that when clicked on, makes your branding disappear and shows wood. This is likely slowing down your site speed, and doing anything that makes branding disappear alarms me. Never choose fancy features over usability. Never. The feature that shows numbers loading between page clicks. I'm not sure if the idea there was to make things look fast, but, in fact, it's just drawing my attention to the fact that I'm having to wait for something to load ... even if I don't have to wait long, I feel like I'm waiting. Lack of text on your homepage. It's a common mistake of visually-oriented businesses to think they shouldn't have text on their homepage. I know that minimalism can be appealing, but it's also giving you almost nothing to tell search engines or people, and nothing to optimize. The product descriptions on your website show that you're taking time to be thorough, but I recommend some polishing here. I think it's awesome that the site is selling "German quality", but if the text is in English, the English needs to be error-free to ensure it's meeting Google's quality guidelines. The navigation may not be ideally usable. I don't know how I did it, but I got onto a page somehow that I couldn't get back to the main site from. It was a dead-end. I'm also finding the font color of the horizontal menu a bit hard to read. I didn't notice it at first. So, this is a start. A real audit will look at everything, but at a glance, I'm seeing some areas in which you could improve. Wishing you so much luck with your business. I really like your inventory!

I'm with Ed. this only has an effect on the CTR. When you use a brand or product in which you put those symbols, people usually click more often on these links.

It's deprecated now what should we use now?

Taxonomies: Categories and Tags Implementing categories and tags on your website is an important way to add structure to it. These taxonomies group content on a certain topic. When used properly, Google will understand the structure of your site better. Categories have a hierarchical structure. There can be subcategories within categories. Tags do not have a hierarchical structure. Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index. Duplicate content Duplicate content means that the same content is shown in multiple locations on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you’ll get the content you came for. But it confuses a search engine: it has to pick which one to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice. Above that, when other websites link to your product, chances are some of them link to the first URL, and others link to the second URL. If these duplicates were all linking to the same URL, your chance of ranking in the top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher. The solution for duplicate content is a so-called canonical link. A canonical link tells the search engines: yes, this content is duplicate, and this one is the original content. Structure of your website...why? The importance of site structure for SEO The structure of a website or a blog is of great importance for its chances to rank in search engines. In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this: 1 - A decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your site. The way your website is structured will give Google important clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index the content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. A good structure could, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google. 2 - A decent structure makes sure you do not compete with your own content. On your site, you will probably write multiple pages about similar topics. Let's take an example you have a recipes website and you want to create a structure for your website. So you several recipes on your website and you have several categories such as Italian recipes, French recipes, Mexican recipes and so on. On the other hand, your tags can be used in another approach such as breakfast, dinner, lunch, low cab ect on this way you do not compete with your own content resulting in higher rankings. So how to fix your errors? 1 - Add title, meta-description and canonical tags to your tag pages. if you are using WordPress is pretty easy to do it. You just need to install Yoast SEO plugin and check one by one all your tag pages If the answer were useful do not forget to mark it as a Good Answer CHEERS and Good Luck

I don't think so - you can leave as is. At some time in the future if you start adding a lot of countries it might look more sensible, but I wouldn't do it straight away. Regards Nigel

Hi Chris You do mention Locksmith Services a lot on the homepage and in the title: "Home & Commercial Safes, 24/7 Locksmith Services | Houston Safe & Lock If the intention is to rank for 'Houston Locksmith' then you did a pretty good job on ranking the homepage! If you really want to change this, I suggest you remove reference to the specific service in the title and H1 and around 12 other mentions on the homepage without links and confine them to the in-line page. The other alternative would be to canonicalise the inline page to the homepage which should push that even higher as it is not conflicting with the inline.Sometimes this is a good idea if you have two very similar pages but only want one of them to appear in search results. The inline page being an internal page which visitors can click on when they get to the page. It's a small conundrum but easily fixed. Kind Regards Nigel

I recommend this page where you can find a lot of templates for woocomerce. They are pretty good and have good seo structure and logically are paid: https://themeforest.net/popular_item/by_category?category=wordpress%2Fecommerce%2Fwoocommerce I don't know exactly what you want it for: service, product, online business, offline, etc. If it exceeds exactly the web you want to create, it could be more specific.

Thanks Christy! Glad i'm becoming a useful part of the group.  It's tough questions every day. I love that.

Hi There! Good question. Basically, what you are embarking on here is the optimization of a local business website. The term for this is Local SEO (local search engine optimization). At the outset of your work, there is one very important concept for you to understand about how Google views local businesses like your physical therapy office: Google views local businesses as being relevant to local users. So, if you are physically located in Fort Myers, the bulk of your efforts will go towards ranking in Google's local search engine results (local packs) for users who are either physically located in Fort Myers, or for users who include the term "Fort Myers" in their search phrase. You are highly unlikely to rank in the local results for Cape Coral or any other city, regardless of what keywords you use on your website. Because of Google's historic bias towards physical location, some businesses are frustrated because they cannot rank in the local packs for any city other than their city of location. This is especially so for service area businesses, like plumbers or house painters, who travel from a single city to a variety of other cities to serve customers. But, your business is not a service area business, if your patients all come to your office in Fort Myers for treatment. Typically, your only relationship to Cape Coral or any other nearby city is that some patients may live there and come to you, but this is unlikely to be a good enough reason to mention these additional cities on your website. If you were a house painter, you could authentically create a page on your website about the houses you've painted in Cape Coral, and you could attempt to gain some organic (not local pack) rankings based on the optimization of this type of landing page. But in your case, you likely don't have anything to say about Cape Coral that would make it sensible or authentic to create such a page. Are there any exceptions to this? Can brick-and-mortar businesses ever optimize for cities beyond their city of location and can it do any good? The answer is: sometimes. If it's essential for you to build brand awareness in cities beyond your city of location, you have to determine if you can build a real relationship between your business and these satellite cities. For example, a doctor could mention his hospital privileges in Cities B,C and D. He could host a sports medicine seminar in city B, attend a conference in City C, and volunteer at a yoga weekend in City D. He could then write about his involvement in these communities and promote himself socially. He could also sponsor teams, organizations, and events in neighboring cities and earn links and mentions from these activities. So, yes, there are some cases in which a brick-and-mortar business in City A can build content and awareness around additional cities, but it should never just come down to putting a list of cities in a chunk on his homepage. This isn't good SEO, and is actually frowned on by Google. Summing up: as a local business, you'll be focusing the bulk of your efforts on your city of location in hopes of gaining local rankings for it. If you need to build brand awareness in additional cities, strategies exist where real-world relationships exist, and the goal of this work would be organic, rather than local, rankings. The alternative is to invest in PPC campaigns that target neighboring communities. Hope this helps!

Thanks Donna,  I've already tried switching back to the default theme and no difference. However your link does show that Wordpress itself adds the canonical link to every post and page by default so that'll be where it's coming from, rather than the theme. Thanks.

Hi, This is a common thing that you see on bigger sites, either product names or company names are the same and at scale that creates near duplicate titles or pages. What I would recommend is adding additional data, about either the location, pay, position type (fulltime,parttime,etc) to the title. Martijn.

Hello! Were you able to fix it? To sum up the other answers, this could be a few things: a redirect in your .htaccess file a redirect in a plugin (yoast, or a separate redirects plugin - some plugins even create redirects automatically) or autogenerated by your theme/wordpress I would work in that order looking for it,

While this is a thread from many years ago, I'm wondering if anyone has any relatively new insight about this? A team I'm working with plans on taking article content and breaking them out into PPT presentations/slides which will be embedded on their site. My concern is the lack of optimization this offers regarding SEO. I know there's countless articles on using slideshare for SEO and lead generation, but are there optimization tips if one is embedding the actual PPT into the page?

Yes have both.  You need to have a page for EVERYTHING you do if you are a services business like a plumbers.  I want to see all your employees smiling and looking like they aren't going to rip me off, I want their qualifications and how you are a great plumber and have been in business many years and I'd like to see every type of project that you do or a portfolio so I can see if you're the sort of plumber with one little van who comes and unblocks my drain or whether you can plumb in my £20,000 under-floor heating system. I also need prices for everything and how you charge for things. Not just a 'oh we'll see when we get there' I want itemised and listed prices for jobs and then price tags on your portfolio jobs so I can compare them to mine. I am actually looking for a plumber at the moment and their websites are dreadful.  No qualifications, no experience, no pictures of the team, no idea how big or how long the business has been operating and no trust factors. The social proof (reviews) shouldn't necessarily be confined to one page.  Spread them out throughout your other content. Where you make a claim (we have the cheapest boiler systems) have a review where a customer has said, "and they're great value too" so I trust you're not just making it up. Because people don't trust tradesmen - thee are huge trust issues - because in the past (and still now to an extent) plumbers will try to charge what they think you can afford or add charges on for remeasures and extra things 'we've found  in the system'.  You need to say that you can assess a system and thet sometimes the price will be more if there are unforeseen things.  But come on let's fact it how many unforeseen things can there be.  I give prices for everything and I'm a dentist - the human body is more unpredictable than a heating system.  So you need to bust this myth wide open with open and honest prices.  Don't just say 'we're open and honest' prove it with reviews that say these things about you.  And with prices attached to your jobs that you've done or broad, ballpark prices on your website for the type of work that you do. Team and recruitment pages are also trust factors because they show that you are a growing business.  So have each team member and maybe a review where they've been mentioned by name as being especially friendly or efficient. Then you'll be ahead of 99% of the other plumbers on the planet. Just like i'm ahead of 99% of the other dentists by using the same strategy of openness in a field where people are expecting pain and a big bill at the end of it.  Just like you.

Thanks Kevin, I'll definitely have a look at those guides. Yeah, it's the exact same page - the main gateway to the site. It's just that once we started looking at the SEO side of things we realised that we should have keywords in the URL on that page too, and having had the site crawled I realised the original doesn't have all the meta data the redirect does. For example right now the original has no keywords, where as the redirect does.