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Category: On-Page / Site Optimization

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


  • this week we back to first page with keyword cleaning companies www.starplusservices.com Thanks to all of you for the repplies

    | starplus
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  • Are you looking for the On Page report card? http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

    | WebBizIdeas
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  • To expand on Nakul, and after checking out your site, I'd say your best-case option is to use rel canonical to indicate to Google which your preferred page would be (in your case, I'd say the first page or a view-all page). This will address your duplicate content issues. As for duplicate title, using a canonical will take care of the SEO penalty associate with that. If you just want to see a smaller number in that red box in SEOMoz, just add a variable to the end of the title tag based on the page.

    | MRCSearch
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  • User orientated sitemaps can be useful, but it is dependent on the site.  Certainly I remember coding them (and writing them out manually - the horror!) for a long time before Google et al started reading xml sitemaps. Depending on the site structure they can use useful for SEO too. I would say this is particularly the case where for medium sized sites that do not have the best site architecture. In those cases a sitemap can provide a nice fast route in to deeper content for spiders. Potentially useful.

    | matbennett
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  • If that's the case, the next question is are you after general traffic or country specific traffic? If it's a specific country, get the TLD for that country (i.e. .co.uk). Otherwise I'd consider a more general one (like a .com). The country specific domains help primarily with country recognition and ranking for that country's search (i.e. google.co.uk) Who owns your "blah".tld? Do they have a legitimate purpose for it? Do the makers of the software have an international trademark for their software name? If they're just squatting, you could have the ICANN give you the domain. Takes a bit but could help if you're trying to sell the brand.

    | Highland
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  • Agree with Marek that you can certainly make URLs a lot firendlier for normal human beings. It can also help keep the urls shorter which can help when people are social sharing. One significant advantage of dropping the extension is that it makes it so much easier if you ever want/need to change the platform on which your site runs. Don't make changes to your URL structure on a whim though. You need to take a careful look at both your internal and  inbound links and plan and redirections you need to put into place. Remember that any change can be risky, so understand the risks and effort required before you start!

    | DougRoberts
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  • OK, so, a flat architecture would suggest more links on the homepage, not less. You're trying to reduce the number of clicks from the homepage to each piece of content, not increase it. If there's good quality content on those pages that helps your sales team, leave it up! If it helps the sales team, then removing it will probably cost you sales, right? I'd stay away from nofollowing those links, and I'd stay away from using rel="canonical", since the way you mentioned using it isn't how it should be used. Removing 9 links from the homepage won't do all that much for you IMO. I'm looking at your homepage now. I don't think you need to worry about removing internal links. I would recommend changing the links for "QuickBooks, Peachtree, Simply Accounting, MAS 90, MAS 200, and Line 50." Either remove the links and leave the text, OR a better solution would be to link them to an internal page on the site such as /quickbooks-pos-integration.html, and target those types of keywords. But definitely don't link to quickbooks.com's homepage, they don't need that link juice and it isn't valuable to visitors. Taking a look at the link metrics for your site, you're at homepage PA 53 and DA 43, which isn't far off from the page 1 ranking sites. I think some link building would make you much more competitive for that keyword. You're currently on page 4 when I search for "POS software", and it's an internal page that's ranking, not your homepage. Get more links to your homepage using POS Software as the anchor text, and do it in a non-spammy way. That will help quite a bit I think.

    | KaneJamison
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  • Hello Erik Your page has a page authority score of 25 and a pagerank=4. So as you mentionned, link signals are not so bad. To me you should follow this process: Identify keywords that drive visits to this page (www.revisitors.com/REF/TEST) Build a new page with content related to the old page to make sure that the content of the new page will stay relevant for google and users 301 redirect from the old page to the new one Modify the title

    | FranckNlemba
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  • Very good answers....thank you!  Will be skipping this idea. Appreciate it, Shara

    | Confections
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    | macky7
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  • It is something Google is doing, and I've seen other complaints about it here as well. As far as I know, there's nothing you can do about it.

    | KeriMorgret
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  • There are mixed opinions on using it on every page, but I think it's very useful on the home-page, for exactly the reasons that @donford suggests. It's easy for the home-page to get a bunch of variants indexed, including tracking parameters. Originally, Google said that canonical wasn't proactive, but they've eased up on that. Worst case, they may just ignore it, but the All-In-One SEO approach on a blog isn't a bad bet. It's just so easy for dynamic sites to spin off duplicate URLs that it's better to be proactive. I've never seen a penalty or devaluation due to using canonical when it's not necessary. I think Bing implied that they may ignore it if they see it too often, but I've never even seen a concrete example of that happening. It's so commonplace now that you'd hear about it if sites were being penalized.

    | Dr-Pete
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  • As far as we know, Shane is right - multiple links to any Page B from Page A basically get ignored. Personally, I don't think that the link from the product # is very obvious to users, but it shouldn't harm SEO. The only minor issue is that the second set of anchor text also probably gets ignored. So, Google sees this links as being on the product name (since that comes first). That should be fine, but it's just something to consider.

    | Dr-Pete
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    | APICDA
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  • Assuming your using WordPress, you could have installed a plugin or functions.php hack to add tags to your pages, which would have been much easier to manage and maintain. Assuming the URL and the page template is the same, there is really no difference from a SEO standpoint in a page vs post. They are both in essence a "web page".

    | CaseyKluver
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  • i  was looking for command to be inserted at the end of url, something like this &us= is there any command

    | seoug_2005
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  • Thanks Josh, Great help.  I will definitely check out these resources. Appreciate it!

    | prospects
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  • Hello Brandon, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question! I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum, and will do my best to give you a helpful answer. Yes, using the landing page of each respective location is a smart plan. If there is a main home office, you might send that one to the homepage, but otherwise, I like the practice of using well-optimized city landing pages. A quick heads-up on this. Don't be surprised if the URL Google displays on the various Place Pages looks like it's going to the main domain. They often do this, but if you click the link, it leads to the landing page. And, be sure you are not using any URL that redirects. That's forbidden by the guidelines. I highly recommend that you read this 2010 Eric Enge interview with Carter Maslan, particularly the area in which Carter discusses multi-location businesses: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml A few of Carter's remarks are now somewhat dated, simply due to the passage of time, but this portion of the interview is one I continue to refer to as the best advice regarding multi-location businesses: Eric Enge: Let’s say you have more than one location, 100 for example. In your view, is it helpful to have individual pages on the website for all of the locations? Also, is it helpful to have the Google local business center linked to each of those individual pages rather than having 100 locations that point to a single web address? Carter Maslan: I can tell you what I think the ideal end state is, and there are various levels of getting there. Ultimately, we would like to have the store-specific page known so that people can just click through and see today's specials and any kind of adjustments for that particular day. We would love to have all of that information on a direct click to the most specific page for that location. That’s what we encourage, but there are still a lot of chains and things that just link to their top-level domain. I guess it's a split answer. We want to get to a store specific page, but we are not uniformly there across all of the businesses. Eric Enge: Could that potentially be encouraged by making it a ranking factor, for example? Carter Maslan: Yes. I guess there are two sides to it. If you create a store-specific page that really just has an address, it wouldn't be as helpful as having some genuinely good content on the page that the user would really appreciate having as the first click-through experience. That’s what I think we need to work through. We don't want to arbitrarily tell people that they must create a store-specific page, because we are really just trying to find the most useful page for that business. That’s why I am not so definitive on the store-specific page or not. I really just want what’s best for the retailer, store or businesses, first and foremost giving the user what he would want to see when he clicks on that business. Eric Enge: Say you have a store-specific page that lists specific and individual things about just one store location. Depending on the kind of business that could be an inventory list that shows you've got extra stock? Carter Maslan: There is a chain of stores that carries yoga equipment that my wife really likes. They have special yoga instruction, carry special brands, and host lectures on some special days. There are all kinds of things that the retailer does that relate to that specific store location, and there is also a general corporate catalogue page. So this is not black and white, and even though we want to encourage it, it's not that there is a definitive guidance saying companies need to have that page. Eric Enge: Obviously it’s good if there is a quality page with information unique and specific to each location. Carter Maslan: Yes, that's great. If we know that there’s good information about that page, then that helps on search and the snippets that we can show on the search results, because we know that the page is referencing that place. It does help even if it ends up not being the page that you list as your primary homepage. If there is good content that we know is content about that place, then it helps us do a better job with query results. If a company has a page that's store-specific and talks about its class schedule, and there is one that says its holding Tai Chi class tonight and someone is searching for places to do Tai Chi, then that helps us to score it. If a lot of people have found that page helpful about the Tai Chi class, then when people search for Tai Chi we would know that that location has something to do with Tai Chi. *Bear in mind, Carter was not providing this information as though it were Google's 'official' stance, but I think it's as close to a plan of action as you can get in this specialized type of work of dealing with many locales. Hope this is helpful. Good luck! Miriam

    | MiriamEllis
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  • No problem, all the best Jonathon

    | Vahe.Arabian
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