Category: On-Page / Site Optimization
Explore on-page optimization and its role in a larger SEO strategy.
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Aggregator/comparitor site outranking us
Hi Lida, This is a great question and surprisingly not one that I've seen before too much. I've been on both sides of this question before. Once as a small business in the hospitality industry trying to outrank Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) on non-brand keywords, and also once where I was running my own startup which was an aggregator/marketplace. Having given a little bit of experience here, I can tell you that aggregators tend to focus in on fat keywords, which creates tons of opportunity for an individual business to focus on long tail keywords. As a smaller business, I had literally no chance to outrank an OTA on generic keywords. Heck, even trying to outrank them on my own brand-reviews keywords was a challenge. Instead of competing with the OTAs head-on in the fat keywords, I spent quite a bit of time to put together a list of long tail keywords that were ultra relevant to my business. Once I had that, I began optimizing and creating content targeted at these long tail keywords and I saw results almost instantly. The big benefit of targeting long tail keywords ignored by the aggregators is that there is little competition on these keywords, hence you're able to hit them fast, rank and move on to the next keyword to focus on. That was my strategy as a small business. During my time in my startup, where I was the aggregator, it finally made sense to me exactly why the OTAs focused in on the fat keywords. As a small business, I had maybe 100 or 200 pages indexed. As an aggreagator, I had over 2000 pages indexed in the first month. I had almost no way of optimizing that huge amount of pages for the most relevant keywords for each of them. I chose to focus in on the more powerful 'category' pages which targeted the fatter keywords. I can say though, if I had the time and the resources, I would have done a much more thorough job and eventually gone through that entire index and done the keyword research properly before optimizing each and every page. If that had happened, there was no way I was going to be out-ranked by one of the smaller sites I was aggregating.
| NgEF2 -
Changing posts that target same keyword to target SIMILAR keywords
Glinski, You should not be insecure about changes to your content. Remember content is designed for the target audience and if one page is geared towards muscle size and the next is muscle gain then the content of those pages should be written to reflect those ideas. This does not mean you need to be exact with the keywords. The meaning of the content needs to reflect what you want to rank for. So if both pages have similar content google will show the best content that is related to the users search intent. So you have an opportunity to rank for two separate keywords by changing the content on one page to more closely match the users intent "Muscle Size" or Muscle Gain" These are 2 very different ideas and can be easily differentiated with good content.
| donsilvernail1 -
Are Meta Keywords Still A Thing?
This is not important, you can read this: http://www.wordstream.com/meta-keyword The domain age is one of the best factors
| SergioB17170 -
What Are other people using in replacement for sliders?
Hey, George! Thanks for the response, I am just at the point of wanting them gone, the crusade has begun! Thank you for the full-width idea. I am still a BIG Noobie to all of this, so any help is appreciated. Thank you!!
| Striventa0 -
Duplicate Content
Hey there, absolutely, let's have less than 10% duplicated. If the products are similar (just different color, size...), use the canonical tag. If the products are different, there shouldn't be a problem to write original content for each of them. Hope it helps. Cheers, Martin
| benesmartin0 -
How specific do I have to be when adding keyword to the meta title which I am trying to rank for?
Thanks Hanna, just ensure it's Women's and not Women as it Dan's reply and remember the use of Ladies' as well, Kind Regards Nigel
| Nigel_Carr0 -
Keyword Stuffing and Product Reviews
Thanks so much for your insight, I used the MOZ on page grader and it flagged for Keyword Stuffing for that reason, that's what got me worried. Knowing that Google can tell that reviews are natural consumer generated content puts my concerns at ease. It must just be a natural ranking shift. Hopefully we'll shift back up to the top 3 soon!
| LaceyVapeWild0 -
Is it important to have a csv with high listing keywords?
Hmmm - are you referring to a list of keywords that are relevant to each of their clients? EG if they're working with a pet food company, they're tracking "Dog food", "cat food", etc.? Or are you referring to agencies that track an index of general competitive keywords to see how SERPs are changing over time? EG "credit card consolidation", "payday loans", "Women's heels", etc.?
| KaneJamison0 -
Is my domain holding me back in the SERPS?
Thanks guys. Yes open site explorer does not register any backlinks. According to google webmasters tools we have 49 links in from 7 domains. I'll work through the points you raised. I'm disappointed about the backlinks as we have, in the past, paid for blogger outreach with programmes like fatjoe and the hoth. I take it, you would not recommend these?
| Buffalo-Mobile1 -
HTTPS and HTTP both exist! How to handle?
Hey there, the sooner you'll redirect HTTP to HTTPS the better. You are going to have more backlinks and rankings in time so it would be definitely harder in the future. Also, try to convince the 6 websites which already point to HTTP to change their links to HTTPS. And then, of course, redirect each page individually, as you said. Hope it helps, Martin
| benesmartin0 -
Rich Snippets in wordpress websites
Hi, Here is 6 best rich snippets plugin for Wordpress @ http://www.wpsuperstars.net/rich-snippets-schema-plugins-for-wordpress/ Hope this helps! Thanks
| Alick3000 -
Does redoing a homepage impact search rankings?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Logan! Appreciate the perspective!
| lightsfilmschool0 -
Domain athority for a redirectiones domain
Thanks for your answers... I´ll be more patience and y hope the site metrics start to grow up coming soon. Thanks again!!
| diegodiaz850 -
What is the best way to rank for variations of your business name?
Hi Mandi, I have another suggestion but it won't come free of cost but there are 99.99% chances that your conversion will go up. Run an adwords search campaign for only branded terms and it won't cost you much but your bran visibility will increase and you will always come on top and last but not least you can show any offer/coupons at the top of search results. If you need any help please let us know we will guide you. Hope this helps. Thanks
| Alick3002 -
Wordpress Tags and Catagories
Hi Eric, Without having too much info to work from, it does sound like you're on the right track here. If the tags aren't really serving a purpose there's no reason to have them junking up your site with duplicates. If those tags are removed correctly they won't generate 404s because nothing should be linking to them. The only way you might end up with an internal 404 through removing them is if you've linked directly to them in your content. It's always a good idea to crawl your site with something like Screaming Frog's SEO Spider after the removal to make sure. The other thing to double-check is your referral traffic in Google Analytics and your backlink profile. Between these two you can confirm that you don't have any links pointing to a tag page that's actually sending real traffic. It's unlikely but still worth checking!
| ChrisAshton1 -
Alot of 302 Redirects, what to do?
Hey guys thanks for the reply back to go more in-depth about my problem. We have a lot of 302 redirects on pages from discontinued products. We're getting ding by Google because of duplicate content or broken pages. My theory is applying a no index on our robot.txt files to stop Google crawls to go on those pages. Would Google still crawl on the links embedded on that no index section? Or would Google's crawls completely ignore that part and don't follow any links?
| petmkt0 -
Word Count - Content site vs ecommerce site
Writing very generous product descriptions can answer questions for the buyer. They can facilitate the buying decision or prevent purchase of items that are poor fits for the shopper - and thereby reduce returns.
| EGOL0