Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Category: On-Page / Site Optimization

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


  • Hi Ali, Well i think that the answer to this question is really simple... User.. User.. User... Do you think that putting the brand name at the end of each title will add a value? Or will it increase CTR? Does your brand that much well-known and popular that you believe that if you add it to the title your CTR will sky-rocket? If you can answer yes to one of these questions, i think you should do it.. otherwise i am not sure In terms of SEO, you will gain absolutely nothing (well but if it increases your CTR.. you might get more rank boost from google) P.S.: google is running a test to increase the serp area from 500px to 600px.  which roughly translates into 70char increase from 55..

    | Yoav-Blustein
    1

  • Just want to echo Patrick's answer. He's pretty much got the right idea. Most rankings not on page #1 will jump all around. I would only be really concerned if it dropped from page #1, down to page 4-5 etc. Also, I would also agree that you don't need to focus too much on rankings week to week - and in addition - I wouldn't focus on rankings for a single keyword too much. To see if you have some sort of site-wide issue, I would check your Impressions in Google Console Search Analytics. See if your Impressions have dropped in the same timeframe. I would also look to queries where you already rank page #1 - and be sure those are optimized for CTR with titles and descriptions, and then see if you can find out if users are happy with those pages - maybe with goal tracking or some sort of measurement to see if they are converting etc. Then - really focus on "local SEO", here's some resources: https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/ http://www.evolvingseo.com/2016/03/29/005-local-seo-phil-rozek/ (disclaimer: that is my Podcast) https://moz.com/blog/category/local-seo http://blumenthals.com/blog/

    | evolvingSEO
    0

  • Not sure if not yet lunched meaning it is a brand new site and domain or if this is going to be a new edsign/cms etc.. so, If the site never went live you should have no concerns google spider coming to crawl your site. But if it is an updated version of an existing website, its better to create a subdomain. This is the most common practice, you create something like test.domain.com and use robots.txt on this test domain to block all access. it is the safest way that i know good luck

    | Yoav-Blustein
    0

  • Thanks Mike. I do get an occasional 404 on those phone numbers, but not a lot. Was more concerned about having links that were really not links and passing equity to nowhere. Appreciate the response!

    | Lions-Pro
    0

  • I don't see a specific reason why this page should not rank, but I did notice that the sitemap referenced in your robots.txt file goes to a 404 page.  You should also look at crawl efficiency and see if that can be improved.  If you haven't done so already, you can use the "URL Parameters" tool to tell Google not to crawl all of the parameters associated with the filtering. Those URLs are canonicalized to the main category page, so there's no reason Google needs to crawl them. Another issue I notice is that most of the unique content on the page is hidden to the user unless they click "read more." This is not necessarily a problem, but Google probably won't give the hidden content as much weight as the content visible when the page loads.

    | LauraSultan
    0

  • HDPHNS, it's quite possible that Google is doing that on purpose--that they see the product is out of stock so they don't rank it as high. Google wants to provide a good user experience, and it would be frustrating if someone went to Google, did a search, went to your site, and found that the product is out of stock.

    | GlobeRunner
    0

  • Morgan, Thank you for your insight. I've been pulling my hair out with how much traffic has been lost with the 301 redirects. I've come to the conclusion that we have to, in a way, start our SEO efforts over again specifically with the inbound links. Your comments just gave me a positive direction to move towards. Thank you. Conrad

    | Radmandu
    0

  • Hi Richard, Please check this you will get idea about DA dropped @ https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores Thanks

    | Alick300
    0

  • You could always test the link to see if it is really being used from the secondary navigation more so (or at all) than the main navigation link. Create a parameter and track it over a few months in analytics. That way you don't over-optimize in the interim but 3 months from now (or less, or more, really that's up to you) you can definitively say whether it is better to remove it or if leaving it alone was the correct move.

    | MikeRoberts
    0

  • Hello, Alt tags are definitely important for on-page optimizations but they were originally created to literally help Google understand what your image is (since GoogleBot can't actually see the image). If you have 1000s of images across your site that don't have alt tags, I wouldn't be extremely worried. I would recommend taking a look at other areas on your site and seeing if there are improvements to be made that could potentially have a bigger impact on your rankings or user behavior (i.e. h1 tags, internal linking structure, etc.) If everything else on your site looks ideal, then perhaps create a strategy for the top 50 landing pages that have images and add alt tags and measure to see if rankings improve at all. If they do, create a plan to add alt tags to the rest of the images across the site. If not, I would recommend simply adding alt tags to new images on new pages from now on. In other words: don't worry, there are other changes you can probably make that will have a bigger impact. If you have the resources, go back and test out 50 or so pages by adding alt tags. If not, simply start adding alt tags to new images and pages when they are created from now on. Oh and in regards to what your ALT tags should be, they should represent what the image is. For example, if you have an image of a man eating an apple, the alt tag could be "man-eating-apple". Hope that helps!

    | sergeystefoglo
    0

  • Well, you’re definitely going to lose your rankings if URLs are changed. Luckily, there’s such thing as 301 SEO redirects that let Google know your pages are being permanently moved to another addresses. As the result, your SEO rankings won’t be affected, even though URL structures will be altered (in your case by adding /product/ part). If you’re interested in automated migration of your store, I’d recommend you using Cart2Cart. For a moderate additional price, it allows to migrate 301 SEO URLs of categories and products, as well as all your products, customers, orders, review etc automatically, securely and swiftly. Good luck!

    | MagneticOne
    0

  • I think it will be hard to discuss this with a paragraph or two. I would suggest watching Rand's whiteboard Friday video. Even-though he is not specifically talking about "how to target local terms on different pages" he makes very good suggestions on how to "optimize" a page to rank for local-terms, which should be your start point. Definitely Google is smart enough, but if you leave this in Google's hands you will be out ranked by other optimized local results. Best Yossi

    | Yoav-Blustein
    0

  • I just wanted to thank everyone again for their insight as well as send an update on the status of our page. We are now ranking #2 for our target keywords as well as other top10 rankings for similar keywords. Appreciate all your insight and feedback.

    | MobileCause
    0

  • Thank you for the response. I have filled all the forms mentioned here almost a month ago but have not received any response yet. Can you please help me with any other method?

    | varun1800
    0

  • Yes, in your example it WOULD affect the ranking, as the first URL no longer exists. Ideally the 1st URL should 301 redirect to the 2nd URL, the updated one. In most cases, timing is everything--and getting a URL crawled and indexed quickly means a lot when it comes to rankings. Keep in mind, though, that you're getting a good ranking, but you then essentially ignore it and get rid of that ranking when you change URLs.

    | GlobeRunner
    0

  • That's completely possible. I'm not sure about how your company works, but if they're slow to change, it's probably worth arguing that that content should be visible, just in case. If they can change quickly, I'd just let everyone know that you're keeping an eye out for changes in the algorithm, and will let them know when that content needs to be displayed.

    | KristinaKledzik
    0

  • HI Don I like you answer and I was wondering if you could give me some advice also? I am doing the SEO for a Shopify site www.neweyeco.net. They want to be found for prescription sports glasses and other key words related to that such as prescription sport glasses. But the other keywords we want to get a ranking for are keywords related to specific sports under "collections" are  eg cycling glasses, golf glasses, fishing sunglasses etc - not necessarily prescription. And also under features they want to rank for "blue mirror sunglasses, clear glasses, yellow lens sunglasses etc How would you recommend they be set up to avoid cannibalization or over optimization as I have run into issues with the Alexa rank zooming up to 16.8mill from 500K in January!! Any advice would be very welcome. Kind regards Sarah

    | Skemazer
    1