New to MOZ and so far love tools but need some quick tips on title, keywords and descriptions

[nickcargill]

First of all:
I am excited about using all the MOZ tools!   I just got back my webcrawl and have found
a lot of issues that I am working on.

I am a Vacation Rental Property Manager with 150 properties, all different.

1. 90% of my pages have the same keywords and descriptions and a lot of same page titles
   too.  I can change all of these by adding a few fields in my database and then
   populating the meta information dynamically.

For Example:

<title>Big Bear Cabins | Big Bear Cabin Rentals - Chateau Alta Vista Cabin</title>
Chateau Alta Vista, Big Bear Cabins, Big Bear Cabin Rentals
Chateau ALta vista is a Big Bear Cabin with four bedrooms, three
bathrooms, it is Big Bear Luxury Property.

If you notice the Title, keyword are dynamically populated from the database using the
property name of Chateau Alta Vista.  The description is an extra field in the database that I just implemented that I can customize per property.

I have a few questions, but here is more information:  I also have 5 or 6 related pages
to each property.   Pages Like general information, photos, calendars, book
Question 1):  Is the best way of doing my titles, keywords and descriptions.  Any concerns or recommendations.  I have read, do not even use keywords anymore.

Question 2) I have other pages that show maybe 8 or 10 photos.  So is it ok to do the following;

Title <photos of="" big="" bear="" cabin="" chateu="" alta="" vista<="" title="">Meta Keywords <photos of="" big="" bear="" cabins="" chateu="" alta="" vista="">Meta Description <check out="" photos="" of="" big="" bear="" cabin="" rentals,="" chateua="" <br="">Alta Vista, etc

3. Currently, I have some archaic page naming with database driven url parameters such as</check></photos></photos>

http://destinationbigbear.com/property_Detail_v.aspx?propid=669

and at worse

http://destinationbigbear.com/Property_detail_v.aspx?propid=669&rate=

$1,127.10&checkoutdate=07/13/2014&beds=4&firstnight=07/11/2014&nights=2

I do not have he ability to to full url encoding such as http://destinationbigbear.com/cabins/chateau-alta-vista

but I can do http:/www.destinationbigbear.com/big-bear-cabin-info.aspx?cabin=chateau%alta%vista

Question is what do I do... If I do change the page names I will lose the history of property_detail_V.aspx which only has a Page Authority of 21,  but if I change the page name and dynamic navigation of my website will I not lose all my authorities,  if so, is it worth doing it?

My highest keyword ranking is 30 which is terrible.

Nick

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Question 1):  Is the best way of doing my titles, keywords and descriptions.  Any concerns or recommendations.  I have read, do not even use keywords anymore.

Agreed on the meta keywords tag - it is no longer needed.

There is some redundancy in the two tags at the moment. The primary rule is that you should be first and foremost writing for people, not search engines. You'll naturally include the keywords search engines need to see if you write for people (check afterwards to ensure you have, but good usability very often translated to good SEO):

**Suggestion **for a page about the Chateau Alta Vista:

<title>Chateau Alta Vista Cabin, Big Bear Lake, California | Big Bear Cabin Rentals</title>

There is no need to repeat the location / site name.

Chateau Alta Vista is located on Big Bear Lake, CA and is available for weekend breaks or longer stays. Space for up to 14 guests, 4 bed, 3 bath. Internet and hot tub provided.

There is no need to use keywords in a meta description from a ranking point of view (they do not influence rankings), but users should get a good idea of what they're going to find when they click through from the meta description. Think of it as free advertising space.

The photo pages should be fine, but consider including these in a larger page about the cabin itself, i.e. adding value to the cabin pages rather than creating new pages, similarly to how property websites show 8 - 10 photos of a property they are selling or renting, e.g. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/33290790\. The slide show takes precedence here whereas yours would probably not (lower on the page or in another tab), but see how they have used tabs to go between content, rather than create new URLs / pages - all the content is stored on the one URL about that one property.

If I do change the page names I will lose the history of property_detail_V.aspx which only has a Page Authority of 21,  but if I change the page name and dynamic navigation of my website will I not lose all my authorities,  if so, is it worth doing it?

If you 301 redirect between the old URL and the new one, the majority of the authority of the old page will transfer to the new one. Having said that, you only want to go through a lot of 301 redirects (NOT 302s! They pass no authority) if you really have to. Modern search engines are far better at dealing with dynamic URLs than they were years ago, so it is really hard to say if doing this would be beneficial enough to outweigh the fact that you need to go through redirects from the existing URLs.

[nickcargill]

Thank you very much.

I was worried about page load time especially with regards to the images that are 150k each and can have 10 to 20 images.... hence separation of content...

Thanks again, I have another question regarding dynamic pages...
I think the webcrawls give me errors or the moz tools for duplicate page titles and content when I have urls like this.

http://www.destinationbigbear.com/property_Detail_v.aspx?propid=500

http://www.destinationbigbear.com/property_Detail_v.aspx?propid=501

and so on...

Is there something called canonical link - I looked at this but I do not think this is would help... I am just looking to have each page craweled as one page or I guess if I dynamically change the title and meta description then they would be unique?

Nick

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

I am not sure why these exact examples are being picked up for duplicate content (their title tags are exactly the same, however) because the text on page is different.

Even though many of these pages are different, the tool will be picking them up as duplicates because there is too much duplication between each page's content, e.g.:

http://i.imgur.com/D44s1wV.png

and

http://i.imgur.com/hEARGo9.png

One option is to have this heavily-duplicated information hosted on a separate URL, with the page calling the content of that URL into the text box using an iframe. This will "remove" the content from the page as far as Google is concerned, but it will mean that the same content is not being found over and over again on different URLs.

This will mean that the URLs have very little content on the however, and you should really write new content to provide sufficient unique content to tell Google what the page is about.

Consider the "tabs" option I mention above - you would start with a URL like http://www.destinationbigbear.com/property_Detail_v.aspx?propid=501 and use CSS tabs to switch to the rates page, video page, photos page, etc. This would house all of a cabin's information on one URL and mean that there are no more URLs like http://www.destinationbigbear.com/Property_detail_rates.aspx?propid=501 where the text content of the page is largely a duplicate of every other cabin page.

[nickcargill]

The different pages such as photos, calendars, etc per cabin are not being flagged as duplicate but rather the same page but different cabins..

Such as

http://www.destinationbigbear.com/property_Detail_v.aspx?propid=203

http://www.destinationbigbear.com/property_Detail_v.aspx?propid=203

Same Layout, Same Page Title, Same Meta information but 100% different content because of different cabin descriptions.... so that is why I am planning on dynamically changing page titles and meta descr by inserting the cabin names.

<title>Fox Lodge Big Bear Cabin <title></p> <p><title> Summit Enchantment Big Bear Cabin <title></p> <p>I am thinking this should cure my problem.</p> <p>Nick</p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p></title>

[nickcargill]

Jane,

You have been awesome!  I almost done going through all of the bad items that Moz generated and am getting ready to run the crawl again!  Then once I am done with that I will submit to Google again.  First time in years I have some confidence I can make a difference.

Nick