Can Anyone show me a site that has followed the seomoz seo rules

[GardenBeet]

hi there - well I have pretty much followed the advice on here for my website (at least tried)

http://www.gardenbeet.com

feel free to take a look - Garden Beet performs very well in natural search - but then I spend oddles of time optimising - onsite and offsite

The best offsite SEO strategy is getting high quality links that point to your domain - I have seen my website perform well - the problem is getting the right anchor links poiinting to the correct page - that kind of task is what will give you a position in the top 3

The best onsite SEO tasks are all the meta tags, unique content etc BUT your site has to look good to get people to share or bookmark your site -while a sexy site is overlooked by the robots its what draws people in

What I find amazing is the gap in knowledge between SEO people and developers - and dont believe developers who says they know all about SEO - unless they are actually doing it regularly - I fail to see how they can keep up -

if you have a very large website sometimes developers do not understand the key terms you are optimising for a given page  - and inadverntely apply a h tag to a non-optimised sub heading- you need to watch the developers for little issues like this to ensure you SEO objectives are being achieved for each page  - even templates sometimes get assigned the wrong h tags - duplicating the error site wide - it is difficult to know whether fixings errors such as these has a direct impact on search straight away

but I do know when all my meta was incorrectly copied over to a new site I lost over 50 key search positions - as soon as they were restored my positions were reinstated - let me say that was not fun - but clearly demonstrates the importance of correct meta titles and descriptions.

[ClaireH-184886]

thank you. i am just about to look at your site. what do you look for when you search for quality links. do you join a link exchange programme, ask for links or look for sites where you can gain a link.

[ClaireH-184886]

just looked at your site which is a great site. i have a question. in the info that i have been reading it is basically saying that by having the links first google just thinks it is a link page and should have the content first so google understands what the site is about. but saying this, you have your links first according to cache and the tool that is recommended to use and 99 per cent of sites also have the links first which is understandable. now this confuses me because it is naturally that you want your menu bar at the top or at the side, so i do not understand why the seo information is saying basically that you need your description and content before your links unless i am misreading it.

[GardenBeet]

i was talking about links from other sites to your site?

actually i dont understand your question

[ClaireH-184886]

sorry what i mean ref the info is.. the seo info as far as i understand is saying that content should come first rather than links to other pages as otherwise google sees that the page as a link page http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development

but i cannot see any sites who follow this rule.

the other question is the links that you gain from other sites, do you join link swapping sites or do you contact websites to request a link exchange or write articles to gain links or use other methods to gain good quality links to your site.

[GardenBeet]

take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

[GardenBeet]

oh yes content is god

you need content first

for links refer to http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

[oznappies]

Hi, I am a developer and hire an external SEO to do the link building but we do the site optimization following guidelines pointed out here and using the Moz Tools for our site www.oznappies.com

We tag to HTML5 where it is clear what an article or main section is and navigation or subsidary links are, as these are defined in the standard. This means we have total control of content meaning that Google will index. I also noticed that Google is including site speed in their beta analytics and so we optimise for performance, using best practices and cdn for js libraries. It is worth running your site through www.gtmetrics.com to see where you have performance issues that will affect rank in the near future, as Google is aiming at 5sec load time for user experience.

We are a new site (3 months old) and have moved from 100+ to page 1 for all our targeted key phrases, including the most competitive ones. We have in-house content authors writing original content every couple of days and posting on relevant forums and blog comments. We are now in the process of taging as schema.org rich snippets to prepare for search engines factoring this in.

[ClaireH-184886]

very impressed with your site, can you explain what you mean by the following. We tag to HTML5 where it is clear what an article or main section is and navigation or subsidary links are,

[oznappies]

Sure Diane, Thanks. If HTML5 there are specific tags to denote type of content.

• • means that the content between these tages is main content

• <nav>- is the navigation links</nav>

• <aside> - is subsiduary content, such as ad content and general information</aside>

This allows for seperation of interests and allows your site to have a logical flow and still provide contextual infromation about the content. If you look at our markup you see content wrapped in these tags.

[ClaireH-184886]

can you give me an example of a page where you put this into place please

[oznappies]

We are setting up a site at http://www,dreambuilders.com.au  which uses all those tags to seperate articles from navigation and the aside. It is still in development but the HTML 5 tags are set up.

Brett

[ClaireH-184886]

hi this is a good site. so does this help with rankings and google by showing what the articles are on the site. at the moment i use sef404 so would have to add this to the site. sef uses h1 and h2 etc

[oznappies]

I am not sure that it helps rankings yet, but it cannot hurt them and it will help at some point in the future. As search engines try harder to understand what sites are about, using contextual markup will help. These changes to HTML and also the schema.org rich snippets will be used in future and will help. SEO is evolutionally as are development practices and it is all about staying ahead of the competition when search engines change the playing field.

I do know following the guidelines here, getting strong relevent links built and ensuring a fast user experience helps rank on sites we built. Does it give us an advantage oer the competition? Maybe, only time will tell.