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Like Jono mentioned, check your referral traffic. I would recommend going into your analytics account, and segmenting by all sessions/organic/referral/direct to really see what is causing the high bounce rate. If it's referral traffic it's most likely referral spam. There are some good tools out there and filters to help get rid of that garbage and true up your numbers a bit more.

Hi Allie Stramark has the right idea. That aspect of Yoast is a tool just for you to help with keyword targeting. It doesn't actually impact the SEO of your page though. You could try something like Moz's On-Page grader. Unfortunately, knowing if you can get Yoast's tool to work, would require knowing how the site was in fact coded. It might be a simple fix, or it might be tricky. I'd see if you can ask the developer though, maybe it's an easy fix. -Dan

thats what I prefer to do - describe the image with the alt tag. When you can use the target Keyword (in step by step instruction you surely could find ways) do it, but describe the image first.

Awesome responses everyone - really appreciate this. It seems I have my work cut out across the various tools to try to identify root cause. At first, quick glance I don't see anything obvious popping up (for example to organic vs. direct) but I have more to check, based on the excellent input from the three of you. Thank you again! Mark

This is generally a mix of two issues... 1. Handling 404s improperly 2. An improper relative link 9 times out of 10 this is the issue. Let's say, for example, the client's site is "client.com" A link in their main template looks like this... a href="client.com/" instead of... a href="http://client.com" or a href="/" That first link will cause Google, or any crawler, to visit "http://client.com/client.com". When the bot visits this page, it finds the same a href="client.com/" link and, now tries to visit "http://client.com/client.com/client.com" so on and so forth. Now, for this to happen, the page also needs to deliver a 200OK, otherwise Google would likely stop trying to access the page because of the 404. Both of these issues need to be resolved.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris. Note the quote from John Mueller in the comments _Lots of good advice from an older blog post that's still valid & relevant today. _ There may be some technical merit that Googlebot starts at the slashed version on the TLD, but I do not think there is any type of SEO advantage with that (if that is the case).

Thank you for your response.  Very Helpful

Interesting.  Thanks for the insight! The reason the sitemap you viewed does not contain links to the new shop products is because that sitemap is generated automatically via the yoast seo plugin.  It can't detect the new product pages since they're on the new WP installation in the /shop/ directory.  However, I do have a new sitemap here, http://startupfashion.com/shop/sitemap_index.xml with the current product URLs and Categories and it has been submitted to GWT.  I initially had those old products and categories removed from the old sitemap, but when I saw that the value wasn't being passed, I decided to put them back as a test because i wondered if perhaps the 301s weren't passing value because Google wasn't seeing those pages anymore.  But I'll definitely take them out again, thanks! As for the double redirect with the forward slash, that's strange.  I'll definitely look into it!   Also... i have no clue whats' up with that category typo.  I don't think I ever touched that, but it's another thing to look into. THANKS!

It does exsist, but it is often considered spamming! Be carefull what you are doing!

Thank you for the answer. We have moved forward removing the sub domain and will keep you posted on our SERP progress Thanks

I have a question -- after you put the city pages in Webmaster Tools, what do you have to do next? Anything special other than what you would normally do in Webmaster Tools?

Great thank you! I'll give both a go!

Just in case anyone's reading this or generally interested since may have encountered same issues, for the account in question this now seems to be resolved

Yeah Press loft worked a treat for us... but we make personalised products that are easily given as gifts so worked well for the platform. Yeah i'd be really keen to find other similar services that are a bit more generic (and cheaper). Anyone?

Google will do this as they see fit in an effort to connect users with the content they are looking for. They will even serve multiple page titles for the same page based on the user search. The factors that determine that are anchor text to the URL and click through rates for specific kws. Essentially Google will treat your SERPs like their own personal Adwords ad, where they will tinker with the ad copy to achieve their desired result.

I think you are on the right path by paying attention to this. Of course you should start with some keyword research. I think you are correct that Brand is often searched before Type (ie: Nike Running Shoes is probably searched more often than Running Shoes Nike), and certain styles are probably not categorized at all (ie: a person searches for heels , not womens heels), while others are (ie: mens sandals, womens sandals). This, of course, can quickly lead to a problem of a confused hierarchy. This is where tags can come into play. There will likely be some contradictions where you would have to choose one navigation style over another even though doing so will force you to be less than ideally optimized for one or another. But, if you choose to noindex,follow your navigation and use an optimized tag methodology for your content that is index,follow - you won't have to compromise. Your users will navigate through the site normally, but your search landing pages will actually be tag-based categorization. This itself can be problematic for a number of reasons, but if you invest well enough into it, the solution can play out very nicely in the long run... You will want to "seed" your tag list with keywords that match significant, unique sets of your content. You will want to add unique content to each of your tag pages such that they do not overlap too much with other tag pages. You will want to limit the total number of tag pages so that you dont have PageRank sprawl (the same huge index issues that faceted navigation can present) You will want to try and align your tags with words and phrases for which your users search You will have to tag any and all products, but often you can match a category to a tag (ie: womens-shoes/sandals/flip-flops could be automatically taged as "Women's Flip Flops" Hope this helps put you on the right path!

Thanks - I'll give it a try!

Hi Leanne, On the "Tracked Keywords" tab of Add Manager Keywords, you will see all the keywords you're tracking by scrolling down. There are filters branded / un-branded as well as the ability to add custom labels which help you sort them. If you haven't selected a filter all the keywords should be visible on that page. Hope it helps, Don