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I would try to figure out why the home page is ranking so well for that keyword. There must be something else within your content that's boosting it…it can't be just the one link (which I assume is in your navigation, so don't remove that). I would use the page grader tool to compare the keyword phrase with your home page and find out what is making the page rank for that. If you have already taken out what is making the page rank for the keyword, it may just take time to catch up in the SERPs.

From there, I would continue to improve the content and internal linking around the page that you do want ranked for your keyword. Like stated above, utilizing social media and your blog is a good way to gain some web presence. The press release and back link thing…don't waste your time or energy.

Is the page new? That may also be a factor. Also, is your home page ranking for what you are targeting on there?

I ran into something similar. Apparently the mention doesn't even have to be in link form. Just a plain text mention of the brand/domain will show up as a mention.

As stated by Alan, I'd disavow them if it seems shady.

Hello!

The description that is being generated is dependent on the search query. When the page is the most relevant to the search, you get the title and meta you have set. When you search the "careers," you get the relevant title and meta for that search. So even though the results is bringing a person to the same page, Google is giving the most relevant excerpt for the search query. You can only have one meta description per page so there isn't a way around this.

I don't think this is much to worry about though…it looks good in the SERPs. The title for the "SQL Sentry Careers" shows up as "Career - SQL Sentry" with relevant meta data underneath.

Hope that helps!

I would suggest contacting the MOZ help team…sounds a bit glitchy

Does your Google Business page and Facebook page display an address?

I'd also recommend WordPress. It's an easy to use interface with tons of themes to choose from. The CMS creates clean URLs and you can install the Yoast plugin for free… it is a great SEO tool that covers all bases

Hmm…

I would just remove the one photo that you don't want to see there and leave a bunch in that you would be ok with. That's what I'm doing. I've been scouring the internet to see what would make Google choose one over another but I can't seem to find anything. Weird…

The only other idea I had was maybe it is dependent upon what the image file is named?? Like if the image name is more relevant to the brand and search it would be chosen before something that was named something arbitrary, such as "logo-1.jpg"

This is an interesting question… I did some exploring on my Google business page and researched what was showing up in the SERPs…turns out what's there isn't what I want either! So this is how I'm trying to fix it but I think it will take time to register changes…

On the left side drop down of my page I selected "My Business." On the dashboard there's two photos and next to it is a "+5" box that I assumed would bring me to all my photos when I clicked it. It brought me to a page with a pop up that said "Map & Search Photos… When a user searches for your business on Google Maps or Google Search, these photos will appear alongside the rest of your business information." It's here that you can add, edit, and delete what shows up!

Thanks for asking the question…never would have learned this without it!

Exactly…. Google is the first one that comes to mind!

Just curious…are any of your keywords or location in the domain name?

If I were to search for this product, I would probably search something like "widget dealer Nashville Tennessee". I try to keep in mind what a person would search when structuring a URL. If your domain states the product, something like "www.widget.com/dealers/tennessee/nashville" would make the most sense to me.

Also, URL structure should semantically make sense as well as narrow down to the point of the page it links to. The URL affects SEO somewhat indirectly through user interaction and usability. Keep in mind, if you use long keywords at the end of your URL ("dealers/tennesee-widget-dealers/nashville") search engines will truncate it anyway in the results (www.widgets.com/dealers/.../nashville").  Basically, clean, simple, direct URLs are the best way to go.

Hope that helps

Indeed! I'd be more concerned as a developer that there are glitches even if it won't affect SEO. Bad business

Hey Monica

Similar to what William stated above, the keyword checker tool in Yoast is purely for your reference. It doesn't tell search engines anything. What I do is enter the keyword that is the most important and optimize for that. Then try out the secondary words. You won't be able to have all 3 words in your title or URL or even your meta description, so keep that in mind when the checker comes back yellow or even red.

You don't want to overstuff the page with the keywords or make the wording of your meta description to sound unnatural with overuse of key phrases. I would focus on your primary target and then spread out the other two words within the content/tile tags/alt tags etc.

Hope that makes sense!

Hello

While there are good reasons to validate your code, it does not directly affect your rankings. Matt Cutts talks about this in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBACTS-tyg

Validation does give insight into your development needs and will help you to improve user experience. However broken code won't take away from good content and that is primarily what search engines are looking for.

Hey Jeremy

I think the problem is that your Google+ page needs to be a business page and it also needs the address of the business added there.

You can make a business page here: http://www.google.com/business/

Google will have to verify that you are at that address and then it will take some time to update after that, so if you re-upload the CSV and it's still telling you that, it might just take some time for everything to show that it is in order.

Hope that helps!

That's a pain! Why would they not want to switch? The Yoast plugin makes is way easier. But you can set the canonical tags through your Google WMT. Here's a resource to help you to do that: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?rd=1

Hope that helps!

Hello!

Yoast is definitely the way to go. However the settings are universal across the site for the title tag creation so you may need to manipulate it a bit to get what you want to show up in Google.

Unchecking the force rewrite is a good place to start. Without knowing how you've integrated WordPress into the site I won't know exactly where the issue is, so I'll give you a couple tips…

Go to Settings > General in WordPress and make sure your site title and tag line are correct. Then, if you have your home page published as a Page in WordPress, make sure the SEO Title at the bottom of the content box matches what you want to see as a result in Google. Then in your header file, make sure that the site title and description is being echoed properly.  Such as something like: " <title><?php wp_title( '|', true, 'right' ); bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></title> "

I have trouble with this on my sites when I install Yoast after everything else in the site is complete. It will often overwrite stuff and then I have to go back in and tweak it.

Hope that helps!

I've kind of found a hack way to do it… (you need a basic gmail account for this)

I go to Google AdWords, under the Tools tab I click "Keyword Planner".

Then under the "search for new keyword and ad group ideas" I enter in the keyword. When you click "Get Ideas" it will give you a whole listing of relevant keywords.

The purpose of this service is obviously to sell you the campaign but I use it to get keyword ideas. It also shows the competition for the words and how many people search the words monthly, so that's a bonus!

There's probably a better way out there and I'm sure there's a resource for this specifically…but this does the trick for me

Hi Rosemary

I've run into this problem several times before on sites with blog postings and events that have piled up but are useless to the current site. If the pages for these events are getting traffic and have good value, I would redirect them to a relevant page so that you do not lose your link juice. However, if the pages are duplicates and don't have much value, I would delete them entirely and let them go to a 404. Google eventually will stop crawling 404s so it is ok to remove old/irrelevant content. You will see a spike in your Moz crawl errors because of the increase in 404s. But 404s are better than duplicate content and duplicate meta descriptions. To improve user experience, you can create a 404 that is engaging…such as with a search box or with links your most popular pages.

Hope that helps!

When you are at the campaign dashboard, click "Search" on the left...then under that click "Crawl Diagnostics"

All that info will be there.

I hear your frustration...been there, done that, bought the t-shirt

It's important to come to terms with the idea that PA/DA isn't everything when it comes to ranking. I've worked on sites where the design and conversion strategy is terrible and people were not hanging on the site too long. These sites with higher bounce rates won't rank as well. Another factor I've seen is the continuous updating and adding content (such as in a blog) helps push rankings upward. One of my sites consistently ranks higher than our competitors with higher PA/DA and I'm certain it's these factors that's doing it.

There's probably a more techy nerdy answer out there, but this is just based on my experience. If sites aren't ranking well for me, I usually suggest a site redesign and redevelopment. Doing an overhaul and clean up can go a long way.

Good luck!