Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Great news. A win for the Good Guys.

This may help you tell your boss...

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_say_i_told_you_so_in_20_languages

I've used submit edge.com in the past, in particular one of their article submission tpe services, I forget which exactly. I used the service to help promote some PA and traffic to a guest blog post I had done.

I wasn't exactly impressed with the result. Most of the links came from completely unrelated niches, blog comments, spammy twitter accounts and really bad directories. I haven't been near a service like it since. Though my blog post did eventually gain some PA and my website got some traffic from the entry. Would it have got traffic and authority without the submit edge service? probably.

I won't be using the service again.

Quick question, I need to make sure Im understanding you corrcetly...

You have created 50 wordpress blogs, and then 200 Blog Posts? So each of the blogs has 4 posts?

If I am understanding you correctly, Im not sure what your trying to acheive with this, but I don't think you will get much traffic out of it and its extremely doubtful you will get any SERPs.

Rather than create 50 blogs, create one amazing blog focussed on your niche and create some stunning content which people want to link to naturally.

Also, Check out Rands awesome post on ways to get more blog traffic http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic

If I haven't understood your question correctly I apologise!

I personally like the 'Find out why' bit, adds a bit of intrigue and makes me want to click through.

Not sure if its just me but when I scan through the SERPs I generally only read the first sentence or less of the description. With this in mind I would want to put my best statements first to ensure I grasp the audience and lue them in without them reading the whole description.

Number 2 for me, but wow, if thats all it takes to rank Im off to strip out all my content!!

Build some industry specific info graphics or jump on a meme that you could tailor to your industry.

A good post on creating info graphics

A great post on utilising memes

Have you considered Social networks as a way to get your content out there and build links, whilst also engaging your target audience?

Share links to your great content on twitter with relevant hashtags, check out http://hashtags.org and build a following. Though its not enough to simply blast out links to your followers, you'll need to engage them too.

Check out the white board friday video on building links with twitter

Also, theres facebook which you could use to grab your audience and potentially build links

Linked in if your industry isn't facebook prone.

Flickr and deviantart if your idustry is so inclined.

Create a tumblr blog to highlight your content (one of my favourites)

Pinterest,oh what did I do without it? yes pin some relevant, cool images of stuff you may sell or relevant to your industry and if its good enough people will share it.

There are other ways too but, I could literally go on all day.

Check this out http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics

Theres a lot to digest, but its not rocket science.

Best of luck and if you get stuck, come back and ask some more

Regards

Aran

Looking at your site I see that your Email a friend script is opening a brand new page and passing through the product ID. To stop the page being indexed you can add the following line to the robots.txt

Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp

afte the line that looks something like

User-Agent: *

Heres some light reading on the robots.txt file

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

BE CAUTIOUS! if you dont know what your doing seek further assistance as you could do some bad things in the robots.txt.

Whilst the solution above will probably solve your duplicate page issue. I think there is room for improvement here.

Email a friend scripts needn't take the user away from the product they are viewing. You could open the email a friend script in a new window, or even better get rid of the Email a friend button altogether and make your social sharing buttons bigger and more prominent. Also, consider giving the users a Call to Action to sharing the product via the social buttons.

Hope this helps.

Aran

First of all, welcome aboard. I always love to here of peoples first steps into SEO and the results they get.

My site has around 450 pages, thus its would be a major job for me to amend my page titles. Sites like SEOmoz have thousands of pages, and the vast majority of them are available in SERPs. Now as far as I know SEOmoz do not change their titles, again because it would be a massive job.

Saying that, if I run an offer or a sale on my website I will generally change my homepage title to reflect the fact I have a sale on, in the hope that the Sale text will be updated promptly in the SERPs and attarct a few extra click throughs.

In summary, no I dont think the freshness of your page titles has any positive effect on your SEO. But, It may impact your Click through rate (which I guess in turn could effect your SEO...now were going full circle).

Clear as mud?

Hi Steven,

I like your site, its clean and fresh and user friendly. Not sure what you have done with regards to link building however it may be worth while to create some guest posts to put on to other blogs and get some nice links coming in.

Unfortunately, your competitors are well established with a long standing clean relationship with Google and some authority links. Try acquiring some links from some of your competitors link partners.

Good luck!

Cheers

Aran

"Link juice" is so 2010.

"Link Love" is the way forward...

Love wordpress as a CMS, it can take some tweaking to get it to behave like a Website and not a blog, but once your done its great.

If you do nothing else be sure to install Yoast SEO plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Have you tried the SEO plug in from Yoast?

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Hi Cameron,

Your idea wih the logs may not be so great. I would consider the usefulness fo the logs to your users will they help your users? Probably, but not by having to rifle through hundreds of lines of logs.

Why not use the logs to find out your most common tech support issues and make a really good FAQ area?

This way you can preiodically review the logs and keep adding ew items to the FAQ and its going to help our visitors whilst adding great new content.

Regards

Aran

Hi,

There are plug ins which handle 301 redirects so I'd start by checking your plugs section and seeing what is active.

Wordpress uses a HTAccess file to store its 301's and such. However if you are inexperienced with handling a HTAccess file, I'd leave it be ad ask a expert to have a look at it as you can seriously mess up your site.

If its a great content thats unique and a good read, what SEO would it need?

Hi,

In your pro dashboard check out Link Analysis. In particular check out the Domain Authority, Domain moz Rank and moz Trust. As you get more links these numbers will grow, the bigger the number the better.

Also, Clicking Links then See more  in Open Site Explorer...this will give you a run down of all the links that SEOmoz have found pointing to your site (along with some helpful metrics).

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust

These link will help you on your way!

I love this type of site, its quick, different and provides a nice UX. Though in my experience, since Google is not going to process the Javascript and thus will be presented with a different view as to what the user will see. Which in the past has been a no no.

Just to note, disabling Javascript on madebysofa.com results in nothing being rendered on screen! thats one thing to avoid, better to display everything than nothing. In other words, display all sections first, then hide parts with javascript.

In summary, I personally wouldn't go for this type of design as I'm not 100% sure what google would make of it. I would start by checking the Fetch as Google Tool and seeing how the page looks. The lack of individual keyword optimised pages and the like put me off. But I like to err on the side of caution and play it safe.

From a usability perspective I'd look at the redirects as a 404 is some what off putting when your trying to buy. It could lead to visitors losing trust and ultimately sales.

In turn, if usbility is effected in such a way then doubtless the SEO will follow.

If you have matching products which have indexed pages with some page authority, then I'd take the time to redirect them.

Your compromise is not bad, it would save a mountain of time which can be devoted to other cool things and its certainly better than several thousand 404 errors!

Im with Goldilocks on this one. A blog post should not be too long, nor too short. It should be just right.

And as Moosa says, it should contain images and a touch of humour always breaks the monotony too.

If you had 1000 links coming from a russian porn site, then you may get penalised as it doesn't appear to be a natural link profile.

However one or two links from foreign sites is not a bad thing. If your site is being discussed/linked too in other countries then it should be a sign that its good if not great!