Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

I ran the Page Speed analysis from Firebug and your site gets a good 74/100. Not too shabby!

But on closer inspection I see that you have around 600k of images loading from within your style sheets.

You could try better optimising the images to reduce filesize. The main culprit is homebg.jpg which is a whopping 250k (maybe not massive, but I'm old school!).

You could also enable some form of server compression like Gzip (though I see your on Windows hosting) to further reduce load times (though it will increase server CPU activity).

Hope that helps

Aran

Link Juice is so 2010. Link Love is the way forward

I use http://www.dreamstime.com/ its cheap and cheerful and does the job.

I'd go with option 1 personally and look to leverage the content another way...

I love the "Pay with a tweet" idea, there are services which require you to Pay for a download with a tweet. http://www.paywithatweet.com/

This is a great way to get some credit for your work, spread the word socially and attract some links/authority from relevant sites and its all perfectly natural!

Option 2 sounds a little shoddy and difficult to manage.

Option 3 could prove to be dangerous with hundred/thousands of ;links with same anchor text

Option 4 Woah there buddy, this sounds a litle 'grey'.

If you want to be 'Completely clean' go with option 1, ask people to share socially or link to you in return for the content.

Hope thats of some help.

Aran

Agreed a Canonical tag will solve your Dupe content issue.

Though I think theres a deeper issue. I will hazard a guess that you already ahve a set of rewrite rules which allow the _http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino_ URL to work?

A redirect may get you stuck in a loop if the venue.php is rewritten to /venue/rosemarino

Hmm, i think generic phrases such as 'Refurbished printers' should be tackled by and article or such content. Not product pages, other wise your going to potentially have lots of refurbished product pages all trying for a SERP for the same phrase. (i.e. competeing with yourself! (keyword canabalisation).

Personally I'd go for Title + Model + condition

(Thats assuming you only have one page per product model/condition).

Hi Noah's Dad!,

I've been following your blog!

Whilst I'm not 100% sure how to output Facebook comments to your pages. I have just installed Facebook commenting on my website (a very easy job of just pasting in some HTML with a dash of php to retrieve the current URL). Its great as people instantly recognise the comments box and seem happy, almost eager to leave a comment. Plus its not restricted to just facebook users, people can join in the fun with hotmail, yahoo, or AOL user IDs. Plus I believe more ways of authenticating are being added.

There is a plug in for word press (of course, cos theres a plug in for everything) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-comments-for-wordpress/

Trouble is that the comments are out put into a iframe, thus Google doesn't pay any attention to them (incas eyour doing this for SEO benefit, which I assume you are). But there is a work around to out put the comments outside of the facebook iframe, though I'm still debating whether to do it as it involves hiding the content (otherwise it would appear twice, once in the Iframe and once outside of the iframe, making for a bad user experience), but since Google may frown upon hiding content on my page, I've stayed away for the time being. (unless someone else has a better idea).

Hope that helps in some way.

Regards

Aran

Hi,

I assume you want to do this in code at runtime so you can tailor the page dependant on where the vistor comes from?

In PHP there is a function $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], this will send the referring url of the visitor. However it is not very reliable and there are many instances where it will contain nothing or incorrect information.

You would then check the contents of the functio results for indicators that they come from a natural search. I.E the referrer contains Bing, Yahoo, Google. This will not differentiate PPC traffic though.

Hope this sets you off in the right direction. (if it does thow a thumbs up my way )

Cheers

Aran

Hi Paul,

I would have thought that a 301 is going to be a little confusing for your visitors, as they may be browsing the Lancashire part of your site and find themselves redirected to the bedfordshire side. I'd personally prefer to write some content for Lancashire/Bedford.

Understood you don't want to share the URL, but as I have said, difficult to answer the problem without seeing it in context.

Cheers

Aran

If your adding new content to you site regularly it may get discovered quicker if your site map is bang up to date.

PLus if your going to do a job, you may aswell do it properly.

You may want to mix up you anchor text a bit and maybe throw in some longer tail phrases. Having too many exact keyword phrases may do you some harm.

Hi Nicola,

Try and Install Yoast SEO for wordpress. You can he take control of your title tags and stop wordpress being naughty!

Good luck.

Aran

Spammy comments look like spam. Spam is bad. Bad is not good

Get rid. Not sure if carzilla supports comment moderation, but if it does activate it.

Also, try connecting with your target audience via social sites like facebook and twitter and engage them in conversation, tell them of articles and cool stuff on your blog, then you may get some natural comments.

I would possibly look towards a different strategy.

Rather than deleting a page once a product is sold I would leave the page live for a while and put a sold sign on it and offer a selection of similar properties to view. After say 3 months then 301 the page back to a category page higher in the hierarchy. Or don't 301 it at all, perhaps Noindex the page after a given time frame?

I'd much rather present my visitors with a Sold sign and a list of similar properties than potentially lose them to a 404.

Don't think search engine, think visitor

Hope that helps

Aran

Mine have improved very slightly. But all the same key players are in top ten in their usual order.

Our SERP for our main phrase Clothes Hangers has gone from third to second, which is nice, but I'm not seeing anything major that I could attribute to a massive algo change.

I do use in my pages, but only when it makes sense to do so.

**Does it help search results? Probably not anymore. But It still represents a useful tool for highlighting calls to action or other text which you may want to attract the visitors attention too.

Then if this increases interaction on the page, then you could say that its helping reduce bounce rate, thus its helping SEO.**

I'm guessing that Google is taking a harsh stand on the Grammar used in the product description. The description doesn't read well, there are many gramatical mistakes.

In addition to that the only other chunk of content on the page appears to be duplicate content. See the Google search below on a piece of the California Umbrellas text.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=+California+Umbrella+has+been+known+for+producing+high+end%2C+quality%2C+patio+umbrellas%2C+and+frames+for+over+50+years.+The+California+Umbrella+trademark+is+immediately+recognized+for+its+standards+in+engineering+and+innovation+among+all+the+brands+in+the+United+States.&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

I'm doing what I always have been doing.

• Seek out very cool niche directories that may actually pass me some traffic.
• Get active in the social sphere
• Update my blog regularly and post on social sites when I do
• Encourage my visitors to review my site (loving reviewcentre for this)
• Guest Post on niche blogs (I try and do at leats 2 guest posts per week and then try and drum up some traffic for them in the social sphere.
• Jump on the occasional meme to score some quick links/social shares

The above strategy has worked for my site getting me to top spot for my chosen keywords. I've just leap frogged my biggest competitor whom has 15k+ links compared to my measley 350+.

Quality not quantity

EDIT: Anyone with a wedding orientated blog offering up some guestpost opportunities, please pm me

On second look at some of my really short tail generic phrases, we have climbed to first and second from page 2. Awesome.

Hi Brad,

Ask not what you can do to maximise your SEO, but what can you do to make your user experience better.

In other words ensure that your visitor gets all the info he/she needs.

1. Make sure you link to products in the Video Description so anyone watching can easy find and purchase.

2. Have you considered creating a transcript to go along with the video?

3. Are the videos embedded on your product pages?

4. Have you shared the videos with your social circles?

5. Are the videos correctly branded with your website logo and URL? alot can change in a few years is the branding the same as it was when the videos were produced?

6. Have you considered creating some new videos? You channel may or may not have subscribers who could come back and view your new videos and maybe purchase a product or two.

These are just my initial thoughs on what I would consider doing, I'm sure you have already touched upon these.

Cheers

Aran