Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Takeshi thanks for your response.

For our site of our size ie c300 pages do you think that the "mega menu" is not necessary and will help improve juice flow throughout the site?

Thanks

Ash

Hi Chris i dont know if its impacting my rankings, but thats what i am trying to establish ie my rankings do move up and down and most are on page 2, if these technical issues were resolved would it improve how google reads my site?

When i do a google cache of our site, i see 2 menus, our developers say that's because the 2nd is for the mobile menu - is that correct, as when i look up other sites that have mobile rendering they only have one menu visible. Plus GWT's has the number of internal links per page at least x2 what they should have - are they connected?

Secondly when i do a spider test through http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/ it shows all "behind the scenes text" eg font names, portals, sliders, margins - "font size px" is shown as 17 times and a density of 2.15% - surely this isnt correct as google will be thinking that these are my keywords !?

My site is www.over50choices.co.uk

Thanks

Ash

On most pages of my site i have a Quick Links section, which gives x3 cross sales links to other products, a newsletter sign up link, link to Blog, x4 links from images to surveys, newsletters, feedback etc.

Will these links be hurting my optimal SEO juice between pages, should the number of internal links be kept to a minimum?

My site is www.over50choices.co.uk if that helps.

Thanks
Ash

Thanks Rand I really appreciate your response - I feel a site overhaul is imminent!

Ash

HI Chris thanks for your thoughts.

Just watched the Vid, which is great & we will review our content.

Of course its chicken & egg, without volume visitors, as we arent on Page1, its difficult to fully understand customer behaviour with regards sharing etc.

Whilst i have also seen short & long pages work, I havent any experience or checked the results of when on the same site they have keywords that overlap & are inter-related, such as the example i gave.

For example, funeral planning will also show search results for funeral plans & yet have different volumes of searches when checking in Adwords Keyword Planner, so i want to target both, and currently i have them on differing pages - so is this the right strategy?

I know that off page factors will also effect my overall ranking but im keen to get the optimum on page structure.

What do you think?

Ash

Hi Guys

My site was launched in June 2013, with approx 6 pages for each section eg, funeral planning, annuities, insurance etc - we have not achieved page 1 in SERPs but many page 2's & 3's.

On average each page has between 200 to 300 words, with images, using the funeral planning section as an example the page headers are:

• funeral planning (introduces what it is eg prepaid funeral plans, writing a Will, inheritance tax planning)
• funeral plans (what is a prepaid funeral plan & the benefits)
• why buy a funeral plan (reasons to buy)
• funeral costs (rising costs of funerals & plans)
• buying a funeral plan online (why buying online is easier than visiting the funeral directors)
• compare funeral plans (compare prepaid funeral plan providers options)

We decided at the outset to go for more pages rather than 1 or 2 pages with 600 to 1000 words on as we thought from a customer experience perspective that the information would be easier to see & with an older audience the headers would educate them & make them more confident to buy online. And clustering the pages & linking them together we thought google would recognise this!

However, from everything i have recently read we may achieve better SERPs if we combine pages, to remove the obvious "funeral plan" keyword overlap & longer pages may achieve better "topic" value with google (as per Rands recent WBF)?

So we are at a crossroads - do we give it longer for the original plan & hope that we pop up in SERPs page 1 or bite the bullet, create one page per section/topic & find a way to display the content in user friendly way?

The latter is of course major surgery to the site, but if there is sufficient long term value I will swallow hard & do it!

Thoughts?

Ash

Thanks Jeff, guess i could link our from the site to the fuller explanation in the Blog Post?

Ash

Thanks Chris that makes sense - think I was trying to over think it !

Ash

So with Google SERPs looking for more customer intent and especially to direct questions eg, How much does a x cost? Where can I find x etc - is it good practice to create a bank of Q&A's on site or is it sufficient to have good quality content on the subject matter stating the costs of x and where you can find it written in a customer friendly manner?

Will a bank of Q&As add any value if they directly answer the most likely search questions?

Thanks

Ash

Your help please as with so much kicking around about what is best practice us poor novices havent got a chance to keep up!

My site www.over50choices.co.uk focuses on personal finance for the over 50s and one of the product sets is Funerals: I have c40 pages on the subject and 25 pages with the word "funeral" (eg funeral plans, how to arrange a funeral, funeral directors, funeral planning etc) in the URL, Title & H1 Tag - individually each page explains specific elements of the "process" and solutions to them eg purchasing a "prepaid funeral plan" all of which were optimised for specific Keywords (because thats what i was advised was best practice 6 months ago).

Am I correct in thinking that in the new world ie post Hummingbird et al, that a better strategy is to use the "product home page" as the core landing page, with sufficient content to summarise what's on offer, covering all of the individual subjects from each pages in an umbrella/topic kind of way?

And to still retain the linked pages from the core landing page, as they will contain the detailed information?

Many thanks

Ash

Also if I do combine the 2 pages should i 301 the compare page to the other?

Thanks
Ash

Tommy thanks for your advice.

Will having specific internal & external anchor text help google know which pages I am targeting for each keyword eg "Over 50 life Insurance" & "Compare Over 50s Life Insurance" or will i always have the same issue because the first phrase is contained within the second?

Ash

Hi Aaron we could merge them, but when we designed the site we set out to be different from the other comparison type sites, in that rather than push the "Buy/Compare" option on the product landing page we wanted to take them on a journey depending on  their level of knowledge.

Laying out their Nav options in the left hand side they could choose where to go depending on which page they arrived at, which is great once you are onsite, but not for optimising for search, hence my question.

Merging the page is an option but are their any options we could explore first?

Thanks

Ash

Yes, I know customer experience is king, however, I have a dilema, my site has been live since June 2013 & we get good feedback on site design & easy to follow navigation, however, our rankings arent as good as they could be?

For example, the following 2 pages share v similar URLs, but the pages do 2 different jobs & when you get to the site that is easy to see, but my largest Keyword "Over 50 Life Insurance" becomes difficult to target as google sees both pages and splits the results, so I think i must be losing ranking positions?

http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Funeral-Planning/Over-50-Life-Insurance.aspx

http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Funeral-Planning/Over-50-Life-Insurance/Compare-Over-50s-Life-Insurance.aspx

The first page explains the product(s) and the 2nd is the Quote & Compare page, which generates the income.

I am currently playing with meta tags, but as yet havent found  the right combination!

Originally the 2nd page meta tags were focussing on "compare over 50s life insurance" but google still sees "over 50 life insurance" in this phrase, so the results get split. I also had internal anchor text supporting this.

What do you think is the best strategy for optimising both pages?

Thanks

Ash

HI Andriy the site is www.over50choices.co.uk the specific page is http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Health/Compare-Health-Insurance.aspx

I have just plugged in the Quake Toolbar and see the KW density remains the same for all pages!

Is this because the site is DNN CMS templated site - is there anything i can do to get the pages analysed as separate pages?

Thanks

Ash

Hi yes, I did change one or two internal anchor texts, so that could be another factor.

I guess i should have changed one thing at a time to test the impact - once it has settled down i will remove one thing at a time to test.

Thanks

Ash

Hi Dan thanks for your advice.

Yes they all have A Grades although one or two of the pages could have too many KWs in the "key" places, which as you say used to work!

I will track and play with over the next few weeks.

Thanks

Ash

Hi I recently updated some page titles, H1 tags & on page content which overall has seen search results slip down following the first site crawl by google I assume.

My question is, should I try to get back  the rankings and test and change one thing at a time to see the impact right now or should i wait for a period of time for it to settle down once goggle has crawled the site a few times or will the subsequent crawls have no impact?

Thanks

Ash

This is the page http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Health/Compare-Health-Insurance.aspx

KW: Compare Health Insurance