Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sorry to burst your bubble Bob, but EGOL is a hobbit.

He drums up his ideas for best of the web content while riding his unicorn across the shire.

A sighting of this hobbit is more rare than reports of run-ins with a sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster and ET in area 51.

It doesn't help that his avatar is actually a photoshopped headshot of George Will.

To make matters worse, the only footprints he leaves are pages of kickass content across the web.

Great stuff Thomas. Made some notes to self.

No idea.

Incentivizing social is easier than incentivizing backlinks and there's a quite a bit of gray area in acquiring backlinks.

Exactly!

I wonder if Volusion called and asked if they could piggy-back?

If they had a partner page with Moz would the rel-canonical go to Rand?

Relevant or not, its the first time I've heard of putting an H1 tag in the footer. Perhaps calling it an F1 tag would be more appropriate. Seriously, some would argue the H1 tag has little to no relevance (Rand would probably fall into this category) and therefore some do not use it at all. Todd Malicoat would suggest the H1 tag has some relevance and is a good practice for page structure and keyword instance.

A recent thread among these posts and one I ascribe to is that failing to use an H1 tag is probably not going to hurt you, but using one is certainly not going to hurt you. If it is going to be of benefit to the user in terms of readability and navigation (with an arguable smidgeon of G benefit) go ahead and use it.

That being said, strong keyword copy in the lower block level is good block level distribution. Putting an H1 tag would be irrelevant in my opinion and unorthodox as H1 tags historically have been in the top block.

Can you believe the security head telling the guy he won't get paid?

It seems the security engineer shouldn't be paid.

Two primary areas of focus for Hummingbird:

1. Better results for longer tail keyword inquiries

2. Voice command results

The public is becoming more seasoned at search as the years go by so they are comfortable adding more terms to their search.

IMO, social has also helped educate internet users for specificity:  @xyz or .com/xyz etc.  We're actually telling people what to enter after a hash-tag. Unthinkable a few years ago.

I'm curious if/how this will affect how many keywords to put in the title tag (for ecommerce - catetories and product names/titles).

We embed the videos right on the product and category pages of our ecommerce site. We like keeping them on the page so the customer stays on the page. If they want to pause or stop the video they can and they don't have to close a window.

Hi Sarah,

It depends. Can you purchase each product from that one page?

How do the keywords differ from the summary page vs the "would be" product pages?

The usability and common sense of it may depend on the answers to the above questions.

It may make the best sense to land on a branded summary page and link to individual products. Or not.

Related to conversational search. Good to know.

Thanks David.

Wow, Shara. WAY TOO MANY keywords for any page. I'm concerned for you as it violates the most basic principles of SEO. You might consider this:

1. Spend time in Google Webmaster tools and glean all you can from its SEO instruction.

2. Spend time in the learning center here at SEOmoz.

3. Narrow optimization to the most relevent keywords by user intent, traffic volume and cost/benefit.

4. Understand principle of keyword cannabilization.

5. Understand principle of duplicate content.

6. Title tags are limited to 60-70 characters. Its a challenge for all of us to use that space as wisely as possible in conjunction with our on-page optimization. You've only got space in the title tag to optimize for 1-2 maybe three keywords depending on how long the phrase.

7. Typically, organic search results for an ecommerce site will land on category and product pages.

8. Category pages are typically made up of shorter tail 1-2 keyword phrases (preppy gifts or monogrammed preppy gifts).

9. Product pages are typically longer tail 3-4 (personalized dry erase board).

10. Good luck!

I like the question, your answer and I don't get this stuff.

If the definition of semantics is: "the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. There are a number of branches and subbranches of semantics, including formal semantics , which studies the logical aspects of meaning, such as sense, reference, implication, and logical form, lexical semantics , which studies word meanings and word relations, and conceptual semantics , which studies the cognitive structure of meaning."

Then, it sounds like I need to use exact plus different partial matches to ad perspective or relevancy to the main keyword.

Then again, I fall into the group of people who don't "get" this stuff.

I've set up a filter to remove bot traffic from Analytics. I relied on regular expressions posted in an article that eliminates what appears to be most of them.

However, there are other bots I would like to filter but I'm having a hard time determining the regular expressions for them.

How do I determine what the regular expression is for additional bots so I can apply them to the filter?

I read an Analytics "how to" but its over my head and I'm hoping for some "dumbed down" guidance.

If you're a manufacturer that sells products, I'm not going to link to you no matter how good your content and how many bells and whistles you've got for promotions. However, if you don't sell products and you've got better content than I can provide on my site, I will link to you. I link to manufacturer sites when they have authoritative information that is beyond the scope of information I provide. For example, flame resistant clothing or fire rating information. If I want to cover my bases (ass) and make sure the customer has access to deep level information that is beyond the scope of what is necessary for a purchase I will link to it on a case by case basis.

Hi Joshua,

I would second the preceding replies and offer this: before you implement your page titles I would recommend three things:

1. Develop a better understanding of keyword research and the difference between broad, phrase and exact match as they relate to long vs short tail keywords.

2. Develop a better understanding of structuring your title with keywords. For example,"<title>Wood Countertops - Butcher Block Counters | by J. Aaron</title>" looks to me more like a breadcrumb than a homepage title. At face value, I would think that title would link to a page about Butcher Block Counters (which is a specific type of wood counter that would have its own page).

3. Wood countertops is a very broad short-tail term - probably very early in the buying cycle and very difficult to hit page 1. If you're a local wood countertop shop, I would optimize locally for immediate results while you build your domain authority so you can rank for these shorter tail terms.

Good article. Thanks for posting

I need to read some more on it.

I wondered how the refinement might influence the Title content.

I don't typically include "buy" in the title but I've got to look at our serps and re-think this.

The quickest way I've found to boost mozrank and trust is developing good local optimization and submitting our site to directories. The jump in those factors happened relatively quickly - weeks not months.

Boosting the moz and trust ranks will help you rank while you build the DA with back links.

Hi Josh,

Keeping in mind I don't know anything about wood counters and kitchen islands, I would make this observation about your title:

<title>walnut kitchen island with undermount sink and tung-oil wood seal(65)er | J. Aaron</title>

1. Too long. You've only got about 65 spaces for a title, then Google clips off the rest. I limit titles to 60 spaces or less.

2. You've got what appears to be 2 related keywords (which you could probably rank for on one page) and a 3rd unrelated keyword in "tung oil wood seal."

3. "Walnut Kitchen Island" looks like a good long tail keyword to me (kitchen island would be short while adding the walnut is a longer tail qualifier).

4. The longer the tail, the more you qualify the buyer.

5. I tighter title would be: "Walnut Kitchen Island with Undermount Sink by J. Aaron"

6. Depending on your site structure you might have a page with a variety of Walnut Kitchen Islands on it with a link to a separate page with an undermount sink (which is what this revised title would suggest).

6. "Tongue Oil Wood Seal" seems like it should be on a page about how to protect and maintain your countertops.

7. Putting your store's name or your name on the page title is fine and standard practice when brand building. Some put it on the back as you do, some on the front and some not at all. If there is room, I put our store's name on the title, if not I leave it off.

8. If you're optimizing for local business, its fine to put your city, state or combination in the title.

9. I've got our store name and street address in the footer so it shows on every page. For pages I really want to kick butt locally on, I put the city, state in the title, otherwise I leave it off and let the footer do the work.

Wait a minute...I'm interested in this.

How did you ninjas find the website?  Must've been posted prior to the answers and removed later.

Luke, would you mind pm'ing me with the pages?  I think I could benefit from a look at it.

A timely question. We've got a bunch of local.com backlinks that just showed up. All are no followed and the anchor text is "website." How nice.

Our domain authority dropped a couple of points (perhaps associated with this - who knows), so I called local.com several times about the backlinks. Still haven't heard from them.

I don't know if Google frowns on a littany of no followed backlinks from local.com with a bunch of spammy looking anchor text, but apparently, SEOmoz frowns on it.

My intent is to ask local.com if they can at least use our store name for anchor text. If they can't, I'd just as soon they give us 2 or 3 no followed links with our store name in the anchor text.

If they can't do that, then I'd be fine if they just get rid of the backlinks altogether. If they're going to give me some directory love, do it right. If they're not going to do it right, don't do it.