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Every 2-3 days, presumably each time we are crawled we go from 2nd for a chosen keyword - to 4th for a chosen keyword. Then 2-3 days later - back to 2nd.
It's always the same two listings that come above us, and go back underneath - why would this be?
I see. We have set up a blog on their own domain.
I've a similar question, sorry to hijack - how on Earth do I host my wordpress blog 'on' my website.
So that www.myurl.com/blog points to www.blog.wordpress.com or similar.
So we are targeting a keyword and we are ranking 2nd for it. Another company is ranking number 1. What is the best element to target for us to improve into position number one?
Page authority: them 41, us 40.
mozRank: them 5.52, us 3.38.
mozTrust: them 5.86, us 5.58.
mT/mR: them 1.1, us 1.4.
Total Links: them 6571, us 68.
Internal Links: them 1138, us 1.
External Links: them 5431, us 63.
Followed Links: them 6569, us 64.
Nofollowed Links: them 2, us 4.
Linking Root Domains: them 25, us 41.
Broadkeyword usage in page title: them YES, us YES.
KW in domain: them no, us partial.
Exact anchor test links: them 161, us 21.
% of links with exact anchor text: them 2%, us 30%.
Linking Root domains with exact anchor text: them 2, us 11.
Domain Authority: them 41, us 40.
Domain MozRank: them 3.7, us 4.5.
Domain MozTrust: them 3.8, us 4.5.
External links to domain: them 22574, us 217.
Linking root domains: them 50, us 48.
Linking C-blocks: them 46, us 42.
Tweets: them 1, us 12.
FB shares: them 6, us 26.
I don't think you'll get much benefit from just sending a tweet to all and say please RT this or put a link somewhere.
In my experience, especially with Twitter it is better to build a good relationship first and then start asking for a link or a RT.
If you want more social signals you're probably best offering unique content that people want to share and RT themselves.
The only thing I think would do harm is sending the tweet out - I'd expect to see a huge drop in followers.
We use Google Analytics for this:
Set up GA and navigate to My Site > Traffic Sources > Search > Organic
Here you can see the keywords that brought people to your site, how long they stayed, the bounce rate and so forth. You can also then click onto the keyword and see a graph of change over time.
SEOMoz have just been talking about this actually, check out this sweet infographic:
http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/killer-blog-design.jpg
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/blog-design-for-seo
All you need to know 
That's exactly what I thought at first. Comparing the 11th/12th July to the 4th/5th July:
Our traffic for our brand name was down 3%. Our search traffic for 'cheap books' was up 8%. In fact our search traffic for our branded terms generally / brand name generally is down and our search traffic for 'cheap books', 'bargain books' and 'second hand books' is up slightly, maybe this, plus less traffic overall and less referrals from Facebook could explain the drop.
Yeah I think you are right Ryan, I'm not convinced that it is anything we have done. The average book price has gone down from £3.43 to £3.09 in our inventory which should only encourage sales! But we will definitely just wait it out - hopefully just a blip.
Hi Ryan,
Your first point is probably a good one, we're getting around 50-100 less visitors a day. Down from 420-450 to 350-380.
We haven't added any new content.
No changes as far as I'm aware regarding prices.
This time last week we got a good link from a famous authors blog/facebook so we got a lot of hits but our average conversion rate is 1.52% and we are down to almost 0.25% over the last few days. Comparing Jul 1 - Jul 4 conversion rate=1.52%, Jul 8 - Jul 11 conversion rate=0.83%.
Only change I can see between then and now is active inventory, down from 12696 SKU's to 12350 SKU's now. And referral traffic down from 15.24% to 5.59%
Checked! No drop in internet explorer vs firefox or chrome, slight drop in Safari but no technical errors in Safari
I run a website selling used books. Our e-commerce conversion rate is on average around 1.40%. Over the last four days this has dropped to just 0.25%! Any ideas why? We haven't made any changes, apart from uploading a new pricing strategy - obviously you'd look at this first but the price of our whole inventory has gone DOWN by £5000 and our average product price has decreased from £3.43 to £3.09!
Everything else has stayed almost exactly the same, hits have decreased slightly, so has referral traffic.
We have a blog set up with Blogger and generate some great content on it. What is the best way to optimise the blog from an SEO standpoint? In particular the domain name, it is currently .blogspot.com address, is there a better way to work with that?
Obviously the blog is branded with our company logo and name etc but is about the book industry. I'm basically concerned about linking people to our blog and not the website and so not getting much benefit?
Plus - look around! Check out other companies Robots.txt file
http://edition.cnn.com/robots.txt
http://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt
You can see what they do not think is relevant for search engines to be looking at.
It's ok but very basic:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /myaccount/
Sitemap: /sitemap.xml
Do you want to stop crawlers from accessing the login page for example?
Ours is something like this:
# Disallow All Engines From Admin and Login
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /index.php/
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /index.php/admin/
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /customer/account/login/
# Sitemap Files
sitemap: http://www.worldofbooks.com/sitemap.xml
I was looking at the ranking factors 2011 and the most important ranking factor is 'Page Level Link Metrics' - what is it?!
Sorry for the, again, basic question - can someone define page level link metrics for me?