Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Branded reports will be included (soon I think) in the Medium, Large and Premium subscriptions.  The 30-day free trial is a trial of the Standard subscription, so it does not come with the branded reports.

For a production environment, I would suggest having one minified CSS file.  This will reduce file size (minifying) and server requests (1 file as opposed to 10).  This will help reduce page load time.

Of course, on your staging environment, or in an archive of the website, it would be best to have your stylesheets broken down into an easier to manage system.  That might mean multiple CSS files, it might not - it's up to you to manage.

Best and most affordable are unfortunately two different things.

If you're looking for the "most affordable" I suspect you mean cheapest.  Bluehost, GoDaddy, Hostgator - all offer WordPress capable hosting for about $5 a month (sometimes less).

If you're looking for the most stable WordPress hosting, with the fastest servers, and most uptime, I would suggest you look at WP Engine and Pagely.  They will cost a little bit more, but if it's affordable for you they are definitely a better option than the larger hosting companies.

Magento causes tons of errors to show up in Moz Analytics crawl diagnostics...tons.  I'm not really sure if there is an easy way to fix that in Magento or not, it's just kind of how Magento works.

Your site does have tons of links.  Just mousing over your navigation bar shows the sheer number of links on every single page.

Duplicate title tags are also a big issue because of the way that Magento category pages work.  These pages have the same title tag, but slightly different content:

http://www.rpamx.co.uk/street/road-gear?color=131
http://www.rpamx.co.uk/street/road-gear?color=127

Magento also has tons of duplicate content issues, also a result of how Magento works.  Because most of the page is the same (massive header, sidebar, footer) the pages get flagged as duplicate content, even though the middle of the page (body) might be different.

We ended up deciding to use Magento as purely an online store, and created a marketing wrapper outside Magento for content and structure.  It's unfortunate because of how expensive Magento is, but I personally think it will be a good decision in the long run.

Magento's CMS is just terrible by the way...

As Chris stated above, there is nothing currently in place to allow your clients to log in and see their data, they'll have to do with reports.

As far as reports go, branded reports are on the horizon for Medium, Large, and Premium subscriptions!  https://moz.com/subscriptions

You'll want to use a rel="publisher" tag.  More info here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1708844?hl=en

[Find us on Google+](https://plus.google.com/yourpageID)

The number of Facebook likes returned by OpenSiteExplorer is the number of times the URL you entered into OSE was liked on Facebook posts, not the number of Facebook likes for the Facebook Page tied to the domain.

So in short, this number is accurate.

Ruben,

I can't think of a comparable profession you can learn in college that changes so frequently and so drastically.  Just think of how much has changed in SEO since 2006, which is when I started college.  If I learned pre-2006 SEO in college and hadn't bothered to keep up with industry standards and best practices, I would be out of a job right now.

I will concede that some SEO courses could be added to another degree, like Marketing or Advertising - such as "History of Search Engines and SEO", "Technical SEO", "Basic HTML and Web Design", "Structured Data" and others.  These could absolutely be beneficial for future marketers.

If I was to hire a new marketer, I would still certainly weight experience higher than college courses - hands down.

Thanks,
Brad

I disagree that SEO should be taught in colleges, or that there should be certifications for it.

SEO requires constant learning, testing, and adjusting.  By the time you finish a 4 year degree, the tactics and guidelines you learned in year 1 may be completely obsolete.

Each SEO is different.  Everyone has their own opinions and techniques.  That is the nature of the industry, and why it's so interesting.  There is no one right answer, there are many different ways to get to the top, and even more that make it harder to get there.

SEOs also use an ever-changing set of tools, which also is adapting and changing with the industry.  The tools you learned while at University are probably outdated or obsolete by the time you graduate.

I personally think that a degree in Marketing or Communications will set you up for a great start in the SEO field, but the majority of the leg work to learn industry standards, tools, techniques, etc., should not be taught in school.

Just realized I forgot to add the link to the article, my bad!  http://www.wowinternet.co.uk/blog/100-dollar-link-building/

The best link building is creating good content and having an audience to share it with.  If your content is good, the links will build themselves organically.

Building links and authority organically can be, unfortunately, a long and frustrating journey - especially in boring niches.  When I pull up your blog posts, I don't see them as blog posts (much like Peter above) but rather as promotional material disguised as a blog post.

The problem you are facing is one that I've seen time and time again.  Online businesses in boring markets with little to no audience are really hard to get off the ground.  You have to be extremely **creative. **

When you are writing your next blog post, I would suggest browsing through Pinterest to see what popular items come up for "storage bins" or something similar.  There are probably a bunch of "life hacks" and instructographics that you can gain inspiration from to write a blog post.  Then share the heck out of it - share it on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, you name it.

I know you are facing a frustrating challenge, but if your task was easy, then people such as myself would be out of work

You're going about it all wrong.  You said that your goal is to drive traffic to your automotive site (pun intended), but then why are you concerning yourself with link building?

Building links for the automotive industry will be extremely difficult in the first place.  How many different blogs could you guest post on?  Probably not tons, right?  Submitting your site to directories won't help you in the Search Engines, and certainly won't drive much referral traffic.  Why bother?

You should focus on building a website that is easy for people to consume and navigate, create content that is worth peoples time, build a social media presence, and focus on customer service and improving your product/brand.

This might seem like a daunting task, but it's the only sure-fire way to "win" on the internet in the long run.

You might think that since you're in a traditionally boring internet niche, that it will be difficult for you to generate buzz about your content to earn links.  That isn't true.  I submit to you an article that Matthew Barby from Wow Internet put together on "link building" on a micro-budget.  What it comes down to is that money isn't as important as creativity.

Good luck!

You could not possibly do any good by building your own link network with 12 domains you purchased.  Google will figure it out, and your links will either be devalued completely, or you'll get a manual penalty placed on your site.

There are legitimate use cases for site wide links (like in the footer) but it's best to nofollow these links to be safe.

You upload images through WordPress' built in Media upload tool.  Don't FTP images directly into WordPress as they won't be recorded in the database and you won't get the built-in feature of having several different sizes of the images made (thumb, small, medium, large).

I would also recommend optimizing your images before uploading them.  Use a tool like tinypng.org if you are primarily uploading pngs.

I think using an intermediary page with a redirect script is the way to go.  This allows you to modify the redirect (301 vs 302), the server header, and the destination - after the fact.

Ideally, you could do this going forward.  For your current affiliates, you could reach out to them and provide a new affiliate link, or ask them to nofollow the link.  This part isn't ideal, but if you had the intermediary redirect page you could handle this without contacting the affiliate.

I personally would avoid CommentLuv.  Off the top of my head, the cons would be:

• Costs $97
• Increases/promotes comment spam
• Increases WordPress database size by adding more data to the comments table
• Increases page load times due to extra processing of each comment

The only pros would be that it increases your exposure slightly and you will most likely get an increase in comments - but if the commenters are self-serving and coming simply to drop a link (as opposed to actually being interested in what you have to read) then is that really a good thing?

On top of all that, I personally think that CommentLuv is just kind of....cheesy....and doesn't belong on a professional website.

I think it comes down to the branding requirements of the new product.  Is this a major product launch, or just another product amongst an existing product line the company has had for ages?

The advantages of having the new product under the current domain (as a subdomain, or a subdirectory as Kurt pointed out above) would be that you could piggy back off the existing brand and online presence, and it would be easy for new customers to find the product, even if they weren't looking for it.

If the product is new, your company is investing a lot in it, and it deserves it's own branded presence, than a new domain might be the way to go.  Search Engines and Marketers have been moving towards "branding" for a while now, and if this product warrants it's own name, personality, or community - this would probably be the way to go.

My two suggestions for a WordPress specific site would be WP Engine or Pagely.

Pagely is a smaller company, but they have excellent speed, uptime, and service.  They also have a deal going on right now for "Cyber Monday": http://blog.pagely.com/2013/12/cyber-monday-12-days-pagely/

You can't go wrong with either WP Engine or Pagely.

Thanks Devanur,

I understand that site-wide links should be avoided, and I fully understand why.

What I'm asking is if it's necessary to physically remove those links altogether, or if nofollowing them will suffice?  You suggested I do both (remove all but homepage and nofollow home page link) - so I'm looking for more clarity here.

Thanks!

Brad

As a web developer, it's not uncommon for me to place a link in the footer of a website to give myself credit for the web design/development.

I recently decided to go back and nofollow all these site-wide footer links, to avoid potentially looking spammy.

I wanted to know if I should remove these links altogether, and just give myself text credit without a link at all?  I would like for a potential client who is interested in my work to still be able to get to my site if they like my work - but I want to keep my link profile squeaky clean.

Thoughts?