Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yep, I like this one too Dana.

I'm sure "UK Clubbing Guide" would have more searches than "Clubbing Guide for the UK" anyway.

Hi Alan,

OSE lists all links, both followed and nofollowed. A good, natural looking link profile is vital for any website, so if you have say 80-90% followed links and 10-20% nofollowed links it's not going to hurt your site at all.

Having said that, don't go around forums/blogs simply looking for easy-to-get no followed links. Google will frown upon this.

OSE is just a tool to identify backlinks, social metrics etc. It's not encouraging nofollow links, just finding them.

Hi Saeed,

Don't bother with the Hubs or Squidoo. Focus your efforts on creating great content for your own site and blog.

I noticed the blog - http://giftbaskets4kids.blogspot.com.au/ - is quite spammy looking and probably not content that is going to get shared. What I would do is create a Christmas gift guide on your site with several different categories and pages, and then go about creating a plan to write great content for your site and blog that will promote these gift ideas.

When writing content for you blog, make sure it's going to be useful to the customer. Don't be afraid to link to outside sources.

Thanks

Hi Luke,

Most of the initial jump was probably due to the fact that "nightlife forum" wasn't actually in your original page title. You had the 2 individual words in your title but they weren't placed next to each other, thus Google reads them as "nightlife" and "forum".

By putting them together it signals to Google that you're trying to rank for that phrase.

As for the placement of keywords at the beginning of your page title, sure it helps a little. I usually recommend having the brand/web site name at the end. I'd go for something like:

Nightlife Forum and UK Clubbing Guide | Talk Nightlife

Your site will rank for "Talk Nightlife' anyway, it doesn't need to be at the beginning of the title.

Hope this helps!

Hi Udara,

Google and OSE use different data. OSE uses the Mozscape index to provide a general overview of a website, it's backlinks etc. The domain and page authority is independent of Google's ranking algorithm.

You can find out more about OSE here: http://www.seomoz.org/help/open-site-explorer-faq

Thanks

Simon, good looking site.

My immediate thoughts would be:

1. Add a Pinterest page and Pin It button - you're in the perfect market
2. Start a G+ page and link to it from your site
3. Create a YouTube channel and add some videos
4. There's very little in the way of textual content on category and sub category pages.
5. Build links - start with low hanging fruit. There's some really easy links to grab out there from domains of high authority*. Start with those and then work your way in to grabbing some links from fashion blogs. A simple strategy here would be to donate an item to fashion blogs and have them review or give it away. You'll get valuable links and traffic back to your site.

*I recently wrote a blog post regarding easy to get links from domains of high authority. Apologise if this is against SEOmoz rules - but I think it applies here. http://www.bradkrussell.com.au/followed-links-authoritative-domains/

Thanks, and good luck!

Upon running the URL through http://www.ragepank.com/redirect-check/ - the site has some wacky stuff going on.

Like Davinia said, I'd redirect non-www to www version. You can do this in a variety of ways, but if you have access to the htaccess file, there's code given on that link I sent through.

Hi Chandana,

This article explains it all: http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/242/How+do+I+redirect+my+site+using+a+.htaccess+file%3F. It shows how to create and name the file and what code to use.

You would want to do this:

Redirect /index.html http://example.com/

I would also recommend redirecting non-www to www (or vice versa) if you haven't done so already - http://dense13.com/blog/2008/02/27/redirecting-non-www-to-www-with-htaccess/.

If you get stuck there's also a free htaccess generator located here: http://www.htaccessredirect.net/index.php

Let me know if you have any problems!

I'm a huge fan of http://www.rei.com/, check them out.

I'll second Get Elastic - fantastic blog with some great articles. Look out for their montly wrap-up which contains a wealth of informative links.

GManSEO - check out the list from here: http://www.invesp.com/blog-rank/Ecommerce

I would agree with everything that danatanseo stated regarding H2 and H3 tags. However, I would never use multiple H1 tags.

As stated in SEOmoz's own on page optimisation reports:

"Best practices for both SEO and accessibility require only a single H1 tag. The H1 is meant to be the page's headline, and thus, multiple H1s are confusing. Consider employing H2, H3 or CSS styles to achieve the same results with text visualization."

Hope this helps!

I did a lot of reading a while back and most people recommended BOTW above all others. So when BOTW had a half price sale a while back, I submitted all the sites we have in our network.

The results were pretty impressive, especially for the smaller sites that had a somewhat small link profile.

I'd recommend it!

Hi,

We've used Rafflecopter extensively before.

When I say 'we' I mean numerous blogs that we sponsor. We are in the cookware/kitchenware industry and we have a large number of blogging partners that run competitions on their own food/recipes/cooking type blogs. We give them a product to giveaway (or review AND giveaway) and then they send a few links our way.

The great thing about Rafflecopter is you can set whatever entry mechanisms you like. One of our most popular competitions was a competition where entrants could win a KitchenAid mixer for their kitchen. We encouraged people to enter via all the usual social media platforms. I.e. they could get 1 entry for tweeting about it, 1 for following us/the food blog on twitter/facebook/pinterest etc. 1 for leaving a blog comment. But the best part was allocating 5 or 10 (can't remember exactly) entries for entrants that created a custom Pinterest board and pinned items from our site and recipes from the blog. This greatly encouraged this form of entry and pushed entrants towards something that would take a little longer than just a simple tweet or share.

Rafflecopter also encourages sharing so we saw a huge number of entries using this system (over 11,000). You can check it out here: http://www.ledelicieux.com/2012/05/17/win-a-kitchenaid-artisan-stand-mixer-valued-at-749/ (notice the huge number of tweets, likes, pins).

Nowadays when I run competitions on external blogs I encourage the blog owners to use Rafflecopter. It allows you to build up a large number of social media followers and gains traction/goes viral.

I highly recommend it!

Cheers,
Brad

From my understanding it's pretty rare to keep old jobs on an employment agency site?

Can't you just redirect each URL to a similar job, job category or other relevant section on the site? Better than getting a heap of 404s!

Hi All,

Are there any similar sites to CrunchBase in that you can submit your blogs, websites, social profiles etc all to one central 'People' type page?

I'm after high quality directories like this that allow you to create profiles to link to all your other profiles. Only after quality sites like CrunchBase, not spammy ones.

Any suggestions?

Many thanks

A good place to start is SEOmoz's own list of recommended companies - http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended.

I'm sure some others on here have the other companies they are willing to recommend as well.

Hi Collin,

I recently did this for a client site of mine (alas it didn't have a huge amount of domain authority). The results were very pleasing, we noticed a jump in keywords simply from switching from H2 to H1.

My advice - definitely go ahead with testing like the others have suggested. You've got nothing to lose!

Thanks,

Brad

Twitter links take ages to appear in OSE. We've got a corporate Twitter account that is very active and it still hasn't shown up in OSE even after a year or so of active use. The accounts of our competitors are 50/50 - some can be found in OSE, some not.

I wouldn't worry about it too much - there's not much you can do about it. Just because OSE can't see it (yet) - doesn't mean that Google can't see it.

Hi Derek,

I have had a look at the backlink profiles of both sites. While yours is certainly much better than theirs in terms of number and quality of links - keep building links. 400 or so inbound links isn't a huge number. I suggest getting some high quality links from places like BBB.org (paid) or http://www.aboutus.org/DoFollow (free).

Now - looking at your on site analysis, you do pretty well for trophy terms like 'Bee Removal' - however I'm going to look at another term it seems you want to rank well for - 'San Diego Bee Removal'.

You're getting an F for this according to SEOmoz's on page reports. That term is not used anywhere on the page, in the title, in alt image tags, in a H1 tag or in bold/strong. Yes, you are trying to rank for it on this page - http://www.propacificbee.com/bee-removal-san-diego-bee-control.php - but if this is indeed one of your trophy terms (as I guess it would be by looking at your site) - why not try and rank for your homepage?

All those sub pages you have for different areas (Allied Gardens, Alpine, Bonita etc) should have more unique content too - there are way too many pages with VERY similar content. Google is going to frown upon this.

Hope this helps,

Brad

Hi Jody,

There was a recent thread on this that might help - http://www.seomoz.org/q/finding-good-content-writers

I've used Textbroker before, but there's a couple of others mentioned there.

Thanks,

Brad