Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Have you got your products loaded onto Google Shopping?

Adwords can eat cash if you get the ads wrong, so I would recommend distiling the keywords to be very specific, set a campaign up and test test test.  The Adwords Team are great at helping set up campaigns.

The best thing I can recommend is to really really understand your target customer and research what they search for and use only a handfull of keywords per campaign.  Don't be hasty in deleting keywords as customers buy seasonally so what might work for winter will not work for summer, so pause a keyword if it worked well and then turn it back on when the season is right, if that is how your business works

Like everything else in SEO and Sales: -  Prior Planning Prevents P* Poor Performance

Feel free to ask more about this...

Bruce

Can you explain a bit more about what you want to know?

Thanks

Bruce

Google Plus arrived after the party started, but is very important to validate customer engagement.

Post content on Google + and keep it regular, share content from your site to Google Plus too.  Like facebook, it takes time and patience to build the level of likes.

Build your circles too and share content. Be aware of C Blocks in general and also for Google Plus, don't just get your work colleagues to all click google plus, as these start to not count from the same building or location.

Google will rank these posts and share very highly to other Logged in Google users, and they will also carry some rank on generic search too

Just a few thoughts

Bruce

Hi Alan

I think you need to think about two different contexts here.

1: Google crawls fresh and unique content often.  Static not fresh content is not crawled that often, Google gets to know how often to crawl your site based on how often fresh content appears.  You can only make this happen by adding new unique keyword rich information.

2: Domain authoritiy and Page Rank are not the start of a good site but an outcome metric.  There are no quick fixes to build a quality site.

Pick your most important pages and start there.  Once Google crawls more often and finds good content and you see a rise in impressions, you are on your way on a long journey...

Think also about your site from another users perspective, does it look appealing, is the content relevant to me, is the information well presented etc.

Building links: There is a great blog here on Moz about building quality relevent links.  Follow it and plan time to do this

Hope that helps

Bruce

Agree with both reponces.

What is the imperative to have SEO done now? If you are in a seasonal retail business makes sence, but if you are not, what is the reason for this need now?

Bruce

Hi Alan

Sounds like a bit of a headache.  First things first...don't assume all drops etc are negative.  Often big drops in search via good SEO are a sign that you might be serviing better content and this must be also compared to other metrics like bounce rates etc.

Domain rank drops can also mean that sites which are also high ranking have been removed, because their links where not related to your content and therefore in the longer term, could be damaging.  Remember links should be from sites which are somehow related to your site.  Google is striving for better service delivery to all searchers and therefore does not want links from a site selling widgets to be linking to sites selling cakes, unless the widget is something to do with cakes.

Press coverage, tends to have no-follow links and therefore check out the value of a link before spending time trying to get the link.

Domain Authority comes from quality linked content and therefore high ranking links in your industry sector should be sought.  Links are like roots, tiny capillary fibres that grow to big anchor roots in time.

Improve your content and make it fresh.  This will do wonders for natural links and google serving up your site.  Track keywords and distil the essence of your site pages to ensure that not one hit is wasted.  I could be wrong but Google also monitors BOUNCE RATE.

Hope that helps somewhat

Bruce

Its not that complicated, it is really easy...

In Google Webmaster tools go to the Crawl/Fetch as Google.  The top level will be displayed at the top of the page.  Press the Fetch Button to the right.

Goolge will fetch the page and this will be displayed underneath on the same page.  To the right of this line, you will see a button to submit to index.  When you press this a pop up box will appear and you can select to either submit just this page or this page and all links from it.  Select the all links from it. (you can only do this full crawl/submit option 10 times in a calendar month, to submit just single pages you can do this 500 times a month) and then press Submit.

Google will then submit all the pages to its index.

Hope that helps.

Bruce

No Sure what the problem was with the "by mistake"

Go to Google Webmaster tools and "manually" submit the site for the home page and all links.  This will at least get the ball rolling whilst you investigate the other possible problems once you revist the sitemap etc just to check that it is complete and has not missed off a bunch of pages

Bruce

Try to contact the spammy link sites to get them removed.

But always if in doubt about any link, do your homework and check it out, if still in doubt,disavow.

Bruce

Big Name sites are huge and Moz cannot index every page of these sites.  Often the link is buried deep in the Big Name Site and therefore will not be detected.

Try to build links with sites that have good authority, but are a bit more niche.  Remember that links are not everything.  Google is very keen on quality content too.

Hope this helps

Bruce

Hi Brian

Do a search on here for h1, this was covered in a topic in the last few days.  In essence never miss a tag, or search engines will stop at the gap and will not jump from h1 to h3.  Change H3 to h2, so that  all are sequential. h1. h2. h3 etc

Hope that helps

Bruce

Are you talking about Brands on other Sites or Brands on the same site?

If you have two site sharing links is not bad as reciprocal links gives great customer experience, but if one is for example plumbing hardware and the other for Knitting Machines, then you should ensure that the pages that link the two sites make sense.  So you might share the link on a page called " Our Other Brands" or the like

Just dropping a link on the homepage within the context of that page, unless relevant, is not beneficial to the experience.

Bruce

h tags validate the data on the page.  So in essence each tag should elaborate on the first.

Example:

h1 Knitwear (keyword) for Children

h2: Jumpers and Cardigans (other important keywords)

having more h1s is not ideal, but is not that bad.

What you definately do not want is a tag missing, so for example H1 and H3 but no H2.  Search engines will ignore the H3 as H2 is missing, so they must, if used, run in sequence.

Bruce

I would disavow them also.  Matt Cutts commented on this a while ago and recommended in essence " any doubt" disavow.

Do this via GWT. (edit Added) Google Webmaster Tools

Bruce

No sure why you would not include the street address.  If this is because the business does not have an office or place for customers to visit then they should make this clear elsewhere on their site..in the contact us section or about us section, stating that the address is a Depot only and does not have a customer service department at this location and to call xxxxxxxxxx for sales etc, will help solve this.

Search engines like complete data, therefore if the full address is ambiguous, then the business might be perceived as ambiguous.

Hope this is useful

Bruce

If you can give a bit more info about the site that would help.

Cost Benefit and load time can be subjective depending on the industry and also what load time is for the normal user and how much "Load Time" is the next issue to tackle on your SEO list of things to do.  You might get far more gains in authority by focusing on core weaknesses such as content, social, and link building that you will gain from the cost spend on a dedicated server

Hope that that is useful.

Bruce

Good points.

Following on from recent developments from the Matts Cutts comments about Directories, we get loads of links which could be, might not be really from Directories.  As these are not top links we have removed some, which we can see are not related to our business at all and have removed these, but some are in that grey area, where the directory has good Trust and authority, but the links are somewhat generic.

We have been working on removing links for quite a few a month or so, and we have seen our Global rank drop like a stone, as unlinking is not a good sign from where-ever, so we know this will recover.

The balancing of this debate is how far you go to strip back to pure distilled links and allow a few diluted links.

Without doing a full audit on each one it is hard to know the right answer.

Tick List for you:

Have you got href alternate language links on all the sites, rel canonicals to tell seach engines which is the main site to index.  Have you also verfied both the www and non www version in GWT and also set the prefered sites? Set the target countries in GWT?

If you are not sure about any task, do a search here as there are so many helpful guides from other Moz users about what to do with each task.

Bruce

We have been cleaning up our back office and preparing our .com domain to take all our future traffic and have got into a debate about how far to clean up the old past links.

We have not ever had a penalty on the site as far as we know, but did once get the site taken offline by Google as they thought it was a malware site back in March this year.  They put it straight back up and running in 5 hours, but was very strange as it is an amazon-webstore retail site.

We are not sure why Google thought (edit: typo) this, so just in-case we have been combing through the historical links and now started to disavow any links we cannot get removed manually.  So far just a couple of sites that have no relevance to our retail business.

However, the debate we have been having is around Directory listings: Should we get rid of these too?  Gut reaction is Yes, based on the need for quality relevant links for the end user, but then some are passing proper links to relevant sections of our site albeit in a directory format.  Dmoz comes to mind

Any thoughts?

Bruce.

Have you checked that the competition for these keywords?  When we are at the top it is harder to stay there as everyone else is working on getting to the top too.

It is also worth checking if you have added fresh content to these pages too, as Google knows how often to crawl, so if you are not adding freshness, it might be that your competition are adding regular content and are being crawled more often and therefore are taking some of your ranking places.

In the past few month Google has also rollout out new algorythms so it might also be worth seeing if these reductions are aligned to any of these.  Check the Moz Weather map for specific dates.

Worth checking other competitors pages and also how the whole page is performing with Moz Page Grader.