Questions
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Multiple redirects for GA tracking
Why not add utm parameters (Google URL Builder tool) to the redirect URL? These will get passed over to the new domain and you can then take a look at the Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns report in Google Analytics.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ThriveIdeas0 -
Local Search and Moz Local Question
I agree with what you have above, but with the recommendation to funnel everything you can to the website and emphasize the drop off locations. I'd even feature a cool interactive map on the front page of the site. Whatever you do, get rid of the P.O. box!!!
Moz Local | | gowebsol0 -
Future address change and local search
Hi C2G, While each directory has its own rules, Google is quite clear about their stance on this, in the Google Places Quality Guidelines: Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public are not eligible for a listing on Google Places So, at the very least, until your client has moved, you cannot update his Google+ Local page. I will add to this that, because you should never publish anything but the current NAP (name, address, phone) of a business on a website or its citations (for fear of clouding the record and harming current rankings) you probably should not do advance work on this of any kind. Instead, this would be a good time to be sure you've created a spreadsheet of all of the client's current citations, so that as soon as the move is official, you're working off an organized document doing his citation editing. And, if it's in your job description to do so, the coming months would also be a good time to come up with the content you'll be publishing once the move happens. This could include both editing of current content, including on-page SEO, and the development of new content announcing the move. So, in my opinion, the next 3 months will be a good time for organizing and planning, but the actual 'doing' should wait until the move actually happens. Hope this helps!
Search Engine Trends | | MiriamEllis0 -
Starting keyword research without a direct competitor to analyze
If you go down the adwords route, checkout Google Grants (free advertising for non-profits).
International Issues | | KevinBudzynski0 -
WordPress redesign: using posts as pages?
Thanks for sharing. I've always built using pages as well, and the pages as posts idea was presented to me as, I guess, just a way to keep the webmaster in one place when in the dashboard. By webmaster, I mean basically a word processor. It actually sounds more confusing now, especially the idea of them forgetting to tag something as a page and having to search through hundreds of posts a few years from now. Good reasoning, and I think I'll stick to the traditional architecture.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c2g0 -
For URLS, better to use folders or long file names?
Re: the rewrite, I may have misunderstood; I was suggesting that if you were planning to rewrite the URL of newfile.php to look like originalfile.html, then a redirect would have been easier for the overall management of the site. You can also enable .html files to use php includes: http://www.ntchosting.com/php/php-in-html.html Yeah - law firm SEO can be a bit dirty. Still, with an industry that requires high trust from clients, the spammy urls just aren't worth it to me - I think the conversion cost is higher than many people would estimate. Regarding using absolute in a test environment, it's rarely an issue for me on small biz sites so I paste the IP instead of the live domain on a page by page basis. Yoast wrote a good article last month regarding the troubles with relative url paths: http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/
Web Design | | KaneJamison0 -
H1 image replacement question
Yeah, and we have no idea what's at play. I mean, if we look around the net and see who is abusing with CSS hiding and who isn't my guess is that 95% of people abuse it...and if I'm Google I'm going to go ahead and put it an automatic point deduction somehow based on how many of those I see, then hope that people who manually rate these sites 'undo' the auto deduction. At least, that's what would make the most sense. I wouldn't risk it, but that's just me. I'm sure the alt tag in the h1 would do just fine and doesn't 'hide' anything...Although...you could certainly abuse that as well since it's mostly hidden, lol. Just use a flippin google fonts or a cufon font replacement and make it as close to what you want as possible. The less images the better! My competitor could easily make their h1 image into text and it would probably look even better than the image they use.
Web Design | | jgower0 -
New site setup questions
Thanks for the clarification, C2G, I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A. Speaking from a purely Local perspective, yes, the job ahead of you for the separate insurance business will be to build a good website with strong geographic hooks in it, following basic local optimization best practices. You will want to linkbuild to the site. Off the site, you will want to claim any existent profiles, make sure there are no violations on any of them, check for duplicates and other problems and fill in the blanks where there are not currently listings but should be. In my opinion, the absolute easiest tasks are for brand new businesses with no Internet presence at all, because you are starting from scratch and have total control over getting things done right the first time around. I find it a little more challenging doing the sleuthing for an existent business in order to turn up all records that pre-exist for their business to verify their correctness, but this is certainly not impossible. Regarding reserving the domain name...it has long been considered a good trust signal with SEs to purchase a domain name for at least a few years at a time. Insurance is a dog eat dog world...you want to encourage the client to do all he can to appear trustworthy.
Affiliate Marketing | | MiriamEllis0 -
Yahoo Directory - Which Category?
If you're competing on a local basis and not looking to rise up the serps for a general keyword then you may see some traffic from people searching the Yahoo directory for a local listing, so therefore, probably go regional. If you're targetting specfic keywords and hoping this will boost your ranking, then I would probably opt for the generic category. You can also request for the site to be placed in up to 2 categories after submission here; http://add.yahoo.com/fast/change/ So, once you're in, submit the request to the category you didn't pick as well
Link Building | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Internal links not showing in Open Site Explorer
good to here, I did not know that, i guess they just dont have the processing power to dig that deep, unlike Bing and Google
Moz Tools | | AlanMosley0 -
Siloing and navigation menu linking
I would suggest the expanded menu as a static menu bar on all of your pages, but at least the top level pages. The homepage is by far the most important for the reasons stated above- it looks like your deeper pages are getting indexed, so that's not an issue. Then it looks like it's time to start link-building!
Web Design | | RDK0