Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Has anyone had any delays on Google+ reviews to show up? We have multiple clients who have not received a new review in over two months. These are good accounts with good Zagat scores with 15+ good reviews from real customers. Our clients have asked their clients and have confirmed that there has been reviews left recently. However no new reviews have shown up in the past 60+ days.

One thing to keep in mind is you have no idea what the majority of users intentions are while searching a more generic "wall decals"(ignore this comment if you have looked that far into your conversion funnel), are they just looking for ideas? brands? do they even know what they are looking for? or are they ready to purchase? I would immagine that someone searching for "wall decals for nursery" would have a higher purchase intent than just "wall decals".

First thing I would do is test with PPC and track your conversion rates for different terms. You may find out that you convert more for the long tail terms over the main terms - or vise versa. Then build my keyword strategy off of that.

Depending on your budget or resources that may not be an option. Personally I would rather be dominating 10 search results for lower traffic keywords that I know will convert than 1 higher traffic keyword that is hit or miss. But it's also always great to get both of those options of course I would optimize your home page for "wall decals", and optimize any sub pages/landing pages/blog posts or any other controlled inbound sources for the long tail opportunities.

Pull up Google and do not hit enter. There are a ton of long-tail keywords that your customers are searching for. At first glance the competition are all sites like yours also, not amazon, target or etsy.

I typed in "wall decals for" just to see what the auto suggest came up with(see attached image). Just those 4 suggested terms come back with 7780 exact monthly searches in Google's keyword tool and I havent even scratched the surface yet on suggested terms.

Hope that helped!

ZoodB.jpg

I think what your programmer meant to say is "It's easier to apply SSL to the entire site". For most instances on a new or existing site, I would recommend just adding it to the checkout page.

There are some great responses on the SEO aspect of your project already from Keri and Matt. As far as building the site, I would build it off of WordPress and use a custom post type for "Recipes", and custom taxonomies for "ingredients" and "type" etc... Then you can use the default WP search function and taxonomy lists for users to easily search for the right recipe.

Wow... I'm sure there will be little benefit if any for SEO with these. I personally can't stand these new domains!

You will not be penalized for using the word "free" in your metadata. Just make sure you have something free to offer and your description is not mis-leading.

How many links are in your footer? If there are 30+ I would try trimming it down a bit, anything less you should be fine. But ask yourself this: Is every footer link you have benefitting the user of the website? If not, get rid of them. If you are using your footer links as an SEO tactic, you should probably take a step back and re-think your strategy.

Footer links in my opinion are perfectly fine when used in moderation and they provide value to the user.

What content is included in the modal windows? It sounds like it's just maybe short snippets and some form fields to login or signup? If that is the case you don't have anything to worry about. Depending on your site structure you should have plenty of other content on your pages to differentiate "page" content from "misc" content.

We have had good success in the past with journalism students from the local colleges. You can usually find them through Craigslist or contacting the schools directly. One good thing hiring freelancers locally is they are available to come in and meet with us when needed to learn about our clients brands and their needs.

I would highly suggest if you want to outsource your content to go with someone local and trustworthy rather than trying to find someone online through Odesk or other similar sites.

Check out the 2012 Mozcon video from Paddy Moogan, great presentation with actionable takeaways.

There can be pro's and con's for both instances. The biggest pro you can get with a blog hosted on your domain rather than a WordPress.com blog is a cohesive brand image. I would never want my blog readers to leave my main website to read a blog on another domain, most likely they wont come back to your main website.

As far as your WP.com hosted blog beating your main URL in the SERP's, WordPress.com has a very high domain authority that can pass through to your blog and help it out a bit. You can think of that as a pro, but I see it as a con if your blog is outranking your main website.

If you wanted to keep the tag based archives, you could always noindex the tag archives. With WordPress, you can do that with ease with the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. That will solve your problem without needing to delete your tag archives.

What kind of a redirect did you do? Also did you re-direct just the homepage or the whole site? Ideally you will want to individually 301 redirect the old pages to the new pages.

To let Google know they are the same website, you will need to verify both websites with Google webmaster tools. Under "Configuration > Change of address" you can let Google know that your website has moved, this should help.

I'm sure you may be aware that .md domain extension is for Moldova(apparently a country in Europe) which could explain your high ranking on that international Google site.

I would check Google Webmaster Tools under "Configuration > Settings" and make sure the "Target users in:" is set to United States.

You can name the sitemap whatever you want, but yes it should be in .xml format and should be located on your server. Having your sitemap at domain.com/sitemap.xml is a best practice. You can also have it in a xml.gz file for larger sitemaps.

Once it is created submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.

I would recommend steering away from Gigya, I have had nothing but problems with them in the past. Their API is garbage and their support is pretty bad. I've had probably 10 different conference calls with their account managers(employee turnover rate is very high BTW). Their developers are helpful, but sometimes hard to understand being scattered around various countries.

I have never used tags, mainly because I have never seen any point to them. Tags are basically categories, so why not just create a category instead? I understand you can get more specific with tags in some cases.

The main reason I dont use them is because they also make tag-based archive pages, which in most cases look like like your category-based archive pages and blog archive pages, making just another duplicate page for search engines to crawl.

It looks like your current theme is called "Focus", rename that to something different and it will uninstall the theme for you and you will be able to access WP again.

You mentioned you deleted the old theme also, so make sure you have either twenty ten or twenty eleven installed as a fallback theme.

You need to rename your current theme, not the old theme. Once you rename your current theme that will uninstall that theme and revert to the default theme so you can access WordPress again.