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Sam,
As Andy mentioned, depending on the size of the site you may want to consider only adding certain pages to the sitemap. With that being said I would suggest using Screaming Frog to develop your sitemap. This is my favorite tool for creating a sitemap, it's quick, easy, and thorough.
Hope this helps.
Chris
Finding a high quality content writer can be difficult, but it's important to find the perfect fit. I would recommend staying away from Fiverr for content, you can find other skills from the site, but I would recommend hiring a well-known writer.
It depends if you want them to work in house, but usually you can find a decent writer on Craigslist, just make sure they provide examples of their work. Another example would be using LinkedIN, the quality of writer you receive from these two sites will be much higher than Fiverr.
Basically your only option is to move the blog from the sub-domain to a sub-folder on your main site and setup 301 redirects to forward the traffic to the new addresses. Let me know if you have any other questions for getting this to work.
As Gaston mentioned, SEO is a long process that won't happen over night. You'll need to develop a well planned out campaign that you can track and monitor. Here are a few steps to get you started, you can get more information on each one with some of the guides mentioned above.
These steps are vague, however once you get a better understanding of SEO these will make more sense. Continue to move the graph in an upward trend. Review what your competition is doing and see what works for them.
Good Luck!
Chris
Bob,
There's lots of options for you to write about, however, many of the topics have already been covered. What would be unique is to offer some case studies. Use some of your experiences to share what type of work you do and the results you get. This can help people relate to the problems they are having.
Hope this helps.
Chris
Hello,
It won't have any negative effects on your site, I would suggest calling it a different section. For instance, you could have Blog, Expert Opinions, Breaking News, etc.
Going forward I would suggest making sure the URLs are set to what you would like, it will save time in the future.
What platform is this company using? You could integrate a Wordpress blog and create your own URLs through WP. It sounds strange that this company cannot create unique URLs.
Hope this helps.
Nick
You're welcome. The canonical tag is used to prevent duplicate content concerns. Your traffic reporting is still going to register traffic at the sub-domain page visit.
Hello,
Is everything on your site properly optimized? For instance, is your site speed scoring well? Often people will leave a site if the page is loading too slow. Research shows it's often after 2 seconds.
Are your landing pages associated with the terms or queries that are bringing users to the site? People will often bounce from a page if it's not related to what they searched. However, it often takes more than a second to realize the page you're on is not related to the search though.
Where's this traffic coming from? Search, direct, social media? If it's direct and only a second, then a bounce, that would strike me as spammy.
Hope this helps.
Chris Hickman - Adficient
Ruben,
In my experience posting to directories does not have any negative influence on a site. Keep in mind the quality of the directory does matter. It is beneficial to have a site listed on particular directories. However, if you're going to spend the time building visibility of a site, there's better ways to spend your time.
Another idea would be to create business profiles for the site. These are opportunities to create a profile with a phone number, URL, and a description of the site or business where keywords can be used. Again certain sites are better than others, so choose wisely.
If you would like more information on this please let me know.
Hello,
A simple canonical tag would be sufficient. You can keep the content the same and not have to take the time to re-write the article.
Chris Hickman
Hello, there are a few options you can consider. First, you can consider getting a dedicated or semi-dedicated server so that you are not sharing resources with dozens of other websites. Second, as already mentioned a CDN such as CloudFlare is highly recommended.
Also, you can read some insight from CloudFlare about TTFB in that it is not entirely an important metric on it's own. You can enable gzip compression which will make your site load faster overall, but this may increase your TTFB.
Depending on your Joomla theme, there may be caching solutions available which can greatly benefit the load times. I think you might be using Rocket Theme so check out RokBooster extension.
Your site has 11 external JavaScripts. You should look into minifying and combining them to 1 file if possible.
I hope these recommendations help. Good luck speeding up your site.
The reason for the -2 added to the category permalink is because you have a duplicate name. Even if this category is in the trash it will cause the -2 to be added if a new category is made. Delete any duplicate names in the trash to fix this.
I would recommend using the shorter category "womens" and if possible shorten the "product-category" slug so that your keywords have a chance to appear in bold the search listing preview.
Usually your product category links and breadcrumbs will update automatically when the permalink is changed. If you have placed manual links to these categories you may want to consider adding 301 redirects to the updated URLs.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your updates.
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Hello, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like your website has been hacked or compromised. I've done some Google searches and one of the first items found was one of your portfolio items which has a redirect to a deceptive site. The portfolio item in question is titled "Callidus Consulting."
The hacker has likely redirected or altered some of your content without your knowledge and it has caused your listing titles and descriptions to be thrown off.
I recommend you do a full security audit and clean up. To start, install the Sucuri plugin to scan, lock down and harden your site against future hacking attempts.
Also, you should consider redirecting https to http because these URLs are indexed. Setup temporary redirects to your homepage for the broken URLs that are indexed so that you don't lose any traffic. Best of luck.
Hello, because you are using a country code domain name and not a generic domain name for your second site it should not be as big of a problem. Google does have some guidelines for international sites and duplicate content. They say that you should try to have unique content for the specific country.
I recommend you consider doing this for your high priority pages and make them have unique titles and copy. Then you would want to use a rel="canonical" tag to all other pages that directs to the .com site.
If your goal is to get the com.au website ranked on Google Australia then you will want to make it as unique as possible from your primary site.
Hope this helps. Best of luck.
Can you please provide the actual URLs or replace the domain with X's but keep the structure.
The structure of the URLs in your examples are not valid addresses so it's confusing. Thanks.
Emily,
If you have it created and it has followers, then I would suggest keeping it active. Once you publish an article or content on your site, or external sites, then share it on your Google+ page. It only takes a few minutes to post to it, and you may see a few visitors coming in from this source. If the content is compelling this can help the SEO, if people see it, share it, link to it, click to additional pages on the site, etc. If posting to Google+ is taking up too much time, I would suggest reviewing your social media campaigns.
Hope this is helpful.
Chris
Hello,
There's an number of reasons of why a site may outrank another site. With a quick comparison it does appear your site is better in a few areas. There are some pretty typical SEO changes I would make to increase the site's ranking.
These are just a few points, I would suggest a complete site audit to see where else you are missing opportunities. If you would like some additional information feel free to contact us.
Chris
Thank you for clarifying. Nice looking website. This is a pretty common issue. If you plan on creating content in the near future on that page you can do a 302 temporary redirect to your page "How Fundraising Works" this would be the most relevant page, not your homepage.
It's never good to leave a blank page on it's own.
Also, I'm noticing a few other minor issues such as double backslash in your footer links and "Hello World" blog post is published. This can be a target for spammers and hackers.
Hope this helps answer your question.
Hi Myles,
Good question. The short answer is that it is not necessary for SEO if you have pages linked elsewhere (such as your menu and category pages), but it can be beneficial. The reason it can be good for SEO is to cover all the bases and make sure that even your least important posts and pages get some internal links to them and get crawled.
It can be a great resource for users to find things on your site. The main purpose of these pages is for users.
If your sitemap is going to be very massive I would consider using other navigation menus, sub-navigation menus or categories instead. Otherwise go ahead and add one.
Matt Cutts of Google has previously said that an HTML sitemap can be more beneficial than XML sitemaps for indexing. Both are recommended. Hope this helps and best of luck with your SEO efforts.