Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you

Hi,

Gyorgy has answered your question about the page titles. However, you ask another question about why your site doesn't show in Australian Google: have you checked webmaster tools site settings to make sure your Australian site has Australia as the geographic target?

Good luck,

Amelia

This is a really good question.

I think ALT tags should be used on all images that add information to the user, but not on those that are just there to add a bit of interest to the page (background images etc).

Someone using a screen reader would find it intensely annoying if you just stuff keywords into your alt tags. Don't ever forget the true purpose of alt tags: they are there to help people using screen readers (generally blind and visually impaired people) to 'view' a web page. Not to get additional SEO benefit. Though of course, if you choose relevant images you can 'kill two birds with one stone'!

Hello Cyrus,

I LOVE your blog posts!

The urls are:

https://www.turnkeymortgages.co.uk

and

https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk

Hi,

I tried to add my URLs and descriptions and titles last Friday evening (I didn't have time to post in here). I had the same errors.

What I would like added is:

TurnKey Mortgages

https://www.turnkeymortygages.co.uk

TurnKey Mortgages is a whole of market mortgage broker based in the UK.

---

Commercial Trust

https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk

Commercial Trust is a brokerage specialising in buy to let mortgages, bridging loans and commercial mortgages. We are based in the UK.

---

A note about Commercial Trust - YES I know it's just displaying our holding page but in about a month's time we will move everything from www.turnkeylandlords.co.uk and everything from www.turnkeybridging.co.uk to www.commercialtrust.co.uk along with some brand-spanking-new content about commercial mortgages...

Thanks for all your help,

XX Amelia

Hi,

For some reason when I try and add my site's link in my Moz profile I keep getting an error.

My site an SSL so I used https instead of http. I tried again without the 's' as my domain redirects to the https version, but this didn't work. Then I tried without http or https and this didn't work either.

Why does Moz hate my site? It's actually really good!!!

Thanks,

Amelia

Thank you Keri - I suspected that this was the case. It is good to have it confirmed by you.

Thank you Chris.

I appreciate you taking the time to answer this question for me.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Hi Jstrong,

I have a cousin called J strong! I don't suppose you are the same person, but if you are, Hi James!!!

Thank you for pointing this out, yes it is very important to have a preferred domain set. I'm just about to double-check that I have done it.

Have a great day

Amelia xx

Thank you, you have confirmed my thinking on this. I will choose the https version.

I'm OCD and have verified all versions of my site in webmaster tools... Is this normal? I thought it was better to have and not need than not have and need... if you know what I mean?

Thanks again for responding, it's very kind and helpful of you to do so. I hope you are having a lovely day

Amelia

Hi Mozzers,

I am about to move a load of content from one site to another and switch off the first site. I've got all my 301s mapped and ready to go. My gosh, that's one heck of a piece of work - it better be worth it

I have been looking at Webmaster Tools Change of address. I want to know which site do I choose to change the address to? I have three versions of my site in webmaster tools:

• the ssl version (https)
• the non-ssl version (http)
• No www. in front

My site has a sitewide SSL certificate (company policy - personally, I'd only have it on the parts that need it, but life's too short for some battles...) so should I send everything to the https version? My instinct says the https version but I really can't afford to get this wrong.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Please help!

Thank you,

Amelia xx

Hello Niners,

There's very little control over this... Via webmaster tools you can demote a sitelink, but you can't tell Google which pages to choose. You can also turn the feature off altogether (though WHY someone would want that is beyond me...)

I guess you have control over the hierarchy of your site, so you could influence the sitelinks, but I don't really know how you'd go about doing this....

Best of luck,

Amelia

Hello,

You are better off not getting keyword rich anchors these days. I wouldn't change a thing if I was you. Google isn't happy by this type of link (apparently it's a 'bought' link even though no money has changed hands), so you're better off making sure it looks as natural as possible.

Best wishes,

Amelia

Hello Wardy,

If you are really concerned, you should make the links nofollow. However, I think Robert has got this answered for you!

Best of luck,

Amelia

Edward,

I just had another thought. If you have good photography it would probably be worth starting a Pinterest board for your products and recipes.

Best of luck,

Amelia

It's a pleasure

Hello Edward,

First of all, you've joined the right community! In my experience Mozzers are incredibly friendly and helpful.

I can't give you a complete SEO strategy, but these suggestions may help:

1. Check out your competitor's backlinks. 
   I have no idea about your industry, but you must have competitors. Use the Moz backlink tool (Open site explorer) to see the backlinks your competitors have. This will give you a list of potential sites you can then try and get a link from. In my experience, it's easier to get a link if you actually speak to the site owner so if they display their telephone number then ring it!
2. Blogging
   You already mentioned blog posts. If you have the time to, you should be posting something regularly on your blog. I believe it is better to publish high quality blog posts less frequently (but still on a regular basis) than poor quality ones more frequently. Make sure you write for your human visitors first - the search engine robots have no interest buying your cavier!
3. Online review sites
   There are several independent review sites where your customers can leave a review of your products and services. Although this won't increase your rankings, if the reviews are good it will increase the conversion rate of your site. Some have an agreement with Google, where once a reviewee has 30 positive (I think 4.3 or higher rating) reviews, then the star rating will be displayed in the SERPs. This can increase CTR which means even if you're not in the top spot your listing will stand out and the stars will encourage visitors. We use Trustpilot, but they are quite pricey - the other company we were looking at at the same time was reviews.co.uk who I believe are a little cheaper. You can also use your Google business page to gather reviews but customers have to create a google account if they don't already have one so the take-up may not be as strong.
4. Reach out
   There are about a gazillion foodie blogs out there. I know because I love food and I read them! Why not send some samples to some carefully selected blog owners (pick the most popular) for reviews / tastings? The reviewer will get some free caviar (not to be sniffed at, eh) and you get some tasty links.
5. Reach out some more
   Why not do the same with your favourite national newspaper foodie columnists? They all have online versions of their columns and may provide a link. At the very least they may include your site in their supplier lists which would be nice.
6. Winter Olympics!!!
   You sell caviar, the most luxurious Russian food available. Use the upcoming winter olympics to your advantage (though you will have to be careful about copyright).
7. Start an online recipe book
   This doesn't need much explanation... Make sure to use the rich-snippet recipe mark-up (or the data-highlighter tool in Webmaster Tools) to 'tell' the search engine's that it's a recipe (if you have a picture of the recipe then this will display in the SERPs increasing CTR.)

I hope these help! Do let us know how you get on!

Best wishes,

Amelia

Hi Luke,

I'm interested in other responses to this question...

If I was in your position after seriously berating the dev I would make sure you disallow the dev site in your robots.txt and use webmaster tools to remove the URLs from the index. Then I would password protect the dev site so the search engines couldn't get there even if they try.

Like I say, I'm interested in other responses! This is what I would do, but I don't really know if it's definitely the right thing to do. Does anyone else have anything to add?

Best of luck - its crappy when someone else's error cocks up your work: when our site launched for the first time our IT department screwed up on a monumental scale by getting the DNS settings wrong.

Amelia

Hi Kyle,

I'd be careful. The more your sites look like a link farm the less likely they will list.

If you can't be arsed creating several decent sites, why not just create one excellent one and put all your efforts into that rather than this (dodgy-to-me-sounding) strategy. If you don't mind my saying, I think it's fundamentally flawed and I recommend against it.

Good luck with whatever you end up doing!

Best wishes,

Amelia

Hello Lee,

Are you using Google+ Authorship? If you aren't then I think you should be.

Are you sourcing the sites manually, and maintaining a direct relationship with the site owners (as in you don't go via a 3rd party)? Are you adding value to the sites you guest blog on? If you are doing this things then I would have thought you'd be OK.

I think the slippery slope is when the link matters more than the content, the site it's published on, the audience who read it and something Rand didn't mention: if you paid for it or not. So long as your content is good and it is being published on sites that send you relevant (converting) traffic then it ticks more boxes than just being there for the links. I try and think of all links like this: If Google stopped counting this link, would it still provide value? If it's on a high-traffic site and is relevant to that site's audience then it doesn't matter whether Google gives credit for it or not because it still brings in traffic, hopefully my site does it's job properly and turns that traffic into customers. Because it's customers that make a difference to my business NOT rankings!!

I hope this is helpful.

Best wishes,

Amelia