Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi

I would think that renting a Regus office address is no different to renting office space in any serviced office location.

It will always take a bit of time to establish a new address/location and be able to SEO around it, but name, address, phone number (with the local code prefix) on the site page(s) is an definite requirement.

Provided your client is not going to be there for a short time then I would back that up by growing citations of their office so that all "signposts" so to speak point to their legitimate office location.

Rand Fishkin spoke on this subject in a Whiteboard Friday back in May. You can watch it here: <a title="http://moz.com/blog/discovering-local-citation-opportunities-whiteboard-friday">Discovering Local Citation Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday</a>

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Gavo, yes they will to an extent because some of the link value passed to your home page will be shared through the internal links you have on your home page (e.g. via menu navigation) to other pages on your site.

A word of caution though, which you may already be aware of, to be careful when gathering links to your site that they are from good quality sites with relevance to your site. Directory sites and blogs can be prone to being 'thin' in quality and can, if they themselves are seen as spammy sites, not help your site if you are receiving links from them.

I hope that helps,

Peter

Hi Adnan

To answer you firstly on Hummingbird and SEO Guru's opinion, yes, it's correct in part, but your client should not get caught up with idea that responding to Hummingbird requires a new SEO magic trick. Hummingbird is the evolution of what Google has been doing for quite a while meaning that today SEO is not so much about saying how do I target this or that keyword, but rather how you answer the questions your target customers are asking.

So whilst including keywords or phrases into a page Title tag is still relevant, it's not about top loading pages, but making sure the whole page is targeted which actually could mean, in terms of that page's content, that you are targeting multiple key phrases.

You are right in saying you shouldn't just be repeating one key phrase such as "oak furniture" across all pages. A Title tag is like the title of a page in a book. It tells the visitor and the search engine what that page is about which then of course needs to be backed up by the content on that page. So all pages on a site cannot be just about "oak furniture".

Having said that, it may be that your client's site could do with an SEO makeover and as such that may mean updating some page Titles and consequently the page URLs. If that happens, you will need to use 301 redirects to make sure old page URLs are redirected to the new page URLs.

I hope the above helps,
Peter

Hi, my thoughts on this page is that for me I don't read it as a blog post as it's promotional and not really informational.

You are right to look to write high quality, helpful and useful content. To do that you need to ask what questions would potential customers in your target market being asking.

You are right when you say in the page you linked to "Storage challenges are common to everyone from businesses to consumers.", so consider what hints and tips and good information can you give to help people with those storage challenges.

You cannot just say buy our storage bins, but you could post something like "101 Cool Ways to use a Dividable Grid Container" or maybe share helpful information on the best way to store important documents and the advantages of using a proper container than a cardboard box.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Mariano

Congratulations on landing this job.

I had a browse of the site. One thing that I think would help with regard to the actual property pages is to improve the Title tags on them which, from what I have seen, seem to be automatically populated with the address of the property, but that is all. For example this one:

http://www.aldodavico.com/info/property/residential/A1858022/

It would be better I think if it actually said the type of property that was for sale, i.e. Penthouse and an abbreviated address, e.g. South Beach, Miami and then maybe the Zip code to close so you make sure the Title is unique.

So, with this example the Title could be something like: "Penthouse for sale, South Beach, Miami 33139".

The URLs could be a whole lot better as well... /A1858022 doesn't tell human or search engine anything that may be useful either to click or to rank higher.

I realise though that you may be subject to the limits of the CMS you are using and its automation on Title tags and URLs, but if you could tweak these then it would help you.

All the best,
Peter

Hi Jack

In my opinion it is better to have a URL that reflects your brand than one that doesn't or loses some of the impact of your brand. If your brand is UnlockMy then it makes total sense for you to use unlock.my as your domain.

If you are concerned with people looking for unlockmy.com then you should get that as well and redirect it, but by the look of it someone has already purchased and holds this as a premium domain.

So to answer your question: "Do you think the memorability of the domain outweighs not having a less memorable .COM domain and would this affect people's perception of site trust?"...

I think the memorability of your domain is more important and on people's perception of site trust, I think that is more to do with the presentation of your site then having a .com, and making sure people know where you are trading from etc.

I hope that helps,

Peter

Hi Zulfiqar

Yes, it could rank. Just because a site doesn't have external links it doesn't mean it won't rank. The critical factor is the site content and whether or not that content is relevant and useful to the people looking for that content. If it is Google will list pages from it in their search results.

That said, with a site that has good relevant and useful content it's really a circular thing and without external links (i.e. votes that confer authority), a site can only rank so far.

By that I mean, if a site has good relevant and unique content it will appear in searches and because it has good relevant and unique content, people will share and link to it. That will give more authority to the site and so it will appear higher in search results. If it appears higher in search results, more people will visit and share and link to it and so it goes on...

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi

How many pages are being measured on your site? An average site bounce rate of 36% is good but it is only an average. You really need to look at individual page bounce rates to see where issues may be occurring.

That you say the vast majority of pages are seeing visit duration of 0-10 seconds and page depth of 1 would suggest you may have a small number of high performing pages, but many are under performing.

For a low page count that could correlate to a low average bounce rate, but as I say to really need to measure page performance at a page level rather than a site level.

I hope that helps,
Peter

That's a great illustration Jeff.

Peter

I don't think the Hummingbird update was specifically targeted at to improving Google Instant, but I guess it is likely that will receive an improvement because of Hummingbird. It's not something I have noticed to be honest, but it makes sense that it would.

Peter

Yes I agree with Chris. There are thousands of sites with duplicate page Titles. They would be typically be sites which have not been optimised at all where the company service and company name are duplicated on every page as a default setting.

I doubt whether Google pays attention to that in terms of the site trying to manipulate search results. If anything they are undermining the search performance of their site themselves by making it harder for search engines to understand the focus of each page. That an SEO company advised them to do this is the most surprising.

Peter

Hi

Effective backlinks to a page are essentially votes of approval for that web page. If the pages you are trying to rank have poor/basic content then you are really going to struggle.

Gone are the days when you can just create backlinks all over from anywhere to point to your pages and give your site a boost in the rankings. With Google's latest updates to their algorithms and the advent of Penguin and Panda in the last couple of years, building backlinks from thin sites or to thin sites is not going to work and is likely to get your site penalised.

My advice would be to go back to your clients with citations from SEO experts that underline the issue they will have if they don't improve their sites with good quality content that engages with the people who would be looking for it. I'm sorry to say this, but the reality of this is that if they continue to ignore how SEO works and advice you have given them then they will continue to lose online.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Yes, very odd that an SEO agency should do this.

It's a dumb tactic, but I doubt it would confer a penalty. More like downgrade the quality of the page and cause it to drop but I would be surprised if this alone would be responsible for the site you mention to suffer a dramatic fall in traffic.

If, as you say, the SEO agency was responsible for doing this, then it's likely that the same agency would have also been responsible for other dumb to verging on spammy tactics on this site with the cumulative result being a significant drop.

Peter

Hi, I don't think there is any reason not to and gives further opportunity to 'like you'

Peter

That's a great detailed answer Paul!

Peter

Hi Ron

It looks OK. However, you might find http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ more useful though with details of how to use it here: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/static/about-browser-size.html

Google said it was going to be retired in June last year but it's still going, probably because people do find it useful.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Then I think you will see a recovery and possible improvement, but check through Paul's suggestions.

Peter

Hi Jason

Are you able to give more information? What do you mean specifically by your "site not progressing at all"?

A lot has changed with Google over the last year. If you started with a new site, then that site needs to build up its authority. When you say you have focussed on producing good content and social that is good. But it's important to check if you have optimised that content correctly, is it customer-focused and targeted at the questions and information your target market are asking and looking for. With social are those you are engaging with sharing it through likes, tweets/retweets, +1s etc? Have you checked your site against competitors? How do they compare?

There's a lot of things to look at and check so with what you have said I can only give you ideas about where the issues may lay, but it's likely to be an issue with one or more of the above.

Peter

Hi Luke

You don't need to as essentially the 301 redirects you put in place will address that. So, for example, where you have had duplicate content pages you can redirect both old pages to one new page on the new site.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi esiow

You have a choice of placing a robots.txt file in the root folder of your website or if blocking individual pages you could use the meta robots tag. See these page for more information: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt and https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag?csw=1

I hope that helps,

Peter