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Basically you are not going to rank this page or either term as it's not your page to rank. Or is this just an unsubtle backlink on an SEO forum to get interest in your app?

Hi Iris

The text you choose for anchor texts is really dependent on where the link is going to appear. The rule of thumb should be to make the link read naturally for the person reading the text. You are right to be wary of repeatedly using the word 'Kenya' in your anchor text links, but that doesn't mean you cannot use it at all.

So, for example, if you had text saying something like, "Kenya is a beautiful place to visit. Our website has the best all-inclusive accommodation you can find...", the link could naturally appear in the phrase "all-inclusive accommodation" or "best all-inclusive accommodation".

But if your text said something like, "Look at our Kenya all-inclusive accommodation pages..." then you could more naturally have "Kenya all-inclusive accommodation" as the link.

So keep it natural and make it balanced.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Iris

Yes, I recommend you do exactly that.

IMHO, tag links are useful for someone browsing your site to help them find categories of pages which suit what they are looking for. But tag links are generally not so good for search engines as they auto generate pages which you have no or limited SEO control over.

Peter

Hi Lesley

It would be good to hear from others on this, but I think that footer backlinks like these to the developer's site are largely ignored by Google these days in terms of passing SEO value.

For many web developers, adding a link like that has been a sort of credit to them, rather like have a credit at the end of a film. It's what web developers have done and many still do. I haven't heard of any web developer's sites being slapped by having multiple backlinks like this, so maybe Google does see it that way.

Peter

Hi Aron

Historically, every word has counted, so any extra "connecting" type words were discouraged by SEOers, but I don't think these days that the main search engines care so much, especially with a shorter phrase as in your example.

Peter

Hi Scott

I think it depends on the size of the brand and site of the company that provides the franchise. I was speaking to a client today who runs a franchise locally and they are stuck, as a franchisee, with having to have a page on the company site. But if you search for the brand (which is quite well known) then you will see the pages that are relevant locally.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Scott

Yes, with duplicate Title and Meta Descriptions it is not going to help you SEO, but it doesn't sound a very helpful response from the web developer. Neither does it sound like a very helpful CMS that makes it difficult to update these tags.

The thing is, if these tags are being stored in an XML file, then someone must have put them in there, so there should be nothing to stop them being updated. Maybe, they are being protective towards "their" site and making it more difficult than it really is. Perhaps you can ask them that if you sent them the set of tags for each page in a text file, please could they update them?

I hope that helps. Good luck with sorting it out.

Peter

Hi Dave

I really don't think the optimisation of Title tags post-Hummingbird changes very much if any at all.

Google continue to use the Title tag (up to about 70 characters) as the link in SERPs and the Title tag is still an important factor for telling both human and search engine visitors what the page is about.

Apart from, perhaps, blog posts, where you might have a longer-tail title that reflects the subject of the post, e.g. "How Google is Changing Long-Tail Search with Efforts Like Hummingbird", a Title tag can be optimised in much the same way as before.

The importance with Hummingbird is focused on Google providing a more intelligent understanding of search requests which might be for a long-tail search request, but the intent of the user's search can still be boiled down to less words.

I recommend reading Ammon Johns recent blog post, "Hummingbird – The Opposite of Long-Tail Search" in which he talks about someone, sat in Denver on his mobile phone searching “Where’s a good place where I can get a pizza?”.

Google's analysis of that search is that they can work out the person is sat in Denver and it will work out that the connection between the words "place" and "pizza" means a restaurant. The short tail result for the intent of that search can be summed up in a Title tag of "Denver Pizza Restaurant".

So you could still use a short Title tag like that and it would work, as long as, of course, other on-page and off-page elements supported the relevancy of the page for the search as did the rest of the website.

Another great blog post recently was Gianluca Fiorelli's "Hummingbird Unleashed". In it he wrote one sentence which I found very helpful for understanding SEO for Hummingbird:

"We should stop focusing only on keyword optimization and start thinking about topical optimization."

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Charles

This may be something you have used in the past as well, but not mentioned in what you said. Have you created a Google Places/Local page for the business to sidecar off of their local website and web pages? Have you checked out https://getlisted.org/ ?

Additionally, Rand's Whiteboard Friday on Local citations may help you. See here...

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi Waqid

This is a tricky one I think because the general consensus is that the best place to have a blog for SEO is at yourdomain.com/blog, i.e. a sub-folder on your website (and not preferably blog.yourdomain.com).

But if you already have an external blog running, then that raises the question how can you move it and move all of your link equity, making sure that everything is 301 redirected at the old blog location to the your website?

Wordpress do offer a guided transfer service which you can read more about here. In addition, they can provide a site redirect option - details here, but I am not sure if that gives you 301 redirects or not. Perhaps someone could confirm on that. The thing is, even if it does, then you will lose some link equity with 301 redirects - probably around 5-10% on average.

So, I guess the decision needs to be based on how many blog articles there are to move and how many point back to your client's domain. If not many, then I would just move them, but if a lot, it may be best to leave them.

Going forward however, I would recommend that you do set up a blog for them on their site so that all new blogging is in what I believe will be the best place for it.

I hope that helps,
Peter

I would say that for the latter part of the Title it is better to have the actual name of the company than "Commercial Estate Agents" on every page. Apart from that is on the home page where the format could be "Name of company | Commercial Estate Agents".

That way you are reinforcing the company name/brand which is reasonable whereas I think repeating "Commercial Estate Agents" is a little spammy and IMHO you don't need to keep using it as the clear message of the site and the pages it has should give the understanding that the site if for a commercial estate agent.

On your other question, I would say:

Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Company Name

is better than

Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Help find the perfect premise

The latter says what the page is about, presumably "commercial property tips", but the second part is just extra words that I assume are saying the same thing, apart from the first part is more focussed on Birmingham.

That's not to say you couldn't use the latter in the page Description tag which could read something like "Company Name will help you find the perfect commercial premises in Birmingham". At the start of the the page itself I would also say something similar.

Peter

Hi, no problem. Keri has answered your query re the Moz crawler not finding them.

Peter

Just as Kevin said! [thumbs up]

Peter

Hi, I don't think it is true to say that as a result of Hummingbird that Title tags are are the main selling point in SERPs, but certainly having lots of keywords in your Title will not be helpful to you.

The longer the Title tag, the less SEO value each word has, but that doesn't mean you should always aim for a very short Title tag either. The most important words need to be near the start of the Title and most of all - and this it true pre-Hummingbird as well - the Title should be a good summary of what the page is about.

Think about the Title tag as the title of a page or chapter in a book. It needs to be succinct but descriptive enough to be understood (by both a person and the search engine) and it needs to be unique.

The Title examples you have given look reasonable and well targeted I would say.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Hi, if you put site:xxx.com into Google where xxx.com is your client's domain name, does Google report anything?

Peter

Hi Silviu

It is as Ari said - source URL is relative and destination URL is absolute.

Peter

Hi Letty

I don't think there is anything wrong with it, but if you are already committed to using Google+ and including authorship on your site's pages which is linked to your Google+ profile, then I don't think you need it. I would use Google+ instead.

I hope that helps,
Peter

Thanks everyone for your feedback. Much appreciated. Glad I am not the only one who doubts the value of this tactic,

Peter

Hi, I suggest putting your site into the Open Site Explorer and looking at the Page Authority and Domain Authority of the links.

These two metrics are Moz's measurement of authority which you can find out more about via the links here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority and http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority. They will give you a good idea.

Just a word on the Disavow tool. Be cautious in the way you use it and maybe check out this blog post: Disavowed: Secrets of Google's Most Mysterious Tool before you do anything further.

I hope that helps,
Peter

 

Hi Josh

Without knowing the URL that you are specifically researching it's difficult to be sure, but I understand if you don't want to share that.

On the Open Site Explorer itself, what do you see if you click the Linking Domains tab?

If I put my site's domain in I see a list of the linking domains with a + symbol alongside each one. If I click that link, then it shows a link to each page on that linking domain that links to my site.

There is also a filter on this tab above the list of links which allows you to Shown Domains with links to: this page, pages on this sub-domain or pages on this root domain. Selecting on any of these and clicking the Filter button will show different pages of results.

I hope that helps,
Peter