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Thanks, Yiannis

I definitely see higher rankings and traffic for the sites that have the specific language tag.

Does anyone else have other input to provide?

Greetings,

We have five international sites around the world, two of which are in difference languages. Currently we have the following line of html code on the home page of each of the sites:

Clearly, we need to change the "en" portion for the sites that aren't in English, but, should we include that meta tag in each of the site's pages, or will the home page suffice. Thanks!

Hi All,

I'm wondering what would be the better alternative - schema.org microdata or microformats. I am aware that search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing recognize Schema.org as the standard. Question is, will it have any negative affect? Our web developer here says that schema.org microdata may result in negative html. I don't think that it will affect our SEO, but I guess that's also something to shed some light on.

So, what's the consensus here - should we implement schema.org or go with microformats - or, does it really make any difference?

Hi All,

I am in process of doing and SEO overhaul for our five global sites in:

US, UK, Canada, Sweden, France

I'd like to track hundreds of keywords and rankings per site - I'm talking at least 300-400 keywords each site. Each site has its own country domain with both www and www2 domains.

So, I need a keyword tool that will let me track massive amounts of keywords. I know that the Moz Pro tool helps, but we only have 350 keywords on this account. I think on this. Any suggestions on something reliable that will provide good data? I'm sure I can get some budget to purchase something, but I also can't spend too too much money. I'm not looking for a massive analytics package. Right now, I'm concerned mainly with our keyword rankings

Thanks in advance!

Yup, absolutely playing a role. We are ranking on page 1 on various local keywords in one city, and completely invisible on the same keyword in another city. Basically, it seems that the more local you can custom your page - especially for a local business - the better off you are.

Say you are a golf course in washington dc and you optimize your pace for that keyword. Someone who types in "golf course" only and happens to be in the Washington DC area is more likely to see your page even though the user didn't specify the "washington dc" location in the search query.

The takeaway - localize when you can and make sure all the major directories know where you are!

Trenton, thanks for the quick reply. We actually did try that suggestion with little success. I'd assume it didn't work out because of all the locations. There was no "honed" location specific content, which spurred the test I launched initially and is now showing results. Also, the pages are dynamic, meaning that content is always going to change as the courses pass in date. So, that does make it somewhat unique in and of itself.

I think I will launch the standardized, generated content but I will watch it closely. I'll certainly not just flood the web with all of our pages at once - maybe put them on our site 20-50 a month and see how that goes. This is a long term strategy, so the patience will be worth it.

Thanks for your help. Everyone's input has really helped here. It's definitely a sticky topic. I'll try to update you all on how it goes after a few months.

Definitely not trying to game Google. We offer classes all around the country at different schedules and times. However, if a student would like to take a class that is offered in New York but lives in, say Atlanta, they have the option of taking the New York class by going to a local center that broadcasts the class live, online as if they are in the actual classroom with the ability to interact with the instructor and students via our patented technology. Thus, the schedules for our courses are all basically the same because students can take them from almost anywhere. This is where the content comes into play.

Say someone is searching for "sharepoint training in new york," they'd be taken to a custom page for all of our SharePoint course trainings in the New York area for the next couple of months. The page will have location specific content. Now, if someone searches for "sharepoint training washington dc," they'd be taken to a custom page for all of our SharePoint courses in DC. However, the schedule would be the same as the one seen for NY, simply because of the student's option to take a course locally even if the course is offered somewhere else - that's the only "duplicate content" I'm worried about, even though each page does have location specific content for each topic area. Hopefully that all makes sense.

My objective is to really let a user know we have courses they're looking for in the areas we are located. It's not like we're creating pages for Houston, for example, even though a student could technically take a course from Houston, we simply are not located there.

Hi All,

I'll premise this by saying that we like to engage in as much white hat SEO as possible. I'm certainly not asking for any shady advice, but we have a lot of local pages to optimize :).

So, we are an IT and management training course provider. We have 34 locations across the US and each of our 34 locations offers the same courses. Each of our locations has its own page on our website. However, in order to really hone the local SEO game by course topic area and city, we are creating dynamic custom pages that list our course offerings/dates for each individual topic and city. Right now, our pages are dynamic and being crawled and ranking well within Google. We conducted a very small scale test on this in our Washington Dc and New York areas with our SharePoint course offerings and it was a great success. We are ranking well on "sharepoint training in new york/dc" etc for two custom pages.

So, with 34 locations across the states and 21 course topic areas, that's well over 700 pages of content to maintain - A LOT more than just the two we tested. Our engineers have offered to create a standard title tag, meta description, h1, h2, etc, but with some varying components. This is from our engineer specifically:

"Regarding pages with the specific topic areas, do you have a specific format for the Meta Description and the Custom Paragraph? Since these are dynamic pages, it would work better and be a lot easier to maintain if we could standardize a format that all the pages would use for the Meta and Paragraph. For example, if we made the Paragraph:

“Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area.” As a note, other content such as directions and course dates will always vary from city to city so content won't be the same everywhere, just slightly the same.

It works better this way because HTFU is actually a single page, and we are just passing the venue code to the page to dynamically build the page based on that venue code. So they aren’t technically individual pages, although they seem like that on the web. If we don’t standardize the text, then someone will have to maintain custom text for all active venue codes for all cities for all topics. So you could be talking about over a thousand records to maintain depending on what you want customized.

Another option is to have several standardized paragraphs, such as:

“Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area. Followed by other content specific to the location
“Find your [Topic Area] training course in [City, State] with ease.” Followed by other content specific to the location

Then we could randomize what is displayed. The key is to have a standardized format so additional work doesn’t have to be done to maintain custom formats/text for individual pages.

So, mozzers, my question to you all is, can we standardize with slight variations specific to that location and topic area w/o getting getting dinged for spam or duplicate content. Often times I ask myself "if Matt Cutts was standing here, would he approve?" For this, I am leaning towards "yes," but I always need a gut check.

Sorry for the long message. Hopefully someone can help. Thank you!

Pedram

Thanks, Rob. I'll certainly check this out as soon as I can. I'll have to get on the Bing side of things too!

Yes I have to agree. My Adwords advisor told me similar things. Basically he said "we're working on it" and that "I'm not the only one with the complaints. Sad if you ask me. So much data has been lost and it's really hard to get new ideas.

Rob, the old Google keyword tool seems to have been removed from all of my accounts that I manage. There is no more "go back" button as of this morning. It sucks really.

Along these lines, can anyone suggest new keyword research tools to use? Rob, I've never used Bing or Jaxxy - what's your opinion on those?

...This is a general discussion.

It's certainly possible. We have a pretty strong DA and our site was ranked on page 1 for a location based term after linking only from the HTML sitemap and also including it in our XML sitemap.

I suggest doing both as well. Miki is right too, though. Linking to it in multiple places helps a bunch.

Good luck!

Oh and more thing. Our individual locations in fact DO make contact with our customers and DO have individual phone numbers. I mention the 1-800 customer service number just because our clients typically call there anyway. But, if it's best to list individual business number AND I can still manage the profiles myself here at corporate, then I think we're golden, right?

Thank you, Miriam and Thank you CleverPhD! Both great answers and very informative.

Next question - should I worry about Google+ Local for business? We have a Google+ business page as is that I've linked to our corporate location via that page (waiting for a postcard in a week). Our Google+ page is for our corporate presence. We don't want to create individual Google+ pages if possible, which is why I am thinking Google Places Local is better for us - and for SEO. Agreed? Thoughts?

Thanks again!

Hi Folks,

I am trying to figure out the best way to get our company's 38 U.S. locations in the major local directories. To start, I'd like to get us listed in the major ones: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yelp. I do have the resources myself here on staff to do everything manually. So, I don't necessarily need a service like Yext (but would also like any opinions on that offering if anyone can offer it).

But, from what I know in the past, every time you try to claim a local listing within each platform, you have to confirm your existence there somehow - whether it be by a mailed postcard or some sort of automated call they give you. Considering that we want to manage all social and local platforms here at corporate, how can we do this? I am not physically at these locations, but I'm sure this is possible to manage everything through one account. The addresses will be local, but the phone numbers on each local profile will route to our customer service here at corporate because the local locations are mostly administrative. In other words, businesses is booked through corporate and carried out at local destinations.

Thoughts/Comments?
I want to do what's best for SEO and also dont' want to harm anything or our link equity.

Thanks,
Pedram

Hi All,

Does anyone have any experience using Yext? We have 36 locations across the US and I think it would be great to get our local listings knocked out efficiently. Can anyone provide information on the directories they list you in (perhaps Google places listings, for example)? Also, can anyone provide feedback as to whether or not there is any harm with blasting so many directories at once? I don't want to do anything that might harm our SEO rankings or provide low quality links.

Thanks in advance!

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the reply. I'm out of the country right now, so reply might be somewhat slow.

Yes, we have links to the pages on our sitemaps and I have done fetch requests. I did a check now and it seems that the niched "New York" page is being crawled now. Might have been a time issue as you suggested. But, our DC page still isn't being crawled. I'll check up on it periodically and see the progress. I really appreciate your suggestions - it's already helping. Thank you!

You're certainly on the right track. Starting from scratch is always a fun thing (if you're an SEO nerd like I am). You can set rules and goals in place from the get go and make sure best practices are followed as fresh content is always delivered and updated.

Content and user experience certainly are a big big plus. Make sure to do some good keyword research and tastefully integrate them within your content. Install a good analytics package and monitor user engagement. Social media definitely is another great outlet - make sure to use it effectively, especially Google+. I've seen some pages rank higher just by sharing on G+ (of course there are a lot of other factors, but this is just a correlation, not causation). Even if a lot of people don't use it, it's important to have a presence.

Dont' build crappy links. As you said, stick with quality over quantity - always. The more natural your content and the more quality it is, the more it will get shared and the more it will get linked to.

In short, you're on the right track

Hi Mike,

As a follow up, I forwarded your suggestions to our Webmasters. The adjusted the robots.txt and now reads this, which I think still might cause issues and am not 100% sure why this is:

User-agent: *
Allow: /htfu/
Disallow: /htfu/app_data/
Disallow: /htfu/bin/
Disallow: /htfu/PrecompiledApp.config
Disallow: /htfu/web.config
Disallow: /

Now, this page is being indexed: http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/uswd74/alexandria/it-and-management-training

But, a more niched page still isn't being indexed:  http://www2.learningtree.com/htfu/usny27/new-york/sharepoint-training

Suggestions?

Thanks, Mike. That was incredibly helpful. See, I did click the link on the SERP when I did the "site" search on Google, but I was thinking it was a mistake. Are you able to see the disallow robot on the source code?