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Hi Alex, I am sorry to hear about this. What a mess, no? If it were me, I wouldn't rely solely on the canonical tag. I would also create a spreadsheet and map all the old URLs to the new URLs and set up 301 redirects from the old to the new. 2,000 isn't too bad. You can probably knock them out in 2-3 days...but be sure to test all of the 301s and make sure they are performing the way you expect them to. Hope that helps a little!
Hi Theresa, First let me say, welcome to the best SEO community in the world. There are so many ways to build backlinks, that yes, if you read all the posts here, it will make your head spin. So, let me give you a link to the Mother of all link-building blog posts. I have this bookmarked and every time I feel "stuck" I go right back to it because I always find some new idea every time I read it.
http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
I guarantee you, you'll bookmark this and go back to it over and over andover and still never exhaust all the possibilities. Hands down, the best, most complete list of strategies ever. Now, I'm not saying there isn't stuff missing off this list. I'm just saying, if you completely exhaust this list, you're going to have one kick ass link profile!!!
Hint - Investigate Tynt.com first....a fascinating link-building tool. Free. Easy to use. Yes, it's on the list.
Hope this helps!
Dana
Understood Alex. Yes, of course you would have to rebuild the pages first before you can 301, but it sounds like you are planning on rebuilding them (otherwise you wouldn't be able to use canonical tags either, because there wouldn't be a page to put them on).
I wouldn't just give up and ask Google to remove all of the old URLs. I agree with what Mike has to say about that below. A 302 is a good option if you are worried about the 404s sitting in the index while you are rebuilding your product pages. If you are still on the same platform (it sounds like that didn't change), I would suggest rebuilding as many of the old URLs as you can (if they were good SEO-friendly URLs). That way you could bypass the 301 redirect. If you want to create your pages so that product options are rolled in and separate colors of things no longer need separate pages, you can then choose whether to 301 redirect those old URLs or simply let them 404.
404s aren't necessarily always a bad thing. Regarding the 2,000 of them you have now, if some of those pages just need to go away, you can let them 404 and they will eventually drop out of Google's index. You aren't required to manually submit them via GWT in order for them to be removed.
Hi Lisa,
I would argue that rubbish and waste can be completely fascinating to a certain audience...my boys for example, who are ages 14 and 10. They are completely amused by anything having to do with...welll..you know...
I recently saw a billboard here in town for a septic tank company that used the headline "Howdy Doody"
Yeah. I thought it was funny, but my boys thought it was hilarious. So hilarious that they kept talking about it for weeks. Guess who I called when I needed my septic tank cleaned out?
Need I say more? lol 
Dana
I would suggest creating some kind of simple system that track what improvements you are making to your website over time. The, Make sure you annotate that in Google Analytics so you can look back over time to see what kind of impact it had.
Hi Chris,
You are welcome. Honestly, I think "Web services" is too broad. I would go local if and when possible. "Web services houston" for example (or something closely relevant to your location. I would also go specific by industry based on what you guys have already done and that you have relevant testimonials for. For example "e-commerce Web management" I would think would be way more achievable...or even "small business e-commerce Web management." Try to forget about search volume a little bit. You need to do that for a couple of reasons. One, the space for "Web services" is so crazy competitive you'd need millions of dollars to crack into that space (i.e. GoDaddy). I'm not saying you can't get there, but you aren't going to get there by trying to start with those kinds of keywords will only get you broke and frustrated. Second, even if you did get traffic from those broad keywords, it's not going to convert very well. People using those keywords are usually looking for something with the word "free" or they have no clue what they need.
Trust me. Build out a long tail keyword list that targets exactly the locations and types of businesses that you want to work in and with and you will not only rank, but get the kind of visitors that are more tightly qualified to your business offerings. I know there's a vanity element to ranking for a broad term, but shake that off. Vanity terms are just that, and they aren't going to help you gain clients or make more money.
Does that make sense? I hope it helps!
Dana
Hi Mike,
EGOL's answer is a good one. You should mark it so (hint, hint, nudge,nudge, know what I mean?)
Cheers,
Dana
Honestly, the best way for him to understand the difference is for him to hire an ad agency.
That being said, I think this is a perfect example of why we, as SEOs, need to educate clients from the beginning regarding what we can and can't do for them. It sounds like you are in a situation where you're having to do the educating after-the-fact, which isn't a comfortable place to be (i'm sure I don't have to tell you that), but given where you are this is what I would do:
This is what I would do. I know the dynamics of the situation may not be exactly the same as my scenario, but hopefully you can diffuse the situation and retain a happier client.
Dana
Hi Cesar,
I am in-house in charge of 2 ecommerce sites as well. We just completed a free trial of Wordstream and I was very impressed. We are going to give it a try for 6 months. I found it very easy to jump in and start managing things without spending a lot of time finding my way around the interface. That's my two cents Cheers,
Dana
Hi Daniel. Yes, there is another schema.org tag that is available to businesses and that is rel=publisher. This would accomplish what you are after. But, like you said, most of us who have implemented this mark up are still waiting for Google to do something with it (i.e. display a brand logo next to a listing). Mine is displaying in the Structured Data Testing tool, but not in Google search results, yet. Hope that's helpful!
While I have found SEOMoz tools to be invaluable for tracking results and providing reports to my CEO, I don't rely solely on SEOMoz for everything I need to optimize the sites I manage. Google Analytics data, reports and tracking are a crucial part of the whole picture.
Have you been tracking your visitor engagement and looking at bounce rate, time on page, depth of site visits, etc? There may be an issue there.
I also use SEMRush, Google Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Rank Checker, and the SEOQuake Toolbar to help me look at many different things.
Every site is different. E-commerce sites will have specific problems that blog sites don't have, and vice versa.
I think SEOMoz tools are exceptional, but I think even Mozzers would agree that they are not meant as a stand alone, all-in-one, never need anything else kind of tool. It works best when used in combination with the other great tools that are out there.
Hope that's helpful!
It's very important if you plan on doing any advertising at all, whether it's Google Adwords, Facebook or anywhere else. Aside from the fact that shorter domain names are just easier for your visitors to remember, many advertising networks have character limitations on display URLs. For example, Google Adwords has a 35 character limit for display URLs. You can have a longer URL, but it will be truncated in the ad, which isn't really what any advertiser wants to happen.
I'd say 35 characters or less for your domain name, counting characters like this:
Don't count the "http://www." part in your character count because you can omit that from a display URL in an ad and people will still understand it and be able to navigate to your site.
Hi James! A Facebook Like is a vote for your page. It's kind of the equivalent of a Brand or a business getting "friended." You can't get friends on a Facebook page, only your Facebook profile. Vice versa, you can't get "Likes" on your personal profile, only "Friends.:
A share is completely different in that it is only someone sharing your content with their followers or friends (it could be either or both). They do not necessarily need to have liked your page or be your friend in order to share your content (depending of course on privacy settings).
Both are very valuable for SEO in different ways. One (the "Like") sort of gauges how influential your brand or page is. The other (a "Share") indicates how interesting and engaging your content is to other people.
Hope that makes sense and helps explain a bit the difference.
Hi Pete,
I don't think you are going to find a cut-and-dried answer to which size of display ad performs the best. It entirely depends on the quality of the ad, the placement of the ad and the publication in which the ad appears. The results are going to vary vastly depending on these and other parameters. My best advice is to spend a good amount of time planning out, story-boarding and then testing ads. Make sure that when you are testing you are getting enough impressions to provide meaningful results. Remember this when designing your ads: You have a better chance of reaching the summit of Everest than clicking on a banner ad....so gosh darn it, make it compelling.
I have seen some very successful results using combinations of display ads for re-targeting campaigns that yielded crazy good (25%) conversion rates though, so there's definitely a payoff if you know what you're doing.
Just be prepared for low click-through-rates and lower ROI during the beginning few months while you are testing. This phase alone is more than a lot of smaller businesses can stomach. Hang in there and good luck!
Dana
Yes! It was the Kotex campaign they did on Pinterest. Here's a link to the video: http://youtu.be/UVCoM4ao2Tw Enjoy!
I admire your pro-active ideas and ambition greatly. As someone who fields SEO sales calls every day, I'd just toss out a word of caution.
Most businesses have spent a lot of time getting very good at what they do. They understand their vendors, their products, their customers, their bottom line. There's no way a gung-ho SEO can look at a site for 30 minutes and pretend to waltz in as if they know the first thing about the business, its goals or its customers. I've had SEO's pitch me keyword lists that were completely wrong for the business because they had no idea who the customers really were (and most likely they didn't care).
I get so tired of people calling me and saying "Hey I took a look at your Web site and did you know you don't have any [insert select SEO term here] ?" The last one, just two weeks ago said "Hey, did you know you are missing all of your meta keywords tags on your Web page?." I should have hung up, but I played stupid and strung him along just to see how green he really was, poor chap! lol
I don't like it when people call me and say they've been looking at my Web site source code. It's almost like they've been lifting up my skirt to see what color my underwear is!
IMHO it's bad manners to offer an opinion unless asked for it. To me, the best approach is to give them a compelling reason to ask you for help. That way, they've invited you into their "space." Show some genuine interest in their business. 30 minutes of prep time just isn't going to do it, and they can see right through that.
The only SEOs who've ever gotten my attention were the ones who offered to fix something small for free just to show me that they were competent and could produce results. To me, that's the best hook in the world.
Hi Paul,
As an e-commerce SEO I feel your pain! I am not sure what platform your store is running on, but is it possible to consolidate all the different colors onto one sweater page and allow customers to select the color via a drop down box (usually referred to as "options" in e-commerce back ends) ? This would in essence create a hub page where you would just have to write great copy once, and include the colors. Now, if you are like most e-commerce sites, every color and ever size has its own SKU. You of course have to add them to your products database, but there should be a way to make it so they don't actually display as product pages. You then associate the SKU with the specific option (i.e. Medium size, color Red) and when a customer selects that options, that specific SKU is what is added to their cart.
Hope that helps!
Dana
Hmmm. Understood. In that case it is a measure of popularity, a vote, where a "share" again would be a measure of engagement or potential that content has for going viral.
I noticed on your homepage that your "Follow us on Facebook" link isn't working yet. Do you guys have a Facebook page? If so can you send me the link so I can "like" it?
Likes and share also display quite differently on timelines. They display a bit opposite from what you'd expect. For example, when I "liked" your homepage, My Timeline said:
...and I did not have the opportunity to add a comment.
When I shared a link, my timeline said:
You'll notice a like produces a link with anchor text, a share does not. However, a share gives you the opportunity to comment on the content you are sharing.
From this perspective, it seems a "Like" would be better than a "share" for SEO purposes in Facebook Timelines.
Yes. It is definitely worth doing. IMHO, there are absolutely no "cons" to adding transcriptions, especially good ones. You are right, the Google machine transcriptions are just plain horrible.
I wouldn't load the transcription into the description area on YouTube, because that's not really what that space is intended for. I would create a transcript, upload it to YouTube and then disable the machine transcription. There is one very compelling reason to do this. YouTube displays a "CC" for all videos that have been closed-captioned. People wanting to watch videos with captions (and that's not just hearing-impaired people, it can be people on mobile devices without headphones, or people at work without speakers on their computers), can search and sort by this parameter. This means if they are looking for a video on a particular topic and they need it to be closed-captioned and they sort by that, your videos will come up on the list. If you transcription is just in the description area, then your video wouldn't come up as having captions available.
I use http://www.dotsub.com to create timed captions for all of my company's videos. They provide a wonderful, easy-to-use and free tool that does a splendid job. Exporting your transcript and uploading them to YouTube is a piece of cake.
There are of course services that you can pay to do it for you too, and they tend to be fairly inexpensive.
Once uploaded, your close-caption file content is 100% indexable content to search engines. It isn't hidden in a iframe or anything like that. The only downside is the same downside you face interms of SEO by hosting your videos on YouTube instead of a 3rd party like Wistia. YouTube will always outrank you for your own content. When your videos get ranked in Google, they will link back 99% of the time to YouTUbe and not to your Website, no matter what you do...transcription or no transcription.
Bottom line is those transcriptions can only help you. They cannot hurt you.
I hope that's helpful!
Dana
This is an interesting question because my company just launched a sister-brand a year ago. We had man discussions about whether or not to make the website domain and EMD or a brand name. what came out of those discussions was that we wanted something long-term. We were going to be selling a highly-competitive product. There were already dozens of companies selling the "product." Branding was really about the only thing that was going to set us apart.
I think your question is a great one because it gets to the core of Wil Reynolds' #RCS argument. Real companies have a brand, and that brand means something. It speaks to s specific group of people who, hopefully, are rabidly loyal fans f the brand. These people might be able to get that same product anywhere...but they choose to buy it from you because your brand makes them feel like they want to feel. A product can't do that. A brand can.
I'd go full-tilt towards the brand. Brand everything, top to bottom, sideways and inside out. Live it, speak it, breathe it. Amazon sells products. You can buy diamond earrings on Amazon. But if you want to seriously impress your girlfriend or wife-to-be, nothing will replace walking into Tiffany's and buying a diamond. Maybe it's the same diamond, but in that moment, it's not just about the product. It's about how that brand makes you feel about yourself. That's a way deeper thing.
Dana