Welcome to the Q&A Forum

HI Kyle,

The process you described is similar to what happens here. I have had an updated website (Theme and functionality) done as of December 2011, it is still being approved through various channels. Technical information must be accurate and approved by engineering, legal wants protection and marketing wants SEO godly-ness.

I'm not sure what particular job you are trying to fill within this company, if its SEO or Web Development or Content / Copywriter or all three. I think the best solution is to help your client understand exactly what you do and what results are obtained. If they don't understand the process of publishing content then you may be responsible for teaching them, so you can actually function without them harassing you.

Me, I'm mostly the web developer here, but also do some marketing work. When we get technical mumbo jumbo back from the engineers we are responsible for staying true to the jargon but still using our keywords and SEO optimizing the information and presenting it in a pleasing manners to our customers.

The short answer is your client must understand the process, what your role is. They must also understand that your service is contingent on certain needs that you don't control. They have to share the responsibility of making things happen.

Hi GenSEO..

301 is a server response code and handled by the server on linux / unix systems usually via htaccess if you have access to the server then you would use this method, unless its a IIS server (Windows) in which case its a little different.

You can test your server package if you don't know what server you're on..

PHP for Linux / Unix / Apache put this at the very top of the page

ASP for Windows Servers

`<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
' Permanent redirection
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://``www.mysite.com/new-page.html``/"
Response.End
%>`

That said, the best option if you do not have access to the server is to use a META refresh, some search engines will treat this as 30x redirect, by placing this at the top of the page
HTML Page Redirect

HI Laura,

I can only comment on one question asked... " How can I get the Meta description to display in Serps?"

Google will use whatever they feel most appropriate for their users. The meta description does hold value, but when Google is returning results to its searchers they will try to return relevant snippets based on what the user searched for.

Example:
Your webpage is about Pajamas and the user searches for Banana Pajamas Google may ignore your Meta description "Family Friendly Pajamas available in cotton and silk for age 2 to adult"

And return "banana pajamas....print sizes kids small..available in standard banana print, adult themes and more.."

Remember search engines first priority is the users, not the websites.

Hope that helps with that question. I leave the other stuff for somebody more experienced in ASP.. I'm a php person myself.

Hi James,

you in fact come up with the answer I would have suggested.

One thing to think about is the purpose of why these pages come into existence and why it was a tactic 10+ years ago...

The reason I would think is.. keywords.

Croydon  Lift Repair
Essex Lift Repair
London Lift Repair
....

Depending on the clients website and using my example service, if they happened to have a very strong presence for the keyword lift repair, then you probably could easily incorporate those longer keywords London Lift Repair onto the main lift repair page and simply canonical the subpages.

If they don't have a strong presence on the root keyword (lift repair) but do show good results for the longer keyword results (London Lift Repair), then all you have to really worry about is 14 pages of content. Which in the scheme of a website is not that much.

I would think that it would be a good idea to include, content, physical address's phone numbers, map results on this page. Also if possible, contact some of the clients and ask them if it is okay get their opinion and thoughts on the service that was provided and use that as "What Others Are Saying". section on these pages. If they are hesitant maybe offer their business a free  follow link, which could sway them in the right direction. From there you could talk about the unique things about each branch, could be employees, service equipment, local community involvements, clients, high profile contracts etc...)

The short is you're on the right track and I hope my thoughts helped you get on.

Don

Hi John

I believe SEOmoz is not quite up to speed on this yet.

Please see staff response by Dr. Peter J. Meyers

http://www.seomoz.org/q/rel-prev-and-rel-next-implementation

Unfortunately, my best answer would be to purchase a domain and hosting service in the US with .com or .net extension. However, I am not sure how easy that is to do from Morocco.

I found the website on google.com and some keywords appear on google.ma

If you're trying to compete with the music industry and specifically the Europe / North America music sites you're going to have a lot of difficulty with a domain from Morocco

I did not mention it in my factors but hosting your site on a server that is in the country you are targeting is a benefit.

Rarely if ever do I see any other domains then .com .org or .net in my daily Google Searches.

Hi Hamza,

Getting to the top of the results depends on a lot of factors some known some unknown.

Your question is very broad, and does not allow for a specific answer so I can only offer general help.

First, I would start with the basics SEOmoz.org has a good Beginners Guide Here

Here are some factors I know can help.. (in no particular order)

1. Domain Age (the longer the site is live, the more authority it will have)
2. Unique Content (do not copy paste other peoples content)
3. Good User Experience On Your Site (easy to use navigation, no annoying popups redirects ect.)
4. External Links to on topic authoritative sites (this helps user experience in showing that you're trying to get your users the correct answer
5. Proper On Page optimization, your keywords are placed in the right places (title, h1, h2 tags).
6. Never spam a keyword
7. Avoid link rings, and most paid link building services.
8. Each page should have 1-3 keywords it focuses on, make sure those pages are optimized for those keywords.
9. Each page should have unique content that is specific, interesting and relevant.
10. Submit your domain & Sitemap to Search Engines
11. Submit your domain to Dmoz.org (be patient and read some guides before doing so)

Amazon has a very good model.

User has to have an account <-This makes a person have to register an account use rCaptcha to weed out bot accounts)

User verified purchase (can't review what you didn't buy from them) <- this prevents anybody from posting a review whom hasn't purchased it directly from Amazon or affiliates

Report Inappropriate feature this allows users to report spam and the like, amazon then can look at the post and make a decision to remove it. Instead of looking at 1 million reviews a day you may only have to look at 10,000 spam reports. (example)

This model only works if you have a lot of sales. If you're trying to build unique user driven content then this make not be the best solution.

Hope it helps

George provided a great link.

You certainly need to be aware of the amount of links and anchor text you are putting out in the world. I believe Cyrus Shepard mentioned a very good alternative to carpet bombing footer links inside a template you made

"... instead of a footer link, how about a single, well placed editorial link somewhere on a real page? (this might be hard to manage with some of your clients, but it's worth a shot).."

I like this option because I am personally of the impression that if you are paid to develop a website then you should also be up front about any other benefit you receive by doing so, and a link (advertisement) is certainly a benefit to you. This could and should IMO be negotiated in a professional manner with the client. Now if you are just selling templates ala template monster or a similar site, then I would remove my name from it period. Since you can't control what happens to the template after it is downloaded.

Hope that helps.

Hi Chandana

Rand covered microsites in 2009 on a whiteboard Friday. You can review his original thoughts here

He also followed up on this topic here

I had the same basic question earlier this year when I was trying to decide what to do with the 100+ domains my company owns. A couple experts replied to my question and advised me to only work on 1 or 2 domains as far as SEO. The thought was dividing time up on multiple domains would show less results then spending all the time on 1 or 2 domains. You may view my question here.

Hope that helps

Hi Santosh,

As others have mentioned the "To Many Links" should serve as a notice, rather then an out right problem.

It is quite common for many sites to have more then 100 links per page, most notable directories, and e-commerce sites.

Please read this post by Google's Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
Here is a chart showing the relative links on the top 98 websites: http://www.nickbilton.com/98/

That said, the main way to cut down links per page is to minimize your links in footer / headers / navigation and use Pagination to deal with pages that by nature will generate a lot of links.

Hope this was helpful

Hi Max

1  should work for your requirements. It is what we use to direct all non www traffic to the www page on 3 different platforms. Oscommerce, php custom build, Wordpress.

Just verify everything by trying to hit a couple none www urls to verify everything re-directs okay.

Also here is a good htaccess shortcut sheet (Note site sometimes loads slow so you may want to copy and paste it to a text file for later reference)

Hope that helps

Wish you the best of luck. It is a very good thing you know about your field, that will lend authority to your site if you can translate your knowledge into helpful information on your website.Even the best SEO's if they don't know the industry will struggle, that gives you a leg up.

Good luck

Hi Andrea

I'm not sure about the issue, but it may help others if you mention what type of software you're running.

I would assume Wordpress since you said widget but could also be Joomla or another CMS.

Good Luck,

Don

Hi smoki666

I can't say for sure but here are a couple things I noticed:

First you are competing with yourself for keywords

Your homepage and your tigi specific page use the same main keywords. I didn't dig further but this should be avoided.

Second your Domain Authority (DA) / Page Authority (PA) is low compared with those ranking above you. To catch up may require time and effort link building.

I hope my points are not taken as criticism rather helpful advice

Hi Bistoss, You should log into Google Webmaster Tools to check the day the problem occurred. It is not uncommon for host to have problems that temporarily cause access problems. In some rare cases Google itself could be having problems. For example, in July we had 1 day with a 11% failure rate, it was the host. Since then no problems. If your problems are persistent, then you may have an issue like this: http://blog.jitbit.com/2012/08/fixing-googlebot-cant-access-your-site.html old Analytic code. Other things to look at is any recent changes, specifically anything that had to do with .htaccess Be sure to use the FETCH AS GOOGLE bot after any changes to verify that Google can now crawl your site. Hope this helps

Great job, I personally like to help others, and love to learn new stuff. I'll hit that mark sometime early next year.

I've been a member for almost 10 months and last month was the first time anything happened that concerned me with the service. Which from what I understand they are still working on..here is a link to the last blog post.

I certainly understand your concerns and would hope that a well written and understanding email sent to the staff would extend your trial to include some up time on the tools you find the most valuable.

Personally, I spent my first month checking our main pages using the On-page optimization tool, followed by setting up campaigns.

The forums are actually a huge value if you use them. There are some extremely knowledgeable people who continue to post on these forums, this knowledge usually comes at a high price.

The short answer is yes in my experience SEOmoz has worked 90% of the time (10 months -1 month)

Hope that helps and good luck Ian.

From my personal experience, link building is never done.

That said, if you reached #1 / #2 then you can probably ease back shifting focus to other aspects, but never stop. My thinking is it is very easy to follow the leader. Take a few extra steps now you're in front.

If you stop.. catching up to you is that much easier.