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Thanks Dirk. I appreciate you doing that for me.

Thank you Dirk.

This is a good place for me to start. Any chance you could ask your technical partner which modules they'd recommend given it seems to have satisfied your requirements?

SEO is about building credibility and a positive reputation with your intended audience and search engines. I think having consistent name, address and phone number data (whether it's in the form of links or citations) across a variety of reputable platforms does that.

The sites you mention above are highly reputable, well respected and authoritative. It would be worthwhile going after those and ensuring accuracy and consistency whether your intent is to rank locally OR organically.

I say take care of it.

Hi.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of an equivalent to Yoast for Drupal sites? Is there such a thing?

I've been asked whether I could optimize a Drupal site and am wondering if the guiding principles and techniques I use for HTML and Wordpress sites can be easily transferred to a Drupal implementation, or whether I might be setting myself (and the client!) up for failure.

Any observations or advice would be appreciated.

I'm with you Rose. The alt tag describes the image. If you want it to include your your keywords, assuming they're some combination of "Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration" (your page title tag content), you could alter it to say "noncustodial parent with his young son". You could do the same with the file name, include "noncustodial-parent-son".

Here are google's guidelines, as conveyed by Matt Cutts, head of Google's Web spam team and defacto SEO spokesperson.

I must be thick because I certainly don't understand the statement "they are arguing that these images should NOT have alt text as it doesn't add anything to the disability screen reader as the image text would be repetitive with the text on the page. "

No, I haven't run into this problem before. Perhaps they're referring to situations where alt tags just get stuffed with keywords. Image alt tags shouldn't just repeat the text on the page or act as a repository for keywords, although that's often what you see. Image alt tags should accurately describe the image first, use keywords second and where it makes sense.

So, for example, this page has an alt tag coded for the little blue button above that depicts Roger, the company mascot (<img <span class="html-tag">alt</img <span>="Roger_blue_square"). The text "Roger blue square" doesn't appear anywhere else on the page. (Well I guess it does now!) It's a bit succinct - first time visitors might have a heard time understanding what the image represents - but it is accurate and isn't just stuffed with "Moz Q&A Community" keywords.

I'm waiting for the day when Google decides to start penalizing folks for doing what you've described above.

Hi Stroke,

First check to make sure Google's has indexed the page. If it has, and you continue to see different results, it's because the search engines has decided to grab something else from the page and display it as the meta description. They do that sometimes.

The best thing you can do to minimize this type of occurance is populate your meta description with a clear and accurate description of your page content.

I concur with Patrick's excellent suggestions and would add a few more to the list.

1. Make sure your site is mobile ready.
2. Optimize for speed.
3. Use Moz and GWMT to identify and fix site errors.
4. If you don't have reviews on the site already, enable them. Feed that into the schema markup Patrick mentions above.
5. Link building. Identify who's linking to your top competitors and go after the ones you can. As your top suppliers and partners to link to you. Give them something of value in exchange.
6. Use screaming frog to scan your site and check for cannibalization. Don't waste resources competing with yourself.
7. Optimize internal linking structures and anchor text.
8. Vary and test rhe effectiveness of different calls to action.

My go-to resources for ecommerce websites is The Ultimate Guide to SEO for eCommerce Websites from KISSmetrics. You'll see it talks about all the items mentioned by Patrick and myself as well as some more.

Hi SEO Martin,

I'm trying to figure out your exact question. Are you wondering whether you should noindex the "empty" pages? Are you trying to figure out how to identify all the pages that are producing errors? Or something else?

Hi sichristie,

I find your question confusing, probably because it's a complex scenario you're trying to describe. If I understand it correctly, I agree scenario 1 would be better for SEO because it's all about reputation. If you're looking for an explanation that might resonate with lay people, I'd try an analogy that builds upon the rationale you've described above. Here's an example of what I mean.

Say to your audience, "Assume you are lost and thirsty in a desert when you come upon a set of three paths pointing in different directions. All three have a sign posted with an arrow saying "this way to fresh water". One of the paths looks like it's been there a long time. It's deep and well worn. Up ahead you can see others have taken this path because there are small items like candy wrappers and cigarette butts shed along-side the path. The other two paths are faint and debris free. You're barely able to make them out in the sand. It looks like their signs have been planted there recently, maybe even moved a few times."

Which path would you take?

Alick's right. Keep your eye on the "last detected" date to make sure new problems aren't cropping up. Otherwise the errors should diminish as Google reindexes your site.

I agree with you. It's all very confusing and little details make a BIG difference. Thanks for sticking with this.

Okay. Let's start over looking at it from a goal perspective. I compared the two pages. Here is the difference between the two in terms of page text, highlighted in yellow - http://63.249.66.211/comparison.html. The differences are in the URL, the phone numbers at the top, a word here and there in the middle, and the 2nd block of text and photo under "Explore Our Solutions".

The first page, which I'll call India, has a canoncial tag pointing to itself. (http://www.sap.com/**india**/pc/bp/erp.html"/>) .

The second page, which I'll call UK, has a canoncial tag, also pointing to itself. (http://www.sap.com/**uk**/pc/bp/erp.html"/>).

• If you want both pages to rank and have authority, then you use the canonical tag. You need to use the same canonical tag on both pages. Right now they're different. That will essentially tell Google to treat the two pages as one; to show one or the other in search results, but considate their combined SEO value into one for ranking purposes.
• If you only want one page to rank, then noindex the other.

Does that make more sense?

You're very welcome Mark!

This might help Shailendra - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en. Skim down to (or search for) the part beginning with "This indicates the preferred URL", about half-way down the page.

Bottom line, Google attempts to respect canonical tags but it's no guarantee. Increase your chances by using "absolute paths rather than relative paths with the rel="canonical" link element".

I'm with Ryan - old data. I'm theorizing here, but think it has to do with the way Google reports queries. They say they report the top 2000 queries that resulted in pages from your site being displayed in results over the reporting time period which is, by default, 30 days. They're reporting the top 2000 query-page-result combinations. Since the redesign, you've had both old and new pages displaying in results so the number of query-page-result combinations could have as much as doubled, depending on how many of the new pages are indexed.

It could take a while before you see impressions start to rise again but I think it's a reporting problem and not a visibility one. My two cents.

Just an add-on. Screaming Frog gives you a good overview of the health of your site by going to the reports link on the main menu and selecting "crawl overview".

Then, if want to be sure you've covered everything, I highly recommend this Moz post. http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

I agree with DC1611 and would reiterate you shouldn't just stuff your keywords into both tags.

Google's penalized keyword stuffing for some time now and they are always emphasizing user experience. Remembering that alt tags are designed to help visitors who are visually impaired and given the space constraints of title tags, I'd err on the side of using language that succinctly and accurately describes the image.

I like this how to retain at least 95% of your organic traffic guide from quick sprout. Very helpful. b-s.ee/1pvTWfc

Header 1.

It's the main heading on the page. On the page you're referencing, the H1 tag contains "We Do Hadoop in the Cloud". Your H1 should contain the keyword phrase you're trying to rank for. There should only be 1 H1 on the page.