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Great question!

What I have found through a few years of helping clients rank on Google is that all the small dogs follow the leader. There are so many aspects of optimizing for google due to algorithm updates and changing of times, that optimizing for other search engines seems silly. Optimizing for Google seems to lift my clients on yahoo and bing. The traffic discrepancy is huge though. If 60% of organic traffic comes from google then the other 40% is divided between the other search engines. I am always surprised however to see rises in Google traffic will correlate to rises in other search engine traffic as well. I do also see the occasional duck duck go but most of the people I have talked to in my circles have not even heard of it. So why optimize for it. Its a near guarantee that most traffic is coming form Google Anyway.

Hi Shadowava,

You will not be able to transfer 100% of link juice.

Instead of deleting pages however, you should use a 301 redirect. The page you redirect the link to should provide similar content as the original page.

If you are comfortable using your home address that is what would do. In fact that is what i do and i am in the same business as you

Thanks,

I thought it was spammy too. Please keep in mind this is a potential client. I raise the question because i want to know if it is ever good to go over the title character count. What instance would it be ok?

You really cleared up any questions I may have about the current title thank you.

The redirects should always be to the most similar content on your site. The reason being is when the old site is being crawled by the search engine spider they will encounter the 301 permanent redirect and replace the index with the new url the redirect points to. So if you point all the links to irrelevant content you may loose ranking. The point of the 301 permanent redirect is to carry link juice over to the new urls.

Hi Kadut,

Maybe not remove the pages but diagnose and find out why they are not ranking. Some things to consider. Is the content on these pages thin? Are there backlinks for these pages. Are they easily accessible from your navigation? Are they linked form within your website? Are you following basic SEO practices, is your on page technical seo tight.

Thanks,

Don

Hi C Pagan,

I work almost exclusively with WordPress and I am very familiar with the Yoast SEO plugin. If your theme has the option to hide titles or you do this with some customization this does not remove the titles from the pages and posts themselves but hides them from being visible to humans not bots and search engines.

In Yoast you have to manually set the page title in the admin under  settings - general site title. For all pages and posts Yoast will automatically use the page or post title along with the site title  so if your page title is Plumbing and your site title is Plumbing NY your page title will be Plumbing - Plumbing NY by default.

You must manually change your SEO page titles in the meta box underneath the editor on the individual pages or posts to be what you want them to be. Here you can also specify your focus keyword and the pages description.

See image for the meta box

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I Received a nice lift in DA as well. So did many of my clients. Only 2 or 3 clients went down. These were newer websites with very little content.

I would start with some market research. If you are in a competitive arena the sales growth from the SEO campaign will be less then a non competitive arena.

Do you have any case studies that could support your finding and make a case for future financial gains? (Previous clients in the same niche). Is the client willing to put x amount of dollars into a campaign to see so much growth. If the client does not have the budget to reach your goals, or if your determining what the budget should be. Basing financial growth upon a specific budget will give more credibility to your analysis. If using an arbitrary budget that a client is not capable of meeting your data will be skewed.

This is where i would start.

Thanks,

Don Silvernail

Hi Twisme,

You do not want google to think of your image title as a site title. It is not documented how google treats svgs and their properties. my recommendation would be to use the old fashion way <img src="file.svg" alt="youralttaghere">

Thanks,

Don Silvernail

Ricky,

Amp on WordPress is real easy. Just install this plugin that is being developed by automatic themselves. https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/.

You can also use the page frog plugin here https://wordpress.org/plugins/pagefrog/ 

This will also help you set up instant articles and give you a visual preview of what your amp and instant articles pages will look like.

Let me know if you need more help

Thanks,

Don

What CMS are you using?

Amp seems to only be big impact for news publishing and current events at the moment. Are you publishing articles that are news worthy or current even based? Clients of mine that I have instituted amp are not getting serious SEO bumps to their rankings due to having AMP enabled. These are WordPress sites and they are running both AMP and CDN. Depending on your needs I would suggest using the CDN for site speed over amp if you are not publishing news worthy or current events type posts.

This is just my personal experience.

I am trying to build links with my content. I always post to social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google + and sometimes Stumble Upon) What are other good choices that may have more staying power?

You would definitely have to set the canonical link to the original content.

WordPress does not use templates it uses themes. These themes can be customized as necessary including best SEO practices for your brand.

There can be many issues for your SEO when switching themes, however they may not be realized until you adventure into the theme. For instance custom post types that might be available in one theme may not be available in another affecting possible urls causing 404 errors or any number of issues.

If you use Yoast for WordPress SEO plugin you can customize your SEO titles and descriptions. This should stay current between themes. A rule of thumb, stay away from themes that have a lot of bloat. Many themes found on theme forest are designed to cover a multitude of businesses and niches causing bloat. Bloat causes site slow down and can hamper SEO rankings. Choose a theme that is light and does not have as many bells and whistles. If you need these things you can always ad on later with plugins.

Thanks,

Don Silvernail

Hi Gemma,

Will need more information. Time is not the only factor the ranks a website. I used open site explorer and see that there are no backlinks.

Backlinks should be a focus area if you want to rank your site.

Hi Bek,

You surely would not have to add meta descriptions to all 700, however i would look at the posts that get the most traffic and are still relevant and find ways to improve the technical seo to these posts. You may also try to update non-performing posts with meta descriptions and technical seo if you feel they are important to the brand.

Thanks,

Don Silvernail

The problem you are experiencing is due to archives pages that are created every time you create a new tag, category, author, or other types of archive pages. The issue occurs when you tag or categorize the post or page. For instance, "Why Do We Need SEO" is your first ever post on your website and you tag it with SEO Best Practices, and you categorize it has SEO. You will have 3 archive pages with duplicate content. The author page, the SEO Best Practices page and the SEO page. This is because each archive page only consists of the same post "Why Do We Need SEO". So as you write more posts the duplicate pages may disappear depending on how you organize your content. If you create lots of tags and tag everything chances are you will always have duplicate content.

To not get a penalty you should no index these archive pages. But if you are disciplined with your organization of tags and categories. You will not have a problem.

Thanks,

Don

Hi Catherine,

As far as matter of importance is concerned, you main keyword phrase should technically be in your H1  tag. This will tell crawlers that this information is most important. If you are using images above the fold is there text on these images? What is pushing your main keyword phrase below the fold?

Google will generally rank the page based on the overall content and the value it gives to the searcher.

Dogara,

Install the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin. Then manually create descriptions and titles for your pages.

The duplicate content issue is most likely caused by disorganized categories or tags. Every time you categorize a post or tag content WordPress creates a new Archive page. This can create duplicate content on many pages of your site.

Thanks,

Don Silvernail