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Here's a post about how Bing views keywords:
The Meta Keywords Tag Lives At Bing & Why Only Spammers Should Use It
So, over-stuffing your keywords isn't totally ignored and can cause a penalty on Bing.
Meta keywords were so abused in the past that they could no longer be used to accurately tell what the page was about. As a relevance/ranking signal it became worthless.
Add a benefit, make your titles compelling and give people a reason to click on them - don't make them harder to read!
What links do you need in your footer?
The importance of these pages isn't just their ranking position, but also the traffic that they are getting, and the conversion rate (how qualified are the visitors?)
I would audit your content and find out what pages really matter to you and then, if you really need to, remove the links to the pages that aren't of any commercial value and question if you actually need those pages at all.
Can you consolidate content onto one page (for example combining any lega/privacy policy/terms of service content onto one page)
Are any of the pages in your footer also linked in your main navigation? If so then you can probably remove them from the footer without affecting too much. I would add a word of caution through - if you've got lengthy content and visitors (the real human beings) are using the footer to find their way about then it's going to affect usability.
Removing links from a page passing lots of link equity then you are going to weaken the target page - if you've got loads of links on your home page and you prune some of the zero value pages you may find that you're passing more equity to your important pages.
As Moosa suggests, if you want to do some housekeeping, reduce the risk by making small changes and testing.
Hi Bill, I can see what you're thinking, but consider this. Unlike PPC campaigns, where visitors will be arriving via the advertising links, the idea behind link building is to indirectly gain traffic, by using an enhanced link profile in the hope that search engines will rank your pages higher and get more organic search traffic arriving on your site, not from the links themselves.
That said, if you can get some direct referral too then that's a bonus! (Sometimes these direct referrals, why lower in volume can actually be more valuable / have a higher conversion rate so don't ignore these.)
Ideally you'll be trying to get good quality links to the page (or pages) on your website that you want to rank highly for your chosen keywords. If you can get links with relevant anchor text then this should help support the relevancy of the page.
When trying to build links, it's a lot easier to get people to links to content that is of interest, useful, or share-worthy and related to the subject mater of their own sites.Of course a lot depends on the subject matter/nature of the site you're trying to promote.
What are you trying to achieve with your link building? What are your goals for the site?
Are other sites loading normally?
Can you resolve the host name from a command window on the PC:
nslookup {hostname}
If you can't resolve the hostname then it's probably a DNS issue. (you could try adding an entry to your hosts file and see if that gets around the problem?)
The Title Element Too Long is just a warning that your title is likely to be cut-off when displayed in the SERPS.
If you've got your website (or company name) at the front of the title then you're going to be pushing your more valuable unique page keywords further to the right. If your title is cut off then you could lose some important words from your title when it is displayed. There's a view that keywords nearer the start of your title are likely to carry more SEO value.
Do you need to have your website name in the title? Are people searching for your website + your keywords? Why is it there? What are you selling? Are you selling your website or is the website selling your goods/services? What's more important - promoting the website name or getting visitors to the site?
Remember that your page title and meta-description is likely to be the first part of your website that someone is going to see. As well as trying to get your pages to rank as highly as you can in the search results you also need to think about click through. There's no point being #1 if nobody clicks on your SERPS.
You need to think about making your Title and Description as relevant, appealing and compelling as possible to the searcher. Think about the search terms and try to match the searchers intent. You want them to feel that they're going to find what they are looking for in you click on your SERP entry.
There's some studies that suggest a shorter title tends to be more appealing.
Google will highlight the searchers keywords in bold - this helps people gauge how relevant your page is likely to be to their search query. If your valuable keywords are being cut-off they won't get these signals.
IF you have a big, reputable brand, then adding this name to your titles is probably a good idea as you'll benefit from the trust in the brand. If you're not a well known brand then I'd put the brand name at the end of the title if anywhere.
Hope this helps.
I'd also add, if it's providing (relevant) direct traffic then you might want to keep it too. It can be a good indicator of niche directories that benefit your business...
Aha! These are your breadcrumb links. Normally the URL isn't clickable, but in some cases Google will extract the breadcrumb from your page and present it under the title. (Check the breadcrumb of the ranking page and see if it matches)
They've been doing this for a while. See this article from 2009:
http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/new-site-hierarchies-display-in-search.html
What do you mean by "Shady" web directories?
Are these directories relevant to your niche (corporate video) or a broader but relevant market (corporate services?).
I would say that if there is a reasonable expectation for a normal human being, your prospects, to find you listed in the directory, (alongside your competitors) and the directories aren't involved in anything that clashes with Google's guidelines then I don't see that there is a problem.
That said, I would wonder how much the link from the directory is actually work and whether it would be better to spend the time to get better quality links elsewhere that would beat your competitors anyway?
How does your site stack up against the competitors in Open Site Explorer? Is your domain authority way off?
As you mention, you use tags to give visitors the ability to browse articles with that cover the same subject matter. Normal practice would be to give the visitor a list of articles that have been tagged with this term.
A list of articles shouldn't flag up as a duplicate of any of the other article pages.
However, I notice that on a couple of the tag pages I took a look at that I just get one article being displayed, and being displayed in full. This is obviously going to be a duplicate of the original article.
I suspect that this is because for a number of the tags there is only one article to be returned.
I would look at how you are presenting articles when listed in the "tag archive" view and perhaps only display the introduction to the page with a link to the full article.
You may also want to think about the tags you are using so that you have fewer tags with only one article.
Hope this helps!
Carl, it's now displaying the following error message: "Keyword Difficulty Tool is having issues displaying AdWords API data. We are working with AdWords API folks for a fix soon!"
In the meantime you'll have to pop back to the adwords keyword tool to get the traffic numbers.
Nice!
Tom, out of interest, do these pages get much search traffic? What is the conversion rate like on these - do they actually get your any work. If you're not getting any traffic/conversions then just showing up in the SERPS for your keyword is just vanity thing.
If the tactic is getting you work then you obviously don't want to tear it all down, although I'm sure you understand that it's not exactly the kind of thing Google's terms of service are trying to encourage. These kind of tactics are still working, but there's a risk attached too and it's not something I would recommend and not something I'd feel comfortable recommending.
You've got to look at your competition too - and I see that it's a pretty common (almost ubiquitous) tactic used in your niche.
Do you detail the area your cover on your home page? I'm worried that seeing "Magician London" at the start of your page title and the keywords "Magician London" all over the copy could put people off looking for something local.
How can people find out if you cover their area when they visit your site?
The page copy doesn't read very naturally! Have you tried reading it out-loud? I'm, not sure you'd talk to someone like this face to face. I would try to make the text more natural and use the first person. After all, you're trying to sell yourself aren't you, and it's your personality, that's makes you different from your competition.
My general advice would to think less about optimising for search engines, and start thinking about optimising your your visitors, what information are they looking for and what are they trying to achieve on your site...
It is confusing and it's something I was wondering when I first saw the Matt Cutts, Feb 2013 video. From what Matt says:
But, I guess the problem with understanding this is that you can't take 301s and links and consider them in isolation. It's not an either/or.
Consider the following:
1. Page 1 -[link to]-> Page 2
Nice and simple, page 2 gets it's full entitlement of page rank ( taking into account share/link and dissipation)
2. Page 1 -[link to]-> 301 -> Page 3
Now I've got an extra step. Does this mean that the page rank that Page 3 inherits is affected by both the link and then the 301? Does the page rank dissipation happen twice?
If, say 50% (not real numbers!) of page rank value is lost for each link/301, then the original link to the 301 would lose %50 and the 301 would lose the same, (50% of the 50%) which means that page 3 get's just 25%
What if I end up in the horrible situation of having
3. Page 1 -[link to]-> 301 -> 301 -> 301 -> Page 3
Does page rank decay happen on every redirect?
Personally, I've only used redirects where necessary and, where I can, I've tried to get inbound links updated to point to the correct page.
How competitive are the keywords you're targeting? IS what you're seeing in the SERPS just the same pages fluctuating positions or are you seeing new pages appearing?
The instructions are near the bottom of the page:
In order to use Fetch as Googlebot, you'll need to have added and verified your site in Webmaster Tools. Then, follow these instructions:
Once googlebot has fetched your page you'll have a "success" link that you can click on to see what Googlebot saw.
This will be the header, including the server response code and then the html that googlebot received.
What this doesn't tell you is how this was interpreted by Google, of course this is where SEOMoz's on-page reports and crawl stats can help detect errors and way your can improve your on-page optimisation.
Hi Marisa,
The first question that springs to mind is are all your pages being crawled? What does it say on the Crawl Diagnostics report?
I'm still seeing the Rel Canonical notices.
So much depends on how you've implemented tags on your site and who your audience is.
It can be tempting to implement tags to try and make up for a broken categorisation and it's tempting to add tags to a page because they mention a topic rather than because it's actually relevant to that tag.
It worth taking a look at your analytics to see if (and how) your visitors are using your tag pages. I've see many sites where visitors just don't use the tags (there too many, they're meaning less, or even they are not obviously links!) and a lot of this depends on just how many tags your using, how meaningful these tags are to people and the relevance and quality of the articles you have associated with each tag.
Have you got internal search set up on your site and are you capturing the search data in your analytics? This can provide some great insights in what people are struggling to find on your site and what they expect to find. It can also highlight areas where your IA isn't working.
(As James mentioned) If your tag pages are indexed, and getting inbound search traffic then segment your non-paid search traffic and look at the bounce rate and other engagement metrics. How valuable is this traffic to you, and how relevant are they finding your tag pages as the answer to their query?
You meta description, while not a ranking factor, can significantly affect the number of click-thoughs you get in the search result pages (SERPS).
Think of your Page title, and description as the equivalent of a small ad you might place in a newspaper. It's got to be relevant, interesting and compelling for the searcher. You want them to think that they're going to find what they're looking for if they click on your page.
Try to match snippet to the searchers intent implied by the keyword (where possible).
Great point Ann. Obviously a lot depends on the motive when it comes to link building and in the real world you can't just measure your return on investment by the number of links...
I suspect that building connections between your own guest posts also increases the chances that people will want to find out more about what you have to say than if they just read one post somewhere.
Pitty you can't see the path people have travelled to arrive on your site beyond the immediate referrer.
Of course the most important thing to a new blogger is getting some traffic. There's little point writing articles unless people are reading them.
Work on getting some backlinks to your blog. At the moment Open Site Explorer is only showing links from 4 domains and pretty much all of these links are no-follow (no-follow links are not seen as an endorsement and pass little authority to your site.)
I'd look at making some connections with other bloggers out there and see if you can do some guest posts. This is a great way to get backlinks and also get your content/name in front of people. You want to target blogs that cover related subject matter and have a good number of subscribers.
Hope this helps!