Welcome to the Q&A Forum

From the On-Page Analysis help:

"The On-page summary automatically generates reports for any of your campaign keywords that rank in the top 50 of your primary search engine. The URL that it grades is the same URL that appears in the search results.

For instance, if you have 75 keywords ranking in the Top 50, you should have 75 On-Page Reports. This generation happens automatically within 24 hours of when your rankings are updated."

You can find the help here:

Web App: On-page Reports

SO, in answer to your first question - are any of your pages ranking in the top 50 for any of your keywords?

You can also run an On-Page Analysis on any page against any keyword by using the tool from the "Research Tools" menu. It's here:

On-Page Report Card

Hope this helps.

Good advice from Simon. I would say that reciprocal linking does occur naturally and helps determine your position in your online neighbourhood.

Imagine a site like SEOMoz, I'm sure many of the sites that get links from SEOMoz (Distilled, SEER etc) link back to SEOMoz...

These links are of course entirely natural and authentic and I don't think there's anything wrong in taking proactive steps to create these relevant, in context,  relationships.

Where things start to go wrong is where two parties agree to place links to each other on their "links" page, page footers etc. Especially when the only reason you could give to explain the presence of the link is "SEO!"

Agree with Marek that you can certainly make URLs a lot firendlier for normal human beings. It can also help keep the urls shorter which can help when people are social sharing.

One significant advantage of dropping the extension is that it makes it so much easier if you ever want/need to change the platform on which your site runs.

Don't make changes to your URL structure on a whim though. You need to take a careful look at both your internal and  inbound links and plan and redirections you need to put into place.

Remember that any change can be risky, so understand the risks and effort required before you start!

I don't think you didn't mentioned that you were paying for the link!

RISK / REWARD / EFFORT(COST)

Personally I wouldn't pay $200-300 for one such link on the kind of page you're talking about.

Think about how much difference the one link is likely to make. Are you going to see a change in your rankings, or any direct traffic how much additional traffic will it take to make it worthwhile (what's your goal conversion rate, and what's the value of these goals)

You can get higher quality links for much less!

I think that maybe you're worrying too much about it. If there's nothing that triggers any warning bells, then get the link and move on.

Useful link/resource lists wouldn't be at the top of my priority list though.

I'm generally wary about "links" pages. It's probably just me.

I like to take a look at the relevance of the list (both to the hosting site, and to my site/keyword). How naturally will my link sit in the list.

Are the links followed or no-followed? Such link pages tend to be used to provide links back to low quality directories that as you to link back to them. Once the directory has validated the link, links get removed or no-followed.

How will the list be perceived - both by search engines and also by human visitors. Does the list provide any value to humans?

If you take a higher level view and look at the overall link landscape how does the site you're getting a link from fit - is it an authority hub? (Normally this is reflected in the domain authority, but not in all niches).

If you had to explain to your customer why the link is there - can you provide an answer they would be satisfied with?

At the end of the day, you have to make a quick decision based on:

RISK / REWARD / EFFORT

If you can get a link, and it's not going to reflect badly on your site and it's easy to get then there's no reason why you wouldn't just do it and more on to getting the next link.

Obviously you'd want to try and target higher value links (where you're going to get more link juice and/or maybe even some direct traffic!) You don't want to only have low quality links...

The more links you have on a page, the more the value of any link-juice needs to be shared. You may be better off getting a larger slice of a small pie, than a minuscule amount of a large one.

The number of links aren't the only factor though. This article by Rand has a number of nice illustrations showing the value of different links:

All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines' Valuation of Links

Hope this helps.

Hi Robert, hope the blood-pressure is under control! Totally understand your frustrations though. It's these kind of tactics that give the respectable/ethical businesses a bad name. I don't know how many times I've had to explain that SEO != SPAM!

What can we do about it? Well, the only thing we can do is educate out clients before it happens, so that they know and expect to get these types of advances once their sites are published in such directories.

Even if there was a directory for use by "ethical seos" it would still be publicly accessible and available to the less reputable end of the industry to scrape and abuse!

I'd start by asking yourself why you want followers, and then think about the return on investment you're likely to get.

There's no quick way to buy a loyal following, you have to earn it.

You want "followers", not "zombies"...

I agree, I really don't think it matters that much.

It's nice to have a URL that you can easily say out loud, on the phone etc, and it's handy if you can keep it short enough to fit on your business card!

Hi Robert, That's my understanding too. (Google doesn't think hyphens = spam).

I do think that there's  a SERP CTR/searcher perception issue that you need to think about when choosing your exact match domain name.

I'm sure that the more words you have and the more hyphens between then will mean that you domain will appear less authorative and more "spammy" to searchers. (Those who actually notice the domain name!)

Sorry to hear you wasted 30 mins!

When was the landing page redirected? I take it if you click on the SERPS result  it takes you to the home page?

" reported a fault with one of there servers that they were using for links" - Eek!

You already know that it was your links that were keeping you at the #1 position, so I would suggest that you need to rebuild these links. I wouldn't put all of my eggs in one basket though. I would rebuild links in a more natural way, not just from a server hosted by your SEO company. (What happens if you terminate your relationship with them!?)

Is your keywords specific page still being redirected? I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do here.

Do your visitors need to land on your home page in order to get them engaged and converted? You don't need to worry that people aren't coming in through the front door as long as your landing pages are working as they should.

IS your home page the best page for your visitors searching for your keyword? What's going to provide the best experience for your visitors, and how can you best get them into your conversion funnel?

What is the user intent, what are their goals, their needs. Does the content on your keyword specific page answer their questions and lead them on to find out more about how you can help them achieve their goals? The page shouldn't be there just for the ranking!

It's difficult to be more specific without looking at your particular site. What I would say is that making a rash decision to change your domain and 301 your entire site is likely to make things worse in the short-term. Any change like this carries some risk!

Don't Panic!

Of course on-page SEO isn't dead!

As you quote in your question, on-page factors go a long way towards deterining the relevance part of the search engines algorithm.

On-page factors are relatively easy to control/manage and as such tend to be the starting point when it comes to optimising a page/site. I don't think anyone would think about trying to get a page to rank without making sure the on-page optimisation was up to scratch first.

For competitive keywords, you're likely to find that your page will be up against other pages that have the same strong on-page relevancy. Compeiting just based on on-page will be impossible. Tweaking very minor factors such as putting your keywords in bold isn't going to make too much of a difference.

I don't think on-page is dead. I just think that now there's more awareness of on-page best practice and as a result the battle ground is all happening off-page.

One final caveat - it does depend on the niche/market you're competing in. You can still get quick wins using just on-page in the more uninformed niches! I wouldn't want to bet that it would be enough to stay there though...

I don't think it's quite as simple as that.

You can take any of these metrics in isolation, you need to look at the relative strengths compared to your own site and make a judgement call. If all things are equal then if you can beat these scores, you should out-rank them, but in the real world it doesn't trend to be as simple as that, especially as you start competing for more and more competitive terms.

Looking at these four metrics can give you a quick feel for hoe strong your site/page has to be to get into the game, they can't predict the outcome.

This page might give you a feel for the relative importance of various ranking factors:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

As for your question, "how many of these factors do you normally need to get within top 5?" well it all depends!

Remember that these aren't the only factors that search engines use when ranking pages. It's perfectly possible to outrank a page that beats you in ALL of these factors by producing a page that's tightly targetted around the chosen keywords. You can beat the competition on relevancy (assuming that there the competing pages aren't so relevant!)

I would say that finding such keywords, where there's a ton of traffic and few relevant pages is rare and my guess is that this is only likely to happen for brand related keywords.

The only good reason I can think of for using hyphens is when you want to ensure that you're keywords don't get confused when placed next to each other.  penisland.com or expertsexchange.com are infamous examples domains that suffer from this problem!

It sounds as if you're providing additional value to visitors to your site, and that can only be a good thing!

As "SeattleOrganicSEO" says, as long as you're not duplicating the content from one page to another I don't see that having reviews of a product and product descriptions in the store should be a problem. Just make sure you're not copy-and-pasting the product description into the review! Make sure the reviews are great reviews!

I take it you're linking the products mentioned in your reviews to the the same products for sale in your store?

Put your visitors/customers first and build content that's of value to them and you can't go far wrong.

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.

Depending on the kind of site you're building, it's common that your home page becomes the main "brand" optimised page and even without much body text, there should be more than enough on-page/off-page signals for you to rank well (unless of course you find yourself competing against someone with the same brand name in a different market!)

When thinking about choosing templates, don't just go by which ever one seems to be the most appealing. Make sure you have the purpose of the home page in mind and how it needs to channel especially "brand" aware traffic into your conversion funnel.

Choosing a theme can mean making compromised when it comes to presenting the kind of content you want/need to have on the page. Just make sure you're not compromising on the things that really matter.

Hope this helps!

My recommendation would be to spend the time building more backlinks to your site, not someone else's.

Why only earn a small share of the link value when you could get the lot? You'll get better return on the time you invest link-building.

I'm my experience it's best to just move on and build the next link than worry about the one you've already got. Do your research first, check the domain authority and the page authority of articles that are currently in the same place on the site that you expect your article to be posted. (That way you can estimate the likely page authority).

Another thing to consider when guest-posting is direct traffic. Check the number of subscribes blogs have and see if you can get guest-posts on those. Look at the content that works on their blogs (the ones with the most tweets/comments) and the kind of headlines that seem to work. You can often see patterns!

Hope this helps!