Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jason

Glad you are liking the community so far! I would recommend starting with this post I did for Moz to help answer exactly these questions about WordPress and SEO: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

When you're starting out and have just a few tags (6 isn't much) it's not a huge deal, but for some sites as they grow it turns into 300+ tags without planning on it - then it's a little more of an issue. Not something that would cause a penalty per se, but just not great for the site to have those extra pages indexed and existing because they don't generally add any value (they are often similar to the posts themselves).

I would use maybe 3-4 tags tops for any blog post. They are little detailed words to describe the content. Additionally, tags only have a utility if used as navigation in the site somehow: either a list of popular tags in the sidebar or sometimes you can click on the tags for each post at the bottom of the post.

Lots of people try to make tags to rank in search engines but I have found this to be a bad strategy. In general, I recommend people to noindex tags as shown in the article. With the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress you should also "noindex subpages of archives".

Categories - I would create 5-7 categories that you will file all blog posts into - and only use those and don't let categories grow (don't keep adding new categories). You can customize your category pages with this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-custom-category-pages/ - and indexing them is fine.

Good luck!

-Dan

Hi

I would prioritize the product name in the title tag on product pages.  Other pages on your site should prioritize the Brand name (assuming you have multiple products from that brand, and a category page for that brand). I'm not too sure prioritizing a SKU would help, since it likely does not receive searches.

Think of it like this; your homepage should prioritize the brand of the website and its perhaps its core keyword. As you drill down into the pages, each page should successfully target categories, sub categories, products etc.

You may want to do some looking at site architecture resources, as they would give you ideas on how to prioritize keywords looking at the site as a whole.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Take it from Google themselves!

http://youtu.be/KCY5pbAuYpk

http://youtu.be/rej2TkVEehg

-Dan

I would begin here - or ask any of those companies to refer you to someone. You can also contact me directly, I'd be happy to point you in the right direction as well based on your needs.

-Dan

Just adding my agreement with both EGOL and Oversteer

I see what you mean, so you have a bit of a unique situation. Have you done keyword research? Do you have an idea of what you really want to rank for based upon search volume etc? Do people search for these specific product names and variations?

Hi

How are you checking rankings?

I see a few on-site issues;

• there are no canonical tags
• a site: search returns the homepage 2nd in the result.  product categories are not high in the results for the site: search - just seems a little odd to me.
• the meta robots should read "index, follow" not "all" for pages you want indexed and followed

The first thing to do is check Google Webmaster Tools. This is the best source of problems with the site.  Correct every possible thing in there first.

Before thinking its something malicious I would

1. verify the ranking numbers you're getting (try different sources like rank checker from seobook)
2. review and correct all errors in GWT

Hope it helps!

-Dan

Hi There

I agree with Kurt's sentiments. I would highly recommend cross checking with a second set of data. If you are only using Moz to track rankings, try supplementing with a daily rank checker. I like Authority Labs, and this is exactly what I do - I use both Moz and Authority Labs.

I would also recommend checking your Webmaster Tools "average position" data - which you can link to with Google Analytics - and filter by search query. You can see exactly how you ranked for each term day by day.

So that's step one - verify they are actually jumping around as dramatically as they seem.

The "Google Dance" as we sometimes call it (when rankings bounce around) could possibly be due to low click through rates and poor user metrics in the SERPs. If you notice right now, when I search "code red 7" and your result is number #4, Google is changing the page title (it's not what you have). This means for some reason they have determined your title is not as good as the one they came up with.

So you may want to have a look at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en and refine some of your titles a little bit, as well as descriptions.

Good Luck!

-Dan

If you can see the links on the websites where you are getting them, they are there. Further, check to see if they are followed or not (the SEOmoz toolbar is an easy way to do this).

The sources above which you mentioned (Open Site Explorer, the link: operator and even Webmaster Tools) are ALL at times incomplete, and not instantly up to date either. OSE can take 30 days to show links.

You can check MajesticSEO for an alternative source too.

-Dan

Hi

Use the keywords that people use to describe what you're offering.

It sounds like you might not have a keyword problem, but rather maybe you're not quite sure what exactly the site is offering, what the architecture is, and what products, services, functions etc you will be offering.

What are people going to be able to do on your site?  Why would they want to come to your site?  What will it offer that's so engaging and attracts visitors?  What's your "unique selling proposition"?

I hope I don't come across as trying to dodge your question, but I think if you can clearly answer these questions, it might make your keyword research much easier.

Also - be sure you're using "exact" and "phrase" match in adwords tool, not "broard" - broad numbers are unrealistically high.

39% is not too high for competition, in my experience.

Also, are you "branding" your website?  That's very important these days of course.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas!

-Dan

Hi

Not sure if the software in this post is too 'artistic' but maybe something there will work.  From SEOgadget / Richard Baxter

-Dan

URLs will always be important in lots of ways;

• They are seen by users in many cases (as links, in social media and even the SERPs) and can help improve CTR.
• They are extremely important to the overall site architecture - and especially for information architecture.
• They can often become the anchor text in links.
• They help a user when browsing the site, as if they represent the structure or "level" depth (almost like breadcrumbs) is can make the navigating experience easier.

I don't think URLs are something Google looks at in a simplistic way like "oh you're URL says X keyword, we're gonna weigh that keyword more" - I think all of these factors feed into the importance of URLs and I don't see that value diminishing anytime soon.

-Dan

Hi Anthony

I would not do that As schwabb said, it's hiding text and that's going to raise a flag. Instead, I would first understand the original intent of how/why H1 tags work: http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/heading-elements-and-the-folly-of-seo-expert-ranking-lists/ - they should be the main "heading" or on-page title of a document, as Bill explains very well in that post.

Looking at the homepage, the part that says "Esthetic Dentistry - Your Reliable Los Angeles Dentists" would be the best H1 tag - it is the main heading of the content for that page. The same follows for the other pages, for example: http://www.estheticdentistry.net/cerec-dentistry-in-la/ - the H1 would be "Get CERC Dentistry from...."

-Dan

Glad you like SEOmoz, I've been a PRO member for about 10 months and love it as well!

Right, you want to look for "nofollow" in the <a>portion of the code. The SEOmoz Toolbar makes it really easy to find them without having to look at source code.</a>

<a>No matter the tactic (link exchange, blog commenting, directories etc etc) - simply ask; does the link make sense to be there from the user's point of you? If you link out to a valuable site who happens to link back to you, that is a "link exchange" but it happens in a valuable organic sort of way. Its the result of a mutually beneficial human relationship.</a>

<a>Judging the value of a link is a little more complex - this is a GREAT (albeit hidden) article </a>http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011 within SEOmoz on linkbuilding by Eric Enge. I'd give it a look

-Dan

Hi

Maybe someone can confirm this, but I believe this is google looking at the content on your site, and telling you according to your content, what keywords are most significant.  And I believe this is measured by the number of times each word occurs, site-wide (if you click on each word in the list, it will give you the number of occurrences and the pages).  SO, one of two things could have happened in your case:

1. Your content changed significantly enough, that the number of occurrences of each word changed, thus shifting around the order.

2. Google indexed new pages that were previously not indexed, which tipped the scales enough in one direction or another, and this changed word occurrence as far as what Google was aware of.

As far as rankings, I don't think its as simple as "higher occurrence=higher ranking" - there are a lot of other factors that come into play with ranking.

So I would take this list as Google telling you "this is what we think you're saying your site is about".  If you're getting words in the top of the list that make you say "well, that's not really what my site is about", you may want to consider doing something to fix that.

-Dan

Hi

Both sites are showing for me in Bing on site: search, searches for the domain and brand name searches.  What are the other searches/keywords where ranking has dropped?  At quick glance I didn't see anything out of the ordinary in Bing.

-Dan

Hi There

I am not seeing any sex titles, where exactly are these showing up, in Google search results? Are you on Google.com or a different country?

I don't see an issue with the replytocom since there is a canonical tag on that page pointing back to the original URL, so you should be all set there!

-Dan

Hey There

For the most part, it is not a good idea to just use tags as a way to try and gain search traffic from them. They are possibly beneficial to users internal to your site. Users may read an article and want to read other similar articles, so having a few tags at the bottom of the post can be useful. Putting tags in your sidebar for navigation is rarely useful, but if done in a somewhat user friendly way it could work. I generally avoid "tag clouds" or having dozens of tag links in one spot.

In terms of the tag archives themselves (like mysite.com/blog/tag/tag-name/), tag archives rarely look different than posts themselves or other archives. Unless you have a giant site, with so many posts, and tags actually add a beneficial way to scroll through archives on a very specific topic, categories do this fine enough.

And for indexation - if it's a new site or a site that has NOT ever indexed tags I would advise to not index them moving forward either. Unless in a rare .5% of cases this is done in an extremely intentional and strategic way, not for SEO but for users and site architecture. (Think of a site like Smashing Magazine or Search Engine Land with LOTS of content, that's a rare edge case where using tags for navigation and architecture might make sense.)

If you HAVE indexed tags already I wrote an article on how to safely evaluate and noindex them.

In general, I would avoid tagging a post with more than 4-5 tags. Tags should always be different from categories (like more specific things).

-Dan

This 'powerful' page of links has been around for quite a while so I don't think time has anything to do with it.

What's "quite a while"? OSE can take 30 days.

Just looking at the site and it's links I would think it an ideal backlink target for my company. However using opensiteexplorer I am lead to believe this backlink is never being found?

If the link is on the page, its clickable and there its followed, Google will count it.

• Make sure the page on YOUR site doesn't have a noindex or nofollow in the meta robots tag
• Make sure your canonical tag is correct
• Make sure its not under "disallow" in robots.txt
• Also, you can check for backlink in Google Webmaster Tools. Its not a complete list though.

Hope that helps!!

-Dan