Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Brett

Few things to add:

• Install facebook like buttons with the open graph meta tags. Documentation here.
• Add tweet buttons.
• Create INCREDIBLE content that people want to share.
• Improve things like page-speed, bounce rate and time on site.

-Dan

Hi

The difference to understand about pages vs posts has to do with how they are organized

• Pages are organized by nesting (into folders or levels)
• Posts are organized by categories, tags, date, authors, etc.

or another way to think of it...

• Pages are for when you want the content to be organized in a traditional format; root/sub-1/sub-2/ etc. which is more or less static or linear
• Posts are for when you want content to be organized in a dynamic format; in other words, you could access the same post multiple ways; through a tag, a category, a date, or the 'blog' page.

So, use pages when you have more or less static pages, organized in a folder type format like described above.  Use posts anytime you have content that you want organized dynamically; ie blogs, news, product catalogs.

Some of the themes you can get make this more confusing than it needs to be too.

Hope it helps!

-Dan

Google webmaster tools just started showing some strange pages under "not found" crawl errors.

www.mysite.com/Cached

www.mysite.com/item-na...  <--- with the three dots, INSTEAD of www.mysite.com/item-name/

I have just 301'd them for now, but is this a sign of a technical issue?  The site is php/sql and I'm doing the URL rewrites/301s etc in .htaccess.

Thanks!

-Dan

EDIT: Also, wanted to add, there is no 'linked to' page.

It is still known to help, but to a generally small degree.  You can see all the ranking factors in the latest study here.

Hi, sure, what I meant was - if you're going to re-target, meaning maybe a page on the old site was optimized for "blue widgets" and you're re-optimizing it for "red widgets". I was just curious if you were trying to change what you're hoping to rank for?

Which brings me back to my point, if you're redoing everything from the ground up, you really want to do keyword research to know exactly what terms you're going to optimize the pages for.

Hi Steve

The best place to begin is keyword research. What are the exact terms you're trying to rank for? Use the adwords keyword tool and SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool to find out what's best to target. Then see how you're ranking for those keywords already, and seek to improve only the ones that;

• have good amount of search volume (use exact match, not broad)

• you feel you can rank for fairly easily (then you can move on to harder ones)

• offer transactional intent - aka the keyword types insinuates a desire to use your services

To optimize:

1. Look at your website technically and make sure it can be crawled by the engines. Run the site through a variety of tools like Xenu Link Slueth, or the SEOmoz crawler in the campaigns, or check google webmaster tools for errors.

2. Optimize your website for those keywords.  You can use the on-page optimization tool at SEOmoz.

3. Then look at backlinks, and aim to acquire high value, legitimate links.

You should also check out the beginners guide to seo and the resources here

-Dan

Hi

Doing a redesign isn't so much about the new CMS or platform, but how smooth you make the transition.

• Is your content (text) or architecture (URLs menus, # of pages) going to change significantly? If so, it matters more to worry about redirects etc.

• Have you done any preliminary work to guide the design of the new site, like keyword research, re-designed the architecture? That type of work, being sure you're targeting the same keywords and searches that you're already showing up for, is pretty important.

But as far as a CMS or platform, WordPress is extremely SEO friendly, especially if you install Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin, and Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.

-Dan

Sure, one thing I forgot to mention. Look at your XML sitemap. It doesn't seem to be correctly formatted at all, and it caused my window to freeze loading it. I'd look into that.

As far as the backlinks, yes I would start to build up some positive and natural backlinks.  Start with all the social profiles, like linkedin, youtube, facebook, twitter - make sure they all have links pointing to your site. Put unique, useful content on them. Try knowem to find more relevant social media sites to register with.

Then I would read over this guide to linking building and try putting it into practice to build new links.

A full off-site review is obviously out f the scope of this Q&A, but you can run your site through open site explorer and take a look - see if there's any sites that stick out like a sore thumb with a lot of links that provide no value (low quality domain, spammy or tons of exact match anchor text). Pick the worst sites and contact them and see if you can get them removed.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Ahh I see, so you're using Wordpress.com not Wordpress.org?  I am not familiar with the analytics for wordpress.com - so not entirely sure.

So its on wordpress servers though, like mysite.wordpress.com?

Ryan's on-site analysis is great. But I honestly don't think its the total reason for a 90% drop in traffic.

In taking a quick look at off-site, its looking like you have a very unnatural backlink portfolio.

And take a look at the screenshot of Majestic's historic backlink discovery.  All the sporadic spiking as well as referring domains spiking without total links spiking or vice versa is the sign of links being acquired unnaturally.

Plus only half of your external links are followed, and there's even much less linking C-blocks, which means many of your links are coming from the same place.

The good news is, you can address this without redesigning the site, but the bad news is, it could take a bit of effort in its self. I'd suggest starting with a back link audit.

Have you done much by way of trying to clean up your links?

-Dan

9kzCme08EJP

Also, are you filtering out your own traffic from your location?

Can you drill down into something else?  Visitor location perhaps or service provider, to look for any commonality in the spike in traffic?

There is an interesting post here on the SEER blog here about misleading traffic reports.

Hi

Try some of these places to start.

Lynda.com is excellent. They have some free courses available, but full access is a monthly subscription.

Sitepoint has some great stuff, including this HTML reference

O'Reily has excellent books.

Also, searching on YouTube is good, sometimes way easier to see someone walk through a screencast.

As a language, I would choose PHP/MySQL because its so common, and especially where WordPress uses PHP, that's probably the web language you'll be looking at most.

This is the official PHP site. - Although it can be a bit intense for beginners, but it is the official source.

-Dan

In theory a change from tables to divs should not affect anything if its simply a layout/styling change. But if you inadvertently changed something else, thats where you might run into trouble.  I would just double check everything else is as before; indexation, URLs, internal anchor text, titles, descriptions etc.

Three things I would do;

1. You have it on a test server now?  Crawl the live site and new site with Screaming Frog or Xenu Link sleuth and see if both crawls return the same thing for titles, descriptions, headers etc.

2. View both the new and old site with CSS/Java turned off and set user-agent to Google Bot (there's a plug in for firefox to do this) and see if you can see all the content.

3. Finally, you can run the broken link checker plug in for Chrome on the new site, and make sure all your links work.

After launch of the new site, I would immediately also check webmaster tools for any errors.

-Dan

Hi

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

-Dan

Yes, I would recommend having the field available so you can add it when needed, but not on every page automatically.

Also, all of Alan's advise is very good, as well as irving's. Hope it helps!

-Dan

Hi

You should definitely be using the canonical tag for that page. As far as site wide, I wouldn't recommend to just add it automatically on every page. What CMS are you using?  There should be a way to control what pages it gets added to, you wouldn't want it applied when it shouldn't be.

-Dan

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?

Mark

No problem

From what I have heard, there is a period of time where you can get a really good rise in rankings from fast backlinking, which might last 30-90 days. But then it will start to regress if a more natural and diverse backlink portfolio is not developed. I believe they allow this window of time to discourage a competitor sabotaging you with a bunch of bad links. Just my own theory though.

-Dan

Hi

I hate to use the "it depends on your situation" answer, but it really does. It depends what your link profile already looks like (an off-site audit would tell you), it depends what industry you're in and how the competition is, and it depends on your goals.

Maybe you've got a good idea of your existing backlink portfolio? And the competition?

I would highly suggest having a look at this resource on seomoz.  Eric Enge gives a fantastic overview of the entire linkbuilding process.

If you can give us some more info, perhaps we can give you a more customized answer.

-Dan

PS - At your hours vs pay, is this $1,000-2,000 per MONTH?  At 140 hours a month (35 hours a week), for $1,500 that's about $11 an hour.  I would highly suggest thinking about paying more per hour but finding someone who can do a quality job in less time. Unless I've assumed the math wrong