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Nice work, I had noticed something similar. Not to mention the fact that if you are logged in to twitter (which everyone always is) it automatically logs you into and creates an account on their site. Bad Ju Ju.

As you said it was a generalization, not necessarily directed at you. The quote you are referring to (mine, not Rands) is a simple caveat to anyone who might be reading this question and thinks that alt text will save the day. Optimizing alt tags is a great way to get the job done and accurately describe the images attached, my point was that stuffing, etc... is not. Again not a direct attack on you, just overall advice for people who might want to go down that road.

If I am understanding you correctly you want to know how many links are going to different folders within your site structure, or to different pages within your site structure. Either way, use webmastertools, although the link counts tend to be off and not nearly as accurate as open site explorer, it will give you the ability to see links built to each level via the "your site on the web" section look for the "links to your site section". \

here is an example:

folder                                                                            links             linking domains

| /lawyer/Pennsauken_New-Jersey |      458 |                    2 |

the folder in question was /lawyer/

There are also a number of hosted analytics solutions you could put on your server that will give you more detailed info.

one more thought is to count the links to pages that reside in that folder by filtering in your analytics, i am not sure of the scale of your site, but it might do the trick as well.

Easy as that!

Cheers,

Hola!

google has this to say about submitting sitemaps "Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover." ala Webmaster tools. I stand firmly behind your inkling to create a good standard issue sitemap and submit. Last week we had a client (attorney) who did not have a sitemap at all for the three years her site was up, google had about 22 pages in its index, after sitemap, 432 pages in its index.  Be sure to submit to BIng webmaster tools as well, cover all bases!

so I say create right away, its not going to hurt anything, and can quite honestly help a lot! as a footnote to this answer, if you are using videos, etc... on the site be sure to build a video sitemap as well we have been seeing a lot successful indexing of our clients media.

Hope this helps!

NO problem! Was it helpful?

301 will pass link juice all day long my friend. URL rewrite... not so much.

The plain old simple fact about deleting twitter accounts is that you will lose followers and potential opportunity to shed some light on your brand and service (no to mention build some pretty solid links to great content). The idea in having foreign twitter accounts is to be able to adequately represent the locals in their own language, destroying the language barrier and bringing everyone a warm fuzzy. So take a good look at your referral sources, conversions from twitter vs the amount of time and energy your staff is taking to manage all these accounts. That equation should spit out a suitable response.

That being said my two companies have 1 twitter account each and employees are able to create their own and tweet as they wish (within reason) we have been able to get followers from most developed countries and tweet entirely in english, with a smattering of foreign words here and there.

in the end your analytics and referral data should be more than enough to answer any questions of effectiveness you might have.

Raven tools (and soon SEOmoz) has some potent Social Tracking / Social Mention features, maybe take a look at those as well.

Anyone using this service? Its seems like some sort of really bad affiliate marketing, which we all know is a no-go in regards to acceptable use policy for twitter.

Just looking for some opinions, a client seems to really like, I seem to really not

someone wrote a pretty good article discussing the use of javascript in navigations, here is the link:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/working-with-navigation-in-seo

Hey Chris,

that is an excellent question. However, it is one with a lot of answers... in short:

1. A 301 should only be used when a page has been moved or deleted.

2. A url redirect should be used in the case of multiple instances, like your homepage. The only thing it does is rewrite your url to make it nice to read And gives the search engines a nice hint that the version you are re-writing to is the one you want associated with your domain.

I know this answer is short, but I hope it suffices.

You bring up a really interesting question. When you say dead links I assume they just lead to nowhere. Ideally you would 301 Redirect (which will pass most of its value to another page therefore keeping some of that SEO steam you have built up) to a page that allows the user to continue to search for similar or related products, keeps them on site with out scaring them away with a "File Not Found" error on their page, etc... I am not familiar with Shopify so I am not sure if its possible. Might be helpful if you were to post one of these links so that we can all take a look at it and work it out as a team.

I agree 100% with what Theo is saying. The use of CSS to replace images has gotten to a point (from a purely aesthetic standpoint) that you cant tell the difference anymore. It is effective and considered best practice to use text when possible. It compounds your pages SEO weight and can edge out your competition if they are using images as opposed to CSS to render text in its place. Style Sheets RULE!

are you using the H1 tag multiple times on the same page?

an Alt tag is wonderful for those with disabilities to actually understand whats going on in your site. Imagine going to a site that stuffs the same three keywords into their image alt tags? It must be super confusing and frustrating for someone with out the gift of sight. At least consider the purpose of the tag. The benefit of stuffing keywords is far outweighed by making your site accessible and easily understood by those with disabilities, or those trying to figure out what that picture might be. I am sure someone else in this thread has touched on the exact same thing I am saying, but if your site is coming down to over optimizing alt tags, chances are your not a very good SEO, you could easily accomplish more with a great description and title tag than all your alts combined.

We do the same, however, I am looking for a third party (other the GA) specifically for facebook that is friendly with some serious reporting.

Thoughts?

HOLA!

I need some questions answered by all the GREAT people here:

1. suggestions for 3rd party facebook analytics tracking (currently utilizing a custom API and raven tools)

2. who is using the open graph protocol  and how are you doing so?

I would mark this question as answered, it seems that a lot of great minds have come together and given a lot of really accurate responses. It just keeps others from re-answering.