Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Keri! Yeah I did find some fun editing tools in there that definitely were helpful. I'll try the online editor as you suggested.

Excited to start contributing to YouMoz!

As the title says, I'm working on a YouMoz post and want to add captions to some of my images. Is this not possible? Since some are justified strangely, I can't just do it with the p tags they offer... I tried dropping a div styled in there and it broke everything, unsurprisingly.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

What you are asking here is essentially "What is SEO and how do I do it?"

Well it's kind of an incredibly long answer and explanation and basically in order to truly master what you are after it will require you to spend some time learning the trade. These forums are a great place to do that, but probably not the best place to start. Moz does have some great resources to get you started, however. I would head this direction and read through every last page they offer if I were you: http://moz.com/learn/seo

Uh.. I don't know where to begin.

A web page is a blog post. A blog post sits on a web page.. What's the difference? ... I like Clever's short answer let's leave it at that.

So I was using Alexa's rankings to determine your site speed. It isn't a HUGE difference, but is worth noting. Consider looking into a service like CloudFlare to serve localized caches based on IP address of the requester... (cloudflare.com)

As for the videos - When you embed a YouTube video into your site, the video is still on YouTube. Therefore, if anybody links to it or shares it the backlink goes to YouTube. (unless they happen to share your exact URL which would be silly because there's a "share" button built right into your video.)

Also, the YouTube page where the original video sits will eventually be ranked and it could end up beating you out of placement much like the example I provided did for you earlier. If this existed say on your own site under a blog or video blog or just video section, then at least your own domain is popping up instead of dailymotion or youtube.

Bottom line is the video being hosted on your own website is a far superior option when it comes to SEO. You want that traffic hitting YOUR server and the backlinks pointing to YOUR domain. Not YouTube's. *(not to mention, ad-free)

Now YouTube can still be a part of a successful SEM campaign.. but I wouldn't put my bread and butter videos on there.

Thank you Thomas! This helps immensely. I'm going to look into Firehost. Sounds like I could use them and skip CloudFlare all together.

I definitely need localization for our Canadian clients as we actually have a fairly large number of them and we have our own Canadian data center as well in Vancouver, so this helps. It really is an amazing difference for Canadian users accessing Canadian servers as opposed to American. The speed difference is instantly noticeable.

Anyway thanks!

A big thanks to everybody for participating in this thread!

I've got a lot to research here! I'll let you all know what we end up going with just to provide closure

Thank you Robert, this definitely helps. Honestly I've been leaning towards Rackspace from the get-go and I'm considering looking at CloudFlare to work along side it as I like the way they serve data and provide cached backups in the event of an outage.

Honestly, I don't think I need a dedicated server. We are a cloud hosting company so we have tons of our own servers in our own data centers. That said, I don't want our website hosted on those servers as it is right now because when we go down, our website goes down too and we are left with no way to notify our clients as to what is happening.

The login portals, backend, and everything else is going to stay on our own subdomains where it resides now. The only thing I'm going to be moving is the HTML files. Nothing that affects functionality will move.

So because of that it doesn't really seem like I'd need a dedicated... The chances of Rackspace going down at the same time as our own servers are pretty stinkin' slim, so I feel like that combined with cloudflare should get me what I need... What do you think?

Thanks guys - Here's a bit more info:

• Don't need email
• Don't need a ton of space
• Not a wordpress site so none of that.
• Need easy access to tools/redirects
• Want Redundancy and I'd like the service to recognize a user's location by IP and assign the closest server to them
• Cost is not a factor

Because Wistia allows you to embed on your own site. Thus, if you have an awesome video that people are watching/linking to/travelling to/sharing on social etc, Google will pick it up and your site's ranking will improve. Not to mention if that video gets ranked on dailymotion.com, it's driving traffic to somebody else's website instead of yours.

Sure you can have a link to your site, but you're losing traffic by adding that extra hurdle. You might get a 20% CTR there if you're lucky.. At that point it seems silly to allow some other domain to reap the rewards of your awesome popular video.

Also if somebody wants to embed the video, they can do so and it's a backlink you just gained (via wistia of course)

That's the quick version (sorry busy monday)

Oh excuse me, it seems you do have a video displaying on that first page of results. Which technically gives you three of the 10 results on that SERP. WHOA!

This would be even better if the video was hosted on your domain, in your blog. Seriously consider moving it there.

(this is the link I'm referencing: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10zfwm_ludwig-van-beethoven-s-fur-elise-sheet-music-for-violin-and-piano-sheet-music-video-score_music)

I came here to say exactly this. You're absolutely lucky to have 2 spots on page 1 for the same keyword.

Also I'd like to point out that the pages outranking you (beyond the youtube vids) all load faster than yours. Just an observation. Speed is a factor.

Also, why don't you get some video content in there? Those seem to be ranking well. (HINT: Use a video hosting platform like wistia.. skip youtube)

Landing pages. You provide the content, the expert will tell you how to present it/what to present.

I work for a cloud computing company. We foolishly host our website on one of our own servers. This means if our data center goes down and service is disrupted (which does happen from time to time) our website goes down as well.

This is clearly a problem as we have no way to provide messaging to our clients during such disasters.

So I have finally convinced the powers to move to a third-party provider to avoid this. We obviously need redundancy and speed is always a factor. What do you suggest? Where should I go for this service?

There are so many stinkin' options that I'm finding the research to be a bit daunting.

Thanks!

Quickly, my first thought is try shortening up your Title tag. Play with that a bit. I think you could do better. Notice what the other two title tags are beating you with.. Play around..

But what will definitely win you over is this - SEO! Build some content, gain some links, keep 'em relevant and you'll succeed.

I don't know. I think it's gotten to the point where I avoid the Traffic Sources referral stats like the plague they've become.

You can't trust that metric anymore.

And people keep saying "just give it time and they will be penalized," but it's been this way for 9 months now.

How many algo updates/refreshes have happened in these 9 months? When's it gonna take?

See my frustration!?

Well for me the preferred page is not ranking as I have recently changed the URL. At least that's my assumption even though it ranked high for a couple days.

The sites that are beating it have link profiles containing completely irrelevant links from random forums, fake poorly written blog article submissions, and disgusting poison directories. The entire first page of results for this keyword is filled by black-hat SEO tactics.

The page outranking my main page isn't ranking that high either. It's just ranking above the desired. Again I feel that the issue here is that the URL is new and that time and a little proper link-building will fix it, but I can't tell you how frustrating it is that the market I'm competing for is winning with black hat tactics and poorly constructed websites.

I'm going to attempt to "bump" this thread as I'm very disappointed that it hasn't gained any responses..

If anybody has any input we'd love to hear it!

Well as per which method is "better," see my last response to AWCthreads above. They both do pretty much the same thing but which is better depends on if you want localized results or not. For certain keywords this won't make a difference of course.

As for what's causing your problem, I'm not sure. I haven't even thought or looked into this, but is there a chance that since you're in the UK the moz keywords are pulling US google rankings? Or is there an option when setting up your campaign to specify browser location? I would assume there is as the moz team would think of this but just thought I'd ask as I'm totally unaware.

Are you referring to the campaign level reports only? Have you tried using the instantaneous rank tracker? http://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker

See what that reports as it will be the most current and up-to-date. Perhaps there was a funny flux/carousel thing happening when the moz crawl happened. I've seen a few of my keywords report <50 in the past when I know they're more like 8 or 9 and the next week they're more accurate. Sometimes moz even sends out an "oops we adjusted your campaign crawl a bit" message.. Or maybe that was a dream.

Let me know what you think... Hope I can help.

I'm sorry I should have been more specific. The &pws=0 parameter removes all personalization correlating with your search and browsing history. It does not affect local. So in other words, Google normally uses your cookies and browsing history to sculpt the SERPs page you see. When it's a term you search often (your target keywords) you will start to see weird results. Probably your site at the top as you click it the most and Google tracks that from your browsing history. &pws=0 removes this aspect and the this aspect only; the search history.

The local targeting remains through this parameter as you've seen. If you do local SEO and happen to be in the city of the business you are marketing, I feel this is a good thing as you want to see what your target market sees. However if you don't live in this city of course it's bad.

To completely remove all traces of personalization the best possible method is to switch to Chrome's "incognito mode." This is done in the menu (you'll see it) and removes anything and everything from your search parameters, no &pws=0 necessary.

Hope this helps. Sorry for the confusion.