Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you mean, Promote a post, it will basically give your post prominence within the page of all your followers, and their followers if the post is liked.

Its certainly not as effective as using the standard advertising with FB ... but also is a lot more cost effective with relation to spend (one of fee less than $10 as opposed to an unlimited spend if you wish)

If you have lot of followers (likes) already,. it can be effective, if you are trying to build likes on any page, it may not be as effective.

I aint one to advocate people spending money on adverting with FB or Google if they don't need to, but if you are really trying to build followers with FB, and wish not to put in the hardwork by organically growing your page followers, FB's paid advertising certainly can help, as you can target your market specifically.

We used it for a client over one week period limiting his spend to $10 per day, targeting a very niche market, with the distinct objective of building likes in a trial scenario, and within that week, we grew his like from 84 to above 350 (an audience of less than 8,000 targets).

Hope that helps

Mozers,

I am of the believe and as a  person who puts the utmost emphasis on the index page of any website I am trying to rank, especially with a new domain ... insuring content is relevant, structured, optimized and we have some link juice flowing in.

I find once we get the index page ranked, Google's little bots then start to index and rank accordingly the rest of the website ... and we start producing results.

We also develop websites (dare I say its where we expertise in) and unexpectantly the client has asked us to carry out SEO work additionally to their web development.

Problem lies here, their index page, has absolutely no written content at all, just one large image with a logo (Fashion Website) ...Which I identify as a huge issue as per my explanation is paragraphs one or two.

I am sure withe the many more qualified SEO experts and gurus within the SEOmoz community, you have also come across this issue

So a few questions, if you don't mind adding advice.

1 - Am I putting too much emphasize on content within the index page, in terms of indexing and actually ranking ...yes I appreciate that terms within the website will be ranked against other pages other than the index page, but will it harm us for having no content at all within the index page

2 - If so, and yes is the answer to above, how do we handle it, we have spoke with the client and he is pretty adamant that he want the index page as is, he has been through out the whole website building process.

As suggested, any advice would be really appreciated, its a difficult market to rank within a it is, and i can only see this index page making the task a lot more difficult

Cheers

John

Cheaper (much cheaper than iStock) could be http://photodune.net

Dont get me wrong, they don't have the quality of some of the iStock stuff, but I have often got some good images there

Regards

John

Nice website

Just one thing I noticed  I would add a preloader  to insure the Full Page Background Slider is loaded before the CSS and HTML on the home page.

As when I load the page the slider kicks in about 5 seconds later.

More website impresion advice than SEO though

Regards

John

I imagine State side as the country is so vast, regional words would be very important

From my experience, I would use regions within Meta Tags,  as opposed to page content, as you say it can look very tacky and not aesthetically pleasing to a website to have a heading saying 'Dallas Family Dentist'

So for example, meta Tag would be "Dallas Family Dentist etc etc", and optimize the page for Family Dentist.

Its worked for me before.

Regards

John

Hi Andy

Yes, hear you loud and clear. I think actually treating everything on the two websites as different entities is the way to go, different url extensions  subtle changes to headings etc,  and try our best to mix content up, even if we need to add to it (although I will be braking my Golden rule of not creating content for clients websites, my real pet hate at web development stage.)

Thanks again for your help and advice, really appreciated, and your kind offer of help, I may take you up, so expect PM soon offering copious amounts of Guinness in return for advise

Kind Regards

John

Actually, on further investigation, blocking the includes folder does not effect ranking, as the content is loaded server side (PHP)

I don't imagine that the robot.txt file is your issue, as its just stopping people accessing your include and admin folder, which you want

Iain

I dont use WP, but just Googled this

"I believe WordPress itself creates the robots.txt file and it is a virtual file, meaning there won't be a hard copy on your server for you to edit. You could create one yourself and upload it to your server and I think search engines will use that one instead, or you can use a plugin like this one, that will let you edit your robots.txt file from the WordPress admin."

Explains why you cant find it !

Basically that suggest creating one yourself and uploading it to the server.

Create a note pad file, add your content, name file robot.txt (must change extension to .txt), and that should work

Iain

Just to be sure, its actually just called a robot.txt (not .text)

I just checked, you do have one in your root file

http://www.iainmoran.com/robots.txt

Bizarrely, its blocking Google indexing your includes, which is a problem cause most of your links will be included in some sort of nav include, not to mention most of your website content.

Its defiantly there, maybe check your public folder and www folder

Let me know how you get on

John

Why not product reviews, used by almost every e-commerce website .... And used by me when I shop online

I imagine they are without doubt the most powerful sort of review on an e-commerce website, assuming of course they are good reviews

Hi Andy

Thanks for reply.

Yes, we did suggest using a .com, the client has the .com also, but the client has a preference to use local domains as there will be a small bit of bespoke pages relating to each country, but in the vast the same content on each website.

We even suggested sub domains with a JS redirect for each country of the .com, but we have to work with .co.uk and .ie

We has also considered mixing the content descriptions up for each product. so they wont be exactly identical, unfortunately after receiving the for product descriptions, there is little or no in the actual descriptions that will allow for making each identical to each website.

But yes, I do take your point regarding large manufactures who have a local site for each country, with basically the same description for each product, they don't have the duplicate content issue effecting their rankings, but lots of other factors contribute to that I imagine.

I love this quote, " if you can't don't loose sleep and optimise elsewhere like hell", if only

Regards

John

Iain

You robots.xt file can be found within your root directory

Where ever your website is hosted, log in there (if you have cpanel which is more than likely) and navigate to your public folder. the robots.text file should reside there, download it and edit in any software really, wordpad etc.

If you don't have cpanel, you can add your FTP credential using an FTP client and navigate the same way

When you edit it, upload it back to your server.

Regards

J

Hi

Wondering if someone can advise.

We have two websites with a .ie domian and .co.uk domain  (e-commerce stores)

The websites are identical so we need to address duplicate content issue. The issue we have is we are targeting both local Google to rank, google.ie and google.co.uk.

Obviously to handle duplicate content we are going to have to "rel can" the one of the websites, which will probably be the .ie domain.

Question is, will this effect the ranking within the .ie domian on google.ie.

And any advice on how anyone else handles this situation would be greatly appreciated, we have had no issue ranking before with one domain on a local search engine, but this is the first time we have come across needing to rank two domains with identical content on each local search engine

Thanks in advance

John

Thanks Tom

Hi

We have a .com and a .co.uk

Main website is .co.uk, we also have a landing page for the .com

If we redirect the .com to the .co.uk, will it create duplicate content ...

May seem like a silly question, but want to be sure that that the visitors cant access our website at both urls, as that would be duplicate content

Thanks in advance

John

Thanks folks

No, the content is absolutely relevant ... and has a natural flow as opposed to the page just containing the keyword several times with no context to it at all

I suppose I was just questioning the page based on the advice given by the SEO Moz page optimising toll as opposed to my own natural instinct.

I am reluctant to post the URL, as the site is not actually mine ....

But I do appreciate the advice .... And feel a little more at ease with the dilemma

Thanks again to both of you.

Regards

John

Hi,

I have a particular page I am working on fully optimised as per the page rank tool and grading A.

Problem is, there is still one issue on the page, the keyword I want to rank for in particular on that page is reporting that I am over using the word.

I have looked through the HTML on the body of the page and see that the actual content is not an issue, I have less than 15 mentions of the keyword, the problem actually arises from the Nav Bar

The word I am ranking for say is football

Well in the nav-bar, I have several pages that are named football-xxx.html

So where the actual page content only has 12 mentions of the keyword Football,

• list has another 13 due to my page naming properties.* Football- xxx
• Football- xxx
• Football- xxx
• Football- xxx
• Football- xxx
• Football- xxx

....... And so on up to 13 different pages with a similar naming structure (obviously the XXX are products like socks, shorts, tops, boots etc)

So, without asking the obvious, I assume that the way to change is would be to rename the pages (can't really happen), or remove the term football from the body of the content on the website.

So firstly, is the Google algorithms not smart enough to recongise that the content in the menu tag is in fact the nav bar ... and page names as opposed to keyword stuffing.

Also, how did anyone else handle a similair situation

And lastly, I am assuming basic on common sense alone that Keyword stuffing is a big no no, of everything I have learned though SEO Moz, this makes clear and concise sense to me ... So how do I resolve the issue I have here

Many thanks in advance for any help offered

Regards

John

Thanks, I thought as much

Wow, just rereading that myslef, its rather a long winded way to ask a simple question

Put simply, is it ok to have both the www.mysite.com and the www,mysite.com/index.html page, will it be viewed as duplicate content by search engines

Thanks

John

To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal

I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com.

All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content.

Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website.

Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ...

Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem.

For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously)

I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content)

To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is  a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website.

This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years.

As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ?

Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ?

Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status

Many thanks in advance

John