Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Just an update for everyone. We use sitemaps, rather than meta tags, to do the circular href lang mapping for our localized domains. In doing so, we've found the HREFLANG XML Sitemap Tool from The Media Flow particularly AMAZING! Talk about saving time! Just make a csv file with a comma for each language/locale, upload it, and then download a zip file with all your sitemaps. Beautiful.
Thank you for the candid response. The international piece is appealing. Does Moz have plans to enhance international capabilities?
I came across Sistrix today, and the tool looks pretty robust ... especially the international data. I wanted to see whether anyone has used Sistrix before. How does it compare to Moz?
Some friends of mine are having their site redesigned. The designer is using Webflow, which appears to be a visual drag-and-drop designer.
Has anyone come across Webflow before? How is it for SEO? I'm not typically pleased with visual designers for SEO, but maybe somebody's had experience and thinks it's fine.
These are all great tips. At this early point in the game, your focus on old-school networking and on-page optimization will have a disproportionate impact.
I would add that your site looks like so many other design portfolio sites in that:
You need to look at your design company as if it were a product. How would you package that product? What are the buying stages? How do you move people down the funnel?
Most design firms have the same issue. They put their portfolio online and expect that to make them stand out. But your really could benefit from product-izing your business.
I think some flagship content could really help with this. The idea is to create a single piece of content - video, info-graphic, long-form blog post, etc. - that is relatively hard to duplicate by competition. Something really useful or informative. Make it free, then focus marketing and link building efforts around it. Bruce Clay, Inc. did this a number of years ago with their SEO Code of Ethics. Moz does it with their Beginner's Guide to SEO. Search Engine Land does it with their Periodic Table of SEO.
You want to gather leads higher up in the funnel and build links along the way.
With well-developed, useful, and focused content like this, it will be more likely for folks to share your site on social media and easier to establish yourself as an authority in something. That will result in easier link building.
If you do it right, it'll also entice qualified prospects. For example, you could create a blog post+video/infographic about 10 Ways Small Businesses in Utah Can Stand Out Online. With a title like that, you will have identified your audience - small businesses in Utah - and their pain - how to stand out online.
You would then have a pretty good hunch that folks downloading that offer are your audience.
I know none of this is technical SEO help for you. But content has the biggest impact on SEO ... plus, I've seen great content beat technical SEO before.
That seems like too much work. I would do this instead:
These sound like product variations to me. Since the content would vary very little between the versions, I would create a single product page that allows customers to choose the variations they want. A single page allows you to focus more on converting visitors on that page. Plus, you can combine customer reviews and other product information there.
(**Note: **If this product is on Amazon, then definitely make it a single product page with variations. Refer to the webinar by Rick Backus for why.)
Spreading that product content over 5 or 24 pages, with very little to differentiate one page from another, won't really help you in the long run. Google will see it as thin or duplicate content.
I would turn instead to your blog or other sections of the site to create the additional content you need to rank. For example, you could write articles covering:
This approach helps your internal site linking structure promote the money page. Each of those articles could link to the product page where customers see all your variations. Your external linking efforts could be more streamlined as well.
Hi Moz,
My Moz campaigns run from Thursday to Wednesday. That's because the person who set them up did so on Wednesday. Unfortunately, every other reporting tool we use thinks a week starts on Sunday and ends on Saturday ... Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, etc.
If I want to report on an actual week in Moz - Sunday through Saturday - I can't.
Well, I can, but I have to log in around 12:01 Sunday morning to create my campaigns ... which I did this weekend for our translated sites ... but I did it wrong because I entered the root domain rather than the .com/de directory, for example ... because it was after midnight and I was really sleepy ... so now I have to wait till next Sunday if I want Sunday through Saturday week/week data.
So here's my feature request:
Thanks. And please don't take the complaining part of this feature request to mean that I don't love you, because I do.
Boo. I am begrudgingly marking this question as answered.
Thank you for passing on the feature request, though.
I did get the same warning.
I want to track the competitor at their new domain. But I don't want to lose my historical data for that competitor.
One of my competitor's has changed their domain URL. I want to update this in the Moz campaign settings but I get a warning that all historical data will be lost if I do.
Is that really true? I replaced one of my competitors with another for a week and didn't seem to lose historical data.
Incidentally, could this be a feature request to allow more competitors to be tracked?
Thank you Aleyda!
Do you know which type of targeting has more impact ... language or country?
I don't know that we need country targeting because we don't display currency or sell offline in physical locations. Also, I doubt we would create multiple French sites ... even if we do want to target France specifically.
Kate,
What if I have one url translated into French but want to target French speakers in multiple countries? Would I do this with my hreflang tags:
Note: I generated these with Aleyda Solis's international sitemap generator. Does hreflang="x-default" ever get used?
I am seriously considering reducing the number of pages in a section of our website. We currently have 39 webpages. I'm considering reducing it to 6.
The site architecture would make more sense giving recent design changes. And we could focus more attention on improving conversions from these 6 new pages. But I'm considering doing this mainly because I think it'll help us do a better job of communicating to and converting our audience.
The new pages would be longish. The existing 39 pages are by no means stubs, but these new pages would be longer.
Anyway, what I want to put out for discussion is the SEO impact.
Honestly, there's a part of me that cannot believe I'm saying this, but I think my heart is in the right place.
It seems as though Google thinks a different page on your site is more relevant for the query "roofing software." I found http://www.jobnimbus.com/roofing-crm-and-project-management-software/ in the top 10.
If you want the other page to outrank this one, then I'd evaluate your internal linking structure, optimize all the on-page factors you can (ex., use "Roofing Software" in the H1 for example), and try to get some offsite links to that page in particular.
I think Hutch42 is right. If your urls have no file extensions on them (.asp, .php, .htm), you really shouldn't see any dip from merely changing over.
It would be worth triple-checking about the extensions, though. We changed our site over a few years back and saw a dip in some key lead-generating pages that had extensions on them.
One place you may see a difference is with load times. Your pages' code structure will likely change. And .NET/IIS sometimes has different speeds than a LAMP stack even with the same content.
That's not ideal.
If you're trying to do this programmatically in a CMS, perhaps there's a way to do something like:
alt="Photo {Some Property}"
alt="{Some Property}"
alt="Photo"
Using "Null" is worse than leaving it blank, I think.
The primary purpose of the alt tag is to assist those visually impaired visitors who are using screen readers. Just make the tag descriptive of the image it is replacing - alt="Photo of Pole Vault Accident". For video thumbnails, you should do the same thing if you can. The video title will work fine.
I consider SEO a secondary consideration for alt tags. You may want to include targeted keywords there. But really, if you're focus is usability, and if the image is relevant to the content of the page, then you'll satisfy SEO when you focus on the alt tags' usability.
There are a lot of other more high-impact factors you can focus on - both on-page and off. If you've gotten on-page optimization down to alt tags, you may want to spend more time on link building.
We use a really good agency, but agencies can be expensive.
Have you considered getting some tools and doing things in-house? I like and have used both Marin Software and Acquisio. When I did consulting, I also evaluated Jumpfly (service) and Raven (tool). Never used them, but left the evaluation feeling favorable. It's tough to find a good PPC company when your spend is pretty low.
Nick, do you have any screenshots of the landing pages you're using for the campaigns? You could probably improve your campaign performance quite a bit by focusing on the landing page optimization, even with no other changes to your AdWords account.
I'm sure some folks here would be willing to give some free feedback on landing page design. Sometimes it's good to get others' eyes on things.
I don't take on AdWords clients anymore, otherwise I'd bid. 
