Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi SEOPA,

Any update on Ultimento? Has it worked out for you through a Magento upgrade? And the Ultimento 3.1 upgrade? Has it been worth the investment so far?

Kevin

Hi Paul,

I actually came here looking for the same info. I'm half way into my 30-day trial, and I have to admit I'm pretty impressed. I get prospect e-mails with the company name, location, pageviews, and referrer of the visitor. That would allow me to send marketing materials to that visitor knowing how they got to my site and what they were looking for. Really cool!

There are a lot of other great tools, like scheduling posts on social media sites (think Hootsuite), form builder (think Wufoo), a simple CRM (think Highrise), keyword analytics (geographically limited and not nearly as detailed as SEOmoz), other SEO tools for content and blogging, and the most awesome feature which is e-mail marketing automation (think Salesforce.com workflow for e-mail). This e-mail automation allows you to set up a flow to "nurture" leads into customers, so if a certain link is clicked or customer information is entered on a certain form or landing page, Hubspot knows and starts sending the e-mails you have created on the schedule you set up for that specific call-to-action. Point is to send pertinent information to leads base on their activity on your site. Now, for a niche business like American BBQ catering in Taiwan, this is really cool. It's probably not so useful for standard e-commerce sites or low-cost, high-volume businesses.

On the down side, and I mean really down side, is the native content management system. Sorry Hubspot, is just sucks. Just a little bit more love on that side and there wouldn't be too many services that could compete. And pricing is an issue for us. The version that would allow me to use the Hubspot API on an external site is over $8K a year, which even if my lead conversion increased 32% (the number they boast), then I'm paying over $200 for every new customer. Those numbers aren't very attractive to me, but they might be for you.

Great people there, great support, intuitive system, terrible CMS. But at the end of the day, the system could help you save time by merging lots of systems into one.

B+

Kevin

This is a hard one, I'm sure. In regards to search, I've read that Facebook pays close attention to verbs and that Google takes into account related words close to anchor text and search terms.

Now I have the unique opportunity to work as the internet sales and marketing consultant for a company in serious need of brand reputation repair. The company has experienced a terrible fallout from a recent product recall. Unfortunately in this case, the company site has really strong reach, which means that our blog posts, product descriptions, and twitter comments can be found copied on hundreds of websites hours after they are posted.

The most recent incident has associated our brand name with words like cheaters, scam, phoney, copycat, and other words that will certainly get filtered here. All my attempts to assure unconditional refunds and offer phone support get labeled as a desperate attempt to save the brand. No doubt, the company has issues but will surely overcome them in time.

SEO Question: Should I close the Facebook page and set strong filters on a new page to delete the onslaught of negative comments or should we spend the time to clean up the current page? This is a difficult decision, as I know many companies like Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Rackspace actually look at Facebook pages to qualify business leads (no fans, go home).

Damage control suggestions also welcome, but the crux of this issue here is how our brand name and product names will be associated with cuss words or negative terms and how this will affect our ranking in SERPs.

If you do choose to keep the www, make sure you have redirects in place so when a user doesn't enter the www, he or she will get to your home page. Just FYI, www.domain.com is a subdomain of domain.com, so if your site can be access through both, search engines view these as two different pages and possibly split rankings.

Keywords related to these areas of law are very competitive, and technical SEO advice will only get you so far. Josh has got the right idea of publishing at least three separate pages that specify and detail each area of expertise. I wouldn't go too crazy with internal linking, but a similar format to squarespace dot com for each page will allow you to get quite a bit of important information to your potential clients. You can link each section title to more pages, but remember not to canalize link juice by trying to rank two or more pages for the same key words.

I'm going to go out on a limb here only because I've seen it work really well for another client. You're no doubt going to need to embark on major link building campaigns and advertising to direct as much traffic to your site as possible. Now, a legal advice forum might help you out in this department. Having users generate content and lawyers answer these questions will drive more legitimate traffic to your site. And this content will be rich with key words related to your firm, even some you haven't thought of yourself. Of course, you'll need to consult with someone on the best solution for your company, but the forum should be on your own domain and not hosted somewhere else unless that association will benefit your ranking. Start a blog as well with great content for potential clients.

Also get on HARO as there are always reporters looking for professional legal sources. Linkmosses is a great link building newsletter. Get on directories, social media, all that. I imagine you're busy, so you'd be best to find someone or some company to do this for you.

P.S. Remember that your goal is conversions, turning leads into paying clients. Make sure you web site has some sort of web-to-lead form and call to action.

Hope I helped a little.

Careful adding embedded video. Your site won't get the link juice of that video URL if it's linked to Youtube, Vimeo, or other video hosting site unless you can customize the domain (most likely subdomain) to the site you are hosting it on. Remember, Youtube is a search engine!

CDNs like AWS have edge servers in many countries (Cloudfront) and allow for custom domains. Video hosting sites aren't necessarily fast; your video needs to create a certain amount of traffic to stay in the cache. Stale video is likely to get pulled from a storage system and then loaded into cache, which is the way most CDNs work.

Anyway, try a service called loadimpact.com and test your sites performance. Make sure to sign up and configure the test to use Simulated Browser Users (SBUs).

Watch those comment pages, ascending/descending lists, article pagination, tag pages, category pages, archive pages, RSS, print pages, and anything else that might create a page link. I recommend upgrading your Wordpress and installing the Yoast SEO plugin.

But also, search engine algorithms change, and I imagine they do here at SEOmoz. Be prepared for these kinds of updates as the point is to keep up with search engines to give the best possible representation of your rankings.

Ideally, you should use both, but I realize that could be a lot of work. Canonical URLs will work well for the case you mentioned above. Just remember to link to your canonical URL on internal pages and have inbound links point to that canonical URL. You should ask site owners that host those inbound links to change if possible or use 301 to redirect those links that can't be changed.

You may also want to consider creating redirect rules to add or remove the trailing slash for all URLs, because links with and without the slash are considered different URLs and will split link juice.

Late to the party here. I'm a Magento user with only about 30 products. The reasons I chose Magneto is for it's hangling of multiple languages. It is by far (and I mean really far) the best at handling multiple languages and maintain continuity as far as design, functionality, and SEO.

This leads me to my second reason: Extremely SEO friendly! I've worked with or demoed shopping carts for Joomla, Wordpress, Modx, and other hosted solutions. Magento can be (actually it must be) customized to do anything you want, like localized checkout process, automatic template switching for holiday promotions, e-mail notifications for any action, custom invoices, and the list goes on. Really, the only limits are either your programming skills or your budget.

About resources, I have to disagree with Ryan on this one. I run my instance on Rochen reseller hosting without issues, granted my site is fairly low traffic given that it's for catering and frozen delivery. But I put out mid-90's on both YSlow and PageSpeed, and that's something I don't see very often with other platforms.

Anyway, if you haven't committed, I do suggest getting to know Magento, but you might need to hire a professional firm to handle development.

Kevin

Thanks for the posts everybody. Confirming that I've done everything I have influence over, I guess that settles it. I just tried searching for more on this after reading Matt Cutts, Eric Ward, Joost de Valk, and others SEO pros share different info.

On to other SEO issues. Awesome to be back at SEOmoz guys!

Question here, but first the lead in. As you all know, 301 redirects don't pass on 100% of link juice. I've set up my site using htaccess to redirect all non-ww to www and redirect all URLs to have a trailing slash. FYI, the preferred domain is selected in WMT and canonical URLs appear in the head section of all pages.

So now what happens when sites that link to mine don't include either the www or the trailing slash, which is actually quite common? Of course, asking the site own to correct the link is ideal, but that's not always possible. So if thousands of links on external sites are linking to http://www.site.com instead of http://www.site.com/, won't lots of link juice get lost in redirection?

I can't think of anything more I can do to the URLs to reduce duplicate content and juice dilution. Thoughts?

Kevin

Hey Ryan,

Question here, but first the lead in. As you know, 301 redirects don't pass on 100% of link juice. I've set up my site to redirect all non-ww to www and all URLs to include a trailing slash. So now what happens to ranking when sites that link to my site don't include either the www or the trailing slash, which is actually quite common? Of course, asking the site owner to correct the link is ideal, but that's not always possible. So if thousands of links on external sites are linking to http://www.site.com instead of http://www.site.com/, won't lots of link juice get Lost in Redirection?

Kevin

Hi Ryan,

Looks like you're using Wordpress. To take care of those redirect issue, try the following in your .htaccess file. Test thoroughly on a demo site before going live with this. Wordpress plugins that you're using might have options that reach the same effect, so look into that as well.

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks

#Force trailing slash
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www.)?mybabyradio.com/$ [NC]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
    RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.mybabyradio.com/$1/ [R=301,L]
#Redirect non-www to www
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mybabyradio.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mybabyradio.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Thanks Tyler. We're committed to Magento. I was inquiring about the SEO effectiveness of the Ultimento template in particular. It's up there at around $600, but if it saves us a complete redesign of an entire Magento theme, then it'll be well worth it. I'd just hate to get involved with this only to find that we still have to work throughout the code changing heading tags, removing extra span tags, inserting XML modifications to add metadata, and all that jazz. If you don't tool with Magento, you probably won't get what I'm jabbin about, but that's ok. Magento is a beast, we're just looking to maximize our SEO dollars in the least amount of time.

Kevin

We're working on a re-design and want to start with SEO rather than leave it until the end. Of course, saving time and money on a custom template would be great. Ultimento found at www.ultimento.com boasts great SEO features. Has anybody used it? Please comment. Thanks in advance!

Kevin

Ok, problem solved. The methodology in my question was apparently not the right approach. The structure should I had to set up a language folder /en/ and copy my index.php and .htaccess file to that location. Then I modified the index.php file to direct to the 'en' site and changed the base URL in the Magento backend to /en/. Also, I turned off 'add store code to URL'. Now my Taiwan visitors see http://www.88kbbq.com/ and visitors to the English site see http://www.88kbbq.com/en/. No redirects necessary.

Note that the current site doesn't have the issue I'm asking about. We're working on a new site with IE6 support (tears) and better address support for Taiwan. I usually use .htaccess for redirects but am open to any solution. Yes, I'm try to avoid the wildcard redirect--I only need www.88kbbq.com/tw to redirect to www.88kbbq.com so both visitors and search engines will never see the former. Thanks for your response. Hope to find a solution soon!

In my multilingual Magento store, I want to redirect the hompage URL with an added language code to the base URL. For example, I want to redirect http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to http://www.mysite.com/ which has the exact same content.

Using a canonical URL will help with search engines, but I would just rather nip the problem in the butt by not showing http://www.mysite.com/tw/ to visitors in the first place. Problem is that I don't want (can't have) all /tw/ removed from URLs due to Magento limitations, so I just want to know how to redirect this single URL. Since rewrites are on, adding Redirect 301 /tw http://www.88kbbq.com would redirect all URLs with the /tw/ language code to ones without. Not an option.

Hope folks can lend a hand here.

Sure Daniel, your example makes sense for an e-commerce site. The question above asked about "different aspects of the same subject," so I would write a thorough article about that subject, which I assume is an editorial here or Russ would have said product, that covers all aspects mentioned. Personally, I wouldn't want to click through a maze of pages to find the info I wanted; I'd like it right there in front of me. Just a preference here.

So I'm going to have to disagree with you about the 5 separate pages for 5 key words in this case. Granted, content for e-commerce sites like your example should be much more focused than a blog or review about a product, as there is a lot of SEO magic you can do with reviews using microformating and RSS, but if you're writing a tutorial or editorial, I'd go with a complete full page with those 5 key subjects organized in paragraphs with key words used in headings, bold text, image alt tags, anchor text, bullet lists, and content. The page rank would be much better than 5 separate pages.

Hum. I've watch videos from Matt Cutts and read in quite a few places that large pages win in SERPs. One comparison I'm sure you can find was between Amazon and Borders and how Amazon's page for the same product was over three times as long and contained 5x the content. Subsequently, it ranked higher than Border's page.

I create pages with relevant content, easy-to-read formating, descriptive images, and SEO recommendations from Google and SEOmoz. Takes me longer to get things done, but I'm pretty happy with my rankings.