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I have to say that so far I am very impressed with what i'm seeing about the google plus project. I think they may have finally fixed a lot of the missteps they've taken over the last half decade (looking at buzz, and wave primarily) What do ya'll see in terms of social or even SEO impact from this project
I agree with Steven on everything he said. Google has been putting a lot of emphasis on making sure SEO's are utilizing GWT as a resource for usability and correct data. I'd use that as your primary source.
Just a quick heads up that you're no longer going to get the "visual benefit" if you're running checkout with adwords. they discontinued this June 2
https://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=1323905
an ecommerce client of mine was seeing great benefit with this in conjunction with his PPC. He saw a temporary drop after they stopped displaying the checkout, but it has since rebounded.
good point on the PO Box. UPS store offers address with suite numbers as opposed to PO boxes, but as I said it isn't necessarily "Best practices"
Landing pages are always effective - especially for localized geo marketing. If you want to do a physical address, you could always do a PO box or a UPS store box that will provide an "Address" location. I am not sure if that is necessarily "ethical" but if you are offering the products in those cities, I don't think you'll encounter too much grief. I wouldnt add the PO box or UPS Store address to google places, but you could create a landing page that would have a little more content on it.
Has anyone had issues with the creative control google is maintaining with the Plus 1 button. I have a client who is very strict on their design structure and wants to make the google button appear in style with their theme. Has anyone encountered this or knows a moderately easy solution besides hacking away?
THanks!
PRweb is a decent tool, the problem is that it aggregates the news, but you dont get any real value from the Press Releases on the major outlets. Do an actual search on the sites you are submitted to from PRweb and you wont find your releases in the results. This is a big complaing about PRweb. I recommend checking out businesswire.com for press releases. It is more expensive but offers real SEO benefits. I used PRweb for a year and a half here at my company and recently switched and saw immediate dividends.
I worked for about 3 years in the mid 2000's on an ecommerce site with great SEO strengths. Enough can't be said about choosing the right ecommerce platform. There are quite a few to choose from, and choosing the wrong platform can create an uphill battle for SEO from the start. The platform we used was X-cart.. it was amazing and had a lot of features and add-ons that made SEO a breeze... the draw back is that it's very expensive. Magento IMO is a fantastic alternative to X-cart and fixes a lot of legacy issues that have crept up over time. If I were you, I would avoid zencart and oscommerce, but once again that is just my opinion.
As for straight up SEO tips
a few other tips on usability
hope this helps.
I actually have similar questions about this. The company I work for hosts a blog that is also syndicated across 4 to 5 other websites. The other sites have bigger reach on the web and our blog isn't getting much direct traffic out of this. I have a feeling adding the author tags to our content will eventually pay off to show that the content is being originated on our site and then syndicated. I am interested / excited to see other ways this will be used. I think its a great fix for the scraping issue and will hopefully prevent needing panda updates X.X
I just wanted to chime in on the meta tag discussion. For the most part, I incorporate some meta keywords in my landing pages as well - also for organization and interpretation as to what the page details. Google (matt cutts) has specifically stated they don't follow meta tags in ranking - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
Additionally, your competitors will get a great idea of the keywords you're targeting if you include that information in your meta data. While it isn't a "Secret" what you're trying to accomplish.. you may inadvertently give them part of your recipe - especially for longtail keywords
I just wanted to chime in on the meta tag discussion. For the most part, I incorporate some meta keywords in my landing pages as well - also for organization and interpretation as to what the page details. Google (matt cutts) has specifically stated they don't follow meta tags in ranking - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
Additionally, your competitors will get a great idea of the keywords you're targeting if you include that information in your meta data. While it isn't a "Secret" what you're trying to accomplish.. you may inadvertently give them part of your recipe - especially for longtail keywords
Thanks for the help guys! I made the recommendation on the 301 / job closed. we'll see how it plays out.
a buddy of mine is running a niche job board and is having issues with expiring URLs. we ruled it out cuz a 301 is meant to be used when the content has moved to another page, or the page was replaced. We were thinking that we'd be just stacking duplicate content on old urls that would never be 'replaced'. Rather they have been removed and will never come back. So 410 is appropriate but maybe we overlooked something. any ideas?