Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree with Aran, setup an archive system that keeps the articles under the same URL but does not show them live on the website.

Alternatively you could setup a dumping "archive" folder where you drop all old articles in and use this link as your rel canonical link

Hi Fraser,

On the On-page Optimization summary page you will see your 11 keywords listed (if not go to the Add/Manage keywords option and add them).

By default I think once the campaign does a crawl it tries to match up your keyowrds here with pages it finds in the SE's index, sometimes these dont match the pages your are trying to optimize the keyword for. All you need to do is to click on the keyword from the summary list and then on the report card page change the URL to the one you want for that keyword. Simply run the Grade optimization report again and then click the run weekly option to make sure you track your changes in grade.

Ahmad,

With Google now taking into account where page elements are located (they can identify header, footer nav segments etc) it is now much more worthwhile getting a link in the editorial content of a website rather than just a simple sitewide footer link.

The search engines are now beginning to look at sidewides as a potential spammy signal and therefore I would say if you can get links within an editorial piece (which will likely reside on only 1 or 2 pages max on a site) then this will pass the most link juice / value ultimately.

Having said that I don't think sitewide's are dead exactly as they can help bolster the foundations of a link profile, I just wouldn't build an entire link strategy from these types of links, or at least this is where your partners are coming from.

Hi Tom, I guess there are a couple of points here to think about. Firstly is the blog in question relevant to the website it is linking to? Would the search engines find your featured article out of place on this blog and therefore look spammy? As long as your outreach campaign is targeting quality sites there is no reason to be concerned. Signs for concern for me would be an eclectic mix of posts and articles that make no sense being part of the same website / blog and / or a spammy looking link structure of it's own. After all paid links do work, as long as they are the right sort!

Dan,

the meta description is your chance to pitch to your customer and nothing more. It is entirely possible to throw away the benefit a #1 ranking can give you in click through if you meta description lets you down.

Also for me it is very important to keep within the 70 characters limit for the page title as having overly long titles can not only not read correctly in the search results but you may be diluting your affectiveness on targeting a page for a certain topic both to the user and the SE's

The pipe and hyphen as already suggested are the way to go for pure usability and space saving for your title tag. In my opinion neither has a direct SEO advantage over the other however they both have a distinct advantage over other techniques. For me keeping the keywords used in the page title to the point help without any extra "by, or, and" breaks the keyword blocks both visually and semantically for the search engines. Now don't get me wrong I don't think this makes or breaks a good SEO effort on a page but for me it's certainly a preference.

Roger, The way we have approached this in the past was to go with separate TLD's using Magento. The main thing we did was to focus on a complete content rewrite for all pages including product descriptions to remove any possibility of duplicate content issues holding back the new sites and then set about localising with directories, webmaster tools and some low level link building. This seemed to do the trick in getting our .co.uk and .ie domains to rank above the older .com original site.