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You need to look at increasing your site authority, so I would start thinking how can you get links to the pages that rank for your keywords and your site as a whole. I would start thinking of ways that you can create content that gets visitors to keep coming back and spread the word to others. Social media is an excellent channel to start building up your relationships with authority/influencers who are related to your niche, by interacting with them on social channels you will eventually be able to put your content in front of them and this will lead to increased exposure and links.

When people ask this question I always say that you should consider a blog if you think you can build a decent one as part of your site and its niche. A blog requires hard work and you must persevere in keeping the posts coming in order for it to become successful. When creating a blog I would also suggest thinking about asking people to guest post on your blog especially those related to your industry who have a good following already.

You also want to think about ways you can create content such as how-to guides and videos. There are lots of good methods out there and I would suggest you search for link building on here to gain a more in depth insight.

Essentially what I would say is remember - great content + exposure = links

links = increase in site authority and in turn ranking.

Obviously make sure you also have all the on page factors in place for any content h1 headers, page titles, etc, oh and a good internal link structure for your site.

Hope this gives you some food for thought...

Yes if you just want to redirect individual pages like that - you could have it so any requests on the domain www and none redirect to the new domain and then specific pages can point to specific pages - see below:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.co.uk$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.co.uk$

RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.newdomain.co.uk" [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^page2.html$ "http://www.newdomain.com/page2.html" [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.co.uk$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.co.uk$

RewriteRule ^/?$ "http://www.newdomain.co.uk" [R=301,L]

Add this to your .htaccess file of your oldsite and it will redirect both www. and none www. to your new domain passing on link juice - sorry I wasn't specific before.

Hi Simone

I think this will help solve your problem -

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

and how to actually do it -

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php/

You will only need to create the redirect in the old domains htaccess file so that all traffic to the old domain will go to the new one.

No mention of any on-page optimisation or strategies and the use of blog post comments I would be very careful if I were you....

I think you are going to struggle ranking well for multiple terms in relation to a one page website. I would even go as far as to say how much value does a 1 page website give to a browser? You could argue that it provides them with exactly what they are looking for. However I would say a site with several pages will allow you to rank for multiple keywords better concentrating on one for each page and then you could actually end up with a better link profile as you can push each individually rather than purely the one page. You might gain decent links to several pages rather than limiting it to just one. I would always stick to the principle that Google is looking for over-optimized and spammy pages, since Penguin especially. How over-optimised is a page likely to look if it is targeting multiple keywords, potentially using all the on-page factors? Also then when Google finds it is a single page it will set alarm bells off if you ask me – this site is just there to rank for these terms and serves no real value. Put the time in to develop an information rich site that really serves the purpose you intend it to well and is not a shortcut for search engine ranking. You are more likely to rank well and get links from decent sites/authorities if you go about it in this way I think.

Well for a 301 redirect you can add the redirect to your .htaccess file. However I have never used Xsitepro to build a site but I assume you have access to the code behind the pages in which case you can place a canonical tag in the header of your index.html instead of the 301 redirect.

See this link on duplicate content and an explanation of the canonical tag is in there -

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Hi Benjamin - have a look at this Q&A from a few days ago, it will help you correct this.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-page-error

You are diluting your homepage strength as you could have some links to one version of the page and some to another. I would create a 301 redirect from the /index to the plane .com version. In Googles eyes you have two pages with the same content, this is a common mistake with a lot of websites and their homepage.

For more info read:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

Well I am assuming all your sites internal links are already pointing to the original product page, so in relation to this, as long as you don't create any internal links pointing to your duplicate friendly URL for offline you will be fine and implementing it as DR Pete instructs. Canonical links should be on all pages that are duplicates of the target page which is part of the canonical tag.

I don't think you need to remove this Gary if that is the case - take a look here for an updated 2012 article on rel="canonical" from the horses mouth

- http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

This might help you.

I have been in a similar situation myself and it is a judgement call - I always tend to air on the side of caution. How I look at it with a lot of the paid directories is the fact that they aren't purposefully manipulating search doesn't mean they aren't going to be hit at some point and when they are you don't really want to be associated with it in my opinion. A lot of business directories purely exist on customers paying for entry and advertising and are not therefore overly concerned with their SEO.

You could, as I have done, ask to talk to their development team/technical - you could also analyse whether they are using no follows on links and ask for examples of their white label sites. Depends how much time you want to put into it and whether you think it could be truly worth using them if you weren't endangering your SEO work..

I would create a 301 redirect from your new short URL to your original product page as you are essentially just creating a new path to it and not new content.

Here is a post about canonicalisation from Matt Cutts - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

And another useful insight from SEOMoz on how to deal with duplicate content - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Hope this helps

Blurbpoint is also correct using his method will also work - blocking the page in a robots.txt file or using the meta-tags no index, no follow will also stop duplicate content issues! The down side is that any links that your short URL acquires will not pass any link juice unlike with 301s or canonicalization.

I would stay away Luke because they are:

1. Likely to be low value.

2. If they have links between their directories this is basically a link network and you don't want any part of it.

3. With link profiles being under more scrutiny than ever and spam link tactics are being monitored more thoroughly you are likely to suffer a punishment from Google because this would strike as a clear attempt at manipulation of search rankings.

The penguin will be visiting.

These are my thoughts and I wouldn't risk it if I were you - plus I definitely wouldn't pay for the privilege!!

I would create separate pages for each of the jewellery shop locations and then look a tailoring them to targeting those locations in relation to the search engines. Make sure you create a menu structure that points to your shop pages with related location anchor text.

Also make sure your url structure for each store is something like -

www.domain.com/(location)jewellery.html

or

www.domain.com/(location)jewelleryshop.html

I would look at creating unique content for each location through the use of testimonials of customers, maybe get the staff to write some content for their individual store. There is so much you can do to make each of these shops rank well for their locations using this method - I have used it successfully myself in a different niche. Look at gaining community following on your social sites for each individual store - I would really target the community aspect for something of this size.

Remember it is important to gain decent links so here is a Q&A that might help give you ideas...

http://www.seomoz.org/q/drowning-in-a-sea-of-link-building-advice

Hope this helps

I have content which is dated and several years old but still ranking for relatively competitive terms on the first page top 3 results and have seen increases in the last few months for ranking. I would however be wary of putting a date on content, as you rightly mention, as most people including you and I will do a search for information and if the date is clear in the SERPs and it hasn't been published recently then you don't click on it. In terms of this I would not be as concerned about the SEO but more the user engagement / CTR.

Hi Ioan,

If I were you I would concentrate on the location and the fact that it is wedding photography. I worked on SEO for a friend who has a wedding car business and he ranks very well for location and service specific searches using the same technique - we didn't brand the titles as his meta descriptions and web address clearly did this for him in the SERPs.

Using this technique you can cover more specific and gain long tail keyword traffic - you can have titles such a

wedding photography (location)

photos from x's wedding in (location)

Wedding photographs at (location)

There are so many variants and possibilities you can cover...

Hope this helps!

Hi Sarah

If you can’t create unique content yourself have you thought about ways in which you could have unique content created quickly and easily so it doesn’t take years? How about encouraging customers to review the service that they have got and their experience in the location they hired from? You could do this by opening up a discount on your next hire or probably more practically a free entry into a prize draw for something that will tempt them to create a review?

This is a tricky one if you want to keep ranking for all your locations but I think it is possible and something that is worth giving time to in order to experience results you have previously...

Hi Benjamin - it looks like you have a real challenge - you could drop your branding to help cut the size down as Irving suggested, however you are still going to have an issue with books that have long titles, as I am sure you have numerous that surpass 70 characters. In this situation I think you will just have to exceed it as this has to be the case for your competition as well - anyone selling books is likely to have long page titles. Have you checked your competitions tactics? I would have a look at Amazon if I were you...

I would say that it is important to make sure you have title tags that stick to the 70 characters or less rule - here is some findings in relation to this by SEOMoz which I think you will find very interesting and current (only published a couple of weeks ago) - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/long-title-tags

Hope this helps - I think you could look at stripping the common words out as long as your page title is still clear, makes sense and an appropriate label for your page.