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Hi Kieran,

I'll do anything for free alcohol, so here goes (for ease, everything below is based on the term "web design cork")...

Looking at your competitors, there's definitely potential there to take them down with some time, effort, patience, and link building:

• Link profile your competitors and see where they're getting their links from (other than their clients), what percentage of exact match anchor text they have, etc.
• Find some niche directories for web design companies (there are loads of these but be careful - only go for the non-spammy ones)
• Do a load of guest blogging.

The last of those points is by far the most important as it will get you good links, not just those from rubbish pages and directories with low authority and 743 outpointing links.

There are loads of opportunities like this in the web design and SEO arena - a good place to start would be MyGuestBlog.com which is run by Anne Smarty who is extremely helpful and happy to offer great advice and help if needed.

Also, searches on google for things like inpostauthor:guest +seo are likely to return a load of results that show potential opportunities. I tend to amalgomate all of these results into a spreadsheet with URL, Domain Authority, Guest Blogging Submission Process, Owner Name, Owner Email, etc. and create a hit list.

I know this is more time consuming but will almost certainly get you better results in your link building efforts.

I'm happy to go into more detail if you have specific questions

• Matt

Aaron - great additions

Haig,

It's all about citations and making sure that your 'place' is picked up from as many sources as possible with identical location data (this includes everything from the business name, address, telephone number, etc.)

There was a great tactic posted by Rand a few weeks ago which is extremely easy to follow and, more importantly, will give you the results you're looking for:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local

The most important thing to remember from this is to be consistent with your information so be sure to take your time and don't try to rush things

• Matt

Stephan - Edit's been broken for a while - apparently a bug report was sent off to the SEOMoz dev team last week

Anant - Stephan's answer below is correct... I should've included that in my original answer but Monday morning laziness took over! One thing to remember - make sure you only add it to pages that require a login as you'll end up de-indexing a load of pages if you mess it up.

-Matt

I'm guessing that you currently load the login form if the user isn't logged in onto the page without redirecting? If so, that's perfectly fine... all I'd do is add a 'noindex, follow' meta robots tag to those pages.

Others might think differently though - would be interested to hear if there're any benefits in redirecting to a central login page...

Have you tried seeding your new content through social media to see if that helps? (As soon as the new article is released post it to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, along with getting a few RT's / likes)...

Arg... There were paragraphs when I typed that... Honest! First time I've used QA through my iPad - looks like I broke it - Matt

Hi, This sounds like a 'sitelink' feature, whereby other pages from the top ranked site are shown below the meta description on google's results page. Unfortunately there isn't a way to manually turn this feature on inside webmaster tools - they simply appears for sites that Google deems to be worthy of such an honour. Once they do appear you can stop certain pages showing as a sitelink by disabling them inside webmaster tools, which does mean that you get a degree of control over how they're displayed. There are ways you can increase your chances of having sitelinks enabled which include things like ranking consistently well, having a high ctr rate on organic searches and (most importantly) having a site with well designed, logical navigation. One of our clients received sitelinks about a month after we started working with them whilst a personal project that I've been working on for just over a year is still waiting... So, unfortunately, it's just a case of being patient. To answer the direct question of how to include a video, this would be down to how your site was set up and ensuring that Google saw the video as being important enough to show as a sitelink. I don't have any experience in this though so wouldn't be able to give you any specific help. Oh... If you're really desperate, there's always the option of enabling them on an adwords campaign!! - Matt

Alan - I did exactly the same thing... it was the wrong URL in the original post:

http://www.colemanfurniture.com/office-furniture/writing-desks-secretary-desks/holden-desk.htm

-Matt

Are the longer links historical or are they being pointed to from somewhere on your site?

If it's the latter I'd advise sorting out your internal linking structure so that it's the shorter URL that is pointed to. A canonical should be enough, but it's only a pointer... so if Google sees loads of links going to a page that is canonicalised which, in turn, points to a page with virtually no juice then it may be that the tag is ignored.

It's also worth finding out if it's just webmaster tools showing the error by checking if both pages are indexed. If they are, you definitely have a duplicate content issue... if not then it may just be a reporting error.

• Matt

I'd agree. We had a similar thing recently with a client who were ranking for 'blue widgets america' on their 'blue widgets new york' page because of some erroneous 301 redirects that were passing link juice to the wrong place.

We changed the 301s to point to the correct page which meant that the old one dropped down the rankings while the new one jumped up... but not as far as it should have done. After a small amount of client-side panic we sat patiently for a week or so and rankings gradually increased so they're now 2 places higher.

Be patient, leave it a week or two, and if things don't improve start looking at your options then

• Matt

Same here - left a few responses that I've needed to edit and couldn't. I thought it was just me!

-Matt

Good question. There are a few ways of doing it but I'd advise using a canonical URL on each page to tell the search engines where the content stems from. I had a quick look at XenoForo and this looks relatively simple to do... although make sure you test things thoroughly just in case

I can help with a few of those:

1. Looks like you're using the crawl tool. If this is for an on-going project, go to http://www.seomoz.org/campaigns and set one up. That way you get a sexy GUI (if you like robots that is) and weekly crawls / rank tracking.

2. That number is almost certainly a UNIX timestamp. To convert it inside excel use the formula below (don't forget to format the cell as a date, otherwise you just see a random number!):

=(A1/86400)+25569+(-5/24)

3. I wouldn't worry about that at all - the crawler converts any non-standard characters to ASCII but, as far as I know, it won't affect your SERP performance.

4. Could you give a few examples of the pages that are affected so I can take a look?

5. That's either a bug or (not too likely but worth checking) an issue with how the numbers are formatted in your spreadsheet. I'd advise opening the file using a text editor to check that the numbers that excel shows match up with the raw format and, if they do, submitting a bug report to the SEOMoz team.

6. The referrer cell tells you how the crawler got to that page. If you don't have any internal links to a page on your site then, chances are, the crawler won't find it. The only caveat to that (and I'm not 100% sure so would need confirmation) is that if the crawl tool uses external linking data. I'd always assumed it didn't but SEOMoz will know where some of your pages are even if you don't link to them internally as external sites will point to them. If that's the case it could be the reason that the referrer cell is blank.

7. Remember that this is SEOMoz crawling your site, not Google. Anything you set in Webmaster tools isn't visible by other search engine spiders such as those used by Bing, Yahoo!, SEOMoz, Majestic, etc. Because of that they won't know how to handle your URL parameters. You're best setting this through either a meta robots tag, robots.txt, or .htaccess (depending on what you're trying to do). Be careful though - if you mess it up there's a strong possibility that you'll end up blocking pages that you want the search engines to be able to access!

Hope that's all helpful... give me a shout if there's anything else.

• Matt

Hi Justin,

URLs definitely aren't case sensitive from a Google point of view, although depending how the RewriteRule is set up (I'm assuming your web server is Apache) the e-commerce software itself might require a URL to be typed in the correct case.

I'd advise testing this on a subdomain first though (ie. dev.stupid.com)... but remember to block all search engines using robots.txt so you don't get some accidental indexing!

As for other things to think about, one would be pagination. Make sure the new tool deals with that the same as the old one or you'll end up with a load of broken links to your sub-pages. Static pages are also something to check, particularly if you have landing pages or product reviews posted through there.

I'm sure there'll be something I've missed but that'll give you more than enough to be getting on with

• Matt

No problem at all - good luck!

Hi Bill,

I've just had a look at your site and the canonical tag is set as:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/index.html"/>

I'd advise changing it so that index.html isn't included (simply because that's the most likely way that people are going to link to you and how they'll get to your site, so it makes sense that the canonical tag points to the most popular 'page' in the eyes of both users and search engines). So, you'd end up with:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/"/>

The error that you're getting through the Report Card may appear if you're checking the base URL of your site (http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/) as SEOMoz would see your canonical tag pointing to a different place (index.html) and therefore being incorrect.

My advice would be to do the fix (as above) and recheck your page through SEOMoz immediately - you shouldn't need to wait until the following Tuesday when using the report card tool as it does an immediate refresh of the page content.

Also, to explain why you only see index.html in the file manager (in simple terms) is that the webserver (apache) sees index.html as being the base file for your site. So, when someone goes to http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/ apache grabs the index.html file and shows it on the page.

Hope that's helpful - let me know if you have any more questions,

Matt

Hi Michael,

The easiest way is to get his/her username and password...

Failing that, and assuming you have FTP access, just add the site to your own Webmaster Tools account and go through the verification process - You can verify one site in multiple webmaster tools accounts with no negative impact.

• Matt

The site you've pointed to uses ajax to load its content. When the page loads there's a javascript snippet which takes over and adds the # to the page (hence why you're not seeing it as a httpd header). If you click on any other link you'll see that the base URL stays the same with some extra parameters on the end.

There are potential crawling issues with this and a number of fixes (some Google documentation here, although this isn't the fix that the site in question is using: http://code.google.com/intl/en-US/web/ajaxcrawling/).

So, in short, there's nothing fishy going on - it's just good old ajax content loading

• Matt

Hi Lewis,

I've done a couple of tests (nothing scientific - just trying things out and looking for trends) on this in the last few months and have found the following:

• Using the same keyword more than once doesn't seem to have any impact on keyword rankings
• The first keyword in the title element seems to be given priority, assuming that it's matched up with other on page elements (ie. Broad usage throughout the page, alt tags, etc)

The best title tag will most likely have your keyword first, followed by some kind of call to action, and then your site name at the end. This works on a few levels - namely that you're improving your rankings, click throughs and also brand awareness.

Kieran's definitely correct in saying that it should be tied in with the meta description, although I'd disagree that there's no benefit to having the brand at the end of the tag - particularly if you're working with a client who's looking to build, or reinforce, their name.

Remember that it isn't all about getting to the top. By including your call to action you're potentially helping with conversion rate optimisation and by including the brand you're helping build trust over the long term... which is incredibly hard to measure but will surely add hidden benefit and gives you another string to your bow!

As far as keyword density goes, the old ways of looking at it are completely outdated. If you aim to use your keyword 3-4 times in a reasonable sized page whilst also employing the ~ operator on Google to find, and use, related terms you'll be fine.

Hope that's helpful - would be really interested to hear how you get on

Matt