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Hi Craig,
I often have the joy of trying to find where data is on Joomla.
What might be the case is that it is in a module. This is just a guess but I have found that on some websites, they keep the text (for one reason or another) within a Joomla module that is then linked to your homepage.
What is your website address so that I can have a quick peep at the code (this might help a little).
Matt.
I think that as long as you are offering something to users then it is definitely an interesting and credible way to build links.
If you simply dictate back what Rand is saying in the Whiteboard Friday vids then no, but if you add your own expertise and insights to the points that have been discussed then it would be great.
I know I would be interested in something like this.
Matt.
No problem.
I think the URLs should be the primary focus, and if you need any help on this, feel free to drop me a private message, etc and I will help you out.
Matt.
Hi William,
I think the linking on the page could do with some improvement.
The first thing I would do is remove the 'www.canvaspaintings.com' link from the header & footer as there is no need for them. And, like you said, maybe a bit of improvement to the navigation links.
As well as this, I would look at using h1,h2,h3, etc tags a bit more effectively as this can make a big difference.
Hope these quick tips helps slightly.
Matt.
Hi there,
This is quite a tricky question and, unfortunately doesn't have a definite answer.
As long as you have set up the 301 redirect in your .htaccess file correctly and have informed Google, then this is all you can do. From here, it will depend on when Google next crawls your website (this differs per website). It could be today, tomorrow, next week, next month...
There are ways that you can get Google to crawl your site more often though. Add regular content to your website, submit a sitemap and keep it updated, etc.
At this point though, it is a waiting game.
Hope this has cleared things up,
Matt.
For the link audits that I do for my clients, I use a variety of different tools. With link analysis, the more tools the better really. The tools I use are as follows:
I compile all the link information from the first 5 tools mentioned and then import them into Link Detox tool. I can then start manually analysing the links and highlighting any potentially toxic links. Next step is using BuzzStream to find the contact information for the toxic links and then I compile a separate spreadsheet for this. I also put together a graph that shows the distribution of PageRank from external links within Excel - this is a good visual cue for the client.
Hope this helps.
Hi Nicola,
I think that you need to think about 2 things here before you go ahead with this:
Firstly, I would definitely class this as grey hat. It could be said to be a mild form of negative SEO. I don't quite know how your users would feel about this as well, because many people will actually see right through this. As well as this, if you are going to try and outrank your competitors for their own brand name, it means that you are going to be competing with their homepage, which is likely to be extremely difficult seeing as you will have a hard job getting links to your 'competitor brand pages'.
Secondly, it is worth thinking about how this will affect your brand. For example, if a user enters your website through another brand-name page, it could provide them with a lot of confusion, and this could lose trust with your customers.
Personally, I would stay away from this tactic, as you have much more to lose than gain in this kind of scenario.
Matt.
Hi Craig,
You have a couple of option here. First thing I would do would be to analyse all of the links going to these pages. If there are any pages that you would say the links are actually of value then set up a 301 redirect to another relevant page on the site.
Alternatively, you could ask for the manual removal of links to the pages via the Google disavow tool. If there are only a couple of links going through to the old URLs then I wouldn't worry too much. I would just spend a while analysing and prioritising which pages need to be redirected urgently and then take a deeper look into their links.
Hope this helps,
Matt.
Hi Lauren,
What I would say is that it looks like you're doing everything right with your redirects - redirecting dynamic URLs through to keyword relevant URLs will work much better for SEO.
Regarding the on-page links... if you have a lot of on-page links, it means that each of the links passes a smaller proportion of PageRank around the website. This is particularly important for your internal links. For example, if you have 10 links on a webpage, each of the page you link to will be passed 1/10th of the PageRank value. This can be really important on your homepage to try and pass as much of the PageRank to your key pages of your website. If you instead had 100 links on the page, you would only be passing 1/100th of the PageRank to each page.
Having minimal links on a page is important, as long as it doesn't interfere with user experience. I would say a health number is between 20-40.
Hope this helps.
Hi John,
This depends on what CMS you are using (if any). If you're using WordPress then you can do this pretty easily by using a search engine friendly URL permalink (which you can often get plugins for on most CMS's).
Let us know what platform you are working on and it will be easier to diagnose.
Matt
For SEO reasons I would strongly recommend that you don't show a splash page to visitors because this is going to cause crawling issues for the search engine bots. I would load a popup (like you mentioned) and then when the user accepts the warning it stores their response on a cookie.
As far as I'm aware, you would need a separate version of your page to be displayed. You can then geo-target these pages within Webmaster Tools or use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x". Check out this for more info - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Hope this helps.
Google would probably look at that as an 'exact match' but bare in mind that this isn't really the be-all and end-all of your SEO. Google is weakening the value given to matches like this so I wouldn't worry too much. Focus on your links 
This is definitely the best thing to do. Whenever a page goes to a 404 you should be consider a redirect of some sort. I would take into consideration user experience when you're doing your redirects as a priority.
In general, when I work with e-commerce website, I will 301 redirect old product pages (now 404 pages) through to the main category pages. This provides a good user experience and any links that were pointing to that product page can be flowed into the category page (you'll be surprised how much traffic you lose from not doing this).
Hi Dana,
You need to probably flush out a load of your inactive users (which you can do using tools like Sprout Social or Tweepi). Looking at your current following I would say it needs to go down by a few hundred really.
Once you've done that give it a while and then you can start adding people - but do it in small chunks at a time.
Matt
I think for your purposes, SEOmoz would more than be enough. You can carry out all of your keyword analysis, SERP rank analysis, etc all from here.
Alongside that, there are many free tools that you can utilise, most of them from Google. So Google's analytics, webmaster tools, website optimiser, etc, all work great and are free.
One area that I find particularly useful within the SEOmoz subscription is the open site explorer so make good use of that!
Try some of the free plugins that you can get for your web browser as well, they can come in extremely handy. SEO book do a great one for Firefox, and Mozbar is another great one.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi Tim,
What I would recommend is to have an intro paragraph, like you've said, on the page in one way or another. This could be in the footer if you have nowhere else (however, I would get rid of those spammy location names that are currently there). Try to get a couple of hundred words if you can (but this isn't always the case.
I'd also have a look at your internal linking to see if you can link back to your homepage with your keywords within the deeper articles within the site. I wrote a full guide on on-page optimisation that you might find useful - http://www.wowinternet.co.uk/blog/on-page-optimisation-with-a-view-to-the-off-page-seo/
I'd also revise your current title tag on the homepage to get some more keywords in there.
Having said all of this, it isn't always possible to optimise the homepage of a site with lots of the keywords so I would place a lot more of your focus towards building relevant links to the site. Get a load of social signals pointing to the articles and, where possible, have some exact match anchor links going to the homepage from relevant websites.
Hope this helps.
Hey James - been a real nightmare since the API update as the plugin that I used doesn't work anymore. Tried your plugin out and it works great. The only thing that I real really annoying is that you have to I purchase the pro version to select how many tweets to display. Quite rare to see plugins like this that aren't free so wondered why you went down that route (as I can imagine it putting a lot of people off - even if it is really cheap - because of the extra hassle of putting in payment details, etc)?
Hi Colin,
No you can archive as many as you like. What I do sometimes, is if I want to dig a bit deeper into some of my accounts then I will make them active for a few weeks, then archive them and make a different one active. This is because I don't need to track all of my campaigns at the same time, but I like to keep a hold of the historical data.
Matt.
I would go with a title like this:
In2Town: Online Lifestyle Magazine - Health, Lifestyle and Style News
Reads a bit better (which will help CTR) and you are getting all of your keywords within it.
Regarding the intro content, yes, content above the fold is much better and I would probably advise that you place it just below the navigation menu. I only mentioned the footer area in case that wasn't a viable option from a user experience point of view.
Matt