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No problem Sameer.
I would also pay attention to what Dana has said below with the Open Graph code because it is just as important to prepare your page content to be shared as it is to optimise for the search engines.
Do you use a CMS? If so, I know a few good plugins that automate this process within both Joomla and WordPress.
Matt.
The best place to start here is with schema.org markup code. It will allow you to markup the different parts of your product pages to signal to the search engines the different attributa that your product has.
An example of some of the code that can be used is shown below:
<div< span="">itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"></div<>
<span< span="">itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwave</span<>
<img< span="">src="kenmore-microwave-17in.jpg" alt='Kenmore 17" Microwave' /></img<>
<div< span="">itemprop="aggregateRating"</div<>
itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
Rated <span< span="">itemprop="ratingValue">3.5</span<>/5
based on <span< span="">itemprop="reviewCount">11</span<> customer reviews
<div< span="">itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer"></div<>
<span< span="">itemprop="price">$55.00</span<>
<link< span="">itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />In stock</link<>
Product description:
<span< span="">itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave.</span<>
Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like
Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.
Customer reviews:
<div< span="">itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review"></div<>
<span< span="">itemprop="name">Not a happy camper</span<> -
by <span< span="">itemprop="author">Ellie</span<>,
<meta< span="">itemprop="datePublished" content="2011-04-01">April 1, 2011</meta<>
<div< span="">itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating"></div<>
<meta< span="">itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"></meta<>
<span< span="">itemprop="ratingValue">1</span<>/
<span< span="">itemprop="bestRating">5</span<>stars
<span< span="">itemprop="description">The lamp burned out and now I have to replace</span<>
it.
The itemtype tag signal what type of content the webpage is about. In this example, it is about a product. Then the itemprop tags act as labels to group the different information as the product name, rating, etc.
Full attribute lists can be found at http://schema.org I hope this has helped.
Matt.
What I always try to do when writing any articles is watch the length of my sentences. try to keep them to around 10 words long so that they don't become too complex. Also, if you are explaining very technical points, use imagery to convey the points a lot better.
Use a readability test like the Flesch Readability Test which looks at how readably your content is. You can do this within Microsoft Word by following these steps:
, and then click Word Options.I hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi Paul,
My advice would be that you don't want to have rel=author on your e-commerce pages, i.e. for product pages. You should have different schema data for those pages to let Google know that it is about a product, the price, etc. You can check most of this info out at http://www.schema.org
With regard to how you actually go about setting up the rel=author to your Google+ profile, you can check out this blog that I wrote on the wow internet blog.
I would stick to using this on blog posts and information pages on your website, i.e the homepage, about us, etc.
Hope this helps,
Matt.
Really appreciate that Robert.
I did worry that I might have opened up the floodgates to every man and his dog trying to sell me things, so that is great advice. I will take a look through the list and see if I can find what I'm looking for.
Seems like everyone is a bit stretched for resources at the moment!
Thanks again,
Matt.
Hi Everyone,
We are a small online marketing firm in the UK and we are starting to hit a bit of a bottleneck in terms of the resources that we have that can be devoted to link building. As a result, we need to outsource the link building for some of our clients (around 10).
Obviously, we only want ethical, white hat link building to take place and it really is a focus on quality rather than quantity. As you can imagine, being a fairly small firm, we also have a very limited budget!
We would ideally like to work with UK link builders but would definitely look at overseas partnerships if it worked out more cost effective and the standard of the link building meets our standards.
Just so that I'm not wasting anyone's time, we have a budget of around £200-300 for this (I know, its a very limited budget!). I understand that with this budget comes limitations so we would be more than willing at looking at some stripped down packages (for example, we already have in-house bloggers, so we wouldn't need that).
Let me know if you are interested or if you would be able to recommend anyone to me. It would be a great help.
Matt
Wow Internet
matt@wowinternet.net
Hi Bilal,
A blog is good to have within your website for a number of reasons:
1. It creates new content on the site that will encourage Google's spiders to crawl the website more frequently.
2. It is an effective way to build more links to your website.
3. It encourages more traffic to get to your website (which is always good!).
Hope this helps!
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.
Hi Steve,
I have seen quite a lot of these kind of Whiteboard Fridayesque videos created by SEO agencies. I think that they are a great way of making what would be a slightly boring article, quite enjoyable to watch/listen.
This kind of content will also encourage sharing through the likes of social media routes a lot more, which as I'm sure you are aware, can be great for building a few more links.
What I would suggest is to maybe incorporate your own spin on the traditional whiteboard Friday; something unique to you. For example, it could be something as simple as 'Blackboard Monday', where you get out the old school chalkboard! Or maybe using some sort of slideshow in the background. This will just help you stand out from the crowd a bit more.
Overall though, a good idea, and it is one that I have been considering myself!
Matt.
I think one of the best resolutions to this problem would be that instead of just redirecting everything is to just add canonical tags to the duplicated pages that then point to the page with the original content on.
This will tell Google that the webpage contains information that is taken from another page and you wont be punished for this.
For example, on the http://duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 page, the canonical tag would link to the http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 page (or vice-versa depending on which page is the priority). So the code would be:
href="http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 page" rel="canonical"/>
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi,
Its hard to actually quantify the impact that that kind of change makes.
What we do know is that the closer your keywords are to the start of your wepage title, the more effective they are for your SEO. Also, if you are targetting the specific phrase 'Tours Nepal' then it would be more effective than 'Tours to Nepal'. However, if it is primarily the 'Nepals' keyword you want to rank best for then changing it to something like 'Nepal Tours' would be best.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
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,
I would definitely recommend this method.
It is much better to have a wide spread of keywords within your website, because if two pages use the same keyword then they will be competing with one another for ranking, and this is not what you want.
Optimise the titles and the content around one or two major keywords; for example, 'Web Development Edinburgh' (it doesn't hurt to add Edinburgh here as you will also be optimising for Web Development as a short tail keyword anyway.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi Craig,
SEOmoz has a great list of free & paid directories that you can get backlinks from:
http://www.seomoz.org/directories
Also, you can use this great list:
http://www.avangate.com/company/resources/article/blog-directories.htm
Hi Craig,
Glad you found it! Joomla can be a nightmare sometimes.
Matt.
To concur with what Brent has said above; although we know that Google divides the PR passed around from links on a page, we don't know exactly how much by, or in some cases, they can actually just ignore the duplicate link.
I wouldn't worry too much about this particular case to be honest. It would be more of an issue if there were 10-15 links all pointing to the category page on each page of the website.
You could, however, maybe do a test over the space of a month or so by removing the second link and see if you get any noticeable improvement in rankings. If you do this, I would be quite interested to see the results, so let me know.
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 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.
Hey there,
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head with all of your comments.
1. Google will only really pay attention to the first link that it crawls and not really pass on any link juice through the second.
2. By having the two links, you will be watering down the amount of PR that is being sent over to page.
If the image is next to the text link, you could just wrap them both in the same hyperlink (obviously if they are not next to each other then there is no point.
One thing that I would say is that this isn't going to be an incredibly damaging thing toward your SEO, so you need to sum up whether it really adds to the user experience and conversion potential and see if this is outweighed by the decrease in SEO. Once you have decided which one wins, make your choice there.
Hope this helps.
Matt.