Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi John,

Here is a list that I have given to a client before to show what we would do in terms of some SEO:

• Optimisation of on-page website technical code
• Sustained back-linking campaign to build reputable links
• Site architecture formatting and streamlining
• Conversion rate optimisation
• Webpage structure and cosmetic build changes
• Thorough analysis and A/B testing of website for continued improvement
• Directory and blogging submissions through PR routes
• Extensive competitor analysis and monthly performance reports
• Linking and distribution of content through social media platforms
• Submission of web pages to search engines and creation of sitemap

In terms of what you need to do, I would first start with the on-page work, which would consist of (not exclusively):

• page titles and meta data
• optimising page content
• img alt attributes
• URL tidying
• internal and external linking
• creation of a sitemap
• keyword analysis
• new content creation

These are just a few things but will hopefully get you on your way.

Let me know if you need any further help

Matt.

Yes, that's what I would advise.

I think a lot of us have been hit with this. Just try and comply with Google as much as possible, and I think the first port of call is all the on-page SEO.

Matt.

Hi Georg,

I have had the same problem. It is because of the latest update by Google around 'over-optimisation'.

Don't worry though, all is not lost! There are a few things that you need to change:

• Make sure that your webpage titles are not over-optimised (i.e. 'Free Shoes, New Shoes, Sports Shoes - Shoe Company'). Make sure that they read properly and don't look spammy. Try not to repeat any of the keywords more than once, if at all.

• Check that all of the links on the page are not suspicious. For example, having loads of anchor text linking to the same page.

• See what your keyword density is on your webpage and see if you have maybe be keyword stuffing (Google is being a lot harsher and stricter on this now).

• Go through your img alt attributes and check they are all relevant and not just blatanet attempts to fit in long-tail keywords.

Once you have done this, resubmit the pages to the Google index and hopefully, after a few weeks, you should start regaining some ground. Unfortunately its a bit of a waiting game now, but make sure you do everything you can to show to Google that you are not over-optimising and you should be OK.

Also, take a look at Rand's recent whiteboard Friday which goes over this.

Good luck!

Matt.

Hi Cormac,

I have had a little look around and this website seems to do what you need (and its free!):

http://www.further.co.uk/free-website-spellcheck/

Hope this helps

Matt.

I see.

I would presume that these guys have been penalised then. It may be that they are now trying to reindex their site and are still appearing in the listings but much lower now.

There isnt really a definite way of knowing if they have been banned, but as good practise, I would try and get any URL removed from a website that I had any doubts about.

You could maybe try contacting the Google Webmaster team to confirm this, but I don't know how useful they will be. Then again, its worth a try at least.

Matt.

Hi Morgan,

The website will show in Google if you do a site:www.domain.com search.

If you searched for 'domain' (replace this with their website name, i.e. seo moz) and they don't show up in the top few listings thn you can be pretty sure that they have been banned.

As soon as this is the case, I would either contact the webmaster or manually delete the link if you can.

Good luck!

Matt.

Hi Morgan,

Unfortunately, there isn't a quick way to do this.

What I have done is use Open Site Explorer and downloaded the .csv file of all the linking domains to my website.

Now that I have them in a spreadsheet, it is a bit easier to filter through them. I have been drilling down on links from blogs with a particularly low PA or DA. Then just doing the hard task of checking to see if they have individually been banned by Google. You can do this by searching for their domain to see if they appear.

This is a slow process, but better safe than sorry, eh?

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Victoria,

I wouldn't use names like 'Online for Equine | Horse Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Jodhpurs'. They are what your web page titles should be like (be aware the recent over-optimisation changes Google is making though).

Your image names should all be different and should be a couple of words long, just like i suggested before. So this could be:

'Riding Clothing'

'Equestrian Breeches'

'Equestrian Clothing'

Try to make sure the image names are in context though or you're in danger of being penalised by Google.

Another thing to look into is creating an image sitemap. This can help a lot with your image SEO.

Matt.

Hi Victoria,

This would probably be seen in a bad light by Google so I wouldn't recommend this.

Image SEO has several things that affect it. One factor is the filename of the image, another is the alt attribute, and another is the text around it.

Make sure that you name your image with a relevant keyword, for example, 'Riding Clothes', then you can also name the alt attribute this. Next, any text that wraps the image, try to make sure that it is related to the image. For example, use semantically similar words, like 'some of the riding clothing that is...'.

This will help you're images rank well.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Victoria,

This would probably be seen in a bad light by Google so I wouldn't recommend this.

Image SEO has several things that affect it. One factor is the filename of the image, another is the alt attribute, and another is the text around it.

Make sure that you name your image with a relevant keyword, for example, 'Riding Clothes', then you can also name the alt attribute this. Next, any text that wraps the image, try to make sure that it is related to the image. For example, use semantically similar words, like 'some of the riding clothing that is...'.

This will help you're images rank well.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

I have now solved the problem. Thank God!

Just in case anyone is aving the same probllem, I used the following Joomla! plugin to generate the canonical links:

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/meta-data/11038?qh=YToyOntpOjA7czo5OiJjYW5vbmljYWwiO2k6MTtzOjExOiInY2Fub25pY2FsJyI7fQ%3D%3D

Hi Justin,

Thanks for that. I have been trying to find a plugin that will work to do the canonical URLs for Joomla 1.7 and having real problems. Ideally, I want a free plugin as well. The one in the blog post you sent is a paid one, and that is just for SEF URLs and doesn't do the canonical tag.

Thanks all the same though.

Matt.

Hi Guys,

Having a really frustrating problem with our website. It is a Joomla 1.7 site and we have some duplicate page issues.

What is happening is that we have a webpage, lets say domain.com/webpage1 and then we also have domain.com/index.php/webpage1.

Google is seeing these as duplicate pages and is causing me some real SEO problems. I have tried setting up a 301 redirect but it wn't let me redirect /index.php/webpage1 to /webpage1.

Anyone have any ideas or plugins that can be used to sort this out?

Any help will be really appreciated!

Matt.

Hi Martin,

I wouldn't hold too much importance towards Dmoz as part of your link building because, with any directory, there are loads of outbound links on the site, which means less link juice.

I would suspect that the reason why your link is not showing on open site explorer could be that Dmoz takes a little while to upload the link onto their website so it may show up in a couple of weeks.

My advice would now be to try having a look into some other directories that are focused around the specific industry that your website operates in. You can easily find these by doing searches in Google like:

'yourindustry' + inurl:directory intitle:add

Replace 'yourindustry' with a keyword related to your site and this should show you a few quick wins that you can submit to. Just remember that directory submission is only a very small part of your link building, but it still helps.

Matt.

Hi Vinku,

Firstly, I would create and submit a video sitemap for your website to Google. This will help them to index the videos on the website and will throw you up the search rankings. You can either submit a separate video sitemap or add some extra code onto your exisiting one for this.

I would advise you to make sure that you are embedding either your vimeo or YouTube videos direct to the website so that you don't get duplicate videos as these will just compete with each other and be detrimental to your SEO efforts.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

I would recommend just keeping a consistent backlink campaign going and it will give you stability in the listings eventually. Look for some high quality directory listings as well as putting together some PR worthy content that is likely to gain some permanent links from some higher authority websites.

These things take time so don't worry, you will get there eventually

Matt.

Hi Nik,

I have had similar problems in the past. The likelihood is that you are challenging for a competitive keyword (correct me if I am wrong) and there are many other websites battling to get up in the search listings.

Your website doesn't have a particularly high authority/PR either, therefore it is going to susceptible to rank fluctuations. My advice is to just keep working on your SEO around the chosen keyword, regularly post fresh new content around the topic and make sure that you are reviewing the performance every week or fortnight.

Try to avoid looking every day at the rankings a making changes based on 24 hours of activity. Let a week go by before you do anything drastic and then make slight changes here and there.

Hope this helps.

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.

Hey there

In terms of your question of 'will it take away from the 'Audi A4' term if you put in further characters to the page titles, the answer is no.

The page titles should reflect the page content, and should also not be too short, as well as too long.

By putting in extra words after Audi A4 will only increase the amount of possible search terms that can gain entry points to the webpage. As good practice, aim to get your webpage titles between 40 and 65 characters as this is the optimum amount.

As my suggestion, go with option B, however, try doing a bit more keyword analysis to find what users search to find an Audi A4. From a brief look on Google's keyword tool, I can see that there are many searches for the product name plus engine size, i.e. Audi A4 1.9 tdi (49,500 monthly global searches). Judging by this, it may be good to put in the brief specification into the webpage title.

Hope this helps

Matt.

Hi Guys,

We have recently created a new website for one of our clients and replaced their old website on the same domain. One problem that we are having is that all of the old pages are indexed within Google (1000s) and are just getting sent to our custom 404 page. We are finding that there is an large bounce rate from this and also, I am worried from an SEO point of view that the site could lose rank positioning through the number of crawl errors that Google is getting.

Want I want is to set up a 301 redirect from these pages to go to the 'our brands' page. The reason for this is that the majority of the old URLs linked to individual product pages, and one thing to note is that they are all .asp pages.

Is there a way of setting up a rule in the htaccess file (or another way) to say that all webpages that end with the suffix of .asp will be 301 redirected to the our brands' page? (there is no .asp pages on the new site as it is all done in php).

If so, I would love it if someone could post the code snippet. Thanks in advance guys and if you have any other ideas then be my guest to suggest

Matt.