Questions
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URL Structure - Homepage, Country and State Pages
Hi Paul, In order to give you an answer about the best international Web structure, could you please confirm: Where's your target audience for your site? Do you want to target the audience of some specific countries (those where you will have the courses from)? Or do you want to target audience that speak a specific language abroad? Could you please confirm the country and language target for each one please? For hreflang tags best practices you can refer to this post I wrote at the Moz blog with examples and a tool to help you generate them. You can still using "self" referral rel canonical annotations in each one of your pages since these won't be seen as duplicated (they will be whether targeting to different languages or in the same language but to different countries) but you don't need to use cross-language or cross-country, as Google describes in their international FAQ. It's important to note that each of your international Web versions should feature specific content optimized for each one of them in the relevant language, targeting its specific audience, from Titles, Meta Descriptions, URLs, all should be in the relevant language, with specific terms used by the visitors you want to attract. This is why doing a full initial research to identify if there's enough volume in each country and language to compensate to build independent Web versions is fundamental. Please, take a look at this International SEO Checklist I published at the Moz blog, that will help you validate each step you need to take for an international SEO process and take a look at the slides of my MozCon presentation about International SEO, where I describe and share resources for each one of them. Thanks!
International Issues | | Aleyda0 -
SEO Internationalization - URL Architecture
HI Paul First to say congratulations on your site. My daughter used it recently before taking her UK driving test! I expect your site is quite a labour of love keeping it up to date? I have to say looking at your current site I don't think there's a lot wrong with what you have now. OK, it doesn't follow the country code / language code convention (which you have included in the new structure), but there is no particular URL structure required by Google I know and I guess it's the same with Bing and Yahoo. Have you had a look at Google's FAQs on internationalisation here: https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation ? So, for your URL structure proposed above there is nothing in particular I would pick up on. Just one things re SEO on your site and one on commericiality... Your best asset re building the site SEO wise will be your articles area. Grow that and add lots more useful articles for learner drivers. Commercially, I think it is a great idea to add Insurance searches on your site, but (1) I think they are hidden where they are in terms of encouraging a call to action and (2) at the moment the dropdown combobox doesn't seem to be working. Again, well done on your site. All the best to you. Peter
International Issues | | crackingmedia0 -
I am new. How do I best use Moz?
Hi Brian, Welcome to the Moz community! We're glad to have you. There's a lot going on in your account, so I can understand if it looks a bit overwhelming at first. A great place to start improving your site's on-page SEO is our On-Page Grader, which gives an overview of how well-optimized any page is for a given keyword. It's in Moz Analytics under Search -> On-Page Optimization. You can read all about the tool and how to apply its data at moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/on-page-optimization. Of course, on-page optimization is only one of many factors that affect SERP rankings, and the Keyword Difficulty Tool can provide some guidance on where to go from there. It can tell you how how much work you can expect it to take to rank for any given keyword, as well as a snapshot of your SERP competitors. I'd suggest running a full analysis on your most important terms, which will provide an idea of where your competitors are beating you—on-page SEO, backlink profile, etc. That helps to give some direction to your online marketing work. You can learn all about that tool at moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/keyword-difficulty. Keep an eye on your crawl diagnostics report, which tells you what issues with your site may be affecting its crawlability. It can be found under Search -> Crawl Diagnostics. Here are a few resources for learning the Moz toolset and inbound marketing: The Moz Analytics Help Hub - Videos, written guides, FAQs and glossaries for all aspects of Moz Analytics The Beginner's Guide to SEO - A reasonably quick, thorough introduction to inbound marketing concepts and best practices Moz Academy - A collection of brief video lessons teaching inbound marketing concepts and skills Finally, as others have mentioned, this Q&A is a great pace to get answers to your questions, and the Moz and YouMoz blogs consistently post useful information. I hope that helps!
Getting Started | | MattRoney0