Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Matt, videos remind me of every moment I spend at MozCon. It was great meeting you at the birds of the father table

Hey Andrew,

Let’s start this way… you have the data of keywords that you have extracted from the Adwords campaign. This is great if you can extract all the keywords that are most convertible in terms of conversions.

Step 2 would be to list down the keywords and notice the traffic, difficulty level and competition each keyword contains and then on the basis of total traffic, difficulty level and conversion rate list down the keywords accordingly. Ideally it should be from highest returns to lowest returns…

Now you have the data so target the keywords that are most convertible… it depends on the resources of how many keywords you should target and what resources should do what!

Hope that helps!

Hello Nicola,

In my 4 years of experience as an agency SEO I only once accept this challenge and that is because my client was a reseller and he wants to come up on the 1^st page with the brand name of the manufacturer. I believe if this is the case at your end then I don’t think this make you wear a gray hat but in my experience this is extremely difficult in terms of competition and takes a long way to be on the first page.

If your case is not similar to the one mentioned above then I would want you to consider few important things before planning this:

• Trust of your own brand

Think from the angle of a visit that type in your competitor’s key phrases and find your website. After clicking it he/she might not find what he/she was expecting and this is where you will lose your own brand’s trust level.

If people are coming to your website and do not find what they are really looking for then eventually you will lose the trust of your own website/brand.

• Bounce Rate

If people coming to your website from your competitor’s brand name.. I believe they will only increase the bounce rate because of the fact that they didn’t find what exactly they were looking for.

• Killing User experience

This activity might kill the user experience to a higher extent due to the fact that you are taking them somewhere else when they are looking for something else.

I see you have planned to slowly poison your website in the longer run as many of the tactics are very low quality or give no positive value to the website.

If I will be at your place this will be the following plan I would have preferred. (Plan always get changed from industry to industry but I am considering this as a general plan)

• Research and gather the list of all the important and high quality directories that are relevant in your niche and get links for all (it won’t be more than 50 ~ 60).
• Find the blogs in your industry allow me to write a guest post on their blogs, shortlist the one that contain more social, traffic and DA and will target them for guest posting. 4 to 5 a month will be fine.
• 6 to 8 Posts on your own website blog (no micro sites) is great, keep the promotion plan on... writing a blog is not enough.
• 1 Slide share << go for it... no harm in it but remember it should have to have a value or else it’s like dumping your time in to waste bin.
• Manual Outreaching fir links.. This can be like link sleuthing, promoting any viral stuff that is available on your website or may be following the competitor’s links wisely.
• Press Release should not have a number... use this only when you think you have something new regarding your company that will attract users. Use it to entertain users and not get links...

I know the plan available here is not complete but still way better than the one you have! You plan give a strong feeling that it revolves around getting links (many tactics you have mentioned will offer your low quality links only.) and my plan is more towards users and targeted audience so that you get only high quality links naturally.

SEO has changed a lot not instead of building links you have to create scenarios and situations that attract links naturally.

Hope this helps!

How about taking a look in to The Recommended Companies by Moz.com http://moz.com/community/recommended

I love the part when you said “follow your questions” because there are people who ask questions and then later down the line they are not active on their own questions which sometimes is bad (especially when people answering the question need more details…)

Very nice video Matt.

Ok, the answer might bore you but this is what the truth is all about so here I go!

Search Engine use around 200+ different signals to rank a website and this links, DA, PA are just the indicators of few.

There are several other reasons why you are ranking above them like:

-          Your content is more relevant against that query

-          You might have got better quality content then your competitor

-          The links that are pointing to your website are less but quality always outranks quantity so maybe you have got better quality links then your competitor

-          My be the bounce rate of your competitors website was more than the bounce rate of your website

Long story short, there are tons of possibilities why your website is ranking above your competitors and one of them or may be all can be right or wrong!

Hope this helps!

Building links was never a race for me it was more like how quality my link profile is and this is how I beat my competitors and rank over them again the money making keywords.

It’s not about how many links your competitors have and how many links do you have... after the panda and penguin update it’s quite clear that its more about the quality of links your competitors have as compare to you!

I would advise you to build some high quality, valuable links within your niche so that you can easily outrank your competitors for the desired key phrases.

I don’t see much problem with PR Web other then the fact that you have to be careful about adding links in the Press Release. Actually you only should use PR Web when you want masses to update about your product or service but for SEO purposes it’s of ZERO value from now!

If you think adding a link in the PR is important for visitors then make it no follow otherwise just eliminate the link and let people know about the update you have!

Remember: Use it for users not for Search Engines!

PA and DA might indicate how many links are pointing back to your website but this is not the only thing that is important to consider when plan ranking better in SERPs from the targeted key phrases.

Again, DA increases when links pointing to your website increases but it does not measure quality of link and how relevant it is to your website. Other things you should consider including is quality of content on the website, internal linking, how powerful the link is and few more.

There are times when you actually deserve better ranking but some websites are outranking you using tactics that are prohibited by Google. In that case you can report them to Google or wait for the update as these things usually cutoff as soon as  the Google launches the algo update.

Hope this helps!

Mike, your question is not clear!

Are you trying to ask whom you should contact if you want to remove incoming links from Lower DA?

If this is the question, then I would really answer this in two steps!

Step 1:

Why do you want to remove links from lower DA? If you think that lower DA means lower quality then this concept is highly inappropriate! A website with Higher DA can be a lower quality websites if you really want to remove low quality websites from your link profile then you should audit the website who is linking to you to see if it really a low quality website.

You can check the design, UI, UX, Link profile, onpage SEO, search their brand name in Google to see if they are ranking 1^st for their brand name and similar tactics...

Step 2:

If you really think that the website is low quality so in that case you have to find the contact email of the website and email them to request a link removal.

**I am hoping that this is something you are trying to ask if there is something else please explain the question in detail and I would be happy to answer you!

I go by the basic rule here, if the two different URLs displaying identical information then this will be considered as duplicated content but including no-index, no-follow tag is also not a good idea as this will affect your traffic and conversions.

All websites are fetching the data from the central resource but you got the ability to display it differently! Like try to display only the related information about the properly and in the rest of the page you can add UGC, content related to the property, some tips or something similar kind of content and more…

In the ecommerce world, we tend to see different websites selling the same products and that is why the pages become identical sometimes so in order to avoid that we try to add extra content like UGC, tips, videos or more to make the page unique in the eye of Google as well as a little more interactive for search engines.

Hope this helps!

EGOL sir, you probably nailed it!

Whenever creating titles and descriptions you have to think about two areas

1. Your search audience
2. Search Engine Rankings

Id I would be at your place, I would list down all the important keywords in one document and then map the keywords on different pages of the website accordingly. Once done and I know what keywords I should be placing on each URL/page, I will move accordingly.

Once I have keywords mapped, next thing is to divide the pages as per the priorities. Important, Less Important and rest of the pages

Start with important pages, than move towards less important pages and then the pages that are on the website but not your priority at all.

As EGOL said, dedicate some time in your day may be half hour everyday (if you have another person to do the job in that case its different) and get the job done. This way it will be more efficient and closer to what your audience is looking for

Hope this helps!

This is not really irrelevant... I mean I have a website that dedicated offer SEO service, and I have few links coming from good web design websites and this is not irrelevant because somehow there is a connection!

Similarly, here the links that are pointing to the website have some connection... I mean if the websites that are link back to your website have a bad health, then you must stay away from their links but saying that the links are simply irrelevant is not true!

EGOL nailed lots of points here so I will quickly go though it again before going further.

-          The title tag is not optimized. You should have to have around 65 characters of a title that that also includes your targeted key terms. Also craft your title in such a way that it pleases humans and not bots only.

-          Meta description tag is not optimized as well. May be Google no more look in to it but still you should use it as a way to increase CTR from organic search. My advice would be to re craft the Meta description tag that encourages real audience to click to the link and get in to your website for more.

-          Keywords tag is present but I don’t think there is any need of this here. Bing might consider this as a signal so having few keywords that you are targeting on the page is a good idea.

-          XML Site Map is also missing

-          Website contain good amount of duplicated content so the advice here is to create a content that is unique, original and focus the targeted audience.

Few other things you can do to get to the first page of Google for your targeted key terms are:

-          Get yourself register to Local Citations and Yellow pages with the consistent NAPs.

-          Make sure you are not getting a link back to some lousy or irrelevant websites. If you are, then you have to clean it up or penguin might attack you.

-          Get some quality links from different relevant websites.

Also, my advice here would be to look for a SEO consultant and get the audit done for your website. Once you will have the problems at the front of you, next thing you need to do is to fix the problems and see how your website is getting better it terms of rankings from your desired key phrases.

Hope this helps!

I don’t see any reliable tool when it comes to bad link checking but if paid is an option for you then I have personally use Link Detox and it works great for me. Link Risk is another tool that I would recommend as I know the people behind that tool and they are amazing brains of the search industry.

Hope this helps!

Ok let me start with 1 basic thing... do not BUY guest posting placements or else you will get dramatically hurt.... not only from the branding point of view but from the rankings point of view as well....

As far as how guest blogging process works here is the short and quick version if it!

1. List down the blogs that are within your niche.
2. Check their DA, total subscribers and social value and separate the best accordingly!
3. Get their emails and outreach to them for the guest blogging opportunity!
4. Check the status of the emails and see who allow you to send them the guest post!
5. Send the guest post and ask them when they can make it live!

Wait for the guest posts to go live...

Once live... its always great to share it on social media channels and work accordingly!

I have worked for the health care hospital based in Florida while I was working for one agency and as far as my experience goes the basic game is pretty much the same. Get your business pages right, keep NAP consistent on all embassies and more.

The only advantage I took was by working with their PR agency. Their PR agency successfully established their brand name displayed on almost all local magazines. I just help the PR team to get the link from their magazines that looks natural (obviously for that I had to build a blog that contain the linkable content).

Links from quality places increase DA and overall authority of the website, right local SEO help me rank for most of the keywords with location pages.

Hope this helps!

A Directory according to Moz SPAM checker tool looks clean to me but the process you are talking about is known as reciprocal linking!

According to Google guidebook reciprocal linking is not ethical and it’s not a good practice to build quality links back to the website.

So, If a directly ask you to do reciprocal linking, its probably a website you should not get a link from but if they are offering a one way link and the website backlink profile is clean then you probably should go for it!

Hope this helps!

As far as I see your website I see images are getting indexed (not all of them but they are in the Google search index). Why are they not appearing in the search results when someone type in related keyword is a different question. If you are looking for that my advice would be to use proper, optimized and natural anchor text instead of targeting keywords all the time.

Also try to change the name of the images to something more relevant. “liposuction.jpg is much better than big-imagejpg”

Hope this helps!