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Hey Nathan, I think it would depend on what your overall goals are, what the title tag you have now is, etc.  If you look at seoMoz's title tag you'll notice they don't have a call to action or anything in their title tag. They have developed the brand.

In regard to your site, have you built a brand for it? Are you selling merch? Is it a blog? Does the content on the home page change often?

I did away with a vague category and 301 redirected the category url to the home page. However the link is reporting as a 404 in Moz Tools when it scans my site. Here's the link, and as you can see it redirects to the home page. Just curious if I did something wrong. Thanks.

Thanks for the kind words. As I mentioned sometimes I like to do full width posts which are 1170 wide so if I use 800x600 the images won't show up correctly on full screen.

Yes, i use catching. But like I said, saving it for 640 wouldn't work for me since I want image to show up bigger than that if the screen is 1170. I'm assuming the images wouldn't be able to be resized any bigger than 640 without looking stretched.

I'm using a few different plug ins to give me various Facebook functions on my site. I'm curious there are any developers out there would could take a look at my source code and see if it looks there is some code being duplicated that's slowing down my site. Thanks so much!

I'm using smushit to make the file size smaller, but I need to be able to at least have 1170 for full width posts (like this one.)  I don't think I need to use save for web if I'm using smush it do I?

Does having css resize the images cause a site to slow down a lot?

I'm trying to figure out why I'm having speed issues with my site, and using google speed test to help me knock out some of the issues.

One of issues deals with image resizing. I have a responsive design and so even though on the home page the normal width is 580 of the blog area, the full post can go up to 1170. So I size all of my images to 1170 wide and let CSS resize them depending on the size of the browser. (The images on the most recent post are a little bigger than this because I was testing something.)

I was wondering what the best practice was in regard to what I'm trying to do.

Also feel free to check out my site and let me know of any other feedback / advice you have. Thanks !:)

I''ll try to find the link where he talks about using pages instead of posts and share it. Curious to hear your thoughts on it.

I'll go ahead and select that option, thanks for your help. (On a side note, what do people not using this plug in do? I'm assuming not many people do this, right?)

You think there is any benefit to doing it, or just one of those "hey why not" sort of things?

Thanks for taking the time to check into it. One I'm concerned with is how this will effect long tail seo / indexing of the comments. How will this effect my organic traffic? (will it hurt it?)

I don't see these sorts of pages coming up in google now, so I'm not sure what selecting that option does (and how it effects the site.)

Yoast does a few things different with his site, and I don't always follow his lead. For example he suggets making new pages instead of new posts for your blog posts. He's the only one I've ever heard say this, or do this.

I'm looking for a good way to mange my social media communities.  I've been logging into facebook, youtube, twitter, wordpress, etc to reply to our community. But that takes so much time. Can anyone suggest a dashboard where I can respond to our community in one place instead of logging into each online community?

It would be great if I could also reply to blog comments also, but since this isn't really a "social network" I'm not sure if any of the dashboards let you reply to blog comments. If so, that's ok. But a perfect one would allow for this also.

In regard to posting new content (especially on Facebook) it's been my experience that posting from anything other than directly to their webpage (no 3rd party app/dashboard) reduces the exposure of that content on your fans news feeds. Has anyone found any work arounds for this, or is the best method using the dashboards to reply to fans, keep up with social networks, etc...and to actaully use the webpage to post new content?

Looking forward to your advice.

Thanks!

hmm..thanks for the feedback. So do you suggest not blocking those? (and I'll message yoast also and see what his thoughts are.)

Thanks.

I want to make some changes to my personal website and need a little help.

I originally hired someone to create this site for me several years ago. Most of the site (including the home page) is html, but the blog part (/blog) is wordpress.

The main site hasn't been updated in a few years (although the blog has been updated more often.) I'm not really targeting any keywords on my site (other than just my name) so I'm not really concerned about loosing any rank or anything.

I"m just curious what the best route to go should be. Would you suggest keeping the site's format "as is" so to speak? (make the front page a landing page so to speak that links to my various sites, a little bio, etc; keep an about page, contact, /blog, etc...? ) Or should I go the more traditional route and make the blog the front page?

Another route is to someone keep the most recent (1,2,or 3) posts on the home page (landing page) and sort of make it a landing page / recent post page. It's sort of like that now, only the main page just links to the most recent post instead of actually adding the post, if that makes sense.

There maybe some themes out there that would work well, so feel free to suggest one if you know one that would work. I think the Aboutme.com pages look pretty nice and will let you use a custom domain, but I'm not sure. (And it's not a complete theme, so not sure that's the best option.)

Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words, I agree, he is a cutie. Will blocking those cause the comments not to be indexed though?

As there other folks have said billions of web pages is a lot of work. But the question you have is why is the work not done by the time they say it will be done sometimes.

They have posted detailed explanations every time there was a problem. (Including this week.) Have you had a chance to check out there posts?

I'm using Yoast's wordpress plugin and there is an option to remove the replytocom variables. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts were on that, and if I should do it.

Here's the site if you need to see it.

Thanks!

Ha,ha..Oh sorry! I didn't catch that.

And yah, he is one happy little panda.

Thanks Dan. This is great info, and your post was great. Right now I'm ont really using tags, and just using categories (around 4.) I'm about to start adding a few more categories and some child categories.

If you get a chance feel free to check out my site and see if my structure look ok. I'd appreciate it.

Hmmm.I'm not sure I'm following what you are doing (or vis versa)

You can check out my site if you'd like, and you can see I have big buckets for things (like therapy.) But I have so many posts under that, I need to make them into child categories. But if I do I can't use the url for the main 'landing' page. (If that makes sense.)

I checked out the link you posted and it looks like when I click on one of your category names I'm taken to a page that has a different url. Is there a reason for that? From what I understand it's best to let users know where they are going when they click on a link. Was there a reason you didn't have the url the same as the catagory they clicked on in your menu?

(I'm still learning so forgive me in advance if I'm missing something.)

Thanks for the reply Lindsay, but that's the problem I'm running into. If I use the mysite/physical-therapy, etc pages for the detailed content page I won't be able to use that url for the categories of the posts. This is a blog so there are lots of posts that go into that bucket. You can check it out here.

I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy.

However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words.

I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.