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Thanks, I understand that I can use google keyword, and wordtracker, but I'm looking for more detailed info on the questions that I asked. And how to do that research.

I was wondring if someone could please help me figure out a good way to do some long tail keyword research. I think the way I am doing it is wrong.

For instance, my blog is written for new and expecting parents of children born with Down syndrome, and today for instance I wanted to share a few tips to help parents get more sleep.

Now the same tips apply to all parents, but I''m assuming it would be better to title it more specific to my readers.

I could title it,

"3 Tips To Help Parents Get More Sleep"

but to target it more for my readers, I would need to title it:

3 Tips To Help Parents Raising a Child With Down Syndrome Get More Sleep"

but I'm assuming keyword wide the only thing I have in there is "help parents get more sleep"  or "get more sleep." which I'm assuming many people aren't searching for.

I'm also assuming more people are searching for the phrase "how to get more sleep" (but that is way to generic).

So I could title it something like,

"How to get more sleep: 3 simple tips every parent should start doing now."

Again, I'm not using the word "Down syndrome" in there (which I'm not sure I even need to since these tips apply to everyone, not just parents, and not just parents raising a child with Down syndrome. (I saw a sleep doctor yesterday who gave me some great tips, so I want to write about them..) However, I don't want to confuse google by writing about sleep tips, when my entire site is about parenting, and more specifically parenting a child with Down syndrome. So I'm not sure on how best to title posts like this, if that makes sense.

I'm also not sure on the best way to use keyword research to find the best long tail phrases to use. For example, how would I find out which of these is a better long tail phrase "how a parent can get more sleep", "how parents can get more sleep" "How parents of babies can get more sleep" "how new parents can get more sleep" "sleep tips for new parents" etc....? I'm assuming I just put each of those phrases into the google keyword tool, but what if there is a keyword combo I'm missing that has a higher search volume? Do I have to try to guess every combo?

I'm just using this post as an example, but I have this same issue on a lot of my posts. Any feedback / direction you can give me on how to best do, what I'm trying to do would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Nope, I haven't even heard of it before, but you are right, it does look interesting. Let me know if you try it out.

On our site I use it on each individual page (post). Same with Facebook, stubmle upon, pintrest, etc...

Like someone mentioned, I want people to be directed back to a specific post. I did put a Facebook like box on our home page which allows people to like our facebook page directly from our home page (which has been very effective) and I thought about adding a "like" button for our home page, but it would be sort of confusing I think to people. There would basically be two different like buttons....

I may experiment with having a place in the footer to like our main page: site wide. I'll have to see how it goes.

Same here. Thanks.

Hope you are doing well.

Yes, I caught it. And it did pick up the canonical to the home page...I lost rank on a ton of key words. I'm hoping it gets fixed in the next index.

Thanks for the reply, but in this case I don't think that would apply.

What's happening is the them is putting 2 canonical urls into each post. The url of the current page, and the home page. So google is getting confused. Trying to fix it now.

Today I noticed I was dropping (pretty big jump) for some keywords, so I checked out the source of a page, and noticed that my source code has two canonical urls. One to the home page, and one to the /page-title.

I just changed themes recently, and the dropped happened after I changed themes.

Is this what's causing me to drop in rank for certain terms? You can view the source here:

http://noahsdad.com/physical-characteristics/

Thanks Casey!

@casey, thanks for your reply, I can go into the header and delete the info, but there's something in the them (a function?) that is getting the into. I'm assuming I delete some info from perhaps funtions.php?

thanks for your help by the way.

@casey, thanks for your reply, I can go into the header and delete the info, but there's something in the them (a function?) that is getting the into. I'm assuming I delete some info from perhaps funtions.php?

thanks for your help by the way.

I have a random question form someone who is a developer.  I"m not sure if this is the right place to post this question, but figured it was worth a shot.

I have the Yoast SEO plug in installed, and it this plug in is duplicating some of the functions of my theme and as a result I have some duplicate html and meta data in my source code.

From what I can tell it looks like both my theme and and the YOAST plug in are duplicating meta description,  canonical url, and maybe a few other things that I can't really understand.

I was wondering if anyone knew of what the best way to fix something like this, and if these issues are having any negative effects on my site / SEO?

Thanks so much.

I am at the point on our blog where I want to start doing giveaways. A publisher recently gave me some books to give away, and so I plan on starting with that. (Although later I plan on doing some bigger items.)

This will be the first time I've done a give away and looking for some best practices.

Our Facebook page has about 13,000 fans and so asking for more "LIKES" to enter the contest for a give away may not be the best way since a lot of our readers are already fans on Facebook. (Not to mention I would much rather have engagement on our page vs. people just randomly liking the page.)

One idea I have is just a simple "leave a comment with the title of the last book you read below" and than "receive a bouns entry if you sign up to receive our blog posts via email." The question I have for this is how do I know who signed up for the email? Do they just leave a 2nd comment saying they did? If so, how do I know they actually did without going through and verifying each person actually did. (Which could take a long time.)

I'm open to any other ideas as well.

The other question I had is in regard to SEO. Is this the kind of post where SEO doesn't really matter? Meaning, I don't really want to rank for people searching for that book since if my page did rank high for that phrase, there isn't anything on the post really about the book; so it wouldn't be helpful for the person searching. I'm assuming you just title the post something "Giving away 5 Free copies of This Awesome Book," or something like that....and not really worry about trying to rank for that post in any way.

Again, this is new to me, so I'm open to any ideas, feedback, blog contests you have done, or other posts that talk about this.

Thanks!

You got it. It was strange. It went form almost none to a ton! ha,ha.

Hope you are doing well.

The site LIfehacker.com does this all the time. They will quote 2-3 sentences from the article, talk about why people should go check out the full article, and than link to it. I don't see anything wrong with that, especially if what you say about the article is unique and valuable.

Thanks, but I'm not sure what you mean by "upgrading my Wordpress." I have the newest version, and I also use the Yoast SEO plugin.

My main readership is moms, so they are very active on pintrest. They repin a lot of my content, and spend time looking at other pages on the site once there.  However, they know what they are getting before they come to the site.

Like the others have said, it really just depends on what sort of audience your site has.  For me, it's been good (I actually want to step up my boards, and make them a bit more organized...) but may not be for you.  Also remember it's invite only at this point, so even though there are a lot of people on it, not every one is. So you'll have to decide if it's worth your time at this point.

I'd be interested in this also. My site has a lot of images (but even worse, a lot of videos). I'm trying to speed up my site, and I was also looking at the CDN. I have been using Site5 shared hosting and I have been very happy with it. (I get a lot more traffic that 500 a day, and it works great.) They also have a VPS that is priced very fair, but to be honest the shared hosting has been incredible. Not to mention their customer service has been outstanding.

I am interested to hear peoples opinion on CDN's though.

Something interesting happened on the last update for my site on SEOmoz pro tools.

For the last month or so the errors on my site were very low, then on the last update I had a huge spike in errors, warnings, and notices.  I'm not sure if somehow I made a change to my site (without knowing it) and I caused all of these errors, or if it just took a few months to find all the errors on my site?

My duplicate page content went from 0 to 45, my duplicate page titles went from 0 to 105, my 4xx (client error) went from 0 to 4, and my title missing or empty went from 0 to 3.

On the warnings sections my missing meta description tag went form a hand full to 444.  (most of these looking to be archive pages.)

Down in the notices I have over 2000 that are blocked by meta robots, meta-robots nofollow, and Rel canonical. I didn't have any where near this many prior to the last update of my site.

I just wanted to see what I need to do to clean this up, and figure out if I did something to cause all the errors.  I'm assuming the red errors are the first things I need to clean up.

Any help you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated. Also if you'd like me to post any additional information, please let me know and I'd be glad to.

I'd like to see if the community could offer some feedback on how to 'step up' the comments on our blog.  I've been looking over various options, and of course you can find as many pros as you can cons for each of these.

In addition to our website, we have a very active, and engaged Facebook page, so my first thought is to install Facebook comments on our blog.  However I believe you loose the SEO benefit form the comments (I'm not sure how much SEO benefit you get form the comments anyways if the post content is optimized), people can't comment unless they have, and want to use, their Facebook account (although I've seen some work arounds that allow people to use either or), people don't get notified when there is a reply to their comment, I don't 'own' any of the comments, Facebook does...so if I ever decide to change comment systems, I loose all the comments, and I loose the ability to send a 'welcome email' to first time commenters (which has been very effective for newsletter sign ups.)  Facebook sends a large number of traffic to my site, and since there are so many people on our Facebook page, I feel this may be a good option.  One other concern I have by allowing people to use either Facebook comments or Wordpress comments is the use of my top commenter plug in.  This plug in has been very useful in increasing our blog comment engagement.  We are even going to be rewarding our top commenter each month. I'm assuming if you use Facebook comments by itself, or the combo Facebook / wordpress solution I've found online, I wouldn't be able to use a top commenter plugin, since this is pulling the data from Wordpress, correct?

One thing I don't understand is I've seen a plug in (I think it's Facebook simple connect) that allows comments to 'sync' between those comments that appear on the blog, and those that appear on wordpress. I'm not sure how this works.  Does Facebook recognize a certain url being posted on the Facebook page, and associates that with the same url on the blog, and simply syncs the two? In other words can people comment on the blog (via Facebook comment) and comment on the Facebook page, and simply continue to conversation from either location? This would be a pretty neat feature, but I'm not sure if that's how it works. Also, if I use Facebook comments solely, does anyone know what happens to all of the previous comments left on the blog? Do they all go away? In other words, does it make it seem like I have zero comments on any posts? This wouldn't be good.

I know a lot of people use and like the Disqus comment system, but I've read lots of horror stories about loosing comments, blogs being slowed down tremendously, etc.  I like how disquis allows you to 'like' someones post. I feel like this would help increase community engagement, but not sure how much. (We already get a fair number of comments as it, I'm just trying to make the experience better.)  I'd like for people to be able to post pictures / images in the comments, and I think disqus allows for there (though there may be plug ins that allow this on the native wordpress comments.)

Finally I'm wondering if there are some good comment plug ins that would allow me to stay using wordpress native comments, but step up the comments. For instance, using pictures in comments, being abel to rank comments (sort of like the thumbs up / down here on SEOmoz) and any other cool plug ins that help promote engagement.

I hope you guys can offer some insight as to the best direction to go with the comments.

Thanks in advance!