Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Nice - thanks Kane. Cool Chrome tool too, thanks for the suggestion.

I'm in GWT every morning to check things out since our site is fairly large - about 220,000 pages. The sitemap checker is a really cool new feature in GWT too!

In Google Webmaster Central, if a URL is reported in your site map as 404 (Not found), I'm assuming Google will automatically clean it up and that the next time we generate a sitemap, it won't include the 404 URL.

Is this true?

Do we need to comb through our sitemap files and remove the 404 pages Google finds, our will it "automagically" be cleaned up by Google's next crawl of our site?

Hi Danielle,

I don't think you can go wrong with either. Plus most SEO tools are now web-based where you simply need a browser. I'm a bit biased to Macs because --- well I love them! They work great and no dreaded blue screen of death.

Tools like Google Adwords Desktop Editor come in both PC and Mac compatible forms too.

Adding the canonical tag within your telling search engines which homepage to use - this seemed to work for us:

If you're having duplicate content throughout your site, I've read having your site admin do something with the htaccess file would do the trick.

You're on the right track with link building and anchor text. It's important to sculpt your priority pages with the branded terms (on page and in the code). You're lucky to have a team working on link building as that takes effort, but well worth it.

I think it would be tough to obtain 100% dominance, but one thing you might try is adwords with your branded terms. In this way, you appear more on SERPs. Kind of like driving down the highway and seeing multiple billboards vs just a few. With more, searchers are more likely to click on your links. Adwords is also a great way to test branded keywords to see traffic and click data, that you can apply when creating your webpages around those terms.

One more think is anchor text linking within your site so that the architecture throughout the site has pages with branded terms linking to your important pages.

Awesome feedback Keri, thank you!

We're getting serious about capturing experts' knowledge in video format for future engineers in the plastics industry, so everything we can do to make it top notch is a good thing. Investing in microphone and production software and training is inexpensive, with big returns.

Your husband gets an A+. We'll be adding a note to the top of each webinar page that allows our users to suggest topics with an open-ended text box. Earlier this week we sent an email to our users asking for topics - a screenshot of the landing page is below, so we will update our signup page to reflect. Again, A+ for Mr. Morgret!

LinkedIn is perhaps the most widely adopted social site for the plastics industry so far. There are quite a few groups and we have a group with about 1400 members that ask design and processing questions. From time to time we comb LI to answer questions, but as EGOL pointed out, having a small staff makes it difficult to do this. Perhaps having some sort of automated monitor for keywords that could notify us of certain topics would be the way to go - maybe Google Alerts, unless you have other ideas.

Thanks again!

webinars-signup.jpg

Thank you Egol,

More content - check! That one is a pretty simple project since it involves a little bit of programming to extract more content from our database. We're thinking of hiring interns to research and write original content about each type of general plastic which I think would be valuable to engineers, especially those who work with polymers infrequently.

Having enough staff for the forum is a toughie. Our thought was to pull historical support requests from our CRM system to initially populate the forum so it doesn't look like a ghost town at launch. Then do what we can to mirror the way SEOmoz does this forum with points and so forth so that it becomes user generated. Another option we discussed was to hire consultants and industry experts to moderate forums that deal with specific topics.

Videos - yes! Great to hear the confirmation and we'll only do them if they are of high value for our users. Great insight - thank you!

Hmmmm, to get you back to normal dinner life IS a tough question! If I think of something, I'll let you know...

Digikey is a great service, one we're familiar with and often refer our customers to. We work the other way around where a design engineer using our Premium paid services can search one plastic material property requirements to find the right material for their application. All of that is hidden behind a login, but it's pretty amazing search technology non-the-less.

Yeah, I'm typically accused of asking loaded questions

I do think all tactics are important - just wish there were 5 (or maybe even 6 of me)!

Thanks Shane, your list of priorities is falling in line with my thoughts.

Yeah, I read just an article by Wil Reynolds this morning that Zappos produces 60-100 videos per day!

Never Worry About an Algorithm Update Again, a History | SEOmoz

Thanks RankSurge.

Keep the comments coming folks because it's interesting to track and see what efforts you all think is most valuable!

We have quite a few ideas for projects to help improve our web presence on SERPs while providing value to our members. Below is a 'short' selection.

Which one strategy do you think would be highest priority, and why?

1. Dynamically-Generated Content Create additional unique content-rich pages dynamically from technical data about plastic materials stored in our database. We don't just want to puke out data, but make it meaningful and unique - educational in fact to engineers, thinking it's good for them and also might give us an opportunity to gain links from edu websites.

2. More Content Hire a company to transcribe our 60+ recorded plastics industry webinar presentations. These are really cool topics (at least that's what engineers think) presented by top industry experts - something we want to continue to do to capture knowledge for future engineers.

3. Forum / User-Generated Content & Interaction Create an online forum for people who design with plastic materials - a forum like the SEOmoz format we think, would be cool! It's good for the users to interact and provide additional user-generated content that can be useful for our members and for SEO.

4. Social Push This is a tough one for us because the plastics industry is an older audience (that continually 'grows' younger). We can see a shift towards social adoption over the past few years, and obviously its impact on search. We see growth on Twitter and LinkedIn, but Facebook and others are a mystery for us - but we've got to adopt it early so we're ready when the plastics industry matures. We're a small company, so we've got to pick and choose the best things that help improve our business while providing top notch products and services to our users, members and customers. Simply posting to a blog that auto posts to all other social outlets seems like an opportunity, but kind of cheesy. You probably have better ideas...

5. Videos We can easily generate short educational videos to post on our site through YouTube. This would be a great strategy, albeit it would take some effort, but we're thinking it would be well worth it.

Hi Bob,

Use this tool in SEOMoz - http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization

As I suspected by simply looking at your homepage, the term NLP appears very frequently most likely affecting keyword density. To search engines, it looks like keyword stuffing.

Running the report check in SEOMoz confirms this. Once place in particular is your <title>tag:</p> <p><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> California and Utah | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Training | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Certification | </span><span class="highlight">NLP</span><span> Courses</span></p> <p><span>You might try something instead like:<br /></span><span style="background-color: initial;">NLP Institute of California | Training, Certification and Courses</span></p> <p>Also, NLP is a very broad term that is probably highly competitive - for example, Google shows 84 million results for the term. It might be better to do some keyword research and focus on more targeted terms - perhaps in your case, NLP Training. I also assume NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming (oddly I covered this topic as my senior research project in college). On your homepage, that term does not appear.</p> <p>Something that might help others answer your question - when did the drop in ranking occur and did you make any changes to your website shortly before the rank drop?</p></title>