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To accomplish ranking for synonymous search terms, are we better off just letting Google make the connection? Should we put the secondary synonymous term in our page titles? Is it best practice to create a completely unique landing page for the term? Not sure how to go about this. Some examples would be "miami lawyer" or "miami attorney", "obgyn" vs "gynecologist" etc. Any help on this would be much appreciated!
Just out of curiosity, I checked out your website also. You may want to consider toning down the keyword placement on the homepage! If you run the homepage in the Moz grader for "wicker furniture" you will see that it suggests that you may have overdone the keyword mentions. This may adversely impact your search rankings and I noticed you have much better stats in terms of link authority than the pages ranking on the bottom of page 1 for the term. May help!
Hi Ian,
Unfortunately, no one call tell you exactly why you're seeing so much success with that page for that term, but we can give our best guesses based on what we do understand about Google's algorithm.
Some contributing factors from what I can tell...
One thing I also checked was site speed...to my surprise your page speeds were VERY low..so you're winning despite that at this point. I wanted to point that out though because it could be something that helps improve performance of other pages for other terms!
Totally agree. Keyword density is really the last thing you should focus SEO efforts on (other than meta keywords :P).
From my understanding, the only important part of the page lies in the body frame. Sidebars, headers and footers that are constant throughout the site don't really factor.
-Ricky
Hi Taysir, just saw that you hadn't received any feedback on this so I thought I throw in my two cents!
Instead of creating a mess of navigation tabs, I would simply have each locations primary page list the service offerings with anchor text linking to the corresponding page. For example...
Plumbing Company in Specific City, NC
[primary page content]
Our Services Include:
I think that should provide a framework that makes sense for the user AND gives the bots an easy way to index the pages without going deep into a navigational structure!
Would like to hear other opinions on this as well
Hey Matt,
If this works, you are THE MAN! This is exactly the type of solution I was looking for. Thanks a ton.
Too close on those numbers, especially in terms of spots 8,6,5 & 2. You're going to have to take a deeper look.
I'd start with digging into the link profiles. Find the links that your competitors have that are really high trust links--I'm talking BBB, industry accreditation sites, quality PR hits/mentions etc. Find the easy wins and try to identify the really high level links that your competitors have that you may be missing.
My second priority would be to check out your bounce rates and time on site. It may be that traffic is better served on those sites and therefore Google is giving them the nod in the rankings.
Third, I'd check out http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013\. Dig in and see where your competitors are beating you in that regard step by step. Process of elimination I'm afraid....we can't really know for sure!
Hey guys, i've seen some stuff about this before but I recently found an opportunity to put it into action and wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into!
I am looking at buying a domain (expired and now only 10 dollars) that has a decent domain authority and has some keywords in it related to my clients practice. I plan on using a 301 redirect to pass "link juice" because this client is looking for a quick bump in rankings.
Thoughts? Benefits? Problems with this?
Thanks guys! I've got a solid checklist now to complete to qualify a site!
Though for anyone else reading this thread--@salman...sounds like a very old-school, black hat SEO tactic! Not only do I doubt that would work short term, I KNOW it is something that Google will be looking to penalize. A link network/ link farm like that is not really a legitimate SEO practice and violates Google's guidelines.
I asked here https://www.google.com/moderator/#7/e=adbf4 but figured out ask the Moz Community also! Is it actually best practice to create landing pages for nearby cities if you don't have an actual address there? Even if your target customers are there? For example, If I am in Miami, but have a lot of customers who come from nearby cities like Fort Lauderdale is it okay to create those LP's?
I've heard this described as best practice, but I'm beginning to question whether Google sees it that way.
Hi Hashtag,
If implementing a 301, there is no need to delete a page from your server. A 301 will essentially "delete" the page to both users and search engines while directing both to the new url. You can do it, but there is no need to.
Hope that helps!
-Ricky
I know that rand recommends hosting your blog on a FOLDER of your root domain instead of hosting your blog on a subdomain.
The reason for doing so is that the domain authority of the subdomain will put a slightly larger distance (in terms of authority signals carrying over) from the root.
For example, its better to have your blog at bobsmithdental.com/blog vs blog.bobsmithdental.com.
After that, its really a matter of tightening up your keyword optimization on the blog posts and building and earning quality inbound links!
-Ricky