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If you set it up your site (blog) on the settings as non-www version. you should add some 301 redirect plugin

According to Google
There is No SEO Benefit To Adding Trust Seals To Your Site

Google's Gary Illyes confirmed on Twitter that Google doesn't have a ranking signal that looks to see if a site has a trust seal on it and then gives the site a ranking benefit for having one.

In simple words:

• Badges will not improve your rank
• Badges will not give you more traffic

But this just from the SEO perspective, from the CRO perspective is another history.

Studies have shown that people trust more in the websites, which show up badges (known or not know) to sort of show how trusted or big they are. This is especially common when it comes to e-commerce websites, where this constant demand of trust as an urge to buy is very important. Therefore these trust badges have a direct role in raising the conversion rates – meaning that more website visitors would turn actual customers after visiting the website. This method is vital for many websites: there are tons of online frauds on a daily basis. Landing and Checkout pages are the most prone to feature all these badges in order to plant trust in the souls of the shoppers

IN SUMMARY

So don't let people sell you trust seals to improve your SEO. It may improve your conversion rates and user's perceived feeling of online safety but for SEO, no, it does not help.

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I worked with that tool in the past and works fine but they were small projects (local blogs or local business). I don't have any idea if it will work ok if you have a medium or a big ecommerce site.

1 - Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?

I strongly suggest to optimize your PLP pages they are like the categories in your website, so they are very close to your home page and should be at the top of your content structure.

So what you can do it about

• Optimize the titles and description tag
• Add schemas to those PLP
• Then markup those pages using Search Console
• Create some internal links to those pages

This are some tips from the SEO Learning Center
https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

Optimal format
Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
8-foot Green Widgets - Widgets & Tools | Widget World

There are a few basic strategies that realtor can utilize to increase PLP SEO scores, site visibility, and conversions.

1. Increase the number of relevant keywords included on PLP pages by adding plain text descriptions and related keywords.
2. Embed keywords within the URLs of PLP pages
3. Raise SEO authority by decreasing bounce rate

7 Critical SEO Errors you should avoid

1. Lack of Properties Description
2. Lack of Properties Reviews
3. Not Optimizing Properties Pages Based on The Search Demand
4. Non-Unique Titles
5. Lack of “Speaking” URLs
6. A Lot of Duplicate Content

The Golden Rule of SEO – Make Usability a Priority
As you know, Google is a search engine that is very worried about its users and their experience. First of all, you should make your online store convenient and useful for customers in order to achieve its respect. What is good and unique to your clients – it’s good for Google.

The more time people spend on your site, and less they click back to the search results page is a great indication that Google is sending them to the right place.

Finally, people who like your website and what it has to offer are much more likely to link to it – and as we said before, links are what drive you to top the search results page!

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2 - If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?

I don't have experience in Real Estate and don't live in NY.
But the first thing that comes to my mind is, did you study your main competitors?
Which are your top 10 competitors? most important
What are they doing?

Base on my experience and looking some of your competitors the best solution is to use Price Ranges

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3 - Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?

There is no absolute answer to your question, because all depends on how your users make their research
So you need to make your own research, Moz and Ahrefs have the best keywords management tools in my opinion
with Moz Pro, you can create some keyword list and see the metrics

Go to your Moz account > Keyword Explorer > Create or upload new list

these are the question that you need to answer

Which keywords use your audience/users?
What is the volume of searches using New York, NY?
What is the volume of searches using Manhattan, NY?
What is difficulty level for those keywords?

When you answer those question you will have the answer that you are looking for

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4 - Talking about your branding
In my opinion, you need to forget your brand and focus on your target audience
Google does not need your brand keyword in title to know who or your company are

you can use Shemas on your site with all your brand information

Schemas for Brands
http://schema.org/Brand

Schemas for RealEstate Agent
http://schema.org/RealEstateAgent

Here is shema generator for Real Estate Agency to make your life easier
http://microdatagenerator.com/realEstateAgency.html

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Sources

Optimizing SEO for E-commerce Product Listing Pages
7 Critical SEO Errors of E-commerce Websites
9 Actionable Real Estate SEO Hacks for Real Estate Agents Looking To Get More Leads
Real Estate SEO for Beginners – Everything You Need To Start Today

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The Google Sitemap protocol enables you to provide details about your pages to search engines, sitemaps provide additional information about site pages beyond just the URLs. Typically, it is best practice to submit XML sitemaps for pages, images and videos. In the case of a CDN there are additional steps needed to implement XML sitemap submission.

The Google Sitemap protocol enables you to provide details about your pages to search engines, sitemaps provide additional information about site pages beyond just the URLs. Typically, it is best practice to submit XML sitemaps for pages, images and videos. In the case of a CDN there are additional steps needed to implement XML sitemap submission.

To submit Sitemaps for multiple hosts from a single host, you need to “prove” ownership of the host(s) for which URLs are being submitted in a Sitemap.

Example: To submit Sitemaps for 3 hosts:

www.host1.com with Sitemap file sitemap-host1.xml
www.host2.com with Sitemap file sitemap-host2.xml
www.host3.com with Sitemap file sitemap-host3.xml

Moreover, you want to place all three Sitemaps on a single host: www.sitemaphost.com. So the Sitemap URLs will be:

http://www.sitemaphost.com/sitemap-host1.xml
http://www.sitemaphost.com/sitemap-host2.xml
http://www.sitemaphost.com/sitemap-host3.xml

By default, this will result in a “cross submission” error since you are trying to submit URLs for www.host1.com through a Sitemap that is hosted on www.sitemaphost.com (and same for the other two hosts). One way to avoid the error is to prove that you own (i.e. have the authority to modify files) www.host1.com. You can do this by modifying the robots.txt file on www.host1.com to point to the Sitemap on www.sitemaphost.com.

In this example, the robots.txt file at http://www.host1.com/robots.txt would contain the line “Sitemap: http://www.sitemaphost.com/sitemap-host1.xml”.

By modifying the robots.txt file on www.host1.com and having it point to the Sitemap on www.sitemaphost.com, you have implicitly proven that you own www.host1.com. In other words, whoever controls the robots.txt file on www.host1.com trusts the Sitemap at http://www.sitemaphost.com/sitemap-host1.xml to contain URLs for www.host1.com. The same process can be repeated for the other two hosts. Finally, submit the Sitemaps from www.sitemaphost.com. The same process can/should be repeated for the other two hosts.

CONCLUSION

Above configuration is okay? Yes It will work, just remember to set it up properly in Search Console

I believe that Google will only follow that below to the TLD domain so subdomains such as cdn.yourdomain.com will work but a completely different domain will not. Most if not all CDN networks you can setup your domain to work in harmony with one another and should be no reason to use another domain.

• PLP > Product Listing Pages
• Search Console > Is the name for the old Webmaster Tools if you don't have it is a good idea to install it on your website

How do I decide where to create the internal links between the pages?
First, you need to determinate your site structure to decide how to make your internal links

Google Search Console

You are Welcome, thanks for your comments

what tool or strategy did you use to determine link prospects?

Buzzstream is really good tool, for me is a really good CRM to keep in order my
links prospect but is not even close to being a decent "links prospect generator"

Please don't get me wrong Buzzstream is a nice tool, I use it regularly to organize
my links prospect but I do not generate them with Buzzstream I just use it to follow up them

By Order, these are the better tools for that

• Google
• Bing

Then you have

• Semrush
• Majestic
• Ahrefs

There is no a magic tool at least I don't know one. I use the API for all my tools
(Semrush, Majestic, Ahrefs and so on) to collect data, then organize it and repeat the process
over and over again at the beginning looks like a chaotic process but once you that over and over again start to recognize the patterns.

It is a repetitive, tedious and time-consuming process that's why I created my own script.
And base on my experience the best SEO do the same (Create their own framework)

In fact, this is how Moz was born. Started as SEOmoz agency

The Moz Story

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happy to been useful

The structure of a website or a blog is of great importance for its chances to rank in search engines.

1. A decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your site.
The way your website is structured will give Google important clues about where to nd the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about, and how easily it will nd and index the content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent.

2 A decent structure makes sure you do not compete with your own content.
On your site, you will probably write multiple pages about similar topics.If we would write eight different articles about bike tours, Google would not know which of the articles or page is the most important one. If you do not solve this by creating a clear site structure, you will be competing with our own articles for a high ranking in Google. Solving this problem requires a good internal linking structure and/or taxonomy structure, resulting in higher rankings. This means that you should pick one article (the flagship article/page/product ) for every major keyword you want to be found for and link to that article from all of your other content about the same keyword.

How this apply to your website ?
So you need to create a site structure who reflects that hierarchy. You mentioned that your main products/service is "bike tours Europe".Let's take an example

1. bike tours Europe

1.1 bike tours France
1.2 bike tours Spain
1.3  bike tours Italy

So probably in your case your case your homepage is optimized for "bike tours in France"
there are many links pointing to your site with that anchor text (Make a backlink analysis)
if Google is putting your homepage in the first place you need figure out why?

Once you do that you need to define your structure in order to make it easy for Google to understand your website.

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Scheme are a great way to help Google to understand your content, there is no limit of how many information you provide to Google.

The snippets will help you not only with crawler but also with your CTR a good example for that are rating snippet, so when a user see your article the plugin allows to the users to rate your post, and the rating will be visible for users and crawlers

Example. you have a tutorial in your post about SEO, when someone have been looking for a tutorial like your post, before to enter your website google will show to that user the rating of other users for that post. This will impact your CTR and if there are to many people clicking for the specific query probably Google will rank your post in better position even when other post has a better Pagerank or Authority.

Basically for Google your post meet the needs of the users so it deserve a better place

This just an explanation about the utility of schemas in an ideal world, so it will not rank your site but might help.

I always install this plugins on my wordpress websites
WP-PostRatings > This is mandatory
All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets > General purpose

From my point of view, there's no a big difference between work on a design tool or directly in the browser.

My opinion that is not an efficient way of work, just think about it.

When you design a website you follow these basic steps

Brainstorm and research you collect all your ideas in a is a single place, change this header, put this form use this layout and so on.

If you do that and made a mistake there is no a big deal with a few clicks you fix the error, you make as many mistakes as you want and try different, ideas, layouts, compositions, banners and so on and then when you have a final version, you just simple code and upload nowadays with so many builders out there you don't need its a very simple process.

But what happens when you realizing that this form, or layout, is not really what you want if you are coding manually it will take 4 times more time if you compare it with fix the error on photoshop.

There is two main type of text content on schemas

An article, such as a news article or piece of investigative report. Newspapers and magazines have articles of many different types and this is intended to cover them all.

blogPost A posting that is part of this blog.

So in theory, an article is like an acedemic document and a blog post is like an informal document, in the real world there's no big difference at least from seo perspective of blog running of wordpress.

The hierarchy of your headers depends on the hierarchy of your content, so google use that hierarchy to understand the relevance of your content, so please don't change and destroy your content and your opportunities

Heading — HTML has six different heading tags — h1, h2, and so on. The h1 is considered the most important tag, and the h6 is the least important. The tags are often formatted from large (or most important) to smallest (or least important).

Let's take an example, we are going to create an article about
so let's take "buy a MacBook Pro" as the main keyword and here is your structure

Note: this just an example base on my experience

<---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

H1-All you need to know before to buy a MacBook Pro - Main Keyword Goes Here
Then you add a description or Introduction Paragraph with the main keyword

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation

H2-the best places to buy a Mac Book Pro (Sub-topic secondary keyword or secondary topic) in this case the main topic is "buy a MacBook Pro" and the second topic is "where to buy it online" as you can see there is a direct relation between your H1-tag and your H2-tag

Paragraph related to this subtopic (Here some introductory paragraph)

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation

And then here comes a list of possibles website where you can buy a Mac Book Pro (Again, inside your h2 you put a list of h3-tags that are directly related to the h2)

• H3- Official Website (Paragraph related to this content)
• H3- Amazon Website (Paragraph related to this content)
• H3- Ebay Website (Paragraph related to this content)
• H3- Apple Local Store(Paragraph related to this content)

<---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

With this example, you can see that every header follow a structure. So if you have a problem with your font-size or font-weight, you just need to add some custom CSS, in fact, is pretty easy for any developer with a few experience ( Example CSS Headings )

_What I'm trying to say with this is, first _you _create a structure for your article this include headers, content, lists, call to actions, images and forms, then try to make a layout (nothing complex) and  in this layout you can play with font-size, line-height or font-weight the easiest way to do that is using the _span- tag, with WordPress is easy to do it.

Why text structure is important for SEO - Yoast Article * How to use headings on your site - Yoast Article* How Links in Headers, Footers, Content, and Navigation Can Impact SEO - Whiteboard Friday

OK the firts place that you need to check is blocked resources report, so basically you need to know if there is a problem with your robot.txt

Googlebot needs access to many resources on your page in order to render and index the page optimally. For example, JavaScript, CSS, and image files should be available to Googlebot so that it can see pages like an average user.

If a site's robots.txt file disallows crawling these resources, it can affect how well Google renders and indexes the page, which can affect the page's ranking in Google search.

OPEN THE BLOCKED RESOURCES REPORT

How to read the report
This report shows resources used by your site that are blocked to Googlebot. Not all resources are shown, only resources that we think might be under your control.

• The report landing page shows a list of hosts that provide resources on your site that are blocked by robots.txt rules. Some resources will be hosted on on your own site, and some will be hosted on other sites.
• Click on any host in the table to see a list of blocked resources from that host, with a count of pages on your site affected by each blocked resource.
• Click on any blocked resource in the table for a list of your pages that load the resource.
• Click on any page in the table hosting a blocked resource for instructions on how to unblock that resource, or else follow the instructions below under How to unblock your resources.

You can navigate backward up this path by clicking the appropriate link in the "breadcrumb path" that appears at the top of the page as you click deeper: Blocked resources > Blocking host > Blocked resource name.

Moz Pro Local if you are worried about duplicate listing for your business I think is the best solution. This is just my opinion there are other useful tools but I don't have experience working with them.

Maybe you should give it a try

• Whitespark Local Citation Finder
• SEOProfiler
• SEOPressor

Hi seoman10 answering your question

They are important, but I think they are not even in the TOP 20 of the priorities when you rank a site, for me the most iportant factor are

1. Content
2. Backlinks
3. Mobile-First User Experience
4. Other Technical Factors

To support my point of view you can check the 200 ranking factors from backlinko and Image Optimization is in the 24 position.

"24. Image Optimization: Images on-page send search engines important relevancy signals through their file name, alt text, title, description and caption."

Optimize the ALT tags can give you a better score but will not give thousands of visitors. In the other hand a good link mixed with agreat content can give you that traffic.

When you are making an onpage optimization is really good idea to put your main keywords or releated keywords in the images and those ALT tags must be related to the topic of your article but is very usual that you will have a lot of images without ALT tag, such as icons, ads, backgrounds and Im sure that they will not hurt your SEO

Sources
Search Engine Journal
Backlinko

Yes, you can also you can add no index tags.

Let's separate your case in parts so is much easier to face the problem.

From my point of view, you did the right choice. But as any choice need some level of preparation.
(This a personal opinion based on my experience and knowledge, probably you know some or all of the tools and process I will mention, I prefer to mention instead of assuming that you know it)

1-Subdomains are Essentially a Different Website

When you use the blog.website.com subdomain solution, you are essentially setting up an entirely different website. And while it is true that Google will crawl and index both of them, you are limiting the full potential of your online marketing efforts.

When you separate your website and blog, it creates two separate entities that need your attention. And now, with things like Time On Site and Bounce rate contributing to your website rankings, you can’t let users spend their time on pages that Google sees as a different domain.

When your blog and website are properly integrated, on the other hand, Google will see that the traffic to your website as a whole continues to go up. This, to Google, translates as a website that has some obvious authority and deserves higher rankings.

As long as you keep your blog in a subdirectory or subfolder, it will keep the Google bots coming to your main website to recrawl and index your site over and over.

2- SEO Considerations For Any Website Migration

In my case to ensure that any website migration goes smoothly and leads to improved business, I follow these essential recommendations. In order to improve the user experience of your website, make sure you’re putting all of that valuable data to use by reviewing:

• Top-viewed website content – Make sure you aren’t cutting content your audience loves.
• Least-viewed website content – Even the best sites have some junk, take this opportunity to drop it or improve it.
• Click maps – Looking at where people are clicking (or trying to click) can help to design an intuitive and frustration free navigation interface.
• Paths to conversion – Regardless of what your website goals are (i.e. build subscribers, generate leads), understanding the paths which your visitors are taking to key conversion points can help to optimize these paths to make it easier and more enticing for visitors to convert into customers.

Web analytics tools that you need to check:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Crazy Egg

Map Url Redirects

If your website has been around for any amount of time, there’s a good chance that you’ve built up search equity in the form of links and social shares. In addition to tight keyword optimization, these are the primary factors that help to increase the visibility of your content in search engines and since they are tied to the URLs on your site, a migration in domain or URL structure can snuff out the valuable search equity you’ve spent time and effort building

To avoid starting from SEO square one with your new website, it’s important to strategically implement 301 redirects from your old page URLs to the new ones, as this will effectively tell search engines where your new site pages are and that they are replacements for the old versions. In addition, it will ensure that people and bots who follow links to your old URLs will end up in the right place rather than an error page.

In order to map redirects effectively, start by documenting for all your existing pages:

• URL
• Page topic
• Target keyword
• Organic search traffic (I recommend looking at a minimum 6-month)
• Links to page
• keyword rank

Also document for your planned new site pages:

• URL
• Page topic
• Target keyword

Once you have these two lists compiled, the next step is to map each page on your current site to it’s planned new location on your soon-to-be-launched site. Redirect mapping isn’t rocket science, but it does take some thought (when done correctly). Fortunately, the previous exercise should give you all the information you need.

Of primary concern is topic relevance, in particular for highly trafficked and linked-to pages. When planning redirects, always consider what the experience of a visitor would be if they ended up on the redirect page rather than the original. Would it serve their needs as well or better than the old page? Would it feel confusing? Ideally, the new page should be such a seamless transition that people don’t even notice the switch.

Redirect mapping tools:

• OpenSiteExplorer – Links and social shares
• Google Analytics – Traffic
• SEMRush – Keyword rankings
• Microsoft Excel

Choose Ideal Timing
Even the best planned and executed website migrations come with some downtime and a temporary decrease in traffic (approx. 30%) and search rankings. It’s a price worth paying, as a new and improved website can drive significant improvements in business over an outdated and clunky site. However, it’s important to time the transition for when it’s likely to have the least amount of negative impact on your business.

The best time of year to implement a website migration is when business is likely to be the slowest. Companies vary in the degree of seasonality they experience, but most have a ‘slow season’. You probably already know when this is, but if not, take a look at your historic yearly web traffic or revenue patterns to determine when your slow season typically occurs.

As with time of year, it also makes sense to migrate your site on a slow day of the week during off hours. For many B2B focused websites, this is late on Friday or Saturday, but make sure to make the decision based on your own analytics, as every site and audience is different.

Analytics
As mentioned earlier, a temporary decrease of approximately 30% in website search traffic and visibility can be expected in the period immediately following a migration, but it’s very important to monitor closely to make sure it is indeed temporary and that things are headed in the right direction.

Make sure to keep a close eye on:

• Organic search traffic
• Visit bounce rate
• Conversion rates
• Keyword rankings

Crawl Errors
Generally, crawl errors like broken links, 404 not found pages or duplicate content will be at their lowest levels on a brand new site, but it’s still important to check and fix any errors, especially as this can be an indicator of a mistake during the migration.

There are many good automated crawl tools available, but make sure you use one that can find:

• Broken links and 400 error pages
• 500 error pages
• Duplicate content
• Inaccessible content

In Summary

A website migration may seem like a lot of work, and it most certainly is (when done correctly). But the potential payoffs in an improved experience for your site visitors and increased business for you are more than worth the investment.

If you want to rank just with content and DA 28, well you need to focus on other SEO aspects

• Almost perfect site structure (recommended tool in my opinion Dynomapper)
• Almost perfect schemas (focus on schemas supported by Google)
• Almost perfect internal links (Yoast premium - very easy to create internal links)
• Almost perfect site performance (focus on AMP and Good Hosting)

Need to make an outstanding content audit to find those content gap, where you can rank, there is no sense trying to rank for a keyword difficulty is 80, does not make sense.

This is just my opinion based on my experience