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Thanks, Ryan.

My entire site is https. I 301 any http request to the https version. That works fine.

I also 301 any non-www to the www version. That works.

I'm not currently doing anything special with the trailing slash (or lack of). I guess I should 301 anything with a trailing slash to the non-slash version, rather than serve up slash and non-slash each as status 200.

Appreciate the guidance...

Thanks for the response. A followup question.... when you say:

"when I enter the same URL with a trailing slash, the same page appears"

What would you expect to happen?

Should I 301 redirect the url with the slash to the url without the slash, or something else?

Thanks.

SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnostics is complaining about a duplicate page error. I'm trying to use a rel=canonical but maybe I'm not doing it right.

This page is the original, definitive version of the content:

https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-newsletter/sent-2011-10-01

This page is an alias that points to it (each month the alias is changed to point to the then current issue):

https://www.borntosell.com/covered-call-newsletter/latest-issue

The alias page above contains this tag (which is also updated each month when a new issue comes out) in the section:

Is that not correct? Is the https (vs http) messing something up?

Thanks!

We have a static page we want to rank for a competitive phrase.

Would it help, or would it make little to no difference, if we added a small dynamic item to the page so that each time the googlebot visited the page it wouldn't be 100% the same as the last time it visited?

The reason to do this would be because of the belief that Google likes pages that update once in a while.

The dynamic portion of the page wouldn't be as simple as a page counter, but it wouldn't be very elaborate either. A tiny portion of the page. Think of something like current temperature or current CPU utilization (it won't be that, but it will be a small updating number that is not incrementing like current time or a page counter).

Would that make any difference at all? (I know there will be responses that I should add real updating data to the page to make it dynamic; let's take that one off the table for right now --trying to see if there's something I can do that is simpler for now). Thanks.

What is the group's opinion on whether or not the <title>tag should have the exact same text as the <h1> tag on the same page? Obviously both should contain the phrase that page is optimized for but is it better to have them be variants of each other, or both the same and maybe equal to the key phrase that page is optimized for? Thanks.</p> <p>Example:</p> <blockquote style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p>title: los angeles blue widgets</p> <p>h1: los angeles blue widgets</p> </blockquote> <p>Or,</p> <blockquote style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p>title: los angeles blue widgets</p> <p>h1: blue widgets in los angeles</p> </blockquote> <p>Where the page is trying to optimize for "los angeles blue widgets"</p></title>

Keri, that link in your post is broken. I see it as:

http://../blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

Nope; didn't try it...

Does anyone know if urls on the 'Websites' part of a LinkedIn public profile create any SEO value (meaning, does page rank flow)? The links looks like this:

<a href="/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Espeechpad%2Ecom%2Fpage%2Fspeech-to-text&urlhash=Xk3F" target="_blank" title="New window will open" name="overviewsite">speech to texta>

Turns out I didn't need the sitemap. I just needed more time. Google crawled and indexed everything as I expected, but it took longer than I expected.

You're right, I probably should block bots from crawling that xml file (yes, it duplicates what is on my blog). On the other hand, it may be a bug in SEOmoz's crawler that it's reporting a warning about a missing meta description tag in a .xml file, too. (so FYI SEOmoz, if you're listening...).

Hi Barry,

Here's the URL

I don't know if .xml files are suppose to have a meta description tag, or if they use just the 'description' tag within the 'channel' block.

The SEOmoz crawl diagnostic tool is complaining that I'm missing a meta description tag from a file that is an RSS xml file. In my <channel>section I do have a <description>tag. Is this a bug in the SEOmoz tool or do I need to add another tag to satisify the warning?</description></channel>

If you're going to pay for it then treat it like a paid ad. Compare CPC (and conversions) for that listing (ad) over time, compared to other paid ads you could buy. If it's a low cost, high-performing ad then maybe it's worth it.

I have had many discussions with people who have paid to be in relevant sections of Yahoo!'s paid directory (for example) and almost all of them told me it's not worth it.

Now, if you have some niche directory with relevant traffic (and a lot of it), and if your competitors are all listed there already then it might be worth it.

But, personally, I'd rather save my moeny and let the organic (free) links/traffic build up over time. Buying link juice via paid links is not a good idea (IMHO). It is a recurring charge and just gets to be too expensive over time. Now, if you are getting profitable conversions from it then that's totally different. I'm just addressing the idea of buying link juice.

Are you talking about a paid link in a niche directory, or a free link? Obviously if it's free (and not spammy) then just do it. It's worth it. If it's paid then I probably wouldn't do it.

Your biggest cost will be time, since you probably don't want to pay cash for any links. To be time efficient, you need to be really organized with a spreadsheet or 3rd party software and, yes, start by eliminating low-ranking pages. Go for the gold first. Work on those PR7 and higher sites. Then PR6, and so on down the line. Do everything that is relevant (and on-theme) that is PR5 or higher. Below that you can work on them as time allows.

Thanks, Roger. Yea, I used the link tool when composing my message but I don't think it likes https. It expects http (my whole site is https and redirects all http requests to the https version). Bug in the link tool for this forum, I think. Now that I know about it I will post http links.

That's a good question about the traffic to the Testimonials page. I just checked Analytics. If I compare the Features page (which has screen shots and describes the product) with the Testimonials page, I see that the Testimonials page has 54% of the traffic that the Features page has. So it's not as popular as Features, but it still gets meaningful traffic (maybe 1 out 2 people check it out).

I agree that putting some testimonials on the Free Trial page is a great idea. Might increase conversions. Thanks.

There is a reason for having 3 buttons on the free trial page. I want people to mentally commit to one of the 3 pricing plans before they take the free trial. The reason is that once you are logged in I have to pay a real-world money charge to the stock exchanges for each person who has access to the data (even in free trial mode). So I'm not really interested in 20,000 looky-loos who have no intention of signing up for a pay service, because those 20,000 people will cost me money to show them a free trial. I'm proactively weeding out the free-or-I-wont-use-it crowd.

Thanks for the link to unbounce. Looks good and I'm going to go study them now.

Appreciate your help,

MikeS

I never pay directories for inclusion, nor do I pay people to do directory submission for me (unless you're just trying to get into 1000 low-value spam directories, it's not worth it). You need to do it yourself so you get the categorization of your site's listing correct (each directory is a little different) and optimize/maximize the characters that each one gives you to write a description of your site (and/or add tags/keywords). It's a high-touch operation for human-moderated directories that are actually valuable.

Guys, this isn't an SEO question per se, although I suppose the robots could latch on to the words in user testimonial. This is an on-site marketing question:

How many user testimonials are appropriate?

We have a page on our site called 'testimonials' where we display nice emails we've received from happy users. Right now we have about 10 of the best ones displayed, and each one is 30 to 200 words long. The users are not famous people; just regular Joes and we list their name as FirstName + LastInitial. You can see them here.

We have another 10-20 testimonials we could add, and we get new ones about once a week. With your marketing hats on, how many is the right number to have? Is there any problem or negative to having 50? or 100? At some point people will stop reading them, I know. And we do put the best ones at the top (they're not sorted by date, they're sorted by how well we like them).

Any best practices regarding user testimonials? Thanks.

Directory submission is a background task and subject to time management constraints and other things you need to get done. I would do all of the relevant non-weak directories first. Then, when you have time, get around to the relevant weak directories. Every do-follow inbound link you get has some value. Especially if it's on a different C-class IP address, or from a trusted source (human moderated directory). I wouldn't obsess about directory submissions, but I would put it on the list of things to do for when you have a few minutes (do a few per day or else you'll get burned out on it if you do them all at once).

As for UK vs non-UK, it may help you to have some .uk directories but regular old .com directories should help, too.

SEOmoz maintains a list of directories here: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

www.ispionage.com shows you what keywords any site ranks for. They give away some for free and then  you have to pay to see the whole list. But you can get some good intel from the free list, too...