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You can really only optimize 1 page for 1 key phrase. Putting the brand in the phrase for every page is a mistake, IMO. Maybe optimize the home page for the brand name phrase, and each product page for just the product name, like this:

Home page: optimized for "BrandName"

product 1 page: optimized for "product name 1"

product 2 page: optimized for "product name 2"

If the brand is in the url that leads to the product page (ie www.brandname.com/product-name-1) then you will get some brand association for each product.

Trying to optimize product page 1 for "brandname product name 1" is too much use of brandname (IMHO).

The best strategy is to pick one succinct, unique phrase for each page and then optimize that page for just that phrase.

Working on reducing page load time, since that is one of the ranking factors that Google uses. I've been using Page Speed FireFox plugin (requires FireBug), which is free. Pretty happy with it but wondering if others have pointers to good tools for this task.

Thanks...

1. Free traffic. Company on a shoestring that can't afford to buy traffic with PPC (my particular keywords are $5 or more per click). Have lots of time, though. So can learn and implement correct and good SEO.

2. Almost immediate gratification of seeing higher rankings in SERPs followed by higher number of visitors/day. Direct correlation between my efforts and results.

3. Satisfaction from beating the other players (people competing to rank for the same phrases I'm targeting). It's almost game like, and Google keeps score with rankings.

I agree that 'with' and 'and' are unnecessary.I would delete the '-' and '/' and just use a string of words:

DeWalt Dual Comfort Safety Glasses Black Frame Clear Anti Fog Lens

From an SEO point of view you need to ask yourself what phrases users who are looking for that product would search for. The category (safety glasses)? the brand (DeWalt)? I doubt they would search for marketing words like "Dual Comfort" or things that seem secondary "clear".

I would play with the Google Keyword tool and see if there are any surprising matches. Actually, I just did and found that "safety glasses" is by far the most common term from the above set. I would be tempted to put the category first, followed by the brand, and then maybe some secondary words.

Safety Glasses DeWalt Black Frame Clear Anti Fog Lens

While it used to be possible to keyword stuff content to game the search engines, that is less true today. I'm a believer in LSI (latent semantic indexing) whereby the SEs understand the meaning of a page even if they keyword isn't exactly present. SEs today know about synonyms and can extract meaning from text, allowing for creative and interesting use of language. Without tedious keyword repetition the content you create will be of more interest and read better to a search user –increasing  the user experience.

I take the viewpoint that you should write for humans first, and then review the content to make sure the keyword is present at least a little bit. I would not go so far as to say you should have 1 occurrence of the keyword per 150 words, or any other hard and fast density metric. But that's just me.

Also, I think the external factors (links with appropriate anchor text, and variations of that anchor text) are more important than on-page factors like keyword density. Just my opinion, although I do rank well for many phrases and I ignore keyword density (other than making sure the keyword is present in some minimal fashion on the page that is optimized for it).

Out of curiosity (and because I don't know), what is the advantage for a malicious spider to spoof the User-Agent string? I mean, I understand this hides its identity, but why does a spider need to hide its identity? And what can a malicious spider do that a browsing human can't do? I haven't taken any action to prevent robots from anything on my site. Should I?

re-adjust the link factor to keep it from getting a bump?

Well, in a weighting if one thing goes down then the others all go up a bit so that the sum of the weights is the same before and after. I think Matt is saying they are going to turn down the keyword-in-domain-name weight, which will have the effect of making every other factor go up a little bit. I think you can probably ignore all of this; I don't think it's actionable info.

Since it's a weighting of many factors, everything else (the non-keyword-domain factors) should go up in relative proportion. I don't think they will explicitly turn up some other factor in order to counter the turning down of one factor.

No, nav and footer links do not suck juice that you could otherwise redirect somewhere else via 'nofollow'.

Yes, juice is split evenly between all outgoing links on a page. So if you reduce the number of links (by deleting them, not just making them 'nofollow') then you can increase the juice passed to the remaining links on the page. This is why it's rarely a good idea to have a page with tons of links on it; each one is going to only pass a little bit of juice.

Having said that, nav and footer links can be very helpful for the humans who visit your site, so you don't want to strip them all away and make your site hard to use. But If you have dozens of barely-useful links jammed into your footer then you should probably nuke those.

Design your site for humans. And trust that Google will do something reasonable with the link juice flowing around your site.

It used to be possible to use nofollow to redirect more juice to where you wanted it. But Google changed the algo so now that's not the case. See Rand's excellent pieces on it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algorithm-handles-nofollow and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow

I've heard people ask that question many times. And the answer has always been (from many people) "no. it's a non-issue". So I don't think you have to worry about it. Here is one thread on the subject (there are others if you Google for it): http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/8461.htm

It's a single site. It's not a weather app; I was using weather as an example. I have another (non-weather) data set that has similar characteristics -- 6 or 8 unique data points per item (a couple of which are dynamic and change as time passes). And several thousand of these items. I want to display them via template.

I guess I'll try it and see if Webmaster tools complains about dup content. Thanks for the ideas, guys...

I'm curious where the line is drawn for "duplicate content" by the search engines. Obviously the same article, or even the same article with minor edits, can and should be detected as duplicate.

I have a use case where there is a database of similar, but not duplicate, content that changes as time passes. I want to serve this content up via html template but don't want the 1000 pages to be considered duplicates of each other.

Example: Imagine local weather. You could create a template for city name, longitude, latitude, altitude, and current weather conditions. The values for all fields would be different for each of the 1000 database entries (cities) and one of the "current weather conditions" would change frequently (hourly, let's say).

Now, if I have a nice heirarchical index pages (first one maybe points to 50 state sub-pages, and each state page points to 20 city pages) that point to the 1000 city-specific pages, would the city-specific pages be considered 'duplicate' since they are based on the same HTML template but all have different values in key areas? Does the answer change based on the % of the template (or visible text) that changes for each city?

My goal is to get these 1000 subpages as part of my site, have them indexable, and have them each flow a little bit of link juice to my home page.

Best practices? What should I be careful of?

Thanks!

Perhaps issue a press release announcing the interview (and/or product endorsement by the legend) and that links back to the interview? PRweb.com or PitchEngine.com are well tuned for SEO releases.

Hope you don't mine me asking a PPC question on an SEO forum but...

Has anyone tried BoostCTR.com yet? They just got funding. Crowdsourced CTR improvement for AdWords. Looks like a clever idea (for those of us who are not AdWords copywriting experts). Opinions or experiences? (I am not affiliated, just found out about it...)

I can't imagine that the traffic numbers include intermediate Instant searches before the user has hit 'return'. Otherwise all the shortest key phrase would always have the highest number of searches (the sum of every other search where it is the prefix).

I don't know how reliable the traffic estimate is, but it seems odd that it's showing zero for a phrase that gets 1M searches. I just tried my own brand and I do show non-zero results that seem low but are certainly not zero.

Jane, a question: My site is served up 100% https. I have a 301 redirect on every http request that redirects the user to the https version. Do I still need to use the canonical tag anywhere? For example, if the user enters 'http://www.domain.com' then they are 301'd to 'https://www.domain.com' and there is no canonical tag on that page. Likewise, external links sometimes point to my site using an http version of the url and sometimes with the https version of the url. Do I need a tag somewhere to merge this link juice or will 301 redirects take care of it?

Thanks!

I have found it hard to evaluate links on a weekly basis, too. All tools give different results. You need to pick 1 tool, create a spreadsheet, and then track links with that same tool week to week. At least you should know on a relative basis if you're improving or not, even if you're not getting the exact true link count.

The Link Analysis tab of SEOmoz shows some stats (external followed links, followed links root domains, unique C-blocks) that are useful to track over time, but they only update about once a month (note to SEOmoz: weekly would be great)

The one thing you CAN track week to week is your SERP rankings, on the Rankings tab. You can track number of phrases you have in the top 3, as well as number of phrases on page 1. If your external link building is progressing then those numbers should go up week over week.

And those numbers drive your organic search visits per week, which you can view on the Traffic tab, or in Google Analytics directly.

As far as follow/no-follow goes, remember that you want a 'normal' anchor text distribution and usually a normal anchor text profile will include some no-follows. So keep some no-follows in there...

I know your pain. Been there. My experience was not good. Tried 2 of them. Even though they promised relevant, gramatically correct English postings, they did not deliver. I believe they were acting as middle-men to low-cost labor offshore who did not write solid English nor know anything about the niche my product was in. Plus, they did some questionable things with links that if done on large scale would probably get my site banned. Fortunately I was able to stop it before it got out of control.

The only way I would use an outsourced service again is to pre-approve every post/article in advance (at least for the first 50 or until I got very comfortable with their work). And that's tedious enough (and time consuming enough) that I'm not sure what value they're adding at that point. I could hire my own low-cost labor and then do the same approval process and then post them (cutting out the middle man).

It's really hard when site owners give testimonials like "my SEO firm is great" because the site owners are often unaware that their outsourced SEO firm is using black/grey hat tactics (eg JC Penny). If you're going to hire someone and pay them hundreds/month then take a long time to interview them. Ask for customer references. Ask for data on improvements they've made for their customers (what were the rankings before they started, and how did they improve over the months?). They should have multiple examples of monthly improvement for multiple clients, and then explain to you which white-hat techniques they used to achieve those results. If they refuse to share client references (where you can get on the phone and speak to some of their clients) or data then move along and look elsewhere; there are a million scamsters out there...

There used to be a traffic column on the Rankings page. Now I don't see it.

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