Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Guy, there are two aspects of SEO to consider. One could save you a little more than the other, however neither should cost the earth.

In terms of on site optimisation, many factors can be edited by the webmaster (in small businesses, typically the owner). A lot of suggestions can be found through the PRO campaign management tool, however there are plenty of suggestions on the Beginners guide to SEO http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

The main factors you should focus on, for on-site optimisation are;

• title tags
• h1 tags
• keyword usage on site
• keyword match in url
• image alt text
• internal linking keywords

In terms of off site optimisation, there should be a small budget set aside. This should not necessarily be spent on paid links, as these will over time be picked up by Google, and your websites performance will drop. However, focusing on generating good, interactive and/or graphical content (for example, see ours: http://www.evoenergy.co.uk/uk-energy-guide/) is the way forward, as it attracts a lot of links from design-related blogs and galleries.

Perhaps you could let us know what niche you are in, and we could all suggest a few ideas for you?

This is a bad idea, the practice has been around for a while and Google is wise to it. OSE and Google don't use the same indexes, and OSE can be up to 1 month out of date at any time.

The links or 301's will not count in Google's eyes, so I wouldn't recommend it at all.

Perfect, that's exactly what I was after!

Does anyone know how often OSE index is updated?

We've relaunched our website recently, and I'd really like to see how our redirects, PR efforts and new internal linking structure is working out for us.

I think I have previously seen a schedule somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment.

Any help is appreciated!

I'd be wary of that community page, however it's extremely unlikely that one page will have a negative impact across the whole website, so it's not a high priority

As mentioned below, reducing the footer on internal pages might be an option?

36 hours isn't enough time to know really.

Because Google realized the site was down, it will probably wait a little while longer than usual until it crawls it fully again, however you should expect to see some real progress by the end of the weekend/beginning of next week.

Internally linking to the homepage is best practice, if anything.

Penguin related problems arise where there are keyword stuffing issues, or anything else that could be seen as webspam.

As well as looking at your internal link profile, it might also be a good idea to check out your use of keywords on the /main money' keyword!

Depending on the rewrite rules of your new CMS, and the redirects put in place, there may be issues with the techniques used.

You can 301 redirect the non trailing slash versions too, just to be sure!

Just use http:// at the start of your links!

If you only use www., then the link will be appended to the end of the current page URI

Hope this helps

Hi James,

There are two ways to do this;

1. In Webmaster tools, there is a link under the Optimization menu to remove a URL,

2. Or if you'rve got access to your robots.txt file, just add the following to the bottom:

Disallow: /airport-cab/?show=gallery

This will remove it from the Google index next time the file is crawled.

If you are on Wordpress, and do not currently have an SEO plugin, try Yoast's, and use the Edit Files sub-menu to edit your robots file there.

John,

41 links for a footer area, whilst it is a large number, isn't too many really. You should be careful on the total number of links on the page however. I believe you should try to cap it at 100, but I think I've read somewhere 200+ is classed excessive

Hope this helps!

Mihai,

Panda is looking for thin sites, so as long as you have a genuine website then there should be no reason your site can't do well in time.

The on page reports are still very useful in highlighting factors for consideration. Whether you take them literally or not is up to you.

Using keywords in H1/Title tags etc is still fairly common practice if you're chasing that key term.

Hello Hardik,

First of all, SEO is not an instant win. There are many things you can do to get a head start, however the off page factors, such as inlinks will take time to build.

I'd recommend reading the SEO Beginners Guide http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo before proceeding too much further.

Exact domain match names will perform better in some cases, currently, however you should focus on building a good brand name, which doesn't have to be relevant. This is much better for future customers, and the potential future for SEO.

Sign up to a few forums, answer some helpful questions, write some reviews, and some blog posts in the hope of getting some links.

In the short term, concentrate on on page factors, such as title tags, keyword density in the copy, image alt tags, and the internal linking structure.

I hope this helps!

Hi Edward, Welcome to SEOMoz!

There may be many reasons why the website in question is ranking higher than yours.

You'll need to factor in a couple of factors, regarding both your site and the competitiors.

How old is your domain? Theirs is almost 12 months old, which if I believe correctly, is long enough to avoid any 'youth website' penalisation. If yours is new then Google may not have crawled it properly yet.

Aside from this, OSE and Google do not share databases, therefore some pages that Google is aware of, OSE may not be aware of. Mozbot would need to follow links to the competitiors site for it to be added to the index (what I believe).

As a result of this, you will see 0 on the mozbar when infact there are some links pointing to it. In fact there are some (rather dodgy) links pointing to ambienmed:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=link%3Aambienmed.com&sugexp=chrome,mod=2&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

On page content can also play a part in ranking factors. Ambienmed has a wealth of content on the home page which is very keyword heavy.

Also, as mentioned previously, your competitiors are fortunate enough to have an exact match domain name.

I hope some/all of this helps!

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Yeah thinking about it that would be great,so they land on a long URL with a few php vars in, then these are $_POSTed to the new form.... The page is then 301'ed, and then the content is displayed?

Any ideas on how to go about something like that? I'll have a look around our friend Google in the mean time!

Does using referral programs, such as by using index.php?referral_id=0001 pass any link juice back to the page index.php?

I'm creating a web app that ideally I'd like people to be able to link to and bookmark - so that they can pull up their own settings.

Is there any way that I can solve both of these at once? The use of PHP GET and the use of SEO.

I'd really like to get a solution as I'm developing my new website!

Any help would be appreciated!

I've read a lot about this over the web, but essentially Thomas below has summed it up. It's good to have these high profile cases in the SEO world as it reminds us all why we link build manually ad by the book!!

Yeah, you might even want to show mobile users some different content for example

How do you mean? As it DMOZ / Google directory?