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Hi All, I finally got to the bottom of the problem and it is that they have not applied canonicalization across the site, only to certain pages which is not my understanding when they implemented the update a few weeks back. So they are preparing a hot fix as part of a service pack to our site which will rectify this issue and apply canonicalization to all pages that contain query strings. This should clear that problem up once and for all. Thank you both for your input, a great help.

Hi Rebekah, Really appreciate your feedback. You are correct in that we are looking to rank for those 3 keywords. I do agree that Towels is too generic, so I'll look at alternative keywords to replace this one. I think the main issue with towels being mentioned so often is that the majority of these instances are links and to change them will re-write the URL's which then means a lot of additional work. We would have to look at this in more depth before carrying it out. I'll have a little play around to see what can be easily achieved and if possible rework the menus to reduce the instances.

Remember some points. Allow H1 one time in the article. Allow H2 two time in the article. Allow H3 three time in the article. Allow strong tag 3 time in the article. Note use strong tag not bold. Allow underline tag 3 time in the article. Allow italic tag 3 time in the article. Keyword Density 1% in the article. Always remember that content is king. simply focus on delivering high quality content.

Hi Greg, Thanks for your reply. So in a nutshell we just need to get back links updated use the new URL's in order to pull back PA we had previously? Regards Craig

Hi Alice, Many thanks for your response, very helpful indeed. Thanks Again. Craig

Hi Greg, That makes perfect sense and thank you. I have also been looking around at how and what our competitors are doing in terms of how the list the product, keywords they use etc so we can make sure we cover those as best as possible. Everyone does things slightly different so time to have a play and see what works best i think Thanks Again. Craig

Matt Cutts has gone on record as saying they don't use the meta keywords tag. Check out the video. watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU

So I am best of finding some phrases that are more targetd and going to pull in traffic with a higher conversion rate than wasting time on terms that as you say are going to near on impossible to rank for. Having said that top spot in the UK only has a DA of 43. I think i'll focus on the terms that are more targeted rather than spending time optimising for keywords that are going to be tough to rank well for. We do have a big update to teh site that going to give us functionality and something over the competition that will allow us to go after wholesale orders online which opens a massive door across many markets.

In google webmaster tools the sitemaps report 14 urls in our category listings not indexed. However, I have had trouble identifying which urls it is

yes you can definitely do that. the only problem is that "luxury towels uk" is not a real phrase like "web conferencing services" which fits into a sentence and has good search volume. "web conferencing" and "conferencing services" "luxury towels" might be but "towels uk" is probably pretty weak So basically you would need to incude instances of the phrase in your content "Shop our store for a wide variety of luxury towels uk and see our quality" it doesn't read proper. I would rethink the keywords. Also, yes include the singular as well as the plural and variations and synonyms. Put similar words on the page that Google knows are related to towels such as bath, beach, microfiber, cotton etc and you can rank for long tail searches as well.