Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sorry, forgot to add... On each Post or Page, at the bottom of the editing page, you will see the All In One SEO section where you can enter in your desired Title Tag, Meta Description for real-time previews as how it would show in Google. It is a really nice feature they added to their latest version. You can also add in your Meta Keywords here too.

Again, hope this was helpful and I wish you all the success in using the plugin! - Patrick

Richard,

We use AIOSEO and love it! It is simple to use and their latest version is really great. We follow a pretty standard AIOSEO setup for smaller business websites. Check out these steps and hope this is a good answer for your needs:

Settings Page Recommendations

1. General Settings box > Check the box for Canonical URLs
2. General Settings box >Disable the "Use Original Title"
3. Home Page Settings box > Enter in your custom Home page Title Tag (up to 70 characters max with spaces)
4. Home Page Settings box >Enter in your custom Home page Meta Description (up to 160 characters max with spaces)
5. Home Page Settings box >Enter in your custom Home page Meta Keywords (make them relevant to the content on your Home page)
6. Keywords Settings box >leave all defaults
7. Title Settings box > This is very important to remove duplicate content > from the "Page Title Format" field to the "Description Format" fields remove the "| %blog_title%" text only at the end. So "%page_title% | %blog_title%" should only be "%page_title%" and so on
8. Custom Post Types Settings box > leave all defaults
9. Display Settings box > leave all defaults
10. Webmaster Verification box > This is new and great as you can submit the meta data given by the Webmasters Tool account into the fields for instant verification
11. Google Settings box > Enter in your main brand G+ URL
12. Google Settings box > Enter in your Google Analytics ID tracking code
13. Noindex Settings box > Check the boxes for "Categories", "Archives" and "Tags"
14. Advanced Settings box > leave all defaults

Patrick

If you want to be subtle about it, then just display a simple horizontal message at the top of the browser window as Cyto references. It isn't in your face, but it is noticable. Leave a small "X" for people to close the message bar and make the bar itself clickable to link to your new website(s).

If you want to really let everyone know, then create a slider image/graphic and place right smack dab in the middle of the Home page and have it scroll with your other images/graphics. Make the graphic clickable to the new website(s).

In my opinion, I would go with the more subtle approach as the visitors will see the site pushed down a little with the message bar clearly having an X to close and a text blurb about the new site and a CTA to click to visit. Also, this will show on all pages from where the visitor lands.

Patrick

Ben,

You can check a couple things:

1. Have you submitted your XML site map to Google? If not, create one and get it submitted so you tell Google what pages you want indexed.
2. Submit your domain and all pages through Google Webmasters Tool as well (Login > left side bar > Crawl > Fetch as Google
3. Screaming Frog is an awesome software, so yes, if you have it, use it to scan your pages
4. Try and do a simple "site:domainname.com" search in Google to see what is being indexed from your domain

Cross reference it all and you will then have a better understanding. I do believe, your sitemap is crucial in telling Google exactly what pages you do and do not want indexed. They will follow that. You're on the right track and hope my input was helpful! - Patrick

So, there is a setting in the image customization section for "Enhanced" or "Original". For some reason, it's defaulting to Enhanced and when I try to revert back to Original, I get a constant error message "Oops... blah blah blah."

So, in the "Google+ Settings" at the very bottom is a section for Photos. Here it was defaulted to Auto-Enhance my images, so I turned that off and now my logo's are showing normally with the white background as needed.

Thanks, vzPRO for taking the time to get my brain thinking about other options.

vzPRO, thanks for looking into it, however, when we upload our logo with the white background (we've never created our logo on a gray background), Google shows us the cropping tool and the white is turned to gray somehow. Then when we accept, it shows as gray. We've tried PNGs, GIFs, and even transparent PNG files with no background and it still does this. It's frustrating and a true head scratcher.

Can anyone provide some feedback for our G+ page https://plus.google.com/+WhiteboardCreations on why we are having our Cover Photo and Profile Photo displayed with a grey background? We are uploading our logos with white background in JPG format, so it's a real head scratcher. Your advice is much appreciated.

Patrick

djlittman,

We've had a couple clients use Reputation.com for their services. None of them really had any bad reviews, but they had several locations and wanted to make sure they were covered. Internet insurance, essentially. In what we have heard from them is that they aren't directly doing work to your website and if they produce a link back to your website, you have the right and ability to request them NOT to link back to your site if they created a blog article or a biography residing on another domain or external post. What they do is "bury" SERPs by trying to rank a positive review or a biography articles to rank over the negative reviews, thus pushing down or "burying" the review to Page 2.

If you are considering them, get a consultation first, ask lots of questions and even ask for examples to help you understand more clearly how the approach this strategy to help you and more importantly, remain Google friendly. Hope this was helpful. - Patrick

Hey Tyler,

We would follow the same protocol if in your shoes. Remove any instance of the indexed dev subdomain(s), then create your new robot.txts files for each subdomain and disavow any indexed content/links as an extra step. Also, double check and even resubmit your root domain's XML sitemap so Google can reindex your main content/links as a precautionary measure.

PS - We develop on a separate server and domain for any new work for our site or any client sites. Doing this allows us to block Google from everything.

Hope this was helpful! - Patrick

Good questions. First, anything which you want to rank in Google can be found in Google. Take for instance, I sometimes do searches for ebooks of certain topics I want to learn about for example, "how to write an ebook". I'd search "how to write an ebook filetype:pdf" and then I could potentially find direct PDF downloads from URLs and bypass any one looking to collect my email, name, etc. I don't check them all, but some may not have the PDF protected or blocked with a robot.txt file discouraging Google from indexing the page, but some do, yet their PDF can be found through a link, especially in WP sites. So, you raise a question about having your content indexed to aid your SEO efforts, right? If you're going to protect the PDF and want the content indexed then sneaky searchers like myself could find your content, otherwise, put the content on the page and the PDF and let Google index. I'd say majority of the people coming to your page would enter in their info to get the ebook(s).

I would, for the sake of saving your users more clicks and thinking, place the downloadable PDF on the Thank You page. Collect their info and eliminate any further confusion or clicks. "Thank you for taking interest in our ABC ebook. Please click below to download your copy now."

Hope this was a good answer! Cheers - Patrick

Steve,

I second what Dubs states. Option C is your best option as you accomplish a lot with this strategy assuming you are protecting the page with a form submission to gain access. You capture their information, you are protecting your content on the site, provide them the downloadable PDF and could track both submissions and clicks to download in Google Analytics as "Goals".

Patrick

Hi Ruben,

We specialize in WP sites and I'd would be happy to discuss this with you over the phone. Our rates are competitive and fall in the range Ricky states above.

Patrick

Hi Matt,

We were having some issues yesterday with getting logged out while browsing the Q&A and Moz Blog which was really weird. OSE was working normally for us and everything seems normal today. It may be a temp server glitch, but if you continue to have problems, I'd hit up support. My guess is what we experienced with a temporary issue only.

Hope it pans out for you soon though as OSE is awesome! - Patrick

Vince,

We also use Serpbook, which is a great tool. We also leverage the Moz Ranking area in Moz Analytics to track keywords. There are a lot of tools out there and Rank Tracker is something we are looking into. Do you recommend that in your experiences? Would love to know your thoughts on that software overall if you use the whole Suite of their products.

Cheers! - Patrick

Hi JBNorthAM,

In terms of SEO for on-page tagging, you can approach it a number of ways, but we like to take a simple approach on this. Do your keyword research if you wish to target a keyword on those given pages and then get creative. *Remember, to also hit your Meta Description as well for this and make sure that if you do target a keyword in the Title, that it is referenced in the page content itself like H tags, paragraph text, alt image tag, hyperlink to another page or blog article or website, etc...

Not sure what industry you are talking about, but let's take a Web Design company in a City for example. You could try this:

• About Us = About Our City Web Design Firm | Company Name
• Investor Relations (not sure you'd optimize this page, but could be) = Investor Relations Info for Our Web Design Company
• Careers = City Web Design Career Opportunities | Company Name
• News & Events = City Web Design News & Events | Company Name

Again, these are just ideas yet something to consider as there are a number of strategies to rework and make them more interesting for the searchers seeing the Title in the SERPs. Make them attractive, creative, meaningful and it should help get their attention and, ultimately, their click.

Hope this was helpful! - Patrick

Richard and Vadim have some great points. I'd also look into an email marketing campaign to highlight some notes about LinkedIn and profile what and how your company uses LinkedIn to engage with Groups, updates, industry news, etc.

Hope this was helpful to compliment the other ideas.
Patrick

SteveTG,

Unfortunately, many directory sites are tied into a larger umbrella company who has a "network" built to provide "value" for their users. Yext is one of the bigger ones. CitySearch and Local.com is others. When you post to them, they can take your listing and pump the info and content into all of their other sites. Aside from what you are trying to do, it's going to be a tough battle, but not impossible... Just could turn into a lot of research to find where you are listed and then to manually get access to your account for edits or manually contacting the site's admins for edits.

We have used UBL.org before, but again, they take your info and send it out to a bunch of places on your behalf (removes work for you and what you pay for essentially).

Hope this was helpful, even though doing this manually (or hiring someone to do this for you) isn't probably what you'd want to hear. - Patrick

flcity15,

The answer could be as simple as "plano" may be wrapped up into so many other variations like "visit plano" "plano cvb" "plano city" "plano, texas" and so on. So, to Google or any other search engine, the keyword "plano" may not be properly segmented out as what you are specifically targeting. Looking in Open Site Explorer, your anchor text is hitting on "plano" for a link, but you have so many others also. This is good, but could be more effective with better links built to that site for that anchor text.

Also, your Home page tagging isn't really saying "Hey, rank me for Plano!". Your title could have another LSI mention and your meta description is extremely long. Work on getting that down to proper character length hitting you main keyword and some variations.

You already can determine who is ranking for "plano", so do a little research on where they are linking to. What content they are using, how they are tagging the site or the page ranking for the keywords and reverse engineer what they are doing to help your efforts.

Hope this was a good answer! Cheers, Patrick

102drive,

Develop a website (or continue working on your current website) to develop a great user experience through navigation and how content is presented across the Home page and inner pages. Google doesn't necessarily see websites targeting multiple niches in one domain as a bad thing. Actually, they are getting better at making sure all websites put to the web are providing valuable, quality content for the searchers/your visitors. When talking about niche websites and only one domain, you'll need to have a strong strategy of not only high quality content development behind the niche and it's pages in the site, but also how and what links are being built to those pages. Targeting multiple niches on the Home page is going to be very tough because you don't want to risk over-optimizing your Home page or any page for that matter. On page SEO can only take so much and trying to hit many niches which don't compliment each other is going to be almost impossible by shear relevance of the keywords you are going after, the content you have on the site and how and where you can optimize those keywords within the page/source code.

Build out your website like www.domain.com/niche1... then pages off of this and blog categories and articles linking to relevant pages and your off-page SEO linking to the /niche1 main page. www.domain.com/niche2 and so on. This way you can properly optimize each of these niche pages while referencing through from the root domain Home page or navigation and internal linking. It's like a client of ours who has many offices in different cities... we didn't build out a lot of sites for them, rather we are building authority to their main, older domain name like www.client.com/city1, www.client.com/city2 and so on. Then building their service pages with original content and blog articles off those folders for relevance.

Hope this was helpful, but it'll be much easier on pumping good content into 1 site vs 5 or 10 other websites, especially if your domain has some age and a little authority build up in Google's eye. New sites will be tougher to rank, depending on your content, your competition, and your main keywords.

Patrick

All great answers here for you, Iris.

I agree with PixelKicks (I gave them a thumbs up) as we use WP Smush.it and love the plugin! WP Smush.it will help you moving forward to keep all your new images uploaded to the pages/posts to be of optimal size for increased page load times.

We haven't worked with Enable Media Replace plugin yet, but from the looks of it, this plugin should accomplish your goals and we'll be implementing for our sites now too.

Just be sure not to completely delete the original (larger) files until you have replaced them and created your links and even tags if they were tagged for SEO purposes.

Patrick