Ask Ur SEO Q's 2011
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- nosaj0
You're a good man TrooperBill. I have a page title question. If I was to create a rule to automate Page titles in a CMS would this example be strong or poor - too many uses of "Plumbing"?
Rule:
Toronto Plumber | ABC Plumbing | [Page]Actual Titles
Toronto Plumber | ABC Plumbing | 24 Hour Emergency PlumbingToronto Plumber | ABC Plumbing | About Us
Toronto Plumber | ABC Plumbing | Locations
- My suggestion is to be more specific regarding the actual terms people will be searching for...spot13
- The closer the match the better your results. For example, instead of just 24 Hour Emergency Plumbing add residential, bathroom, etcspot13
- residential, bathroom, etc. And take out the repetitive stuff completely.spot13
- nocomply0
OK got one more...
I know YouTube videos can come up in Google's results, but is there any kind of a penalty for posting duplicate videos on YouTube?
The issue is that my client posted a video several weeks ago, but they now have an updated version with a minor edit that they want to use instead.
But the way YouTube works is that you can't simply "update" a video. You'd have to delete the old one and post the new one at a new URL.
- Also, thank you trooperbill for all your support!nocomply
- Ancillary0
Dear Mr SEO Guy,
The SEO guy at my work is morbidly obese and but manages to date cute Japanese girls. Is he a racist?
- trooperbill0
@hektor911 best thing to try is probably wordpress with a load of plugins
- trooperbill0
@nosaj yes too much plumbing also your titles always start with your main term - simply reverse them for deep pages. the google adwords keyword tool will give you better medium and long tail terms you can match to your content.
tip: use a keyword density tool to see what keywords your content is referring to and tailor your titles around that.
- trooperbill0
@nocomply for youtube they dont have transcribing down just yet so my advice is to make the title more optimised to your keyword and upload it... you can always delete the old version.
- If you delete the old version, you lose all your visitor statistics and you video will loose ground in YouTube searches.spot13
- It's better to keep both but set them in a playlist so that the both videos are visible and make it clear that the new one is newspot13
- Spot13 - That's exactly what I was afraid of. The multi-video playlist sounds like a good idea.nocomply
- trooperbill0
@Ancillary whats his email i could do with some tips on picking up cute birds lol.
- trooperbill0
@reaperbot my advice is to have a mix... different types of link building work differently in differing niches... for the first 3 months its typical to try everything and see what works (just keep your keyword focuses different for each type of link) - guest posting is the way forwards ... ive also heard a lot of good things about media link building (powerpoint/slideshare and stuff like that) but i havent yet tested it.
- trooperbill0
try: paid and unpaid directories, article marketing (spun and unspun), forum participation, blog commenting (non spammy plz), guest posting, online pr, sponsorship, getting links from trade associations, micro site development (you will need to seo/linkbuild to these too to make them effective) and the best/worst technique buying links - look for in article links on NEW content (dont get links in old content theyre iineffective and you cant change the anchors later without adding in more new content to existing pages), sitewides (sparingly), in content home page links (again add new text with your link inside). try to get a 70%/30% home page to deep page link proportion and a 30%/70% brand to keyword anchor text (add keywords to your brand for home page links)
- trooperbill0
Just updated my site. if you want a free SEO audit just fill in your details www.markrushworth.com
- spot130
Here are my comments on your site trooper:
1. Don't put special characters in your page titles as it will reduce the relevance to the search string.
2. Look at your site with CSS turned off (which is close to how crawlers see it). It looks like a list of random articles and has no prominence structure or purpose. I would add an umbrella statement with the site's purpose and goal, even if it's not prominent when CSS is on.
3. Use heading tags H1, H2 H3 to highlight content priority, not just a single heading in H2.
4. Your date display is not legible to search engines. They see it as random numbers instead of a date which is why when you search for "Mark Rushworth May 1" your May 1 posting doesn't come up: http://twe.ly/zwlb
5. You can use deep directory levels (or parameters), and it WILL HELP dramatically, but it all needs to be relevant. For exampe, shop/shirts/men/sweater/ would work, blog/stuff/anything/sweater will not work as it communicates nothing.
6. On your landing page you list the term "SEO" appears 65 times but Search Engine Optimization only once and it is miss-spelled. This gets back to writing proper content and what search queries are you answering with this content?The content is the most critical piece and the inbound links to the content tell Google how important the content is. While there are things you can do to "optimize" a site for specific words or phrases, your best bet is to grow your content base carefully and strategically and work on improving your prominence in your respective industry.
For the most part SEO companies will tell you a lot of bull shit ideas that usually require months of ongoing "work" to revise and rework HTML (because most SEO people don't know programming) and what they actually do is use an inbound link network to artificially boost your page rank for the time period that you pay them to do so.
- thanks for the feedback, im sue ill get around to sorting out things eventuallytrooperbill
- very interesting.mydo
- hektor9110
@trooperbill-The reason I'm asking is becuase my gf who happend to be a photographer is about to finish her website with WP she bought from some of the guys here. I was wondering what tips could you provide, given the type of work she does. I get the adding text is important, but not king. I guess she can talk about her projects individually. I'm sure there is more to it. She wants to appear on searches in Texas, locally as well.
- spot130
hektor911, I'm not strictly speaking an SEO person like Trooper, but here is what I would do in your situation:
1. Define your target audience and find out what they are looking for and define a number of search queries that you want to optimize for.
2. Write content pages that answer the above with very specific details and word variations for the defined queries.
3. Set yourself up with a Google Places listing and get it mapped and ensure you are listed in any local directories that are applicable.
4. Pick a domain that has the keywords in it like TexasPhotography.com and ensure that your page titles are meaningful and that you have web-friendly URL's checked in WP.
5. Ensure you have a Google XML site map.
6. Offer value to your visitors!! People always think, "how can I get people to come to my site" but never, "what can I offer people who come to my site". Content can have value, freebies have value, great images have value, but you MUST have something of value to offer your visitors.
7. Finally, sell your site. SEO is one small part of a marketing campaign and if you focus too much on SEO and not enough on selling you will have marginal results.I built and manage websites that get well over 10,000 visitors a day and the success of these sites has nothing to do with 2 levels of directories, short parameters or % of home page links, etc.
I would love to see some case studies or real data that show, for example, changing your footer nav to be written by js improved traffic or that having 30% deep links on your home page does anything but I have not so far. Trooper, any chance you can share some of your SEO technique sources?
- trooperbill0
@hektor911 The problem you're going to have is that by limiting yourself to a region you're going to come up against Google Places listings and a host of spammy sites all SEOing for that local term. (google places is a bitch because it takes over the above the fold listings and theres no hard and fast way to manipulate the results - my best advice here is to copy the profile of the #2 listing and get lots of reviews) so organic listings for these terms is worthless.
I'd go into the Google Adwords keyword tool and look for some bigger traffic non geographic keywords that have reasonable traffic and lower competition. and formulate the site around those.
I wouldnt buy a keyword rich domain name as yes at the moment its a shortcut to high serps but Matt Cutts has already publically posted that theyre aware this is a problem and theyre looking for a solution. so go with something branded.
as for links, sticl with photography resources and at least links from within the creative industry. the google adwords tool will show you in the let hand menu what industries your terms relate to.
design wise, dont have a splash screen
get around 300-500 words of unique content on each page and if possible make sure that theres in text links to deep pages throughout your site (look how wikipedia does it)
check your site through with the screamingfrog web crawler which will show you any issues with your site.
For your photography subject matter - this is great - you can seo each f those pages for the subject/location etc which might bring in additional custom
- trooperbill0
@spot13 its just a rule of thumb i use for new sites... the serps response will tell you how hard and fast you can go so after a few months you will see if you can ramp up/down any particular technique.
- trooperbill0
dump due to flooding
- silentseven0
What about changing the Preferred domain from www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com. Does that affect anything?
- trooperbill0
@silentseven if your domain is a keyword then yes as it means theres less noise in your anchor text (www.) for links that are just your domain. however i woundlt go out and buy loads of keyword rich domains because google's working on fixing that loophole.
...if not then no.
both should resolve to your real site and if so, both can be used to mask link building activities helping you to hit anchor text harder.
- jadrian_uk0
Hi
I have a multi language site, what is the way to proceed for good SEO for each locale, right now i have:<meta name="description" content=" ">
<meta name="Keywords" content=" ">So i thought i could switch the content of these meta's depending on the language selected by the user, am i on the right path?
thanks- Oh and the site structure is one page (for ex index.php) wich is redraw with PHP in different languages.jadrian_uk