Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the reminder. Definitely okay with it, but better safe than sorry.

Hi,

I have a (brand) new client (outdoor recreation), and it links to many different lodges. It's built in Wordpress (Pagelines), and the partner page link URLs.

Although they do have the "?" in there, it's only has a single parameter.

http://www.clientsite/?partners=partner-name

Google is indexing the URLs, I do plan to increase the amount of content/on-page for each. Yet, weighing the risk/reward of rewriting all of these URLs.

You got it. While you can have your ads trigger for a trademarked/competitors' term, you won't be able to use it in your ad copy, therefore, your quality scores on those terms will always be low.

I would put it in a separate campaign for that reason.

Here is my go-to from the good folks at seomoz:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-an-advanced-keyword-analysis-report-in-excel

Read Yoast's "Definitive Guide to SEO" where he specifically says "pages over posts." I think you said it yourself earlier that posts tend to roll off in the SERPs over time.

And users don't know the difference. Also, you won't have to deal with the hassle of blocking the archive and category pages.

Posts are known to be more time-sensitive by the search engines, so will not rank as well as pages.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

If you're going to allow comments, how will that affect your keywords?

Your most important pages should be pages.

Sorry, I hit submit before I was finished, but if you are new to SEO, don't use a software like this whose whole aim is to manipulate search results and build low-quality links via comment spam and 'social bookmarking' on sites Google doesn't care about.

Learn to do SEO the right way (it may be the slow way), as outlined in SEOmoz's Guide rather than the fast way, the wrong way.  You will just end up chasing your own tail.

I've never heard of it. After visiting the page, I stopped reading after:

• Scraper
• Privacy Protection
• Article Spinning & Rewriting

I guess if you're going black hat, this is the tool for you, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole!

I would definitely point the link to #2 (http://www.foo.com/item.html) - because of the directory structure in the URL.

You could NOINDEX http://www.foo.com/category/sub-category/sub-sub-category/item.html with robots.txt.

K.

It's on a very bootstrapped budget right now, but I will be trying to build awareness, build a following, and ultimately, increase sales.

Can anyone help with successful grassroots campaigns where dollars for search or display ads and fresh blog content were at a minimum? The client has spent too much on product development, PR, web design, etc thus far, so I'm going to need to get some viral traction first in order to convince them to re-invest.

Below is my strategy: 
It is an online assessment that helps lawyers and law students make better career decisions by answering two questions:

• Which legal practice areas are the best fits for my interests and values?
• Which general (non-legal) career fields are the best fits for my interests and values?

Tangible Business Goals:

• Build awareness
• Spark relationships with clients, prospects, and influencers
• Better understand buyers or potential buyers
• Increase website traffic
• Improve search engine rankings
• Generate leads
• Generate sales

Targeting:

1. Law Students
2. Prospective Law Students
3. Lawyers
4. Law Schools
5. Law Firms
6. Companies employing in-house counsel
7. Bar Associations

Channels:

• LinkedIn Groups
• Facebook
• Twitter

Action Items:
Find influencers on Twitter to help spread the cause using online tools like FollowerWonk.

Low-hanging Fruit:

• Posting to primary social channels, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.
• Frequency:
• Twitter: 3x daily
• Facebook: 3-4x weekly
• LinkedIn: 3-4x daily
• Forum & Blog Participation: 5x weekly

Content Marketing Campaign:

A contest to target winners of a free assesssment.

Contest selects 4 winners, since there are several different audiences.

1. Prospective Law Student
2. Current Law Student 
3. Current Attorney (Law Firm)
4. Current Attorney (In-house counsel)

Contest/Giveaway:

• Social media activity steam in initial phases will be based around contest opportunity.
• In order to enter, entrants will need to either Like on Facebook and follow/retweet on Twitter, connect with LawFit Company Page on Twitter.
• All will be required to subscribe to e-mail newsletter.

What am I missing?

@Miriam, Owen:

I agree that a light SEO hand is best. As one who was a writer and journalist first, I despise over-optimization.

When you are just starting out with a new website, it's tough to know how aggressive one should be. When looking at the competition for local search terms, it does seem like most of my competition that ranks well does "over-optimize" for these local search terms like "birmingham alabama web design."

However, I need to just keep my head down for the next couple of months and blog repeatedly.

@Helen:

I've seen that done - creating a unique page for each locale - I'm not a fan of it. I'm not knocking your comment, but it does seem that in most implementations I've seen, the content seems to be bordering on duplicate with only the local SEO terms swapped out. I bet there's a "best practice" implementation out there - perhaps an "Areas Served" channel, with the cities as sub-pages, and then some truly unique content on each page with some keywords seeded in.

Curious to what others might think of this strategy?

I am just building my website and planning keyword strategy for my pages.

How much is too much in terms of optimizing locally?

So if I want "web design firm birmingham al," is it overkill to add that in the URL slug, title tag, essentially all the on-page optimization?

/web-design-firm-birmingham-al

much uglier than

web-design-firm

Obviously, would prefer to think big and believe it can go beyond one city to compete in other markets statewide or regionally, thus, optimizing for one city is too narrow (and there's the ugly url thing).

I'm working on offsite local optimization, so I'm thinking this will not be necessary.

Thoughts?

I have a client who is a business broker. I have just begun working with them, and they are trying to determine the best domain name to use - they have several.

business-broker-alabama.com

vs

businessbrokeralabama.com

Which one of these has more value? I know that search engines have somewhat devalued keywords. The first one probably has a little more SEO value, but is going to be a drag in terms of marketing -- saying "business hyphen broker hyphen alabama" is going to get old for them.

Thanks!

Sorry for the lapse in my reply - Tgiving intervened.

Yes, a few of my blog-post pages are ranking (for long-tail terms).

Good advice on trying to build external links to these pages. Realistically, it's unlikely that I'm going to be able to get anything other than directory or social bookmarking links (in the short tun), so would you recommend going that route?

Hi Kyle,

Yes, these pages are indexed - I submitted them manually through Webmaster Tools. I am trying to rank for the words in the url's:

kenya and tanzania safari (49% difficulty; 1,000 local; 5,400 global)

machu picchu travel (50% difficulty; 8,100 local sv; 135K global, wtf?)

Both pages have an A grade in the Term Grader.

Thanks!

We have a PPC landing page template that I've used to aggregate blog post collections thematically.

http://www.ietravel.com/machu-picchu-travel

http://www.ietravel.com/kenya-and-tanzania-safari

The hope was that they would start ranking. After 5 months, it has yet to happen.Thought it was a good idea at the time because these pages have a nice prominent call-to-action area.

It now occurs to me that the pages are probably under-performing because they are not incorporated into the main site navigation.

Do you think that if I move these under their appropriate categories in the main site I'll see some lift? (Of course, I will add 301 redirects as well.)

Thanks

EGOL,

Would you be referring to Traffic Sources > Keywords report?
For example,

September 2011:
Search sent 6,200 total visits via 2,427 keywords
Non-paid keywords: 1,147
Paid: 137
Non-branded, Non-paid keywords: 2,168
*The above is an advanced segment I use.

September 2010:
Search sent 7,804 visits via 1,279 keywords.
Non-paid: 1,186
Paid: 3,954
Non-branded, Non-paid keywords: 2,020

This seems to reveal that things may not be as dire as I thought.
I did have less PPC spend July-Sept year-over-year.

Sha,

Thank you for the Screaming Frog tool. It showed that several pages - including the HOMEPAGE - were noodp & noydir - I have no idea how this happened. Nevertheless, they have been resurrected.

How much damage do you think my homepage being set as noodp, noydir has done to my rankings?

Magento,

Thanks for your input. Linkbuilding is one piece of the puzzle I've not had the budget for....Any recommendations for services? You are welcome to PM me offline.

Cheers

Hello Ryan. Thanks for participating in helping me figure this out. You are correct - competition in our space has really ramped up in the last year as we fight for the last bit of consumers' disposable income. Also, there has been a steady decline year-over-year in travel-related search terms, according to Google Insights.

RE: the robots.txt. On the form pages - we actually do NOT have a customer log-in area (planned for an upcoming improvement), so that's why I had them blocked by robots - as a safeguard. Do you think I would be better off just deleting these nodes that Drupal generates from the forms? I had been leaving them there because I wanted to have the historic data on hand, but it seems to be doing more harm than good.

Also, how do you so quickly identify the 302 redirect? Our DNS controls are administered by parent company's support, so I'll need some "proof" to get this error corrected.

Finally, any tips on pulling specific reports/tools to identify where a drop in long-tail has occurred?

Thanks again for your insight.

Wonderful reply, EGOL. I am very inspired - I hear 'getting stronger' in the background.

Correct you are about the competitiveness of this space - and we have actually recently had a huge competitor enter the space for our Amazon River cruises.) We are challenged with a lean budget, and I am a one-man e-commerce show.

I think you are right - it's time to go back to basics w/ the term-targeting grader. Solid suggestions on the UI as well.

Question: To your analytics point, what is the best way to determine if the long-tail search volume has dropped? I'm trying to think of the best way to pull this in Google Analytics.

Thanks again for your inspirational post and insight.

The Good: We redesigned our nature travel website (www.ietravel.com) in Drupal. Overall, it's a great improvement in look and usability. Also, we are ranking for more relevant search terms (the SEO was managed by an agency before, and there were a lot of junk terms in their campaigns that weren't converting).

The Bad: Organic search referrals have consistently been down 10-20% year-over-year each and every month.

The Ugly: I am trying to dig in and figure out why this is happening, and I'm at a loss. We are aggressively publishing to our blog 5 days a week, and I've built many keyword-focused landing pages.

Here's what I do know in terms of things that could be problems which I've seen in Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools.

1. I have a lot of files restricted by robots.txt - 1,337 of them. Many have to be that way by design because they are nodes generated by web forms (w/ private user data). The rest are "Dates & Rates" pages - I restricted them because for each destination they are very similar in content. Wondering now if that was a mistake. For example, http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america/galapagos-islands/dates-rates

2. We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages. The Lightbox Module that was installed for our photo galleries was a disaster. I am researching a more SEO-friendly solution, but that solution is a month or more away.

3. We have 31 duplicate meta descriptions.

My question is, could these errors be THAT significantly impacting our rankings?

I should note that according to Google Analytics, Referral traffic & Direct traffic is also year-over-year every month since the redesign. I don't understand the Referral part especially, since we took great pains to put in many 301 redirects. There are no 404s or non-indexable pages showing up in Webmaster Tools either.

If anyone has any suggestions for problem areas or red flags I should investigate, please let me know. Really, any thoughts are appreciated.

Best,

Carlton

Damien,

Thanks very much for your input. I have been doing a lot of reading on content siloing, and my question (FINAL   is, how similar or dissimilar should the URLs and on-page SEO on the landing pages be from the product pages? For instance, if I'm targeting "amazon river cruises" and "galapagos islands cruises" on the product pages, should I consciously seek to use variations for the landing pages, such as "amazon river tours" and "galapagos islands tours"?

Best,

Carlton

Dan, Damien:

Thanks for your answers - they were very helpful in being "forced to consider" this issue. I'm basically planning on paying a service to generate 125+ articles for me over 4 months, and was trying to decide on the most beneficial way to house them. The service recommended building landing pages aimed at each of those terms, but we don't want content pages outranking commerce pages - sales are what it's all about, at the end of the day!! That said, what would be your recommendation?

My thinking was to publish them under the blog under the most relevant categories, then push to the authority pages via anchor-text links.

Hello,

We recently launched a redesigned site in Drupal in December of last year. We are an eco-travel company. My current URL's look like this:

/africa-and-middle-east/kenya-tanzania

/central-south-america/galapagos-islands

My pages have good term targeting grades, and the rankings for the terms we are targeting - "kenya and tanzania safaris" and "galapagos islands cruises" are decent, but not great - most are on page 2 or 3. The one URL where I targeted our most important term, "amazon river cruises," I am still on page 2.

/central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises

My questions are:

1. Did I miss an opportunity with the rest of the URL's, and should I consider changing the rest to more targeted terms with 301s? Since the new site launched in January, perhaps I have not given enough time for my new URL's to index and mature. Would it be easier to set up landing pages with unique article content that targets terms such as "galapagos islands cruises" and "kenya and tanzania safaris"? If so, how can I do it in such a way as to not "compete" with the pages I want to drive them to?

This also raises the question of redirecting the same URL twice i.e. I would have 2 redirects in place for the same url e.g. from the former site to the new site, and yet another redirect to the most-recent URL. Is that a problem?

Sorry if I've asked too many questions in one post.

Any advice appreciated.