Questions created by csmithal
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Would these be considered dynamic URLs?
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.
Technical SEO | | csmithal0 -
Ideas for Building Bootstrap-Funded Project Guerrilla Style
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:
Branding | | csmithal
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?0 -
Optimizing for Local Terms
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?
Keyword Research | | csmithal0 -
Hyphens in Domain Name
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!
On-Page Optimization | | csmithal0 -
SEO Landing Page Fail
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csmithal0 -
Organic traffic still down 9 months after redesign
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. 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 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. 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
Technical SEO | | csmithal1 -
URLs: To Change or Not to Change
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: 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.
Technical SEO | | csmithal0