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Hi Laura

I just took a quick look at the page and did some analysis with the SeoMoz toolbar - you can download that as a chrome extension and its brilliant for a quick healthcheck on your individual pages.

The first thing I noticed was that you have the Title tag <title>as your business name - The Electric Heating company.  I would start with immediately changing that to Include your keyword at the beginning.</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">I only checked a few of your pages, but all were named with your business. A classic no-no as Google definitely uses the title tag to find out what your page(s) are about.</p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Another thing, you have a couple of images on there named radiator3 and radiator4...consider renaming those images and adding alt tags to include 'electric radiators for conservatories and EHC Electric Radiators.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">I also noticed you have a wordpress site.  I'd really recommending adding the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin.  That trains you how to optimise your pages and I have had great success with that.</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Hope that helps - that will definitely help you get ranked for the term.  </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Thanks</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Jo</span></p></title>

I just wanted to add my views.

I don't think there is such a thing as 'Google Images'.  Google is returning a search result of images that exist on peoples websites, with links through to those websites.  The purpose of those images is to drive people to those sites they are attached to, not to take directly from Google.

If your posts are along the lines of 'what to do in this city', you'd be better off approaching the people and asking if you can feature them on your site?  e.g. if one of the things you are suggesting is 'visit this theatre, or visit this restaurant, I'm sure the theatre and restaurant would be delighted to get a mention and willingly let you use their images.  You should link to their sites and they may well give you the benefit of linking back to you as you are featuring them as a 'good things to do when you are visiting x'.

The bottom line is always ask permission.  Chances are, if you are giving credit to the photographer, or the owner of the images (i.e. the restaurant, theatre etc), they will be happy to let you use them as you are promoting them.

You can get into some hot water by just taking them and it's not fair on the owner not to receive some credit for their work.

One of mine does that for a particular search term...I haven't manipulated anything just followed the best practises of SEO across each piece of content.  If I had done any sort of dodgy manipulation, I would have been picked up by panda and penguin.

I hope they are not mistrusted because of it. If it were me experiencing it, I'd definitely remember them and probably look.

Let's face it, all SEO is manipulation of search results!  Anybody who follows the best practises is hoping that their competitor is not and will therefore rank below them.

There are many, many ways that SEOmoz can help improve your sites performance in SERPS but none of those are direct.  Having a pro subscription to SEOMoz, or any service will never affect your rankings.

SEOmoz is really just a set of measurement tools to show you how well your optimisation efforts are working.

So, if you are optimising one particular webpage for one particular keyword you can set that up as a campaign and watch how you are progressing, allowing you to monitor against your competitors.

All of the SEO tools help you to conduct research and analysis to enable you to make decisions when doing onpage and offpage optimisation.  The purpose of the tools is to help you make the best decisions based on insight so you can improve your sites performance.

Use all the tools available in the Research tools section and learn how to use each one.  Also there's a lot of help in the beginners guide.

You can use the tools to show you any errors on your site, duplicate content warnings, keyword analysis etc.  All of this will help you go back and make your site a better place.

The report card tool is exceptionally helpful.

Hi Dusty

That is correct that a 301 does pass link juice and a 302 does not.

I would go into detail, but SEOmoz has a very detailed description here!

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Hope that helps

Jo

You have to create content that people will link to.  There is no such thing as boring either.  I manage social media and SEO for nuts and bolts companies, so i understand what you mean but you have to find your market and build the links there.

Also, why would a guest post be any less boring than posting on your own blog (re your advice on this post)?

edit.. added this link about borings companies creating great content.  

Also check out what Ladders online are doing on Google plus.

Hi

For the official line on meta keywords form Google, I've attached this link:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Google officially announced in 2009 that meta keywords was not a factor in ranking at all.   I also believe that the description isn;t a ranking factor - the reason you need to focus on the description is to ensure that it has a strong hook that accurately reflects the content of the page to entice the searcher to click on the link.

Hi Robert and welcome

I would definitely include Bloomington Illinois as searches are going to be for your specific local service.

Have you checked out the Google Adwords Keywords tool for some suggestions yet (not that it's  the be all and end all).  I just had a quick check and some suggestions were along the lines of 'back pain specialist', 'back pain clinic', 'back doctor', that sort of thing (with the local town name included).

I would also strongly suggest setting up a Google Plus Business page and linking it to your website - when you have set up your page you will see an option in your 'about' section to do this.

Google Pages are showing up more and more in local search, so a Google Page is pretty essential. It should also be well optmised, i.e. full profile details and a rich description of the services you provide.

Good luck and if you need any further help with that page, let me know!

Thanks for your reply, very helpful.  I'm trying to do the same with rel publisher to get my clients logos appearing from their google plus page.  I mainly use wordpress sites and using authorsure plugin, but I'm still getting to grips with it and running lots of tests.

I think the ghostwriting is the best option.  The director of the company will be happy to use his image, but he doesnt (or didnt) have a google plus profile.  I've just set him one up.

Does authorship really only benefit by showing you the face of the author is or there actually any additional 'google points' for it being a highly engaged and highly circled account?

Thanks for your response anyway, much appreciated!

Hi All.  Just wondering what your experience is with using Facebook graph search?

I have a site that ranks highly for a good number of keywords on google, yahoo etc, but when you use the facebook graph search, it either doesnt show up at all or is buried away in page 5 or something.

I'm talking about the 'Web Search' bit where it returns web results rather than searching for pages likes by my friends etc.

Any thoughts?  Why is my site way behind the competition in Facebook?  I'm a white hat kind of girl and can't think what I might have done to offend!

Have you come across any good resources advising how to optimise for facebook graph search for web?

Thanks

Jo

Just wondered whether you think the footer text here on tis page constitues 'keyword stuffing'.

I think it does but wondering why they haven't been penalised for it.

http://www . lippyliciouscakes . co.uk/

Thoughts?

Many thanks.

Hi Robert and welcome

I would definitely include Bloomington Illinois as searches are going to be for your specific local service.

Have you checked out the Google Adwords Keywords tool for some suggestions yet (not that it's  the be all and end all).  I just had a quick check and some suggestions were along the lines of 'back pain specialist', 'back pain clinic', 'back doctor', that sort of thing (with the local town name included).

I would also strongly suggest setting up a Google Plus Business page and linking it to your website - when you have set up your page you will see an option in your 'about' section to do this.

Google Pages are showing up more and more in local search, so a Google Page is pretty essential. It should also be well optmised, i.e. full profile details and a rich description of the services you provide.

Good luck and if you need any further help with that page, let me know!

If you have several duplicate pages (with the exception of location), I do think you run the risk of being penalised for duplicate content.

Does each local area actually have a branch or is it all run from one location, with all the additioanl pages being written to garner the local belief that the service exists as a 'local service'?  I've seen businesses do this and it doesn;t feel right to me.  I agree with the previous poster that you'd be better building a national brand that services different parts of the country rather than making it look like you are a network of branches.

If your client does have several branches/franchises, I'd be tempted to make every page unique and about that local service.  Use images specific to each location and title and alt tag accordingly.

SEO companies still focussing on this stuff are either scamming people, or just so out of date and it will catch up with them.

Backlinks are still very worthwhile, but they must be earned naturally.  Any backlink that can be bought is not natural.

SEO post penguin is actually REALLY straightforward!  Implementing it is blody hard, but the theory is straightforward.

Really, all you have to do is create good quality content, relevant to your business on a regular basis.  You also need to socialise this, be social on your social networks, publicise your content through your social means, earn backlinks by people coming across your content and deciding to link to it

Ultimately Google wants to know that your site is good quality (and it measures that by deemed good quality sites naturally linking to it because they think it is good).  Social signals, tweet, number of facebook likes, google plus ones, other kinds of shares, people talking about your site etc.

Don't focus on 'SEO'. Focus on building a great website, a great brand and getting the word out and the links should come naturally.

Obviously all the on page and technical seo, ste speed etc best practises still apply.

From my initial glance, it does look a little like you are overoptimising for lifestyle magazine.

If it were my site, I would be rethinking my approach on that keyword altogether.

I would concentrate heavily on optimising all the articles for the content that they represent.  For example, the article, members of staff too scared to take time off work.  I would be looking at changing you title tag and optimising the content to appeal to people searching for articles, news, tipes etc specifically around that subject matter.  You'd need to get creative for each one and do the research into what the exact message of each article is and who your audience is.  What might they be searching for etc.

The title tags of each article do not need to be the title of the article. I would start with optimising each article one by one.  The backlinks will come as your readers find exactly what they are looking for on an article by article basis.

If you optimise the content on your site for what it actually is, you will become known as a lifestyle magazine just as a matter of course.  I'm not saying don't optimise for that, but I think you are focussing on the wrong topic.

If you do find people nicking your articles, try sending them a polite message telling them you have no problems with them borrowing your content as long as they link back.  If they don't, give them the heavier email!

When I do an incognito search you are number 3.

As a previous poster says, make sure your page is A+ in the analyser.

Beyond that, continue building some high quality backlinks to that page, but also some social signals might help give it a boost.  That page has no plus ones, likes or anything like that.  Tweet the page, get it retweeted, get it all over google plus.

When you use the keyword research tool on SEOMoz you can opt to run off a csv, very detailed breakdown of the stats for the top ten results for that keyword (I think you get 50 per month).  Not sure if you have done that already but I find that very helpful.  Gives all the social signals  backlinks, page authority, domain authority etc.

Hi David

Without knowing what your errors are, it's hard to say but, I notice you have a wordpress site, so I'll offer another add-on suggestion to the other excellent suggestions above.

Some of your errors might be 404 errors - there is a great plugin called redirection.  If you have 404 errors, work through each one and redirect it to an appropriate page.

404s usually happen when you change the url, or remove a page.  Google has indexed those pages/urls and if they are no longer available Google will return a 404 error page.  With redirection you can point the old page to a new, appropriate page with a 301 redirect.

Hope that helps.

I use buffer, mainly for twitter (when I remember) and it's great for spreading out the content you are sharing.  Sometimes I might be in meetings all day yet I want to be able to tweet stuff, so its fantastic for that.

Sometimes I've seen twitter feeds that look like they just churn out content, which I don;t think is wise, but as a supplement to what I'm already doing it is great and helpful.

Re changing the title tags, no you don't need to add any redirection.  Yo only need to do this if you also change the url and the existing url has already been indexed.

I've done quite a bit of redirection on some sites when optimising and so far suffered no issues, but I'm going to go away and view that video!

All my campaigns (different sites) are crawled weekly.  As far as I understand you can;t control this.

Do you use wordpress?

Hi.  Everything Tom said and I also wanted to add another extension to this - If you use Firefox this is for checking nofollow and dofollow links.  When you add the extension, if you right click and select the nodofollow it hghlights nofollows in red and dofollows in blue.  I use it all the time.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/nodofollow/

SEOmoz isn't affiliated with any of the search engines so there is nothing that SEOMoz can really do to actually help you achieve higher rankings for you.

The only way you can improve your rankings is to employ tried and tested best practise techniques and use the SEOMoz tools available to help you research, track and improve your chances of progression.

I don't believe there is a piece of software out there that can genuinely improve your rankings.

Bing webmaster tools is pretty helpful when it comes to this sort of thing.  Verify your site with Bing WT and in Diagnostic tools you can run SEO tests for your URLs and it will give you an outcome.  If there are any biggies on your site it will highlight in red and amber and so on.

Bing WMT is a great tool and I think it's widely underused.

I think it depends on the nature and the quality of the sites.  For example, say I got a link from the Guardian and I was so chuffed I posted a link back to the article on the guardian on my blog, I'm pretty certain I would still reap the link juice benefits.

Edit - I just want to add that I do have direct experience of this on a new clients site. As a UK jounalist for a british new site he has dozens  of backlinks to his site.  They;re his only backlinks, his site isn't optimised at all and hasn't been updated in years, yet he has amazing rankings for highly competitive keywords.

Thanks, I'm not so sure!  I'm a freelancer and I wok on my own so I have nobody to really bounce ideas off, so this community is great for that.  Glad to know I'm doing it right

I'm not a bit lover of plugins and I try to keep to a minimum, but I've removed anything unessential - even my beloved Flare sharing buttons, for now anyway.

I'll let you know when Google come back to me

I've attached a screenshot of what you should be looking for.  You need to go to your dashboard -> users -> all users -> then select any user.

There should be several fields including your bio area...as per the attached.  Mine is filled in with my google plus proifle.

Something I forgot to mention is that your user will also need to add themselves as a contributor to the blog on their Google plus profile.  I have attached a link to my google plus profile.  If you check out the about section you will see about two thirds down a section where is says 'contributor to'.  Here you add the url to the blog.  This links the two.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/101142923283224674423/about

1. You need to link the blog to the G+ Profile

2. You need to confirm in G+ that you are truly a contributor to that blog (or you could add any old superior influencer)

That should be it.

g+jpeg.jpg

I'm recently inspired by Red Bull.  The opportunities there are endless.

Thanks all for your help, I was de-blacklisted this afternoon - phew.

pdfs are indexed just as html pages, so you should avoid duplicating what is on the pdf, as it will look like two duplicate pages on your site.

You can add, summarise or make sensible and good use of the html page and add unique content and that would help.

I hope you're right Tom!  I'd hate to have to go and start de-optimising

hmmm....I'd want a more indepth conversation with your developer, because that doesn;t make a lot of sense.

You can get loops but that happens when the redirect has been incorrectly set up, or you have a really long convoluted chain of hops..  (I have done this myself personally and got in a couple of knots).

At the end of the day, you need to be able to reasonably rewrite your urls and it is your developers job to facilitate that and do whatever is technically necessary.  You might need to look back at the history of what you've got redirecting where to prevent it going haywire.

I agree with the previous poster.  SEO is a long winded and tough nut to crack - you either need to do it yourself or you need to outsource it to a professional SEO.

If you have made the decision to do it yourself, you need to learn how to do what SEOs do and that means starting at the beginning and learning from the ground upwards.

There is no one answer to your question, it's just a steep learning curve from the moment you accept taking it on yourself.

That said you are very much in the right place for learning how to do it properly. The only advice I would give is to do everything with caution and make sure your understand the actions you are taking for your site so you don;t end up getting penalised by not understanding the consequences.

Hi Derrick

Back in November I built a website for a client that is already ranking between 1 and 4 for several keywords and I had similar concerns at the outset.  One thing I noticed about that report you ran was that all the directory style competition had very low page authority scores.  Good page authority can outrank directories.

What I've written below is based on what I did...It started off with a lot of work in the initial set up, but it's generally just a couple of hours maintenance a week..

As it's local, get a google + page and link the page to your site and focus on getting some good social signals for each page - tweet your pages, facebook like and share you pages, google +1 your pages and so on and if you are blogging, do the same.  A good bit of content and plenty of social sharing can work wonders.  Set up social media accounts on a few of the main networks and use them to really connect and bulid relationships, rather than churning our rss feeds.

Also ensure you have cast iron on page, pick a keyword per page and make sure the page fully reflects that keyword so that when a search lands on it they are truly finding what they are looking for. Have that keyword in the title tag and a good meta desc that tells the user what your page is about.  Don't stuff the page with the keyword, just make sure it appears a couple of times, particularly in headings if you have it broken up.

You can also get yourself some free decent directory links - proper local business directories, not spammy ones and industry specific national directories.

The verified google plus page is invaluable and you can well optimise your google+ page, get reviews etc.