Got a basic SEO question? Leave a comment here and we’ll answer it as soon as makes sense.
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NathanD: Great to see you guys back, I've missed you. This is more of a...
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David Brown: Hey Dano, We have covered this in a podcast, but for the life of...
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Hey Guys, great podcast, I hopefully am not asking something you have already covered.
Does it matter to have your company name in the tag? I’ve seen CMSs default to this in nature and just assumed it was for SEO but I can see how it also might be only reflective on user experience.
Example “Page Title – My Company”
I’ve also seen recommendations like “Saucy Word1 | Saucy Word2 | Saucy Word3″ would it be better for SEO to have, “Saucy Word1 | Saucy Word2 | Saucy Word3 – My Company”
Thanks Guys,
Dano
I just found this site and saw a lot of topics that I need to improve my knowledge of, but when I went to the podcasts the files appear to be gone. See this page as an example http://podcast.neo1seo.com/?cat=64
I’m creating a new website for a friend and need to optimize the entry page. The company is a machine shop that manufactures metal parts. These small businesses are commonly known as machine shops. At this point, there is no way I can compete in a Google organic search for the common industry phrase “precision machine shop” (too many optimized sites).
Another phrase “machine shop high precision” came up in WordTracker (KEI of 15, only 8 Google competitive sites but only 300 monthly searches) which if I optimize the site for this phrase I’m guaranteed to be on the #1 search result page.
Is it worth me optimizing the phrase (machine shop high precision) with these low search results but I’m likely to get listed on the 1st Google result page or should I skip it and further optimize my site thru link building and hope I can eventually work my way into Google 1st page search for the popular phrase “precision machine shop?
Thanks
I have just acquired a site that receives almost exactly 70 unique visitors from type-in traffic a day. Upon examining the sites analytics, I see that 98% of the traffic is coming via IE6. The bounce rate is equally high as well…Hmmmm Fishy?
I’m not quite sure what is going on here.
How can I track down the source of this traffic?
Anyone have any ideas?
I have an e-commerce site that I’ll working on http://www.nursingpin.com that I’m having a difficult time ranking well. The site sells jewelry focused on medical professionals example: nurses, dentist, pharmacist, therapist, etc. I’m not 100% sure how to go about choosing keywords for the home page since we are trying to target so many different medical disciplines.
Any suggestions?
How hard is it to SEO a WordPress site?
I just found your podcast the other day and am an instant fan! I believe I have already listened to 5 SEO 101 pod casts in the last 48 hours. I have a two part question – I am looking to do an online store and its position in google is critical. I was considering yahoo storefront, but was curious how well it will work in terms of SEO. In other words, will it be competitive with other made from scratch sites?
Also, what about these site templates (stores) I see, how well do they fair in terms of ability to rank in google?
Thank you,
Ray
How do you go about about words with different spelling i know you should not mix all different spellings on one webpage but how do you chose if all spellings seem to have equal number of searches ( eg mock-up mockup mock up)
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions on your last podcast. I attended a SEO meetup in Toronto a few nights ago and something was said that I wanted to get your opinions on. The speaker had mentioned that when a user searches on Google, the search engine is aware of their location based on their IP. The speaker said that Google therefore uses this information on what pages may be more relevant to the searcher and that Google also takes into account the location of the hosting server to give the most relevant search results. Therefore, if someone is hosting their site from a server in Toronto they have a better chance of getting found from a person searching in Toronto. Is this fact or fiction?
All the best,
Cliff Spicer
Cliff Spicer Photography are Wedding Photographers in The Greater Toronto Area as well as a group of PR Photographers in Toronto
Hello,
Thanks for posting my comment on your site. I really appreciate it and hope you get a chance to answer my questions. When listening to your podcasts you had mentioned that dropping a link on this site when making a comment was cool and you had mentioned that it may be a little SEO juice for our site. I then noticed in the source code that you have a line in my links that say rel=nofollow which I believe means that he search engines should not give any credit to the link but I may be totally wrong. Can you clarify your use of nofollow in terms of the links I dropped with my comment?
All the best,
Cliff
Hello,
Just wanted to let you know that I love listening to your podcasts and think you guys are great together. I also wanted to let you know that I have taken a poll and all Canadians have decided that when the Queen of the Universe elections are officially held we will all vote for Carolyn. I also do have a few questions.
1. google allows me to request that a link be removed and I am wondering why or if I want to do this when I can just do a 301 on those links?
2. I read an article on using analytics to check my SEO keywords effort and I have found I am not being found by the keywords I have been optimizing for but for other words in my site. Does this mean I should work harder on the keywords that people are finding me with or work harder on the terms I had in mind originally?
3. I would volunteer my DIY SEO efforts to be critiqued on your show and would be more than willing to call in if Carolyn would agree to help out a SEO novice from the Great White North, EH?
Cliff Spicer
Cliff Spicer Photographer
Cliff Spicer Toronto Wedding Photographer
Cliff Spicer Toronto PR Photographer
You guys rock… thanks for covering my question in one of your recent episodes. I laughed my butt off.
I have one more question for you… and I hope it’s not too complicated to cover in SEO101.
Are there things that you do differently when trying to optimize your site for US search vs. international/global search?
Of course there are those obvious things like getting links from sites in other countries – but anything else that we need to be aware of?
Finally – any tips for easily monitoring our site’s rank on various search engines world wide?
(Related… Brian – I use your ranking tool and find it to be very helpful… TY!)
Thanks guys!
Melinda :0)
LOVE your show. Listening for ages… all the way back to the “voodoo” intro days.
(Hope that was a big enough *SWAK* on David’s bootie to get you guys to answer my question… ME, ME, ME!!!)
Listing to a recent show and you just glazed over multivarient testing.
Could you please dedicate quality time to explaining the when, who, why, and how of multivarient testing? I’m very interested in learning more about this subject from your expert, one might even go so far as to say genius (SWAK again) perspectives.
Thanks so much!
A fan always.
I am starting to get enough traffic to my website (which is in wordpress 2.7) where I want to start to worry about the my search function. I want to know what people are searching for on my site to help me with usability and also SEO. The default WordPress extension doesn´t seem to log the searches for my review later. What extension do you use for your search function in wordpress blogs? Thanks.
With regards to optimizing a FLASH site –
We are starting to see the XML being used to populate our FLASH in Google’s index.
What do you think about setting up a 301 to redirect people who click on the listing so they go to the FLASH rather than the ugly XML?
OR
Possibly restricting the XML and swf from being crawled at all and only allowing access to the HTML dup of the page?
Hi,
Great show all, love listening!
One question, I run one of Australia’s largest safety portals, we had a name change about 6 months ago (www.ohscentre.com.au) and I 301′ed all the old links to the new domain. But we are finding it hard to even rank for our own name in Google. We have great content and it is a very useful resource. What are we doing wrong?
thanks heaps!
Hello –
If I’m trying to have each page of my site have unique content, but the pages are very similar – which is more important? My site is about hiking trails – while the experiences are all different, the descriptions in words aren’t THAT different. How can I have dozens of pages that are totally unique when the core content is nearly the same… or do I drop that priority and just make them descriptive?
Thanks
Hello –
I’m comparing two sites, one has severe dropoff in PR from the home page to other pages and the other one tapers. I can’t see any difference in inbound link quality of quantity and other factors (age, constructions, etc.) seem fairly equivalent. Help?
Dan
I’m looking for an SEO to optimize my site for organic search. What are the most important questions I should ask a potential SEO?
Love the podcast. Thanks for doing it. My question:
Is it bad to have Capitol letters in your URL? I spaced out and put caps in the URLs of my last site. For example:
http://www.sitename.com/Articles/How-To-Swim.html
Are caps in the URL like above bad?
Thanks, Scott
Can you recommend a SEO book for beginners? I’m looking for something that’s great as a reference source and explains SEO concepts without too much jargon?
to heidi:
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect.
How you use it? If you have an old page (www.something.com/old-page.html) and you redesign the site, and the content is now on a new page (www.something.com/new-page.html) you 301 your old page to the new page.
By doing this all the people and bots (google bot, yahoo slurp etc.) that somehow end up on the old page, they will be redirected to the new page. And in this case you will pass all the pagerank and google juce and other things to the new page. You have to 301 all the old url to the new urls this way.
Hope that helps :)
p.s. if you can redesign the site and leave the same urls, it is the best think you can do and there will be no need for any redirecting.
I built a website on the Tripod free hosting service about 10yrs ago. It ranks in the top 3 for one of my keywords on google and also ranks high on yahoo therefore it generates good traffic. I’ve since paid for my hosting with tripod so i could put my own google ads on the tripod site while i’ve been building a much better site with it’s own domain name. My question is can i somehow redirect the visitors coming to my tripod site to my new site without losing my page rank for the tripod site. I’ve read some on 301 but not sure If thats my best option. I really don’t want to lose my page rank or just paste “please visit my new page” all over the site. thanks
Firstly, we have a website that has been created with a content management system. We want to totally re-design the website using a new software website builder called XSitePro. We want to know if we move the current content onto the new site and then switch will we also be able to keep all of our back links if we use the same URL? We have about 7000 back links and we don’t want to lose them. We appear on page 1 and 2 in google in our keyword categories, are we risking those google ranks if we change the website?
Website: http://www.Fathers-Resources.com
A couple more questions…
What the heck is a 301?? and should I care?
Still didn’t understand the difference between a static and dynamic URL and also didn’t get your explanation about how google is searching forms and what I should be doing to improve my forms.
your help in understanding this is greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Heidi
Hello again,
On 2007-11-05 I have posted a question here, and received great answers, so I decided to ask a question once again, as we have redeveloped our site.
As listening to your shows gives a lot of good information, I think I have made the transition quite well.
The sites urls changed, so I have taken the most popular “entry pages” from google analythics, and redirected them to the new pages through 301 (about 500 of urls).
The new pages are well optimized with unique title tags, keywords and descriptions.
Now I am waiting for google to index the new pages and mess around with my rankings :(. I had 1-3 positions for most of my pages, so I was very happy :) but now everything will change (and I will be very sad :)
I had to redevelop the site, because it was mate in frontpage, and all the pages were handmade, it was not possible to manage it already.
THE QUESTION IS: WHAT SHOULD I DO MORE?
- I don’t have a sitemap jet, but will make one in txt today from google analytics content data just to have one, and will make a better one in the future.
- What should I do more to get the good rankings after the changes are seen in google? How to get the same positions, that I really liked earlier :)
- I now the link building :) but it’s a hard one. Maybe to take the sitemap and put it on blogger? WordPress blog? To get the 500 links at once to all the new pages? :)
Thanks for all your suggestions.
You help me a lot to earn my living.
The ‘Link Building 101 Part 2′ episode is a copy of the previous week’s episode, ‘Upgrading WordPress’.
[...] to ask a question? You can post your SEO questions on the “Ask a Question” page. We may not get to it right away, but we do get to them eventually [...]
Hey David, I was thrilled when I read your reply, that my question(s) were going to be addressed on the upcoming show. I’ve been listening (and enjoying as always), but have not caught it. Did I some how miss it?
DS
@Schmoozii: All of the episodes are still available here on the site. Not sure whats up with iTunes. I’ll put it on my to-do list. Thanks for the heads up!
DB
I tried to download your podcast on iTunes back from 2007 and early 2008 and the links seem to be broken. It’s showing a time of 1 minute for each show and when I try to download I get an error. I was able to get the recent shows.
Are the older shows still available?
What is the wordpress plugin you are using to subscribe via e-mail with Feedburner?
I found the RSS feed. For anyone else who wants it, here it is:
http://www.webproworld.com/external.php?type=RSS2
I still haven’t figured out the issue with the podcasts.
Hi Guys
Love the show it has been a big help.
First time I have asked a question and really hope you can help as I’m having a big problem with google webmaster tools.
I have had to change hosting accounts for reasons out of my control.
When I changed over my domain name changed from <a href=”http://www.justcoachhire.co.uk” to <a href=”http://justcoachhire.co.uk” which was ok I have now been reindexed and my rankings have stayed the same or moved up for some key words.
The main problem is I keep getting keep getting errors when I try and verify my google account via both Html file and meta tags.
This is the file http://justcoachhire.co.uk/googled176f438faa02159.html
and here are the errors
I tried to verify my site and I received an error. What can I do?
If you tried to verify your site and received an error, find that error in the list below for possible causes and solutions.
* We encountered an error looking up your site’s domain name.
We tried to access your verification file, but were unable to access your domain due to a DNS error. This could be because your server is down, or there is an issue with the DNS routing to your domain. Make sure that your domain is resolving correctly and try again.
* We encountered a DNS timeout looking up your site’s domain name.
We tried to access your verification file, but were unable to access your domain due to a DNS error. This could be because your server is down, or there is an issue with the DNS routing to your domain. Make sure that your domain is resolving correctly and try again.
* We were unable to verify your file due to a server timeout.
We were unable to verify your file because we received a server timeout. This could be because your server is down or is busy and responding slowly. Make sure that your server is responding and try again.
I have emailed my hosting company but have not as yet been able to give me an answer.
So I hope you three can help me.
Also I have stopped getting updates form your podcast via itunes any ideas why?
Many thanks and keep up the good work
Greg Dickson
Thanks for the info on the Forum. I have 2 observations:
1) I couldn’t find a direct RSS feed for the SEO-101 section of the forum. Is it there and I couldn’t find it? I am currently subscribed to the WebProWorld RSS, but I am concerned that I will end up getting crushed with messages from the forum in general, when for now, I only want to keep my eyes on the SEO 101 forum. Maybe I am wrong, maybe it is a good idea to watch the whole forum, but I like to start with bites size chunks. Any thoughts?
2) I am a big fan of your podcast. I have attempted to listen to every episode. I say attempted, because I have been unsuccesful. I would say over the last 3-4 months (estimate) I regularly get only about 1/2 the podcast, or I end up with a podcast that is 50+ minutes long, where parts in the middle of the podcast are repeated. Of all of the different podcasts I listen to, it is only this one that I seem to have so much trouble getting complete podcasts. Any thoughts?
Hi Ryan! The only ‘stupid question’ is the one you don’t ask! The team at WebProWorld was kind enough to set up a SEO 101 forum for us on their site which you can find here http://webproworld.com/seo-101/
db
Hi Danny! Thanks for listening to the show… keep listening because we’re going to answer your question on our next show!
DB
In some of the podcasts, you refer to a forum, but I can’t find the link to it. Where is it? Sorry if this is a stupid question.
I’ve been listening for almost a year now and love your show, and a…Help,
I have a six year old site and only this week learned that the underscore is not read as a space by search engines, vs. the use of the dash.
Now that I’ve leaned this, I’m making the changes to my site with hopes this will give me some seo advantages. The problem google and the rest have logged these pages with the content in them. My worries are double content if I keep those pages up too/ should I apply a redirect (301/307?) to each page direct to it’s new version/ if so how long do I keep that up?/ note were talking about a site with 3k pages (lots of work).
Oddly enough before this I was going to send you a questions asking you to take a peek at my site and solve the mystery why a 6 year old site run by someone who has been listening and reading everything they (me) can on SEO, but yet still is out ranked by my own clients selling my product (I’m a wholesaler). Perhaps the underscore is one part of this riddle
I looked at the list and those are all good things to do SEO wise in theory… but how many of us can create a facebook app? or write an ebook that people want to download? Oh yeah… Brian and Carolyn can – I on the other hand do how to videos to help out and gain quality IBL’s for free ;)
Thanks for listening and for the link we’ll probably use it as a reference in an upcoming show!
DB
I have discovered your podcast on webmasterradio.fm and have been listening for most of today.
In one of your episodes you were talking about link exchanges. I got the impression that a webmaster should only select a few sites to exchange links with (and actually phone them to acquire links etc). Also in the episode it mentioned that people go crazy to get heaps of links.
Being a former member of digital point forums and now a member of web talk forums, I have previously been one of those people that go crazy for links.
I have been submitting to directories, commenting on blogs, putting my link in forums etc and trying new methods. I got the impression that I should not be doing this because I am “going crazy for links” etc. Should I continue with these methods?
I was also planning to follow the strategies listed here:
http://www.nbridges.com/tips
Do you recommend these tips?
I would like to inquire about trackbacks and inlinks… How do they work, how do you get them, why do you need them… etc? Also, are trackbacks and inlinks the same thing?
ThanX! ~TYE DURBIN
No offense, but this podcast is so bland. Not just that, but who wants to listen to these lame advertisements sprinkled throughout the podcast? For a fun yet informative podcast, check out Mr. SEO’s podcast at mr-seo.com
Thanks for the show. There is something to learn in each episode. My question is this. I have 18 pages that provide information about particular cities. Each page goes over the same basic info. Is it considered duplicate content if I just change the place name in the title tag and leave the rest of the tag the same given that the rest of the tag really does apply to each page?
Thanks
“The Other” Dave Brown
Great question. We’ll try to get to this on the live show next week (5/1/08) or the following Wednesday.
I was recently told that search engines can read PDF files. So – I need to optimize my PDFs the same way I would web sites.
I’ve never heard of this before, and I think it sounds kind of crazy… but who knows. So, I’ll ask you guys… Is this true? If it is — how can a bot read a linked PDF file? Does it download and search the file?
Or – is this all bull?
As always, thanks for the informative and entertaining podcast.
Hello,
I have been listening to all of your shows, and last year you talked about log files, that they are very important to have. Earlier I had awstats on one of my sites, but i changed the hosting plan, and I dont have good statistics.
I want to collect my log files, contacted my hosters, 1 said they keep the file for 2 days, the other keeps the files for 7 days. The only way they suggested to download them is through ftp. How do you collect you log files for future analysis? I dont have time to ftp my sites every day :) some tool to send them by email every day? some backup on to the hard drive? any suggestions?
Thanks for hard work, we can all learn from you a lot.
Good Job.
Rokas
Hi guys
Thanks for a great podcast – I learn something new with each episode.
My question:
I have a South African site (.co.za) that I offer some products and services on. I would like to expand the offering to an international market (.com domain). Does this mean I have to create an entirely new site for the .com domain, or can I make a copy of the current site? Some features of the .com site will be unique, but much of the content will be applicable, thus will be the same. I’m worried about the duplicate content ssue.
I don’t think a redirect will work, because there will be some key differences in the site.
Thanks again for sharing your extensive knowledge with us newbies.
Regards
Bernard
Hi guys
Thanks for making your extensive knowledge available to us newbies.
My question:
I currently have a South African site (.co.za) that I would like to expand to offer my product to international clients (.com domain). The international site will basically be the same, but some key features will be different.
Do I have to create an entirely unique site, or can I copy the site? Some of the content will be different, but some articles will be relevant to all clients, thus will be the same. I’m concerned about duplicate content for this.
I don’t think a redirect is the answer since the sites will have some key differences.
What is the best way to go about this?
Thanks again for a great podcast.
Regards
Bernard
Thanks for answering both of those questions!
The internal linking part makes more sense now, and it sounds like you share the “content siloing” theory that I’ve heard Bruce Clay talk about.
Thanks again,
Jason
Hey Guys,
Would you mind discussing best practices for building good internal link structure on a future podcast? I think this is a major confusion point for many of us newbies.
Also, another possible topic would be “beginning” link building strategies. I think it would be interesting to hear about how you would go about building links from scratch today, given that directories seem to be devalued and the possible minefields with paid links. Maybe how to buy links under the radar? :)
Thanks in advance; I (we) truly appreciate all of your help and insight.
Best,
Jason
(lev-ridge)