ask a seo genius anything thread

[bensd]

I am developing a site for a client and they would like a holding page live until the website is finished.

The holding page will include a small amount of content and will not link to any other part of the site.

Would it be better to upload the holding page as an image and restrict search bots until the website is finished or would it be better to code the page and make the content live?

 

[peacock]

Hi Rob,

Firstly you should reduce the amount of times "maldives" is mentioned on the front page (40), Google may see this as keyword stuffing so its a top priority to sort this one out.

Try adding posts to you blog, then interlink them using your keyword to your targeted search engine landing page (tselp). This will improve your rankings by you showing google what the page is about and showing that you think it is of value to to relevant content.

Try researching and creating a new homepage title tag that is more keyword relevant.

In your .xml sitemap you have given your "contact us" a 60% priority. Since it wont be changed try giving it a 30% priotity with a monthly change rate (google appreciates honesty). Also change the blog to daily (approving comments ect) count as a change. Remember to add relevant weekly content to your blog (add a few categories and give them different sitemap priorities too) - it helps show google which page you love the most .

Ofcourse another reason you may have noticed a reduction in your google rankings could be due to loosing a few high quality links. Try to re-gain a few good quality links from news sites etc (using link bait, viral marketing and news worthly stories... press releases will help you promote them). Also bookmark all of your sites in digg, stumpleupon ect as many blog writers get ideas from them and may reward you with an article linked to your site (remember the alot of theviewers of social bookmarking sites are bored webmasters who are looking for a story to break).

Adding your site to relevant (free) relevant travel directories will also help boost your rankings but ensure to use your keyword as the title when submitting.

Try changing all of these and you should notice a difference in your G rankings.

Cheers & Good Luck

WigWam

Thanks for the review.

 

[WigWam]

I am developing a site for a client and they would like a holding page live until the website is finished.

The holding page will include a small amount of content and will not link to any other part of the site.

Would it be better to upload the holding page as an image and restrict search bots until the website is finished or would it be better to code the page and make the content live?

Hi Bensd,

What I would advice (for both users and serps) would be to upload a 1 page wordpress theme (blogs tend to get more hits from google than static sites) with a theme like this one http://www.elegantthemes.com/preview/Anticipate/

Try to add maybe 300 / 500 words explaining what the site is about (for the users) and pop in a few keywords for good measure.

Add slightly different title tags and descriptions and update it weekly (add / takeaway a few words)... this will get google and other spiders licking their lips so that when the whole site is up it will get indexed in no time

Cheers

WigWam

 

[bensd]

Hi Bensd,

What I would advice (for both users and serps) would be to upload a 1 page wordpress theme (blogs tend to get more hits from google than static sites) with a theme like this one http://www.elegantthemes.com/preview/Anticipate/

Try to add maybe 300 / 500 words explaining what the site is about (for the users) and pop in a few keywords for good measure.

Add slightly different title tags and descriptions and update it weekly (add / takeaway a few words)... this will get google and other spiders licking their lips so that when the whole site is up it will get indexed in no time

Cheers

WigWam

Unfortunately, they have already had a holding page designed (i am just coding the website) with approx 50 words of content.

Would you still recommend going live with it?

 

[WigWam]

Unfortunately, they have already had a holding page designed (i am just coding the website) with approx 50 words of content.

Would you still recommend going live with it?

as the saying goes, 'anything is better than nothing"

WW

 

[jwm]

ok have a question for you.

how would you recommend link building to a sex toy site given a lot of regular link building methods would not be available due to the content of the site?

 

[WigWam]

ok have a question for you.

how would you recommend link building to a sex toy site given a lot of regular link building methods would not be available due to the content of the site?

Hi Jwm.

Your right, many link building methods (mainstream methods) are out of the window for your site, although there are still alternatives.

Instead of submitting to a regular directory, submit to a directory in that niche. Blog comments can be done on relevant blogs and article submission to many top article sites is still allowed. Try exchanging links with other similar sites (I am sure they would as they have the same problem as you).

You just have to be creative and not submit explicit content to regular sites . Probably worth using a professional seo person for it who has experience in the market.

Cheers

WW

 

[WigWam]

Hi WigWam,

I have a strange query (or at least, it's strange to me)...

I have a website over at www.seemly.co.uk with a coinciding blog, www.seemly.co.uk/blog. But the strange thing is, results for all previous well ranking key phrases have dwindled to nothing.

By no means is this anywhere near a high traffic blog, receiving on average around 20 visits a day. But for the last week or so, I have only been getting 5-6 visits per day.

This website is just a portfolio of my work and services, and the blog is just about general things surrounding website design, graphic design and anything else I find interesting and helpful. Now I dont try to make money with this site. I don't pro actively promote it/spam it, etc. It's literally just my ramblings and posts on anything of interest and things that may help others.

Now I used to rank well for phrases such as "best nexus s widgets", "fancybox close button not showing", "computeach reviews", "ie6 duplicate content fix", etc. These all used to rank on the first page for each given query. Now they are nowhere.

I use a wordpress plugin to auto-generate xml sitemap, and I use "the all in one seo plugin".
I did recently change the blog title (the blog is using wordpress), which seems to have duplicated posts in the index rather than over writing them, so I changed it back to what it was... kinda silly thinking back on this, but hey-ho, I didn't realise changing the blog's title would change every posts title.

I don't link build, and never have (other than comments on blog articles of interest). I also haven't changed the folder structure.

Now the only major(?) thing that has changed is I changed hosts from one.com to krystal.co.uk, in the hope that having a uk based host my ranks would improve... but quite the opposite has happened.

I contacted google through webmaster tools asking for reconsideration, to which they replied:



So my question is: What the hell happened?

Thoughts anyone?

Hi Seemly.

I have just had a quick peek at your site (any your blog post) an have a few comments as to what could be causing it.

Firstly you mention a few keywords that you used to rank for (56th I believe) which have now disappeared. Firstly I wouldn't say that this is a google dance and that it is a fact of improvement to you site is needed.

Consider the following

Adding robots.txt (then submit to google webmasters).
The frequency on your .xml sitemap is FAR to high.
Your whole site only has 61 links in total (most low quality), you will need to step up your linkbuilding effort (try 2 HQ links a day), for the keyword you mentioned it would be virtually impossible to rank for without a good few dozen hq links.
Optimize alt tags on pictures



---
Changing your nominet tag wont make a difference (very unlikely google scans these). Changing server / ip can create a bit of a dance as google will see it as something new, but ultimately if they see the server as an improvement (speed & uptime) they will reward you for it.

Changing the title tags will dent your previous rankings, but again if they are better / more relevant to the keyword google will reward you for it.

Swapping to a UK host is a good geo locating tool for google, this could cause a dance aswell, or a loss of rankings on the generic google.com yet increase your google.co.uk ranking.

The blog does have good quality content (well done), but try not to overuse keywords.

Try swapping from "all in one seo" to "seo ultimate" I prefer using that much more as an seo base on wordpress sites.

In the sidebar use a text widget called "top 5 blog posts" then link 5 of your best posts with keyword relevant anchor links.

Just keep on writing good content and google will keep visiting your blog, and with time it will increase.

Cheers and good luck with the site.

WW

 

[Ashton]

WW, could you take a quick look at my site before I flesh it out?

http://125ccmotorbikes.co.uk

Any on-site SEO suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[WigWam]

WW, could you take a quick look at my site before I flesh it out?

http://125ccmotorbikes.co.uk

Any on-site SEO suggestions would be appreciated.

Hi Aston,

Some quick observations.

1. lower the amount of times you mention "125 cc motorbikes" (14 times) on the homepage. This is keyword stuffing and will do allot more hard than good - try to reduce it to 1 x the keyword per 100 words.
2. When you add the links to the sidebar make them detailed anchor links
3. add alt tags on picture on homepage
4. add sitemap.xml (there are free wordpress plugins for that).
5. add at least 200 more words to the homepage content (relevant).
6. add robots.txt
7. since it is a "product" site ensure you do relevant deeplinking (but dont overdo it).
8. in the footer change "© 2011 125ccMotorbikes.co.uk" to "© 2011 125cc Motorbikes"

hope this helps & good luck with the site - great domain.

Cheers

WW.

 

[wb]

I've got one for you, thought I'd ask it on here rather than email as it's come up a few times before in other threads.

What's your opinion of dropped domains which have good backlinks? (e.g. is there any value in bringing them back to life on a related topic and using them for the 'link juice' which they may give to backlinks).

 

[WigWam]

I've got one for you, thought I'd ask it on here rather than email as it's come up a few times before in other threads.

What's your opinion of dropped domains which have good backlinks? (e.g. is there any value in restoring them to a related topic and using them for the 'link juice' which they will give to backlinks).

Its a strange one this, very debated within the seo community. Although google says that they discredit any previous links this is unlikely unless the domain becomes un-indexed.

In the past I have had domains (that had dropped and caught) rank for some of the strangest terms because of the backlinks that the previous owner had.


Godaddy expiring domains (not quite the same thing) regularly have pr5 domains dropping (if you have the right searching tools you can find them when they sell below £20 daily).

WW.

 

[denchomsky]

Question?

I am soon to launch a car hire site with most of the info/offers uk centric, I have decided to include european car hire so was wondering should I register the .eu of the domain, create a subdomain, or just a new folder?

I know there are benefits with just doing it via folder structure with internal lnks and stuff, but would it be more beneficial duplicating the site (structure not content) put it on the new domain and link between the 2, with the second one being on a different IP?

Cheers.

 

[WigWam]

I am soon to launch a car hire site with most of the info/offers uk centric, I have decided to include european car hire so was wondering should I register the .eu of the domain, create a subdomain, or just a new folder?

I know there are benefits with just doing it via folder structure with internal lnks and stuff, but would it be more beneficial duplicating the site (structure not content) put it on the new domain and link between the 2, with the second one being on a different IP?

Cheers.

I would strongly advice that you use a file structure withing you existing domain e.g. www.carhire.co.uk/{location} or even better www.carhire.co.uk/{country}{location}. It very much more beneficial towards link juice distribution doing it this way and will save you on marketing.

WW.

 

[denchomsky]

Cheers WW, saves me £8 as well.

D

 

[WigWam]

Cheers WW, saves me £8 as well.

D

It will also add allot of value when you come to sell your site (only selling one site // with more traffic).

WW.

 

[willbon]

Nice thread Wigwam.... you ARE the SEO section!

My question for you sir....

When you stop a 301 redirect from domain A to domain B will there be a drop in the ranking for domain B or will it retain it's 'inherited love' from Google?... (assuming domain A is taken off line for a month before developing again)

.. and will domain A get any of it's previous 'love' history back once reignited... or does it need to start again?

(the code 301 has been in place for 9 months)

Multitude of thanks old man.....

Will

 

[WigWam]

Nice thread Wigwam.... you ARE the SEO section!

My question for you sir....

When you stop a 301 redirect from domain A to domain B will there be a drop in the ranking for domain B or will it retain it's 'inherited love' from Google?... (assuming domain A is taken off line for a month before developing again)

.. and will domain A get any of it's previous 'love' history back once reignited... or does it need to start again?

(the code 301 has been in place for 9 months)

Multitude of thanks old man.....

Will

Hi Will, thanks for the compliment

I did this as a test a few months ago with one of my pet related domains (301'ed it to a completely irrelevant site to transfer a good part on the rankings built through linkbuilding). The value of the links will slowly decrease (links getting deleted, sites with links on loosing pr etc).

I restarted the site "A" and gave it a 1 month rest period (as you are) where it was just on a small 1 page site with around 400 words. I noticed that most of the previous rankings for the homepage had come back to their positions, so you should be fine. Just build a few hq links (maybe 10) to give google a bit of fresh interest in the site and build up its crawl rate again.

edit: the site B will loose all benefit from site "A" within a few weeks of the change.

Cheers and good luck with the site

WW.

 

[willbon]

I bow down to your knowledge sir! - Great info - many thanks!

... edit... just seen your edit!

Thanks!

 

[clickedon]

Hi,

A handful of generic questions

- What tips would you give to maximise visibility/click-throughs in the SERPs?

- When generating/optimising content for a site, would you concentrate on directly targeting long-tail phrases or modelling topic clusters?

- You advise above only submitting to article sites which are "relevant to your site and well indexed with dofollow links". Would you go out of your way to avoid 'nofollow' links, as it could be a signal of being spammy, or is it just that you wouldn't spend the time pursuing these links?

- Based on your experience, what ranking signals are currently growing in importance, and which do you think are fading away?

- What tips would you give for SERP domination for a brand name search?


Cheers