Ask me Anything - Search Engine Optimization Expert

OldCoals said:
What does (not provided) mean in Google Analytics?
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Means Google doesn't want you to know the keyword from their search results.

You can actually go into webmastertools > search traffic > search analytics and found out the keywords.

Fairly sure the answer is no said:
i run a cleaning company and we have a nice decent website getting better every week with little tweaks, extra pages we feel the customer may want to read, blog etc. i know that in reality even with myself unless i used a company, i'd never feel the need to share someone's site like mine. It'd have to be something like say i had a builder and they created a beautiful bathroom, i may share this on fb and maybe link to who did it.

in the past i used to hear about how you should submit articles to article websites, make comments on blogs and link to your website, but these tips seem to have died off now and always felt spammy and unnatural any way.

if a customer does share a link it'll most likely be through facebook, and more likely to our facebook page, so not really doing much from seo.

what ways could we create links to our site? 1 way is we hope to create interesting articles that would one day be shared, but how do we go about letting people know these articles even exists? should we let local news businesses know of a great article we just did comparing xy and z, or perhaps good deals? I feel the only way to get links is to either pay or do what feels like spam
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The best option is not to create links but get your content noticed (content marketing) and get people to link to you (link earning) because your value proposition or content is the best on the web (or first).

Content marketing sometimes needs a bit of a push, an example would be to find a relevant resource or website and pitch them your great content. For some niches it's easier (like publications) for others it's tough but can be done.

Sometimes when I'm stuck I go through competitors and reverse engineer the good content marketing. I go through their whole link profile and pick up the gems I can do myself. This though is time consuming but usually worth it even if you only get 1 strong link.

swinnie said:
Would you approach a new website/domain differently to one that has been online for sometime? Even if you were developing (or a new website had been developed) onto the existing domain?

If there are differences, what would they be?
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Depends what you mean by new and existing. If the existing site has nothing ( basically just a website that has been online ) it's similar. If the website has been online for a few years and is "rocking" it in sales or views etc you may need to plan out differently.

It's a case by case thing so no definitive answers without seeing what they/you have done to the website. Some sites need more/better content, some need links, some need better onpage seo or CRO. Usually sites vary a lot in these areas.

It all comes down to what you need more sales, or leads or more traffic etc

Gangster said:
How do you know if SEO is 'done' if you follow guidelines? Is it just a waiting game?
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It's never done, but it's a waiting game in general. You have to define the goal of each change so you can track if you are getting results.
 
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Here is an interesting one, I've just had to take a job for a local company on their media team. They are a UK wide company.

the sole purpose of which is to publish 2000 blog posts with 'location specific blog posts' in the next 100 days in order to get them to the top of google without needing pay per click. Looking at their website it seems that a lot of them are the same blog post with different locations in them.

Surely this will be picked up by google and they will end up being penalised for this?

Su
 
AHarvey said:
Here is an interesting one, I've just had to take a job for a local company on their media team. They are a UK wide company.

the sole purpose of which is to publish 2000 blog posts with 'location specific blog posts' in the next 100 days in order to get them to the top of google without needing pay per click. Looking at their website it seems that a lot of them are the same blog post with different locations in them.

Surely this will be picked up by google and they will end up being penalised for this?

Su
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If the posts are anything over 20% of duplicate content good luck :)

20% btw is my rough estimate and even that much would need an extremely special case for 2000 blog posts.

Churn and burn is the term for websites like that.
 
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Fairly sure the answer is no said:
so where i've done the following...

http://www.mayercleaning.co.uk/services/oven-cleaning/woking.php
http://www.mayercleaning.co.uk/services/oven-cleaning/guildford.php
http://www.mayercleaning.co.uk/services/oven-cleaning/walton-on-thames.php

etc, where you can see the only difference is the town name in the title, h1 tag, and a few times on the page, however all the content that is the exact same, is this not going to do any good for seo? how much would i need to have unique on each page?
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Its thin and duplicate content.

They will probably never rank in a million years.

Seriously talk with the Company and tell them they are going to have trouble in the future.
 
ok i've spoke with myself and wondered then what better way to do it would be? I don't mind going through and changing the content for each page to be some what unique (though it will take it's sweet ass time), but how much would the required amount be?
 
Fairly sure the answer is no said:
ok i've spoke with myself and wondered then what better way to do it would be? I don't mind going through and changing the content for each page to be some what unique (though it will take it's sweet ass time), but how much would the required amount be?
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There's no exact required amount, does it help the user ? Is it content that isn't available everywhere or somewhere else?

As a user type your selected keyword in google and see what pops up. The first results are what users prefer.
 
anyone any basic up to date booklets I can print off that covers how google rank websites?

I had a great one from Tim McCloud over at TMC from a workshop I attended through Cheshire website but I can't find it now :(

I just need something simple and to the point that covers the 3 methods Google use to rank sites so I can show it to the new boss and hopefully we can go to creating an informative site over one rammed with duplicate content.

(And getting them to read through moz.com is asking too much)
 
AHarvey said:
anyone any basic up to date booklets I can print off that covers how google rank websites?

I had a great one from Tim McCloud over at TMC from a workshop I attended through Cheshire website but I can't find it now :(

I just need something simple and to the point that covers the 3 methods Google use to rank sites so I can show it to the new boss and hopefully we can go to creating an informative site over one rammed with duplicate content.

(And getting them to read through moz.com is asking too much)
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http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

This is probably the most jam packed one..
 
There is a website I'm interested in, but it looks like it has been blacklisted by google. Nothing linked at all etc, even though the site has been active since 1995.

Can it be unblocked or once gone is it gone?
 
sports_brah said:
There is a website I'm interested in, but it looks like it has been blacklisted by google. Nothing linked at all etc, even though the site has been active since 1995.

Can it be unblocked or once gone is it gone?
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does it come up for a site:website.com search in google ?

If you are sure it's blacklisted don't touch it get a new domain with a new rep, its near impossible to "unblock" it.
 
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Something I've been wondering, how important these days are H1,H2 tags etc? Ive played around with a few ready made Html templates from Themeforest recently, some stunning looking ones which appear to be very well coded but when you look through the code itself some of them have no H1 or H2 tags, and maybe only a handful of H3 tags?
 
Draeger said:
Something I've been wondering, how important these days are H1,H2 tags etc? Ive played around with a few ready made Html templates from Themeforest recently, some stunning looking ones which appear to be very well coded but when you look through the code itself some of them have no H1 or H2 tags, and maybe only a handful of H3 tags?
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H1 tags are a must. H2 onwards can be used inside posts or pages with <h2></h2> etc, so not a biggy imo.

You can custom code everything relatively easily, but do you trust a theme developer that doesn't even know the basics of SEO ?
 
Draeger said:
Fair point! :)

So what would be involved in changing say an already present H3 tag into an H1 tag? Is it as simple as amending the code and substituting a number 3 for a 1?
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Yes and no.

The H1 tag is only used for the page title (1 element)

"Ask me Anything - Search Engine Optimization Expert"

This is the H1 and should only be present once...

For wordpress your page.php / single.php is where you can edit this.
 
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englishpremier said:
How important is https to SERPS. Sure I read somewhere that all things being equal google will rank a secure site more highly. Curious as to your experiences with this?
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HTTPS had a reasonably strong correlation with first page Google rankings. This wasn’t surprising as Google has confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal.
 
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