Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It does not appear you've designed your site for the user - it looks quite spammy.  If you really want to rank for Chesterfield Lawn Care, add it to the title of the homepage.

I don't understand the disparity between the rankings.  I would think Bing would want to mirror the "Big G" as closely as possible to meet user expectations.

We are ranking very well in Google SERPS, but lackluster for the most part in Bing SERPS.  i haven't seen anything that clearly lays out how to optimize for Bing, but my concern is that if we make changes to opt for Bing that we might lose Google ranking.  Any insight as to what we might do?

A few suggestions - considering the size of the homepage, it loaded fine in my Chrome browser.  If I was browsing the web, I would probably bounce from this site if I was looking at design alone.  Perhaps spend a little bit of money and time coming up with a professionally designed logo?  I don't understand the color scheme - bright colored line breaks with gray borders? If you're trying to generate income and interest readers, maybe create an oDesk job and see what you get?  Good luck!

That makes MUCH more sense.  I'll Google it a bit and see what others have to say.  Thanks Keri!

We are experiencing a similar phenomenon.

Everything is way off.  Even our company name according to GWT is ranking at an average of 4.5.  Does GWT also include universal results in their ranking report?

In our keyword rank tracking report, we've dominated a keyword in Google and have secured the slot for years.  All evidence points in this direction.  In Google Webmaster Tools, however, this particular keyword averages a rank of 6.5.  Is anyone else experience these kinds of discrepancies?  What is your take on it?

I can only speak from personal experience, but we've done very well with not including our company name in the title tag.  I would think that Iris Scott is unique enough that the competition will be low and you should rank naturally.  When you say title is too long, how many extra characters do you have (over 70).  I don't know how much of a factor that is outside of viewers not seeing the entire snippet in the SERPS.  One could argue that Google would look at that because they want to provide the best experience for their viewers, but I would devote my time doing keyword research instead.  Good luck!

PHP.

It appears that the free online tools limit the number of URLs they'll include.  What tools have you had success with?

What tools do you use to determine which links you will be disavowing?

Not one of these sites have been developed and therefore do not have link equity.  You think we'd get benefit from pointing all the TLDs to the main IP?  I can't imagine someone typing mysite.ws.  There's been internal discussion about pointing all of these to the main site, but I don't see the benefit of this besides some of the misspellings (which aren't listed here).

We have close to 60 domains that we are considering pointing to our main site.  Is this type of a redirect a good idea?  We have a number of domains that are industry related but do not have our brand name in the domain.  Should we point these sites to our homepage as well?

Pros/Cons?

Examples:

<colgroup><col width="201"></colgroup>

XXXXXONLINE.COM

WIDGETSRUS.COM

WIDGETBLOG.COM

|

I'd recommend doing some research to determine if the best thing to do would be to blog.myotherdomain.com vs. myotherdomain.com/blog.  I've been told by a reputable source that wordpress is not a very secure platform.  They recommended that we put it as a subdomain.  I was disappointed to hear this because you then lose the real SEO value to the root domain.  Maybe somebody smarter than me can explain this better.

Google is king, but it seems as though there is a significant source of traffic and revenue from Bing.  What is the preferred strategy?  Optimize for Google and hope it filters to Bing?  An obvious concern would be that if we change tactics to please Bing, we could stand to lose our rankings with Google.  Any opinions/thoughts/feedback/suggestions would be appreciated.

I've found pluralized versions of a word tend to be searched more than singular versions - at least according to our set in Google Keyword Tools.  I look at customer intent.  Would a customer search for thai food restaurant in oregon, or thai food restaurant(s) in oregon?  If there is a clear winner I would go after that.  I'm not absolutely certain if Google will give you a solid ranking for the singular version because it is embedded in the pluralized version.  Maybe someone can confirm.

Bonne chance(s)!

Which specific metrics are not improving?

White - Only for the consumer.

Black - Only for the search engine.

Gray - Where most of us live.

That example is a dark shade of gray.  I mean who in their right mind would find that second example helpful?

Maybe consider how you want to present the data?  Just shooting from the hip, I'd say create three - one combined and two separate.  But there might be filters within one profile that will split this data.  I believe in identifying the goal (in this case how to display the data) and then formulating an action plan to get to that goal.

I run a custom report in GA that looks at landing page by keyword and try to make some sense out of that.  Do you have any better custom GA Reports?  As far as your other points, they are all very valid and we've been considering them.  I am a proponent of gaining insight through the customer voice - as long as it is not viewed as being intrusive.

Thanks in advance for your response.

I understand your point.  We are not seeing that lateral spread - instead, we are seeing advancement in our product rankings.  Say we were in jewelry, we would be seeing more traffic from "rose gold necklace" or "pearl ring" rather than "how to take care of pearl jewelry" or "what is the best length necklace".  Similarly, we might rank for broad terms like "jewelry store" or "jewelry store + geo-modifier".  To me, these would be very significant terms that could convert, and while it doesn't hurt to have them, what can/should we do to convert?

We've definitely looked at landing page modifications and moved product around to what we think customers would most like to see.  We are definitely seeing a dip in conversions, but this could be a reflection of the economy, etc.  What I'm curious to know is if a site sees a huge lift in visits, what's an acceptable drop in conversions?

Thanks in advance for your response.

That basically describes what we've done - we've taken our retail site and really fine-tuned the icon/niche products and secured #1 placement for most of those terms.  We have not pursued the article/blogging avenue as of yet, but we expect to be successful in that venture.  If we do as suggested, we expect to drive even more traffic from words that wouldn't fit in our current ecommerce setup...but wouldn't that contribute to an even lower conversion rate?  At the end of the day, the "bankers" are interested in the money in the bank and not the number of visitors that came through.

So here is the dilemma - I look at the keywords and they are all what I consider to have high potential - but they are simply not delivering.  The other issue I have is that we are driving a significantly higher amount of traffic as a result of this campaign to our store locations page, but I can't tell how many of these customers go into one of our 30+ locations (I am assuming a significant amount).  Our local search efforts really have helped us in this endeavor - but without proof of the results, there are challenges to justifying the time an

So what we've done is in effect expanded our net with highly relevant keywords, but we don't know why they are not buying or if they are buying at one of our locations.

We don't know if the most effective approach would be to bring on a survey partner or seek advice from a conversion expert.

Any thoughts?

Wow, that is funky.  Are they on the same server?  Any infrastructure issues?  I don't understand how that would happen unless the content was somehow switched on the pages?  I would assume that if you look at the result in the SERP, you can compare that content with what is on page....are you sure that doesn't occur anywhere on the site?

We've recently implemented a successful strategy whereby we've increased non-branded organic search traffic by over 50%.  We started with our niche products and secured those rankings and then expanded the program to include local results.  Rev is up, trans# is up, but conversion rate dropped.

Here is the question...is there an acceptable ratio between the percentage growth in visits and the percentage decrease in conversions?

Look for the SEOMOZ tutorial by Benu Aggarawal (spelling might be wrong).  The focus is on local optimization and they really go into detail about citations, links, NAPs (yes nap), etc.  I haven't seen Yahoo local mentioned in a long time - is it that significant that it deserves that much focus over Google & Bing?  Here's a pure speculation on my part, but if you do edit Yahoo Local as you've suggested, the PA might not be as strong, but wouldn't the DA retain it's integrity?

Definitely spend the hour or so in reviewing the tutorial - I think it's called Google Places Best Practices or something like that.  Very good stuff when it comes to optimizing for local.

I would say your idea to target the keywords in blogs that are subsequently developed is a reasonable approach.  The example of the footer links seems a bit spammy, yet at the same time it does seem to provide useful navigation and may represent the overall architecture of the site.  Are you going to target a local approach as well?  (i.e. ms access consultants in California, etc.).  Maybe someone on here can explain cannobilization of keywords better than I can, but we've had good results "silo-ing" each page and are ranking high on those keywords.  I think you could do the same.  Good luck!

Google will deliver personalized results including, but not limited to: browsing history, geographic location, etc.

For instance, if you've been to your own website and search for a specific term tied to your site, your site may rank higher on your computer because Google's been altered that you've been to the site before and might want to see it again.  This was a fun lesson for me when I was thrilled when one of our key terms hit #1 on my computer only to have the powers that be pull it up on their computer and it was at #6.  I use SEOMoz Rank Tracker and love it.

Are you talking about coming up in Google Places as the #1 position or in the regular organic search?  Rand just put up an awesome tutorial on local search - go to Learn SEO, then Pro Webinars and look for the one about local content.  I just finished watching the video, and it was awesome! Tons of ideas.

Did you use the seomoz.org/rank-tracker tool?  Does it show you rank #1 for this term?  My guess is that it doesn't....I'm interested to know.

Wow, that's a really good question.  If there were only one image on a page (e.g. selling a product), I'm sure that labeling it as you suggest wouldn't get flagged as keyword stuffing.  Certainly you want to enrich the human experience, but to be honest, I haven't noticed as much impact with the alt tag as I have with other methods.  I'm interested to see how this discussion evolves.

We went through almost exactly the same thing a little over a year ago (although the pages were not created in FrontPage).  When we switched to a more dynamic solution, we did not use 301 redirects and we suffered as a result.  With a little bit of elbow grease in the form of optimizing page titles, URLS, on page text, etc. we are ranking even better than we ever have in the past.  We did notice a huge increase in branded keyword search and a huge drop in direct traffic (I am attributing this to not having done 301's).  Do 301's no matter what!

I've heard of the age of a domain being used a signal by Google, but not the age of a page (I don't have information on this if it is true).  I can't imagine that Google would reward an old page as opposed to a page that is optimized and current with valuable content.

It is true that the pendulum could swing either way, so make sure you create a baseline of where you are at in terms of SERPS now and be straight-forward with the stake-holders.  Don't panic if you drop.  Just work your way methodically back to the top using ethical practices.  In short, the ramifications could be good or they could be bad.  Good luck! That's quite an endeavor!

I just got a brochure with a very impressive lineup for the upcoming eTail conference.  Has anyone here been to the eTail Conference?  What's been your experience?

We've had very good results by silo'ing our content.  We do use drop down menus.  We are ranking very high (top three) for some targeted key phrases that are over two categories deep.  I'm a big fan of the silo approach.

Thanks The Back Burner.  The site does not rank higher than us for the targeted keyword, but their DA blows us out of the water.  I think (very roughly) is a fair assessment, but how can you use the SEOMoz report (if it's so off) to come up with a strategic plan?  I would expect this sort of variance from a free service, but not one that is $100/mo.  I look forward to Matt Peter's response.

Thanks gmkrish for that resource.  I would love to hear from the engineers.  I love the summary screens but they don't seem insightful at all.  Would the better way be to go through OSE, export to spreadsheet, and sort by different metrics for each competitor?  Seems like a lot of work for this kind of insight.

We are competing with other national brands and have a competitor who is NOT a national brand and who does NOT have any metrics ranking higher.  With the latest SEOMoz metric update this week, they (hawaiianjewelryshop) now have the highest DA in Link Analysis. Has anyone else experienced this?  Can SEOMoz explain this for us, please?  It would be great if Matt Peters would respond to this question.

The sites in question are:

www.nahoku.com
www.mauidivers.com
www.hawaiianjewelryshop.com
www.jared.com

I've heard the term used in some of the webinars hosted on SEOMOZ and tried googling the term with no results. What the heck is this?  And how is it good for SEO?

Thanks Dan.  Actually, it is exactly what our site is about, and we are getting ranked for all kinds of non-branded keywords.  Happy days!  I didn't think of the indexing possibility and tipping the scale.  I'd be interested to hear what else people say.  Thanks again!

I am seeing some very interesting changes in our non-branded keywords, and am curious to know how keyword significance in Google Webmaster Tools plays into ranking of a site.  Say for example we are a photography website selling photography supplies.  At one point our most significant word was Canon, but now it is photography.  Would that mean that we would start seeing a lot of non-branded keywords generating from Google like "camera strap", "camera lens hood", etc.  This is really good for us, but curious to know if the only reason we are seeing this is the shift in our keyword significance.  Any insight?  Thanks!

Do you have Google Webmaster Tools installed?  I am curious to know what your keyword significance is.  Also, take a look in the Magento admin panel, you should be able to find where you can automatically generate SEO friendly links...very handy.  I don't see any category descriptions...just product.  Do you think you might benefit by including some text?  Do you think you might have any issues with making the logo image your H1 tag?