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Lots of times I'll Thumbs Up a question, blog post or response not only if I think it's high quality but if I think I'd like to revisit it in the future. Essentially, I want to use a the SEO Moz Thumbs Up as a bookmark.
Is there any way to see all the SEO Moz content that I have given a "Thumbs Up" to?
I know I can review all the questions I've asked or answered in the "My Q&A" page. Perhaps, I'm just missing a "Thumbs Up" page somewhere on my profile?
SEO Moz only gives out 20 Moz points per month for responding for asking or answering questions or leaving replies. After that I you can still thumbs up your own question, response, etc.
First off, congrats on your success! I think it's smart that you are getting people to pay more for timely responses.
In regards on where to go next with all these unanswered questions I'd be asking myself:
If you don't want to go with a forum solution for unpaid questions (and you feel like the pool of experts question answers you could attract to your site is large enough) consider a question marketplace where other experts get paid to answer questions and you take a cut of each transaction.
If you feel like the population of true experts is relatively small and you don't expect to get competition in the future from a competitor who answers questions for free I'd keep all the unpaid questions online along with your price for answering them within 15 minutes. I'd then make sure I marketed the heck out of myself as a true expect. Under these circumstances I don't think your site would seem spammy for leaving up free questions (and acquiring some SEO benefit from them). If your one of the few true experts online and you are filling a need then people will be willing to pay.
This is an interesting idea.To maximize your SEO benefits I would:
Image links have less value then text links. How much benefit will this stategy really give you is tough to quantify. It depends on how many sites are republishing content from your RSS feed, what the quality of those sites are and how relevant the are to your site's industry.
Having the image link back to a post on your site has the added benefit that if someone reads a post on another site on in their RSS feed and clicks the image they'll be taken to your post. Every additional visit to your site is a chance to capture another new reader.
Images don't have a ton of value.
It's tough to say what happened without knowing exactly what the page looked like before and after the change but I'd be asking myself the following questions:
1. How much did the text on my homepage change? How many words did I used to have on the page? How many words to I have now. Has the keyword density changed? Has the number of links gone up drastically.
2. Have my competitors received new links or changed their pages? This sounds less likely given the fact that you apparently dropped about 20 slots.
Can you simply link to your blog, remove the post excerpts and see if you move back up the SERPs? That would give you a pretty accurate idea if the blog is an issue.
I personally would not start each blog post with the same seo keywords. That may or may not seem fishy to Google but will certainly seem fishy to your blogs readers. I'd focus on writing legitimate content and trying to get links to it.
There's been some of discussion on these forums recently about WordPress tags. The general consensus seems to be stick to Categories and avoid Tags unless you can figure out how to SEO tag pages and how to avoid duplicate content issues with post and category pages. I personally don't think that Tags help or hurt that much with SEO. I'd use Tags and Categories if you can present them in such a way that your blog readers will find them useful. Otherwise avoid them.
Google Analytics can track outbound clicks with using their Event Tracking Mechanism. However, you'd need to add javascript to each HTML tag.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55527
I recomment using jQuery to add the javascript.
You can do something like
jQuery('a[href^="http://"]').not('[href*="yourdomain.com"]').each(function(){
jQuery(this).click(function(){
recordOutboundClick(this, 'Outbound Links', thedomainhere);
});});
If you are not technical this Google Analytics add on can help
Sites that work hard at Web Accessibility often reap large SEO benefits.
If you think about it, search engine crawlers have a pretty limited view of any give web page. They can't see the images. They work mostly by indexing text strings and ignoring large components of any web pages presentation.
There's a ton of simple tips for accessibility that help with SEO. For instance, add captions to your images and create navigational components out of HTML lists.
Google's SEO Guide touches on Accessibility
The W3C has Accessibility Guidelines for HTML which is also worth reading.
A quick little tip, whatever SEO plugin you choose, make sure you choose one you like and want to continue to use. If you write a bunch of meta descriptions in one plugin and decide to switch you'll need to figure out how to migrate your existing descriptions or you'll lose them. This is not so much an issue for categories as it is for posts and WordPress ages.
Spiders from search engiines "crawl" the web by following a link from one page to another. Using a rel=nofollow HTML attribute on a link tells the search engine not to follw the link and crawl the page that the link points to.
Search engine rankings by sites like Google are based on the premise that the best content has the most links to it (this is a super over-simplification, I know). "nofollow" links aren't counted by Google when they assign value to the page being linked to.
Most often sites use "nofollow" to block links from user generated content that might be used to manipulate search engines. An example of this might be a blog that nofollows all the links in it's comments so that spammers don't show up and flood the comment section with links to sites they'd like to rank higher in google.
If you decide you absolutely must use tags I recommend creating or buying a wordpress theme that only shows post excerpts on the tag pages. That should help with duplicate content.
Categories in WordPress are better for SEO b/c wordpress stores a description for categories and SEO plugins can grab this descrption and add it to the meta descrption tag in your posts HTML header.
Spiders from search engiines "crawl" the web by following a link from one page to another. Using a rel=nofollow HTML attribute on a link tells the search engine not to follw the link and crawl the page that the link points to.
Search engine rankings by sites like Google are based on the premise that the best content has the most links to it (this is a super over-simplification, I know). "nofollow" links aren't counted by Google when they assign value to the page being linked to.
Most often sites use "nofollow" to block links from user generated content that might be used to manipulate search engines. An example of this might be a blog that nofollows all the links in it's comments so that spammers don't show up and flood the comment section with links to sites they'd like to rank higher in google.
A quick little tip, whatever SEO plugin you choose, make sure you choose one you like and want to continue to use. If you write a bunch of meta descriptions in one plugin and decide to switch you'll need to figure out how to migrate your existing descriptions or you'll lose them. This is not so much an issue for categories as it is for posts and WordPress ages.
There was a really good Whiteboard Friday on this topic.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Rand discusses the tradeoff of the approaches you mention above. Be sure to also read the comments. Some commenters mentioned they had really good results using geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools.
Personally, I would avoid this strategy. If the site selling the dofollow comments is caught by Google then Google could determine that you bought a link and penalize you.
Can you find any sites in your industry that remove the nofollow tag from comment of users who participate a lot on their blog? I'd focus my efforts on such sites.
Not that I'd necessarily recommend this, but you could always report your competitors to Google if they are indeed buying links. Before you do this I'd make sure that you were playing by Google's SEO rules.
I always thought Google's policy towards the Yahoo Directory was strange. However, perhaps it teaches us that if the directory charges for something other then placement (i.e. pay us and we'll expedite adding your listing to our directory) then the paid link is "legitimate".
Lots of times I'll Thumbs Up a question, blog post or response not only if I think it's high quality but if I think I'd like to revisit it in the future. Essentially, I want to use a the SEO Moz Thumbs Up as a bookmark.
Is there any way to see all the SEO Moz content that I have given a "Thumbs Up" to?
I know I can review all the questions I've asked or answered in the "My Q&A" page. Perhaps, I'm just missing a "Thumbs Up" page somewhere on my profile?
Google Analytics can track outbound clicks with using their Event Tracking Mechanism. However, you'd need to add javascript to each HTML tag.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55527
I recomment using jQuery to add the javascript.
You can do something like
jQuery('a[href^="http://"]').not('[href*="yourdomain.com"]').each(function(){
jQuery(this).click(function(){
recordOutboundClick(this, 'Outbound Links', thedomainhere);
});});
If you are not technical this Google Analytics add on can help
Some of those headers might help you serve your page faster. They might save you and your users some bandwidth.
I guess if you think that page load time is super important (most say it's a small factor) then you could argue those are important for SEO but genrally speaking Marcus is right.
Interesting theory! I just checked us on in trends. It says we got whacked too. Still I'm seeing pretty good traffic to our site. I wonder if those graphs are not as bad as they look.
This WordPress plugin might work out-of-the-box for you
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like/
Just download, unzip it and put it in your wordpress plugins folder. Once you've done that login to the wordpress admin area and locate the "plugins" menu on the left side bar. Click on the word "Plugins". You'll be taken to a the "Plugins" dashboard page. Once you are there use the search box in the top right corner to find and activate your plugin.
I know you don't want to deal with PHP but if you have to here's how you'd do it. It's pretty easy.
You'll need to add some markup to the header (i.e. inside the "" tag) of your posts.
The old way was just to just use a "link rel" tag in your header. I believe it still works but is deprecated.
The new way is to use Facebooks open graph tags. See the "og:image" attribute in this document.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Here's an example of the new markup:
property="og:image" content="http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/bb2.jpg"/>
You can test out your new markup using this tool.
