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Ben Morei stated the difference between HTML4 and HTML5 in using heading tags already. His answer is therefor completely correct.

What i would like to add to his answer is that you should look at H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 tags as if the webpage is a book. In a book the chapter-title is a H1 tag. All the subchapters have an H2 tag. If these subchapters have another sub-area then this would be marked up with an H3 tag and so on.

Having a clear hierarchy in your heading tags will make it more user friendly. Search engines might also understand better which parts of the content are connected to each other and which are separate because of this.

Hope i answered your question and if anything is still unclear feel free to ask more details.
We have three answers to your question here now and the question is still on marked as 'unanswered'.

If your question is answered could you please mark the answer which was most helpful as the correct answer so this question is no longer on the bounty page for no reason?

Hello Rob,

In order to improve your local SEO you would need to claim (or create) your company's 'local listing' pages across platforms. A lot of websites out there list local businesses such as Google Places/Local, Yahoo local, Foursquare, Hotfrog, Yelp and much more.

Many of these platforms allow you to claim the page where they give out your company details so you can fill in the information about your company yourself. Once you've done this you need to make sure the information there is correct.

Enter your company name, address and contact details everywhere in the same way. For a computer it's very difficult to understand that avenue is the same as 'ave' in an address.

Fill in a good description, add photo's/video's if you have any and make sure the listing describes clearly what your company does and what it is all about.

The most important one of these is your listing on Google Places/Local. This page will actually rank in the search results as you described. Make sure you fill this in as good as you can. Google will use this information and compare it to other listings of your company. If they see that the information is consistant this would indicate to Google that the information is correct and they will trust you more and more. This would help you rank better in local SEO for related search queries.

Another good thing to remember is that reviews help you rank too. If you've got loyal and satisfied customers, ask them to write a review for you on your Google Places/Local page.

Note: Don't pay people for reviews or anything. It's against google's guidelines to buy or sell reviews just like links.

Some resources to get you started:

• The definitive guide to local SEO

• Free local SEO tools that belong in your toolkit

• Local SEO tips for 2014

Hope i answered your question. If anything was unclear or if you have any more questions please let me know and i will do my best to answer or explain more.

It is very difficult to tell you something if you don't tell us where to find your website.
If you could post the url here in the following format: domain (dot) com then we could give you an accurate answer.

My first guess is that you haven't set up a proper rel=canonical.
In the eyes of a computer the following URL's are all different pages.

www.domain.com
domain.com
www.domain.com/index.html
domain.com/index.html
www.domain.com?sessionid=1
etcetera...

If you're not canonicalizing your pages or redirecting them properly then a computer such as a search engine will see it as different pages with exactly the same content.

As i mentioned before, this is just a guess and i can't give a proper answer without knowing the URL of your website.

Hope my answer will be useful to you.

Optimizing the page with geographic long tail keywords is still best practice.
Google does display local search results based on IP adress when they have access to the location data of the given person.

I would still recommend using the location based keywords as long as you don't keyword stuff your texts.

Hope i answered your question

Ah i had this same issue before. Perhaps you made the same mistake as me.
If you go to your campaign and click on the top right button 'Campaign Settings'. Here you should have a look at the page crawl limit. There is a 50.000 limit on this in the trial version and on my first campaign i selected 50.000.

If this is the problem for you as well you can just edit it and create another campaign

Google tends to scramble the title tag and description tag up if they think that it will serve the user better based on the provided search query.

Sometimes Google changes title tags so they'll contain branding purposes.

Anyway nothing is wrong with Google changing your title and/or description tags. Google always serves what they think is best for the users. I've noticed that they were scrambling my things up too and they actually helped me improve my title tag.

Root domains i suppose. Where exactly do you see RDs?

First off you should go to webmaster tools and make sure that you have verified that you are the owner of both the www and non-www version. After this you can tell Google your preferred version of the page under the site settings within webmaster tools.

This by itself will tell Google that it should index the preferred version. Furthermore you said that the non-www redirects to the www version now. Google will pick this up in time and will start indexing the www version.

Your question about why only one got indexed is hard to answer like this. If it's not the robots.txt than it could be a link rel="canonical" pointing towards the non-www version?

Think about the user experience when implementing a solution like this.
If your user expects to find a blog post about a certain topic make sure they are redirected to at least something which is connected to that.

On a webshop selling clothing articles it would make sense to redirect a deleted shoe article to the category page for shoes or to show them a custom 404 page which helps them on their way to find more content.

If redirecting them to something relevant is not possible i would suggest creating a custom 404 page which explains that the page has been deleted but that certain pieces of your content may be interesting for them. (Link to those pieces of content.)

Just redirecting users to the homepage or other pages which are not relevant only annoys the user and gives them a negative association with your website.

Hello Denis,

To your first question: Schema.org is indeed much more specific than Google's data highlighter tool.
To your second questions: If the client has a footer with their contact details and address location than this would be a good place to use the schema markup and then it would be included on every page.

You're talking about 'manually marking up every page'. If the contact information is in the footer this would only have to be marked up once? Don't really understand that part of the question.

**Conclusion: **It's not necessary to mark up local business information on every page, but if the client has the local business information on every page because it's useful for their users than this is a perfect opportunity to mark it up with schema information.

Hope i was of assistance and if you have any other questions please let me know

I would recommend going for option 2 -> domain.com/category/images

The keyword you mentioned is "Category images". Both of these words are now in the URL structure. The difference SEO wise is very very very small though.
The structure of option 2 is much simpler and more straightforward. It looks less spammy and is easier to type in. Therefor it's better for the user and for you to use option 2.

If you have any other questions feel free to ask me

I've worked with some e-commerce sites before. I'll try and explain the way i handled it.

1. Know the opportunities and limitations of your CMS (Content Management System). I've worked with Magento and i did a lot of things by myself which were done automaticly by Magento. Such as creating XML sitemaps. Knowing what your CMS does for you helps you focus on the weak points of the CMS.

2. On page optimisation: An E-commerce site wants to get found on it's products in most cases. Are your product pages optimized? Make sure that all your product pages have a really good title and description. Not only for SEO purposed. Of course having your important keywords in there helps but make sure people would click on it too. Find someone from your target group and ask them about the quality of your titles / description. Would they click on it? If no, then why not. Use their feedback to improve them even more. Product descriptions should be really good too. This webshop http://www.vat19.com/ really knows how to create product pages which are aimed at their target group and contain a lot of content. The images and video's are rich media which are relevant for the target group and Google loves this.

3. Social: There are so many possibilities for E-commerce websites on the social platforms. Make sure you have a Facebook page, twitter account, Google+ account and Pinterest account. The buttons should be implemented on at least the product pages as well. Facebook and twitter allow you to reach your target group and get more exposure to other people. It is now even possible to include webshop functionality on Facebook pages. Google+ will soon get this too if i'm not mistaking. I mean they have Google shopping and they are making Google+ the center of all Google products with an added social layer. Pinterest allows you to pin all your products and recently they added the option of adding prices and stock to your pins.

4. Link building: As Takeshi said before this is an excellant list of link building techniques: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies. Make sure you have content that people want to link to. Some e-commerce solutions offer a blog next to the webshop and i know that there is a Magento plugin for making a connection to Wordpress. A blog is something to get a better connection to your customers and is great link bait by itself. If you do other things such as product review video's or so this is also an excellant place to gather feedback from customers.

I hope i helped you somehow and if you want more advice or if anything was unclear please let me know.

Good luck

I'm not sure if Google if able to tell the difference between good or bad English at this moment.
But i do know that this is one of the criteria which they want a website to rank as is described in this document about Google Panda: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

This method is not permitted though and you may have a benefit for this on the short term, but i can tell you that it won't be long before you will get a penalty for this technique. Link building is not about buying links in any form. It's about creating awesome content that people want to share just because they think it is awesome.

Of course reaching out to people is also part of the process. But the key is always to make sure that you have to create a site that people **want **to link to because it is awesome of because their website will get better from it because your website offers great value to their visitors.

Always keep this in mind

For 'regular' SEO citation usually offer very little to no value. Most citations include a nofollow link and citation-website are often not niche specific.

Sure users might go to a local listing service like yelp and search for a business that performs the service they need or sells the product they need. But these searches are often for local businesses. If the business we're talking about is indeed a local business than they would benefit from this through Local SEO and the users searching for them through these platforms.

For a non-local business the value of citations is debatable. It doesn't hurt, but there might be better links to pursue.

4000 products is indeed a hell of job to tackle if you want to write an original description for every single one of them. It is recommended to do this since it will improve the site.

I agree with Doug that you should start on the products which sell the most because you want to get found better on these products. I would start doing a given amount of products each day and keep good track of which products you did and which you didn't change.

Furthermore what i think is the most important thing is the title tags and description tags of those 4000 pages. Are they well optimized? Even if the pages are ranking well at this moment the title and description tags are the only way you can convince the visitor to click on your link in the search results and therefore they should be compelling and descriptive.

As long as the affiliate links are 'nofollow' there won't be any problems for you.

Very good one Takeshi. Didn't think about whether the site in question had similar products like these. You are also right about the user reviews.

User reviews are a great way of getting unique content on a page. If you implement user reviews and ratings make sure you mark them up with structured data such as HTML5 Microdata. This way it can appear in the rich snippet. This page explains a lot about it: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173379&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

My preference goes to a seperate stylesheet. Many people will indeed not update their browser because they don't want too or because they can't. Depending on the niche you're in people might be visiting from their work computer a lot. Could be that they are stuck in an old browser from their. Therefor a link to a browser upgrade will only annoy them instead of helping them.

Using a stylesheet to fix the errors in older browsers (such as IE8) will give them a usable site which looks good too. This increases the user experience much more than an annoying pop-up.

You could republish to blog posts wherein you use the new keyword in principle. What i think you should take a look at though are these two posts here on Moz by Cyrus Shephard.

They are about using keyword themes which is the way to go from now on. If you are thinking about editing blog posts this might be a good thing to start doing right away.

• How to Rank
• Keywords to Concepts

They are invaluable resources and define the modern and future best practices concerning keyword research and optimization.

PS: If you're going to update your blog posts you might also see if they could be made better in any way. Using rich media, is the content completely up to date, is there anything else that could be added to improve the article etcetera..

I have found the error.

At the bottom of the page at the left side of the screen you have a green link.
This link is pointing to http://www.comptavenir.fr/www.comptavenir.fr

You should change this link from:

www.comptavenir.fr

To the following:

www.comptavenir.fr

Hope i helped. If i did please mark this as the correct answer

If you are really sure that there are mistakes in the software then you should probably contact the Moz Technical Support.

If you contact them and together you will find something out let me know what the outcome is.

I don't think the word 'cloaking' is the right word since that is hiding content from users which you do want to present to the search engines. It is pretty weird though. A 302 should be a temporarily redirect and that they want to no-index the link it redirects to could make sense in some way.

If they are planning on changing the website then they could be temporarily redirecting the url's to new ones which they don't want to be indexed. When they have made the necessary changes they will remove the redirect and possibly the no-index pages.

Seems like a weird workaround but i've seen people thinking in weirder ways before.
It's more probably that they suffered from a panda or penguin update and that just like you they thought they could recover with a no-index (and a redirect?).

Pretty weird story, curious to see if anyone else has some kind of explanation to why someone would set their site up like this.

I see a link to http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/HeutinkICT.aspx from http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/ReindersICT.aspx.

It's the bottom left block which causes this link. This way you will get a big nesting effect.

Don't try to do it through Google Map Maker. Instead go to Google+ under your personal profile.

• On the left hand side in the sidebar you will find a link 'Pages'
• Click 'Pages' and then click 'Local business
• Type in your company name. It will show existing companies with that name. Choose your company.
• Follow the rest of the steps.

After some time a postcard will be send to your companies address with a pin-code. This pin-code can be used to verify you as the owner of this page. Then you will have full access to edit the content of the page.

Alsvik, in your previous post Joel Day tried to help you by addressing your questions one by one.
His reply was very helpful and polite, you didn't give him that respect back.

He also meant that the issues you are having are technical and this is not the right section for that.
This is for community based questions. Not questions to Moz.

You started a new question. Make sure it is a question.
Your previous questions were answered correctly. If you would have listened you might have been been helped already by Moz technical support.

My answer is exactly the same as Joel's. E-mail Moz about your issues.

I mean no disrespect with this answer.

About the ripped articles. If they have a rel=canonical link in the header it shouldn't be a problem.
If they don't have it you can report it to Google.

Half the links is a pretty big number. It's not harmful to your site if you have a couple of bad links coming in. It's part of a natural link profile. Perhaps you should focus on gaining more good links so that your link profile is better in balance. If they are linking to your from websites like porn, drugs, gambling etcetera i would disavow them with Google Webmaster Tools.

For now i think your should focus on getting more quality links since your link count is apparently not very big. (you said 52 links were half of your total link count).

Great infographic, thanks for the share

John, did you use an incognito browser where you are not logged in to your Google account?

The 301 redirect would be a better option.

I will try to explain why this is better than a 404 page.

1. If people posted a link to the product PageRank to your website.(This is one of the ranking factors in Google) If the page doesn't exist anymore and brings up the 404 page it will lose the value from all the links to that particular product. If you use a 301 redirect to send visitors to a relevant product or to the homepage then the value from those links will have effect on the page where you send them to.

2. Nobody likes a 404 page. There are very cool things you can do with a 404 page so that they are still helpful to the visitor such as most popular pages, a search function and even jokes. But in the end nobody would have clicked on the link or typed in the url to your website and think: Now i want to see his 404 page.

I hope i answered your question. Let me know if anything was unclear.

These links in the footer pass little to no SEO value anymore. I would stop doing this and encourage your client to spread the news about their new website to local media and have them write an article/press release which refers to you as the designer with a link. If the website contains a blog they could also place a blog post about the new site and give you credit themselves.

A 303 won't send 'link juice' that means that all the value you website gets on mywebsite.com won't be send to mywebsite.com/fr/. You should use a 301 instead.

If you mean cancel the Moz subscription. There is a button on the billing screen (on the right).

https://mza.bundledseo.com/users/subscription

Did this answer your question?

That shouldn't hurt your site. I rebuild an e-commerce site which had 50.000 redirects in place at the moment i was working on it. Of course it adds a little bit of load to the server but it's not really noticable. This way you will keep the value of the old links.

Thomas Hall is right about the soft 404 pages being generally more acceptable. If you care more about the user experience then about the value from your old links then you could build a dynamic 404 page.

This page should tell the visitor that the product no longer exist and should give them a couple of products which are similar of relevant to the product they were searching for. This way you will improve the user experience with a soft 404.

Just to be clear, you don't have to set a redirect to the home page. You could also do it to the category pages or to popular products. It's very difficult to say since i don't know which branch your in. Who your target group is and what they are interested in.

Hello Rob,

Rich snippets are still in an early fase so i understand your pain about not being able to show your logo in the SERP's. The publisher markup is an option as Matt Antonino mentioned but this only shows up for brand queries so it might not be what you're looking for.

I do see that you have a YouTube video placed prominently on the homepage. Perhaps you could use a video sitemap to get a video rich snippet?
The process for this is described here: Video sitemap for vimeo and youtube

Other than that it's not possible as far as i know to get a good rich snippet for a business if you do not have a specific product or recipe to show.

Hello fellow mozzers,

I have a lot of experience with Magento and a little bit of experience with Prestashop and i am quite aware of their strengths and weaknesses regarding SEO.

I was wondering which E-commerce CMS is the best for SEO. I am talking about the CMS as you download it. There are hundreds of plugins for the popular systems which improve their SEO power tremendously, but i'm interested in which CMS is the best right out-of-the-box.

Let me know what you think and why you think so.

Thanks in advance

Which URL(s) is/are causing problems?

Perhaps you did something to send people who end up on a 404 page back to the homepage and typed in 'www.domain.com' in the place where to want them to end up. You should type in '/' at these kind of plugins to go to the root domain.

302 means a temporary redirect. If you want to permanently redirect the old URL's to the new URL's.
Why would you want to redirect to the search page? That doesn't seem to be the most relevant page for the redirect?

You could use this extensive guide: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

If after this guide you still have questions let me know and i would be happy to help you with that

Okay, I am sorry to hear you cancelled your subscription.
I'll try to address everything one at a time.

The Moz tools are working correctly so far for me so I can't really help you with the issues that you have. As said before the Q&A is still not the place to talk about technical difficulties.

I think the reason that your thread was closed was because Joel answered your question on a couple of subjects and told you that you should contact je technical support because you were asking it in the wrong place (Q&A). It's a shame that after so many mailing with SEOmoz they haven't been able to solve your problems.

About the respect thing. I wasn't talking about use of different words but more the reference to Gordan Ramsey. Gordan Ramsey is not known for his polite way of saying things and this reference was not necessary in my opinion.

Hey Segafredo,

Don't you think these URL's are a little bit long?

There must be a better way to organise your URL structure.
www.domain.com/shop/coffee/beans/brand for example.

You could leave out the second 'coffe-beans' and the 500gr could be an attribute of that product. This way it won't be in the URL. It would make your URL's easier to remember. Makes it look less 'spammy' and just look a lot cleaner.

You would still rank for 'coffee', 'beans' and 'coffee beans'.
Your name is Segafredo so if you are really from the major company Segafredo then the short URL's would be a lot better. A big brand like that would get visitors and links by itself and messy URL's would do your reputation no good.

Hope i was of assistence. If you have any other questions let me know

If you can create a really good page for the basketball/hoops, then make a really good page for that.
If you can't create something good for that then you should change it to basketball-hoop. It will take care of being found on the query 'basketball hoops'.

You should take a look at how many links are pointing to /basketball and /basketball/hoops. Make sure you set 301 redirects if you change the URL structure.

The second website path is a little more difficult.
swingsets.com/swingsets? That is what i would call stuffing + users don't like long urls.

If it's possible try to stick to the following structure: www.domain.com/category/product-name.
I know it's difficult since you are doing something with combinations.

I'll think about it some more and if i come up with something i'll let you know.
Hope i was remotely helpful at this moment.

I would like try and identify the problem. Send me the link and i'll see if i can do anything for you:)

Okay, that is a difficult question. They are two completely different sites in the eyes of search engines unless you do a redirect. At this moment their are probably a lot of links pointing to one of them and also a lot pointing at the other site.

This can also create nasty duplicate content issues.
Sorry. but i wouldn't know which one to choose for the most accurate one since they should be counted as a single website.

Hope i've helped you in some way.

Hardley 111, NAP stands for name, address, phone number

Do you have Google Analytics installed?

If Google sees these 404 errors too you could look from which pages it finds these errors.
If you can find a page which links to http://domain.com/domain.com or something let me know and i'll inspect the page to see if i can find a problem there

Thank you for the answer and video Christine!

Are you somehow linking to www.website.com/dogs/dog.html from the page itself? There could be something wrong with that link.
I made a small mistake not so long ago with a redirection plugin. I told it to go to domain.com. This plugin was looking at the base + what i told it to. So it went to: domain.com/domain.com. Perhaps you made a similar mistake.

Maybe you can send me the URL and i can take a look at it?

It would be better to post on a regular schedule. (In your given example that would be every two weeks).

This is for a variety of reasons.

1. The search engines will see that you have a fresh batch of content every now and then.
2. Users will see that there is a blog post every two weeks and if they think that your blog is interesting enough to follow they will visit you every two weeks to read the new post.

Hope i answered your question