What would you pick? Species/Breed or Topic
-
If you'd like to take a look, the site under quesiton is http://ArkAnimals.Com. At the moment I am considering doing landing pages by topics and not by the type of animals. I will be blending both wild and domestic animals but how to best do this is confusing since so much has changed over the years.
My competitors are focusing on animal types mainly and competition is fierce. Also the site attracts by three main topics not specific animals--so I want to be a bit unique which is why I am considering a topic driven focus.
What would you recommend?
Background
This site has been online since 1994 and on its own domain for a long while. However, over time it has suffered from a lot of things--different designers, expansion, movement of content to niche sites and bad seo. LOL
Once everything was on one site with sub directories. Then, it expanded and my online advisors recommended moving topics off into their own niche sites. So, I did that. Ugh.
Now, much of that content is being integrated back as I am undergoing an intense revamp (the last one was a disaster).
There are a few presenting problems that I could use your perspective and expertise--since I am too close to it.
Problems for Needing Your Input
-
The site is over 2600 pages with many in html and others in php.What is the best practice? Moving the remaining html pages over into php? Some of the pages that were not active have a redirect to the blog. I plan on doing page to page 301 redirects once I dig in--unless you have a better idea. There are a lot of well established links to some of the pages.
-
How many topics are too many? I have a wide variety of content. First, the magazine format covered about six topics. Later, I began covering more pet related items and did a lot of different news summaries to keep it fresh. I want to dump the short outdated pages as many of them have obsolete links or are too short to add any value. Or should I update if they help with the seo rather than continue to let them dilute the site?
-
Landing page or blog? Which is better, an index landing page or blog? At the moment the blog appears on the main index for freshness and the site attracts traffic for specific topics not animal breeds or species.
I want to move the site from an educational site to serving as a main funnel for potential clients driving them to get on a list or to a niche site for sales related to the particular topic/training of interest.
What your take on this if you were to tackle it?
Any input would be greatly appreciated. My audience includes those who are pet owners, novice trainers, and animal lovers with no critter sense.
-
-
Thanks Ryan, I can play with the widget code for the Facebook.
Yes, I am doing an entire site redesign but I wanted to run a few things over here at SEOMoz as well.
It is pretty comprehensive based on all the topics and content and so it is taking a while. My designer so rocks--and has some great ideas.
-
A few thoughts I can share:
The attachment is an image of how your facebook widget appears to me. I checked two different pc's using two different versions of Firefox. There are numerous issues with it's appearance.
I am not a web designer. I have the highest respect for those gifted designers who have the ability to take web content and present in cleanly with a "wow" effect. I can share an award winning web design I have found which I enjoy very much. This design is for Joomla CMS, but can be modified for other sites: http://themeforest.net/item/futureprospects-stylish-corporate-joomla-template/full_screen_preview/400149#?tp=1
I specifically like the "HOW CAN WE HELP? What we offer" idea. Whatever services you provide and whichever items you sell need to be presented in some format on your home page. At the very least, a link needs to be offered which provides greater details.
It sounds like you are unhappy with your site. You would clearly benefit from an updated design. I realize it can be expensive but you may want to consider a site rebuild. Determine what you want from the site with respect to SEO, sales, presentation, etc. and work with a developer who is able to offer a high quality site.
If a site redesign is not workable for you, then possibly redesign the home page.
-
Thanks Ryan,
Appreciate your taking a look. We have already implemented a site wide htaccess change for the blog to remove date stamps but I wasn't aware we could change everything site wide. The last designer did a html template and that is a mess which is another reason I wanted to change the pages.
To answer your question, yes many of the pages I have not touched do have backlinks. Some have traffic and some of the links are 15 years old--which is why I have stayed hands off on messing with it.
Orginally the site was a magazine with six different categories. At the moment I am testing two keywords in the nav and one is out peforming the other. I have three business services which is why you see three keywords. So what would you suggest?
I switched to the Genesis theme last Nov and am not happy with it for a number of reasons. Not sure why the Facebook looks odd to you but will put that on the list. I am testing the response and it actually has grown my community offsite.
As far as sales, at the moment a call to action for sign ups for more information is one idea or a call to action leading to the specific sale of the service most relevant for the topic.
We've discussed doing landing indexes per topic--so your idea about an animal page in a different manner.
Again, my topics overlap different services/topics about animals and each has a different audience (think domestic versus captive wildlife) so I didn't think the animal category would be the best based on the current competition and since many of the topics would overlap between the two species.
For instance, training principles for dogs are common for say, an elephant--so the training principle topic focus makes more sense to me--but then I am too close to this which is why I am in the forum.
I'd be interested in any additional thoughts about that as well.
-
I am wondering the best practice in moving the remaining html pages over into php.
From a technical perspective, any html page can be changed to a php page simply by renaming the file. If you have a page called animals.html and rename it to animals.php, the page will work just fine as long as users link to the proper url.
From a SEO perspective, it would be best to use "tech-free" URLs. Instead of linking to a /animals.html or /animals.php page, simply link to a /animals page. The extension is not necessary. You can ask your host or web developer about making this change. It is extremely easy but the exact method would vary depending on your site's software.
Once the change is made, you would simply 301 the old pages to the new pages. Ideally you can make the change with a single redirect for the whole site saying to simply remove the .php and .html extensions from all URLs. This method would save you from the headaches involved with redirecting 2600 pages individually. It also improves the look of your URL, and eliminates the need to make similar changes in the future.
Before dumping any pages, I would suggest performing some analysis. Do these pages have backlinks? Do these pages have traffic? If the answer to either question is yes, you want to carefully 301 these pages to the most relevant page on your site, or consider keeping / updating the page.
Your site has many SEO opportunities.
-
Your home page title targets 4 keywords and contains your phone number. This is not a good strategy for SEO.
-
You do not have any H1 tag on your home page
-
Your facebook widget is poorly integrated into your sidebar. I am using FF and the appearance is quite bad with me not being able to read any of the text of your comments.
There are numerous other opportunities. In general, if you wish to transition to a sales approach, you will need to directly engage your visitors and have some form of "Buy" call-to-action message prominently displayed.
-
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
JS reliant faceted navigation - ecommerce/blog - is it a bad idea?
I have noticed that some e-commerce sites don't worry aout their store working when JS is switched off - yet some do - are there any SEO implications of losing faceted navigation/filtering functionality when JS is disabled I tried M&S - didn't work - but Tesco did - when JS is disabled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Crawling/indexing of near duplicate product pages
Hi, Hope someone can help me out here. This is the current situation: We sell stones/gravel/sand/pebbles etc. for gardens. I will take a type of pebbles and the corresponding pages/URL's to illustrate my question --> black beach pebbles. We have a 'top' product page for black beach pebbles on which you can find different types of quantities (differing from 20kg untill 1600 kg). There is not any search volume related to the different quantities The 'top' page does not link to the pages for the different quantities The content on the pages for the different quantities is not exactly the same (different price + slightly different content). But a lot of the content is the same. Current situation:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMAGARD
- Most pages for the different quantities do not have internal links (about 95%) But the sitemap does contain all of these pages. Because the sitemap contains all these URL's, google frequently crawls them (I checked the logfiles) and has indexed them. Problems: Google spends its time crawling irrelevant pages --> our entire website is not that big, so these quantity URL's kind of double the total number of URL's. Having url's in the sitemap that do not have an internal link is a problem on its own All these pages are indexed so all sorts of gravel/pebbles have near duplicates. My solution: remove these URL's from the sitemap --> that will probably stop Google from regularly crawling these pages Putting a canonical on the quantity pages pointing to the top-product page. --> that will hopefully remove the irrelevant (no search volume) near duplicates from the index My questions: To be able to see the canonical, google will need to crawl these pages. Will google still do that after removing them from the sitemap? Do you agree that these pages are near duplicates and that it is best to remove them from the index? A few of these quantity pages do have intenral links (a few procent of them) because of a sale campaign. So there will be some (not much) internal links pointing to non-canonical pages. Would that be a problem? Thanks a lot in advance for your help! Best!1 -
What does Disallow: /french-wines/?* actually do - robots.txt
Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Putting my content under domain.com/content, or under related categories: domain.com/bikes/content ?
Hello This questions plays on what Joe Hall talked about during this years' MozCon: Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing. My Case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
So.. we're working out guidelines and templates for a costumer (sporting goods store) on how to publish content (articles, videos, guides) on their category pages, product pages, and other pages. At this moment I have 2 choices:
1. Use a url-structure/information architecture where all the content is placed in one subfolder, for example domain.com/content. Although it's placed here, there's gonna be extensive internal linking from /content to the related category pages, so the content about bikes (even if it's placed under domain.com/bikes) will be just as visible on the pages related to bikes. 2. Place the content about bikes on a subdirectory under the bike category, **for example domain.com/bikes/content. ** The UX/interface for these two scenarios will be identical, but the directories/folder-hierarchy/url structure will be different. According to Joe Hall, the latter scenario will build up more topical authority and relevance towards the category/topic, and should be the overall most ideal setup. Any thoughts on which of the two solutions is the most ideal? PS: There is one critical caveat her: my costumer uses many url-slugs subdirectories for their categories, for example domain.com/activity/summer/bikes/, which means the content in the first scenario will be 4 steps away from the home page. Is this gonna be a problem? Looking forward to your thoughts 🙂 Sigurd, INEVO0 -
CMS Pages - Multiple URLS (/)
Hi guys, this type of question has been asked a few times before but I couldn't find something that told me what i need so apologies if its a tad repetitive. I use Magento, and have several pages using its CMS. However, it produces 2 URLS for each page with a simple /. For example, website.com/hire
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
website.com/hire/ I know google treats this as 2 separate pages, which would be the better solution. 1. Write a URL re-write for every CMS page
RewriteRule ^hire$ http://www.website.com/hire/ [R=301,L] (Is this right?) 2. Write a general rewrite rule to always add the /
No idea where to begin with this 3. Add a Canonical tag to the page which i think is possible in magento by adding this to the Custom Design Layout XML option in the page CMS. <action method="addLinkRel"></action> <rel>canonical</rel> <href>http://www.website.com/hire/</href> This would make the /hire/ page self-reference and the /hire page reference the /hire/ page I think. Which one of these solutions is the best and any pointers with the coding would be grand.0 -
Best way for Google and Bing not to crawl my /en default english pages
Hi Guys, I just transferred my old site to a new one and now have sub folder TLD's. My default pages from the front end and sitemap don't show /en after www.mysite.com. The only translation i have is in spanish where Google will crawl www.mysite.com/es (spanish). 1. On the SERPS of Google and Bing, every url that is crawled, shows the extra "/en" in my TLD. I find that very weird considering there is no physical /en in my urls. When i select the link it automatically redirects to it's default and natural page (no /en). All canonical tags do not show /en either, ONLY the SERPS. Should robots.txt be updated to "disallow /en"? 2. While i did a site transfer, we have altered some of the category url's in our domain. So we've had a lot of 301 redirects, but while searching specific keywords in the SERPS, the #1 ranked url shows up as our old url that redirects to a 404 page, and our newly created url shows up as #2 that goes to the correct page. Is there anyway to tell Google to stop showing our old url's in the SERP's? And would the "Fetch as Google" option in GWT be a great option to upload all of my url's so Google bots can crawl the right pages only? Direct Message me if you want real examples. THank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Indexing/Sitemap - I must be wrong
Hi All, I would guess that a great number of us new to SEO (or not) share some simple beliefs in relation to Google indexing and Sitemaps, and as such get confused by what Web master tools shows us. It would be great if somone with experience/knowledge could clear this up for once and all 🙂 Common beliefs: Google will crawl your site from the top down, following each link and recursively repeating the process until it bottoms out/becomes cyclic. A Sitemap can be provided that outlines the definitive structure of the site, and is especially useful for links that may not be easily discovered via crawling. In Google’s webmaster tools in the sitemap section the number of pages indexed shows the number of pages in your sitemap that Google considers to be worthwhile indexing. If you place a rel="canonical" tag on every page pointing to the definitive version you will avoid duplicate content and aid Google in its indexing endeavour. These preconceptions seem fair, but must be flawed. Our site has 1,417 pages as listed in our Sitemap. Google’s tools tell us there are no issues with this sitemap but a mere 44 are indexed! We submit 2,716 images (because we create all our own images for products) and a disappointing zero are indexed. Under Health->Index status in WM tools, we apparently have 4,169 pages indexed. I tend to assume these are old pages that now yield a 404 if they are visited. It could be that Google’s Indexed quotient of 44 could mean “Pages indexed by virtue of your sitemap, i.e. we didn’t find them by crawling – so thanks for that”, but despite trawling through Google’s help, I don’t really get that feeling. This is basic stuff, but I suspect a great number of us struggle to understand the disparity between our expectations and what WM Tools yields, and we go on to either ignore an important problem, or waste time on non-issues. Can anyone shine a light on this for once and all? If you are interested, our map looks like this : http://www.1010direct.com/Sitemap.xml Many thanks Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fretts0 -
Finding broken links / resources by topic
Hi fellow mozzers! In an effort to ensure we're exploring every avenue when launching our new website, I was hoping to find some useful broken links / resources that we could incorporate into our link building. We have used the standard tools for this (W3C, Xenu etc), but they all seem to have the same issue in that they reveal all the missing links on a site (although some don't actually tell you the page they are on), but you still have to sort them to see if the links/ resource is related to your theme. When you're on a niche site, this obviously isn't an issue, but on a site like Mashable (to use the example given in a recent SEOmoz blog) it could result in wading through hundreds of links to find one relevant one right at the end. Is there a tool that allows you to specify what theme links you are looking for from a site, or better yet one that allows you to check multiple sites for multiple missing themed links in one go? Or is the best way to export the list and just search the document for certain keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | themegroup0