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SEO questions and answers

Written by: Elchanan Rotstain

Article Overview: Web owners with no SEO experience writing us about their problems. We're solving their troubles on our blog. and I'm sure you can find out a lot and learn about search engine marketing by reading these answers.

SEO questions and answers

Subject: How much would it cost to optimise an apartments site?
Q: How much would it cost to optimise a site that I’m building that caters to renters and landlords kind of like apartments.com and rent.com? I want to rank for keywords such as apartments, apartment, rental apartments, flat guide, etc.
A: If you don’t have $100,000 marketing budget to invest in SEM - forget about it!

Subject: We need a web presence and traffic can you help us?
Q: Just built this site not one of the most beautiful jewelry sites out here on the web. What we need is a web presence and traffic can you help us? We are new to this, and we don’t want to lose our shirts in advertising that does not work.
A: THIS IS YOUR PROBLEM:
Be modest. Your site is not “most beautiful jewlrey sites out there”.
Nobody can help you get top ranking for “Powered by Microsoft Office Live Small Business” website. Don’t spend even a penny for that.

Subject: an Entire site is not indexed.
Q: an Entire site isn’t indexed.
A: Your home page does not have links to deeper pages of your site (sitemap XML is not sufficiently) and your search results are purposeless. Why do you believe Google will index its own advertisements?

Subject: Banning due to multilingual version of website
Questions you need to ask yourself:

1. When it happened?
2. What have you recently done or changed?
3. Why do you think it banned?

You can find some answers for common ban issues on blogs.

These are the answers provided by the website owner:
As requested you can find here more details related to our problem:

1. When it happened? It happened in March 2007 when we dismissed the old website and launched the new one (as it appears now). Google ranked the domain www.***.it.it but not the main one www.***.com.om.

The .com domain was previously ranked in Google but then banned. In June 2007 we also presented the multilingual version of our website.

2. What have you recently done or changed? We are trying to optimize contents and metatags (title, keyword, description) for search engine optimization but the problem of www.***.comcom still remains (banned).

3. Why do you think it banned? We are very confused since the website is well structured, and we keep updating contents.

Thanks again for your help.

A: The multilingual version is defiantly the reason. Are you sure all your sites are happily grasping in Google meadow?!

This is typical Google filter for months now, so they’re not banning related sites (checked by whois data similarity, too many cross links, etc.),
What they do is, if you have A.com, B.com and C.com domains they will show only A.com were the other two B.com and C.com sites are “transferring their juice” (jargon, read nice explanation at randy zlobec blog) to A.com.

Don’t be so sure your sites are banned, they just boosted another site of yours. This is exactly what BLOGS are for.

You also hit the “Google canonical filter” which even BMW has been banned in the past (here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ramping-up-on-international-webspam/), from the same reason: Doing wrong with their multiple sites targeting different languages.

Use site analysis and learn how to optimize your sites for Multilingual & International SEO. Do it right and within 6 weeks you are on the road again.

Subject: How many characters are recommended.
Q: How many characters are recommended on following fields -keywords;-title ;-page title?
A: Title - Max 70 chars
Keywords and desc - Max 250 chars.

Metatags Order:
- Title (first line after the head)
- Keywords
- Desc
- the rest

Subject: I pay too much for AdWords Pay Per Click Advertising.
Q: I pay too much for AdWords Pay Per Click Advertising, and want to convert it to natural/organic search results.

A: Site Analysis:
You are using Yahoo Store shopping cart. Y!store is not giving you real SEO solutions...

The Solution
(1) Login Yahoo Editor and edit Object properties Headline, Custom properties and add the missing Search Engine Optimization elements.

(2) Replace built-in Yahoo Site-Search/search-box with better site search solution that integrates with your Yahoo Merchant database.

(3) Improve site navigation, searchability and accesability on your Y!store website.

(4) Use Analytic Tools helps you to understand better your visitors and their behavior. We mean organic and PPC.

(5) Verify Y!store website and add generate Google Sitemaps.

(6) Submit free XML Feed to Google Sitemaps.

You can also use products like “static site wizard” to solve the Yahoo Store Catalog dynamic content publishing problems.

Subject: I need help clearing the duplicate content on my site.
Q: I need help clearing the duplicate content on my site.

A: Site Analysis:
You have about 2,650 indexed pages by Google with bad title metatag.
Only 506 are in the main index, all the rest are in “Google hell”.

Read more about Google hell on blogs.

Read more about Google patent Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate files here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,658,423.PN.&OS=PN/6,658,423&RS=PN/6,658,423


Subject: We are in the penalty box.
Q: We are in the penalty box. We have rectified everything we can think of. I.e paid advertisements , too many keywords and links per page. We are stuck and want out.

A: Site Analysis:
Your site is not penalized in any way. You have inner-links content issues that Google dislike and the proof is this: Go to search page number 34 to see this message:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 333 already displayed.

If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Ratio of 330 “good pages” (main Google database) out of 53,000 “potentially indexed” is bad one.

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Article Tags: advertisements, apartment, beautiful jewelry, blogs, business website, domain www, google, landlords, marketing budget, microsoft, microsoft office, rental apartments, small business, traffic, web presence, website owner, website questions, xml



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