Quote:
Originally Posted by TatumLD
Thanks for your replies. I greatly appreciate it. 4-5 years ago I read that links were important so I added them to my home page.. I obviously regret the decision now.. but I am a little paranoid to remove them. I had enjoyed great placement with Yahoo and Google for my main keywords, "Save the Date Magnets" and basically thought that I shouldn't change anything since the site ranked so high.
Anyway, the site is dropping with Google. I am concerned that if I move the links to my "links" page that something bad will happen.
Any input? Am I just being paranoid?
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I have lots of input on this question!
(And it's very timely as I just got my first save the date magnet in the mail this week ... a niece is getting married. )
First of all, Google *does* give your page some juice for linking off the site or home page to an "authority" site. So, since you are trying to be a site about Wedding Magnets, your link to the magnet and wedding sites are useful *iff* those sites are considered to be authority sites by Google. I have a feeling some should go off your home page, and you should maybe link to some other higher quality sites to take advantage of this feature.
If you look at my home page you will see I link to several
SEO/web design sites.
Do I lose business because of it? I doubt it. I believe you have to capture the buyer above the fold; and if you haven't done that, it doesn't matter if you give them a way to leave your site.
NOTE: You *should* (hate that word) at least use the target_blank attribute in your href tag so that a browser window remains open on your site, but I really believe that for the most part, a visitor who leaves via a link like that was going to leave anyway, so better they left via a link on your site than returned to a Google SERP because Google sees that and understands that they found something they wanted on that page; and that is a good thing for your site.
If you want to test it, though, you can take the links off entirely, and put them on your links page. Wait until Google caches the page, check your placement and if you're slipping, put them back on the home page and see if you recover some ground in the SERPs. ... Personally, I would leave the good ones there, move the ones that aren't relevant like beauty products or the slacker site, perhaps, and add a couple that are more Google trusted sites. Want to know which ones to add? Do a search for weddings and link to any of the top 10.
And these should NOT be reciprocal links. You defeat the whole exercise, as Google is less and less impressed with recips.
BTW, why not use Google Analytics? It's free and it really will help you understand the traffic you are getting ... you will be able to see if you really are losing traffic to the links and to which ones ... as well as much much else ...
Wedding Save the Date Magnets is searched more than twice as often than save the date wedding magnets. And you come up #1 for the more highly searched term, #13 for the second term, so I presume that's the one you want to target ... so it seems you are doing pretty well. Were you higher for the latter terms before the redesign?
But why not change your title tag to
save the date wedding magnets? I know it doesn't read quite as well, and we are supposed to consider the human visitor first! But is that really the smartest move? I don't think so ...
If
I am not optimized for the search engines I will not get the traffic (unless I want to pay for it), so to my way of thinking designing for people first and SEs second is backasswards. 
First design and optimize for the SEs with humans in mind, obtain your position in the SERPs and *then* refine for your buyers ... of course, you can do both to start with ... but if I have to choose one over the other, I choose SEs first.
<title>Save the Date Magnets for Weddings and special occasions! We have
photo wedding magnets too!</title>
That's several words you don't need: 'we' 'have' & 'too' ... don't waste valuable title characters ... and since people aren't searching 'magnets' and 'special occasions' together those may also be wasted characters ... tighten and refine or use another useful keyword phrase.
Try renaming your logo with your keyword phrase, too ... save-date-magnet-logo.gif ...
your magnet samples could be renamed as magnet-desc.jpg, etc. ...
And here's a biggie: maybe I am missing it, but I don't see an absolute link on your home page to your home page using your anchor text ...
That's enough out of me tonight ...
Happy SERP Recovery, MJ
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