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It depends on the blog. General good manners dictate that you use your name or company name, but some blogs don't mind if you use your keywords. Read the blog's comment policy and/or look at the other approved comments to see if it's OK to use your keywords.

If in doubt, use your name or company name. Many bloggers don't appreciate keyword comments - they look less authentic and more spammy.

John,

I would go with the second title tag you listed. It contains all your keywords in exact or phrase match, and is more professional looking.

I avoid using exact keywords when it means your title becomes a list of keywords. It looks unprofessional and I haven't seen better results by doing it. I would ensure that your most important keyword is listed first.

Another example:

Keywords: cordless phones, buy phones, discount phones

My Title Tag: Buy Discount Cordless Phones (much better than a keyword list, and works just as well in my experience.)

So, I was reading Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth tonight, and found a description of a graffiti tag in the Labyrinth that says "MOZ RULZ". What do you think? Is one of the Mozzers a demigod who has explored and survived the Labyrinth?

(See attachment for book quote.)

F1WmT5r

I've never seen any evidence that .org links are inherently more valuable than .com or other links. (I've not seen any evidence that .edu links are inherently better, either.)

This post from and this video Matt Cutts seem to imply that the TLD is not a significant factor in ranking.

I think this whole idea that links from certain TLDs (eg .edu) started because people took a true statement (eg "most .edu websites are high authority websites with strong editorial control) and extrapolated that into ".edu links are inherently more authoritative". Mediocre SEO's then latched onto this idea, because they found they could easily get .edu links through blog comments and sell them for a premium by claiming they are more powerful. What you actually had is people building outright spam links and claiming they are great just because they are on an .edu domain.

I analyze .edu and.org links just like I would any other link - relevance, authority of domain, authority of page, editorial strength, etc.

I think you may find this helpful: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details

SEO:

• Do a search on Google for the products/services your company offers. Show your managers how potential buyers are finding your competitors and buying from them instead.
• Explain why SEO traffic can be such a powerful way to drive sales - because you get to present your company at the exact moment a potential buyer is looking for exactly what you have to offer!

Social Media:

• Present how you could use social media to promote content that would help position your company as an industry-thought leader.
• Present statistics showing how many people are using social media.
• Show how other companies in your industry are using social media to stay in touch with prospects, promote product specials, etc.

I'll skip the whole buying links lecture and give you some practical advice.

If you are going to buy links, my advice is to not buy them from a broker - links bought via brokers and networks are easier for Google to track and penalize. Buy direct from the webmaster.

I did a super-quick review of your backlinks in OSE. What I saw was mainly press releases, with a few links from sites you own, and links from pages full of spam like http://www.alivincent.com/blog/post/2010/04/28/Work-Weeke280a6e280a6-when-the-reality-show-becomes-a-REALITY!.aspx

I also notice that your backlinks are overwhelmingly using your target keywords as anchor text, so you may be suffering for anchor text over-optimization.

My recommendation would be to focus more on higher quality, natural backlinks. Focus on SEO strategies that build your brand and focus on users. You might find http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-big-brands-get-all-the-breaks helpful.

Hope this is helpful.

Anyone have insight into what specific factors penguin is targeting and how it works?

Matt Cutts seemed to infer that the site was targeting things such as spun content, keyword stuffing, etc. but most of the sites that have been hit that I've seen aren't doing any obvious content spamming like that.

For example:

• Is penguin looking primarily at onsite or backlink factors?
• Does Penguin just discount spammy backlinks, or does it apply an additional penalty to sites that have poor quality backlinks?
• Anyone noticing specific onsite or offsite factors that correlate with whether a site has been hit or not?

A few suggestions:

• Anything you can do to get the new domains indexed and a few links built to them well in advance of the redirect might be a good idea. I've never had it happen myself, but I've heard of a few cases of lost rankings when redirecting to a fresh domain.
• Once you do the redirects, try to get your most important links changed to the new domain. (Redirects to lose some link juice and/or decay over time.)
• Make sure you are redirecting each page on the old site to the most relevant page on the new site.
• I've never redirected every single URL on one domain to pages on two other domains. You might want to ask around to see if Google might frown upon that (I can imagine this is a tactic spammers might try to use to pass link juice to a bunch of domains). I'm sure someone else has done this and could advise.
• Any chance of keeping your current domain for one of the two sites?

I can think of a few options for the homepage:

• Don't redirect it. Create a splash page with a "which do you want" option and links to both domains.
• Redirect it to the domain that is most important to you.
• Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the highest number of users.
• Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the keywords the homepage currently ranks for.

Hope this helps!

If they haven't 301'd the link, they are missing out on the link juice.

You could always try to convince the websites to replace the broken link with a link to a similar page on your site.

That's an OK idea. Personally, I would 301 the .net to your main domain and blog on your main domain. I'd rather have all your link juice pointed at the one domain.

Yes, I've seen this more than once. There are two causes I'm aware of:

1. Google hasn't updated its index and is showing an old version of your page.

2. Google is getting the title from elsewhere, such as DMOZ (they can and will do this in some cases).

About 160 characters or fewer: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

You will need to programmatically add the canonical tag to every page on your site (just make sure you do it correctly!) so that every page has a tag indicating which is the canonical version of that page (the version without the setCurrencyId variable in the url).

Here are more details on the canonical tag.

Another possible solution would be to use GWT to instruct Google to ignore that variable in the URL.

Why not add a blog to your website and focus on producing some really great content for it? This can be a great way to not only get rankings but establish yourself as an industry expert to sell your services.

That's just a fraction of a percent difference.

Google's count of results is not that accurate. You can demonstrate this on smaller sites. Google might say "200" results but once you start digging down its only 154 for example.

The count of results is only an approximation of the actual number.

100 isn't really a hard and fast recommendation any more. I do not think your page has too many links to be user-friendly. From an SEO standpoint, see these resources:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0

I don't think you necessarily need to reduce your links on the page. However, I would definitely limit links to less important pages so that you maximize the link juice that flows to your important pages.

Subfolder is more ideal. Seems link juice may get passed better between subfolder and domain than subdomain and domain.

Hi Nic,

That's a pretty broad question, but here are a few basic suggestions:

• Unless you really want to manage your blog in Magento, I would setup your blog using WordPress. All the features and plugins you'll need, plus plenty of community support, and it's easy to use.
• Focus on publishing great content, SEO, social, and building an audience.
• Install Google Analytics.
• Make sure you have Facebook like button, Tweet this, and Google +1 on each post.
• Install the All In One or Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
• Publish great content and promote it.

I would:

• Keep the photo on Houzz
• Make sure you're linking from Houzz to your site (dofollow if possible)
• Keep working on your site, so you can rank about Houzz, then you'll have 3 first page rankings

There already is. Below the question there is a little envelope icon you can click to "Subscribe to this Question".

A few rules of thumb I use to target multiple variations of the same word:

• If possible, optimize your page for each variation
• That would include having each variation in the page title
• At the very least, include each variation in the page content
• Prioritize which variation is most important, and place it closer to the start of your page title
• Use each variation, and variations of the variations, as anchor text when link building

By the way, I would be interested in hearing about the differences you are noticing based on case sensitivity.

Matt Cutts has indicated that they use whois info to try to know when sites have been sold and 301'd for link juice. Other than that, I would not expect your whois data to affect your ranking.

Sure, it's possible. Site size is generally not a ranking factor. Not directly, at least. As Jim points out, the larger site may be more useful to the user, which would attract more backlinks, etc.

Bottom line: Focus on making your site the best. If that means adding more great content and making it bigger, great. If you can make it great without adding more pages, that's fine, too.

Just wanted to second basically everything Cyle said. Your design is great, but your sales copy and messaging are very generic and vague - you need copy that grabs visitors attention and tells them exactly how you're going to help them get what they want or need.

As Cyle said, conversion/bounce rate optimization is not a quick fix - it's working with a lot of different factors and testing changes to improve results.

I suspect that at least one of these statements is true to some extent:

• Contextual/in-content links have a little more weight than byline links
• Contextual/in-content links have more contextual relevance than byline links
• Contextual/in-content links are slightly less likely to be penalized or filtered than byline links

I can't prove my suspicions, and I'm not suggesting that byline links are all bad (far from it), but we know for a fact that Google takes "location on the page" in consideration now when calculating PageRank. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE

That would be bad for SEO, and search engines would not likely index the content. It's possible, but not likely. I am working with a site that has done this exact thing, and the content is not indexed.

So basically you're asking if Google Adwords and/or MSN Adcenter ignore stop words for the purpose of match types? I've never heard that they do, so I believe that your ad would not show in the examples you gave.

Sure. Here goes. Of course, keep in mind that for more enterprise/corporate situations, the options we use may not be as good of solutions. I think that for their target market, Vocus probably works very well, I just think it's not for us at that price point.

Based on the demo I saw, here are the main features included and how we fulfill them:

• Listening Platform - Google Alerts for super basic stuff. We use a platform one of our clients has, and there are other platforms available for low cost.
• PR Distribution - On the rare occasion we need mass coverage, we just pay the per release cost. Most of the time, it's individual outreach that gets us the best results anyway.
• Facebook Apps - Some of these might be of use, but not the custom page one. We custom design Facebook pages. I think Wildfire has some free ones.
• Press Requests - They are just offering a slightly premium version of HARO, which you can use for free.
• Recommendation Engine - I currently don't use any platform that automatically recommends people to connect with. You can use FollowerWonk, Twitter search, etc for this, though.
• Sharing Options - TweetDeck, browser toolbars, and a host of other applications are available to make sharing easy and even schedule posts.
• Reporting Dashboard - We use SEOmoz features, Google Analytics, etc to do the reporting we need.

Unfortunately, there are no specifics any of us could give you in that regard. The results (number of visitors) you'll get from x number of links depends on many factors, including your keywords, onsite optimization, link quality, etc.

The best way you could estimate would be to take each keyword and determine:

How many exact match searches are their on Google for this keyword each month?
If we achieve a #X ranking, what CTR could we expect?

The answer to those two questions will tell you how many visitors you might expect from the keyword.

Then you'll need to analyze your competitors keywords and estimate how many and what type of links you'll need to achieve the ranking you want.

Together, that will give you a very rough estimate of how much traffic you might expect from your link building efforts.

"anchor tag and then an image with alt attribute as logo"

That is what Matt Cutts says Google prefers, yes.

SEOmoz has a ton of features. Here are two good places to start:

Beginner's Guide to SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Overview of SEOmoz tools: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/seomoz-pro-tool-overview

If you search for locksmith Phoenix, this Google+ page is ranked #3 in the local results: https://plus.google.com/117543374216451236579/about?hl=en

The phone number is a VOIP number, they don't appear to have many/any citations, no reviews, etc. They've listed the Yelp search results page as their website. Strange.

How are they ranking so well? Is Google ranking them well because it's associating them with Yelp.com?

Any thoughts?

Article spinning is certainly not the best way to achieve top rankings. In general, I would consider it "probably  spammy" depending on how it is done. Google is actually starting to crack down on article marketing in general a bit with the recent Panda/Farmer update. There are definitely better strategies to focus on.

Based on what Matt said, it sounds like Google only wants you to use the tool for links that you've tried to remove manually but couldn't. My guess is they may ignore your disavowals if you rely too much on the tool.

OK, here is what I see:

1. You don't have a robots.txt file, so it's not that

2. As Tyler mentioned, you have quite a few pages indexed: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aenergyacuity.com&num=100 although most seem to be in the Newsletter subdirectory. THe main pages of your site don't appear to be indexed.

3. I checked several pages of your site and found no meta tags that could be causing the issue.

4. Your links are not nofollow, so it's not that.

One possibility is that Google just hasn't gotten around to indexing the pages yet, perhaps because of your site's low backlinks/PageRank. Are you sure your entire site used to be indexed but no longer is?

Yeh, at least 12 SEO years, if not 20, the way stuff changes.

I would imagine it hasn't changed a lot though, because SEOmoz still says that alt tags appear to carry a surprising amount of weight.

That's a bad thing. Use an alt tag instead. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBLvn_WkDJ4

My reply was in reference to web directories, not link exchange directories.

I do not recommend that you do link exchanges based just on PR. If you want to exchange links, find a few very high quality sites that you can exchange links with that will offer value to your users, not just search engines.

I'd say one site per market.

So if your content is about 5 different types of sport cars, make 1 big site.

If your content is about sports cars and printers and fishing, make 3 sites.

"How do I know when a site has too many links versus the number of unique cblocks?"
There is no set number or formula. You want your links to be as diverse as possible, and C-class IP blocks is one metric that matters.

"Is this the total number of unique cblocks on the web or am I using the tool wrong?"

There are many more than that. Not familiar with the tool, but it may be a limitation of the tool. It looks like it uses Yahoo backlink data, which is limited to 1,000 links.

I would not do social bookmarks or search engine submissions.

I would:

• search for a few good quality industry or local directories to submit to
• try to get links from vendors, local businesses, etc. the client has a relationship with

Google makes updates to its rankings and algorithms daily. That being said, SEO is a long term game played over weeks and months. If your site is new, expect it to gain rankings over a matter of months.

We have a client site (a dentist) that has 10 locations and 20+ services (braces, teeth whitening, cosmetic dentistry, etc, etc.). We're trying to figure out the ideal approach to optimally cover all their locations and services, but each option we consider has drawbacks:

1. Optimize service pages for service name + each location name (or at least the biggest location names), with service name and location names in the title tag. That results in a too long title tag, plus possible user confusion, since they are searching for "braces richmond" but the title tag lists other cities, some of which are in a different state.
2. Optimize service pages for service name + each location name, but don't include the locations in the page title. This is the current option being used, but it appears to be hurting the rankings at least a bit not having the location name in the page title.
3. Create a page for each service + location combo. That will be 200+ pages, which will mean the pages will be deeper in the site, with less link juice.
4. Create new domains for each location/state covered. But then we have to start over building link juice.

How have other sites dealt with this? What has worked best and what hasn't worked?

If you pay them to put links on their private network of sites, then those are paid links, which would break Google's guidelines.

What good/bad experiences have people had trying to optimize a single URL for multiple locations in different states? eg optimizing a page of the site for "dentist atlanta", "dentist orlando", and "dentist miami" (the client has offices in all these locations).

Has anyone found that Google has an algorithm that get's suspicious if you try to optimize a given URL for either too many locations and/or for locations that are too far apart?

I would use the domain name or brand name. A keyword anchor text link in the site footer looks like a paid link/spam link.

Correct, Bing powers AOL and Yahoo.

I don't think DuckDuckGo has a Sitemap submission feature. If you list your sitemap in the robots.txt file, though, maybe they will still crawl it.

Billy gave you some good advice, but I disagree with him on one point. Domain authority doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether a link is dangerous or not. You can get a spammy link from a domain with high authority or a great link from a lower authority domain.

You want to get rid of links that Google will view as intended primarily to manipulate search rankings instead of providing value to the user.

Some factors to consider:

• Is the link from a page or site that is relevant to mine?
• Does the link make sense for / provide value to the user?
• Does the link use my target keyword(s) as anchor text? (Too many keyword anchor texts is a problem.)
• Is the link purchased?
• Is the link near or with spammy links?
• Is the link from a low quality directory, forum signature, blog comment,
• Is the link from a page of duplicate content?

Hope that helps!