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so do you think it will be a big deal if my server is listed on the list? I understand how annoying spam is, I just get concerned that my server IP is on the list.  It is a shared server btw

Someone here pointed out that my server ip is on the SORBS-SPAM list and I was wondering if this was a big deal, and how it might have got there, and I would go about getting it off the list?

that Jquery slider is AWESOME! totally going to use it. great tip.

So I am fixing the alt image text, but I checked the keyword analysis and I got an A for my search term.  I think that the search term you checked was just carpet cleaning? do I have to worry about keyword stuffing if I am not going after the broader keyword? My search term is "carpet cleaning my city" or my city carpet cleaning." Not sure how I could lower the instances of "carpet cleaning" and maintain a proper use of those two keywords?

I will definitely work on the heading logo alt text too, I had never noticed that.

Thanks for the tip on the press releases, I will not submit for awhile.  I think I did 2 of them in the last month  What would you recommend for link building for me? I am always open to new suggestions.

good tips, I will begin correcting all that you have listed.  I wonder how my server IP got on the sorbs_spam list? it is a shared server, I wonder if this is going to be problem?

Really appreciate the vote of confidence. I guess it is just a matter of time. Not having the google places is killing me. I have been trying to get the pin for 2 months, somehow it doesn't make it.

I'm sorry I should have put that in there http://winecountrycarpet.com/

I have been working away on my site for almost a month now, following all the advice I have gotten here and things seem to be going great.  I have built a pretty large 400+ number of backlinks from blog posts, press releases, forum posts etc.  Everything is very nice and white hat, really almost nothing spammy at all, maybe a couple of blog comments that I shouldn't have made but nothing in the big scheme of things.  The problem is that my position in SERP has not changed at all.  Its strange my on page SEO got me to the first page of all my keywords but from there I have not moved a bit.

I am local service site and I am still waiting for my pin from google places (third try) and I know that will have a huge effect on my main city. I also have landing pages in 3 other small local cities though and those haven't budged a bit either.

I just wanted to see what people here had to say, possibly I am just not patient enough? it has been probably 1.5 weeks since my links really started to index and show up in webmaster tools.

I checked out your link and that pretty much summed it up, it seems as if there are no GREAT directories, it is all about figuring out which one will work for you, and whether my category will actually index.

GREAT answer, I think you clarified it for me.  The only advantage would be that I could add content to a blog easily but I would lose a lot of the functionality I get with DW.  I think for now I will stick with DW for my site and worry about a blog down the road (if I have trouble ranking).  In the future I think I will create WP site using DW's GUI.  I see there is a Lynda.com tutorial on it and it doesn't look terribly complicated. I will definitely check it out in the future (must be a reason everyone loves it) but for now I will go with what I know.

cool thank you soo much again.  You have been a huge help.

I ended up adding it in the sidebar because I just felt it looked more natural there due to my site layout. Do you think this will decrease the effectiveness of it? I have so far only added the hCard to the index page (targeting city were business has places page etc)  and all of the other non landing pages.  I have left it out of the city landing pages for now, but I will slowly add it one at a time and see what it does.

So far I don't believe the site has been crawled since I made the changes so I can't speak to the effect just yet, but hCard makes a ton of sense now that you turned me onto it.

I did  add geo tags to the head of those pages for the city that they are targeting and I am excited to see if that makes any difference.  On the same note, once my places page is more established, I am considering using rich snippets to pass those along on my other organic rankings.

I understand exactly what you mean.  I love that i can edit certain aspects of my site with ease on Dreamweaver.  I also like that i can integrate certain things easier. I doubt I would ever leave DW all together, I am just to used to it.  I would like to ad a blog to the site and for whatever reason I get the impression (here and every forum I participate in) that wordpress is the only way to go.

I guess when using WP i could do something like a blogroll where the content exists on the main landing pages of the site?  I feel like i have seen this work for people in the past.   I hate when service business do blogs that outrank there intended landing pages.  You click on these search results and are faced with their header, then a bunch of spammy nonsense.

Is there a way using WP or DW that i could actually add content without sacrificing the look of the page returned on search?

I probably will add a page for our presence in the community that is a good idea.  My wife is a teacher so I am always getting talked into providing raffle prizes and donating to this or that.

For now though I would love to increase our presence in organic search results outside of our main service city.  I am curious what are some white hat methods of building links that don't cost a fortune.  It seems like there must be something I can do that will produce something pr2-3 that would help substantially. So far the best I have come up with are relevant forum comments that were on pr 1 pages.   I have written some articles but they never seem to do well.

Thank you Keri, i am doing my best to pursue all local connections that I can.  I have so far gotten great responses from our customers and they have become our number one source of new jobs, so I can imagine if I could target specific groups of people it would be amazing.  We are in the process of sponsoring some local events a baseball team.  This area is so not tech savvy though, that really there are no links involved in any local advertising.

BTW i checked out your site and that is an AMAZING hobby.  I love water, I love sinking things, I love mechanics, it is PERFECT.  I actually bookmarked it LOL.

I totally agree that wordpress is now definitely king of the hill so to speak, when it comes to CMS.  I just wonder how much of an advantage it would be for someone like me, without a lot of new content, and who is comfortable with dreamweaver.

I have a site that I have built with dreamweaver (local service business not a lot of new content needing to be added) and I am curious how much of an advantage for me converting it to wordpresss would be.  I see that cs5 works with wordpress and that lynda.com has a tutorial on integrating the two.  I would like to integrate a blog into my site, but it is not totally critical that I do so.  I would just like to hear what some of you experienced users have to say about the advantages of wordpress vs dreamweaver from an SEO prospective.

I have a local service site http://winecountrycarpet.com/ and I have been link building as much as possible for my landing pages (which aren't local to my city, but are within 20 miles).  I would like to keep my link building as above board and white hat as possible (so i do a lot of forum sigs and links in do follow forum in my industry)  I do not seem to be seeing any results though.  My pages are on the first page for their targeted keywords, but I think this has more to do with onsite SEO and non competitive keywords.

I am wondering if anyone can recommend any strategies that I might find more effective.  I have thought about leaving blog comments on do follow blog's but it just seems so spammy its hard to imagine it working.  I am open to any ideas.

I was wondering if there is a comprehensive list somewhere of places I should enter in my business information.  I have done the usual google places, city search, yahoo, and many others.  i have just been cruising for places to enter my information, and I am sure I have missed some.

I really appreciate this tip! I had forgotten to come back to this thread, I have been busy implementing the changes that Miriam outlined for me. That is a great tip. Should I insert the geotag of the city for each landing page? I am still wondering if I should add hCards for my business to the landing pages (since I am located in a different city)

I have actually added a bit of new content and enough new images that I believe everything is now unique on each page (I will have to check now that I say that)

Alright, I have read up quite a bit on wordpress, and it seems like going to a dynamic php based setup like that would probably be a big change for me.  What I have now seems to be working well, I am just interested in adding a bit more content to each page.  Maybe I am way off base but it seems like to recreate my site in wordpress would be a pretty decent amount of work (for me being a noob and all)

I guess I just had two more questions.

Is there a substantial advantage SEO wise to using a dynamic site like wordpress?

Is there any simple way anyone can think of two beef up my content without losing what ever aesthetic appeal or end user friendliness I have created?  I was kind of hoping there would be some spry utility for it, or something of that nature.

Alright I am gonna look into switching to Wordpress, I am sure I can find lots of tutorials and info on it. No matter what I will defiantly re do anything that is an image instead of text. We love it up here, my parents actually moved up here from the San diego area. I love it down there.

I am currently reading up on word press, this is the current site http://winecountrycarpet.com/ If you look below the footer you will see the links to the other 3 landing pages based on geographical location.

hmmm, interesting, I am looking into wordpress now.

I know it sounds lame, but could I just add a form to the side and put the content there? Seems like it would be less intrusive to the end user experience, but would still ad content to the site?

I guess my question is would a table like that index as part of the site?

I would like to ad a blog to a few different pages of my site, is this possible? I would prefer it to not be a stand alone blog, because I am pretty sure it would begin to outrank my landing pages in search results.

I built my site using dreamweaver, but I have seen a reference somewhere to a utility for adding a word press blog to an existing site?

This site seems to be doing what I had in mind?

http://www.drynclean.com/

both great answers, the htaccess change didn't work for me cause I am a helpless noob, but the rel=canonical worked like a charm, thanks all your the best.

Thank you again Mirriam, I am in the process of implementing the changes that you have outlined, I just had a couple of questions. The shop is just my garage, their are no other business at the address.  I am going forward completely with your changes regarding nap and everything else.

Should I add the nap to the footer in a different way so google can read it? If I add it into the image that won't help with google will it?

Should I add the nap to the alt tags of images? approximately how many of them should I add it to?

Will adding my Atascadero Contact information hurt me in the rankings in the surrounding towns?

I am going to add it to the meta description of each page, this is what I had in mind

Does that look right to you?

Thanks you SO much for your help so far, I appreciate it a lot, its a confusing world out there and I appreciate you clarifying it for me.

I am having an issue with duplicate content that I can't seem to figure out.  I got rid of the www.mydomain.com by modifying the htaccess file but I can't figure out how to fix theproblem of  mydomain.com/ and mydomain.com

Thank you Miriam I actually really appreciate a straight answer (they are not easy to get these days),

I will definitely start to implement the changes you outlined.  I have been a bit embarrassed of my copy the whole time, but I am going to sit down and just pound out a few versions of it for each page.  I absolutely agree with what you say about making it feel as local as possible on each landing page.  I was happy with my picture of Morro Rock for that reason.  I am just going to have to get more stock photo's of local landmarks is what I am thinking for each landing page., I tried it with my own pictures and it just looked bad.  I am going to actually hire a photographer to take a picture of us and the van for the header though.  I feel like people like to see who they are letting into their home.

Do you think it is important that I ad the hCard ? i really try and keep my address of the page as much as possible since it is not a commercial building, just my home and a shop, but I am open to it if there is a benefit SEO wise or if you feel the end user would appreciate it.

The point about optimizing my contact us page is interesting.  I have pretty much left optimization out of the extra pages, the services and the contact us pages, thinking it was all about my landing pages.

How much different does the content need to be to avoid duplicate content? I believe I have used different wording on each of the landing pages and switched up the images, different titles, different alt tags, I know when I audit the site with seoMOZ it doesn't trigger duplicate content? now you have me a bit worried.  I was more concerned that I might be split a little thin regarding linking. I definitely have a google places (postcard is in the mail) and same with bing and yahoo.

i have set up my local service site using my index page for my main city that I am targeting.  I have then created three more pages targeting three surrounding cities.  I am now link building using good anchor text to each of the appropriate pages.  I think I am doing right but i have read some stuff today that made me question my technique

here is the site http://winecountrycarpet.com/

Thank you in advance for any advice I can get.

I am in the process of promoting my local service site at http://winecountrycarpet.com and I was wondering what you guys would recommend? i have submitted to a lot of directories and get any backlink I can.  I have also started writing articles and submitting them to sooper articles and Ezine articles, but I feel like I am doing something wrong.  I am open to any suggestions.