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I would take the new sites and recreate the posts with identical information.  I would then redirect each old website posts permanently to the new posts on the new website.  I think you would lose a lot of link juice if you were just to redirect to a homepage.

Google adwords tool is a great tool, but you can also use the competition keyword analysis tool to see how hard it would be to obtain those rankings.  There are also sites like wordtracker.com which can also assist.

I think you can use it in your title, but I would only pick one.  I would probably use the city first in my title

"Chicago Car Loans | Website Name"

"Atlanta Used Cars | Website Name"

In your body text I would also include variations of these keywords to keep things honest.  you want to write content for your users and you keep your SEO inline with that.

Honestly I think there is way too much going on the page.  I find the layout hard to follow. I would like to see an image-slider with nice crisp photos and text below it.  Also I think you need to integrate a more clear and defined call to action to your website.

I agree - when adding 'alt tags' it is essential to describe the image and not stuff for keywords.  Typically I will work my keyword into my description if it doesn't look spammy.  For example, If I am working on a fence companies website and they have a page dedicated to "city fence"  I will make the alt tag "privacy 'city' fence |  6ft pickets " or something to that extent.

I agree with Tom.  Backlinks can be from anywhere as long as they don't appear to be blatant spam.  I tend to agree that a backlink serves a greater purpose than just link juice and may actually send relevant traffic and business to your company.  I would try to target as many local links as possible, but branching out to a global mindset won't hurt at all.

It really depends on what kind of site your friend's site is?  Is it relevant to your business niche?  How many links does the site point out to?  I think it looks a little unnatural for it to always link exactly to the page title.  I prefer one link from one root domain and I try to aim for it not to be in the footer.  Can't really say if its going to hurt your SEO effort - only trial and error will let you know

I have noticed when i add meta keywords in my websites for keywords im targeting bing comes back around and ranks my site's quite high.  I know a lot of people say "if i use meta keywords then my competitors know what I'm trying to target"  Who cares just do what you do and keep building quality content and authority and you will be perfect.

one thing to keep in mind is server down time and server speed.  A lot of websites can be affected by having a slow host or the website being deindexed for significant downtime.  I have a client right now that is on network solutions and had his site deindexed because it was down for 5 days because of a unix environment issue.  The website is still taking 8-12 seconds to load and is killing his traffic.  We are in the process of moving it now ;).

I would keep them as do follow and just brand with your company name.  Don't use any keywords such as web design.  You will not be penalized for a branding anchor text of your company name, unless your company names is 'shoes' and at that point why would you need to do any seo work

I would consider this spam.  If you are ranking number one for a keyword and someone visits and leaves your site without a conversion, there was a reason for it.   Dominating multiple spots might sound like a great idea, but it is going to be hard to formulate unique content when you are targeting such similars keywords.  I would rebuild my original content to reflect multiple variances of the keyword and make sure that page is super authoritative and try to rank naturally.

I believe Google is against paid directories that accept everyone.  Directories such as Yahoo, BOTW etc charge a fee, but those fees can be considered an editorial fee.  Believe it or not high quality directories actually do reject applicants.

In google's guidelines it tells you to submit to directories, but people ended up taking that and submitting their site to thousands of directory sites not matter the quality.  Submit to the big high quality directories and you will be fine.  Make sure that the directory page you are submitting to has a higher page authority that way you can pass some link juice.  These are my personal practices and beliefs and may vary with other people on this site.

Another great idea for receiving backlinks is to become a "sponsor" for a charity or host local meetup meetings online.  If you can get your company noticed for donating to charity or sponsoring an event you will get massive backlinks just through news articles and stuff like that.

Here is my opinion on each of the items you are in:

I am not a fan of directory submissions.

3-5 guest posts is a good idea as long as the site you are submitting to has a lot of traffic and isn't super spammy with other guests posts.

I am a fan of local business directories - it will help you in your local footprint and will allow you to build some authoritative links.

Forum and signature backlinks are abused and overused.  The only time I would actually consider using this is if the forum site actually provide you leads (For example, a business message board, marketing forum, business community)

Squidoo Lens are now No Follow and also contain a ton of spam.  I think you would be better of building a blog on your website and building original content there.

I still think there is value in blog commenting as long as you are providing diverse anchor text and valuable non spam links.

Im sure it is possible it could devalue down the road, but Title, URL and Body are one of the easiest ways to identify if the content is relevant.  Google also takes in account bounce rate so if 'title', 'url' and 'body' are targeting 'shoes', but your website is about garage install it will be able to tell immediately that your site is not relevant.

Well in today realm of SEO - you are really hiring a strategist that obtains high quality backlinks instead of low quality links in mass.  You can definitely hire a company that is reputable to work on your website and provide some great value.  I don't think it would be wise to hand it off to someone who has no SEO experience and is just doing a checklist everyday.  Just my thoughts though.

I would personally would hire a full time SEO consultant.  I wouldn't want that company doing SEO for me and definitely don't like what they are offering.  They say there method is Google Penguin accepted, but its super spammy.  Eventually it will be caught by Google and you will be left in a worse place.

I guess the main thing to think about is....

if they are not automating this process how in the world is it worth for them to supply all those links, articles etc for that price point each month?  If its not automated then its definitely contracted out overseas.

As long as your server is located in the country your business is located I think you are fine.  I would find it odd if in the Google's Algorithm it weights server location with any significance.  Although I could also see that having a foreign hosting location could have an impact on Google.

Your category pages should be no-indexed if they don't have rich unique content per category. It is hard to say without seeing the category pages if it will provide duplicate content, but in most cases it will.  You should also no index your archive area as well because that will definitely provide duplicate content.

Just create a redirect in your htaccess file with the old URL to the new URL.  There are multiple plugins that support this feature on WordPress such as "simple redirect" etc.

I think that is also a good answer, but I believe you have to take in consideration your anchor text diversity.  If you have been targeting this "phrase" with any consistency and then you add 2k more instances of this keyword it could pose as some trouble and look unnatural.  Remember linking is about looking as natural as possible, so if you think that is covered then you should be in good shape

I would be proactive and email the website to take the link down.  If they do not reply in 24 hours I would use the disavow tool and make sure to cover your tracks.

In my experience I don't think its going to negatively affect your SEO it is just a better practice to keep everything lowercase.  The only thing you do not want is the search engine viewing the same page 2x as separate pages creating duplicate content.  If these are relatively new pages I would go ahead and fix them, but if they have any significant link juice to them i think its fine to leave as is.

Depending on what platform you are using you are going to want to make these pages as no index in your robots file.  Alternatively WordPress and other promising CMS allow you to mark a page not be indexed. using a plugin.

I would say that our traffic and our clients traffic varies 2%-11% for Bing depending on the niche.  I actually think search engine traffic is directly related to what industry you are in.  I know Google is considered the benchmark, but Bing does have a nice interface as well and all my sites seem to rank higher on bing anyway :P.

I think its important to keep your logo as an image to keep your "alt text".  It really depends on what you are trying to achieve.  It sounds to me that you are trying to increase your speed optimization of your page which directly can affect your SEO.  If your site is optimized and you can keep your logo in as an image I would keep it.  If you making your logo into a sprite increases you page speed a lot and gives it a big boost in performance (highly doubt it) than do it.

Im in favor of buying domains that are close to your brand and redirecting, but buying over 100+ domains to redirect isn't smart.  Unless they have a strategy built around populating unique content around them - its not a good move.

Not really a spammy link promo or anything, but I have an SEO client who ranks number 1 for...

generic keyword such as :  "land survey company" and 20 surround cities.  He emailed me a couple day ago asking me to target "company surveying city name" sigh....

Thats odd because when i view them up in OSE I only see two root domains linking.  Red Beacon and their domain.  I don't like what the old firm did for BDF and were definitely going to make some changes on their inner page locating cities.  I would of preferred to rank the homepage for all the cities rather than individual city pages.  Just adds to my work.

Better Decks & Fences seems to have a higher quality backlinks and obviously it has a nicer design.  I'v never been this baffled by a website ranking like this.

I just took over an SEO campaign for a company we recently did a website for.  The old company created individual landing pages for each city they service, but they didn't have any original content except replacing the city name.  We are in the process of creating completely unique content per page.

My main issue is that there is a company with no link profile, duplicate content on every page, no social media presence, etc - but consistently ranks for city + fence company

The company we are starting to work with is: http://betterdecksandfences.com/

The company that is ranking for everything is: http://www.alcovyfence.com

Any ideas?

Sync your website with Google Webmaster and use the disavow tool.

We use OSE exactly like you do, but also use it as an education tool for our clients.  Many people has so many misconceptions about SEO and if you take the time to explain the basis of what you are actually doing they will see the value.

Thanks yes we love the trendy business industries.  It takes you out of the boring typical industry designs and gives us a little more flexibility with the design and functionality.

If you are using WordPress you can use "J translate" which allows you to have multiple versions of the copy per language. That is what we use for our foreign clients or websites that require multiple languages.

Genesis is by the best framework to use.  We use it on all of your clients websites and integrate Yoast with it.

Here are just a few sites we have recently completed using Genesis:

http://shadow-soft.com/ http://www.thekentlawgroup.com/ http://www.eitanrosenthal.com/?lang=en

Before we were just using our own custom framework, but this provides a lot of stability and once you get the hang of the framework anything is possible.

In my personal experience I always find silos a positive strategy as long as its not natural and not overblown.   I think it makes a user's experience more concentrated and in turn will help your on site time and make it easier for you to build links for a specific term.

When it doubt Google.  Syndicating all your reviews with a plus profile will only help your SEO strategy.  The only time I would prefer another review site is if it was specific to my industry like urbanspoon for restaurants or angies list for contractors.

If you want it to look the same you are going to need someone to redevelop a mobile version of the site.  A plugin can only do a variety of tricks to get the job done, but there are sure to be some inconsistencies across the board.

there are no particular rules, but I think its important to have your links stand out from body text for a user experience.  I would also recommend having a visited link and a hover color change as well.

Hey Carla,

There are a bunch of different security measures you can take to protect your websites on the server side and on the wordpress side.  My company specializes in WordPress Security.  If you would like to PM I could give you some rates per site or a bundle for all of them.

The ranking reports are run on a weekly basis.  Your rankings will vary depending on how your native google search settings are configured.  Make sure that your google settings are set for national and not city specific and make sure you are not viewing personalized search reviews when you're logged into gmail.

OSE doesn't show all the links.  Just because its not listed doesn't mean its not relevant.  I have a couple of websites that have links from the BBB and those are not listed in the explorer.

I don't think that is abnormal.  I have not had any drops like that lately, but I know about a year and a half ago we would go from like 6 -> 25 and then the next week we would be at 2 and occupy that spot for 3-6 months.  I started noticing when we dropped it was an indication that we were going to jump up a couple spots in the next week or so.  Not sure how scientific that is or if there is any documentation to that, but it happened to us multiple times.

We use Istock - I believe you get what you pay for in the stock photography area.  There are some free stock photos, but you have to be careful with royalty free etc.

Unless I missed can you attach the real URL of your website or PM the URL.

Here are my comments...

1. Guest Blogging - Is he planning to write blogs for other websites or is he getting people to guest blog for his website?  I don't think its bad for him to guest blog for other websites as long as its not spamish material.  Guest blogging can be an SEO benefit, but more importantly I think it may drive wanted traffic if he is writing awesome material.

2. Press Release Marketing is a tad outdated and if I am not mistaken Google doesn't even look for press releases anymore. I don't think its a bad practice for realistic Press Release items such as new product lines, business mergers or something of that sort.

3)Blog Commenting will have little to no effect on his SERPS.  If he chooses to manually do blog comments that are informative and not anchor text driven then that will be fine.

I always believe that as an SEO consultant you should drive your meetings and the strategies. If a client has a different idea and doesn't budget it might be time to fire them

For the on page optimization tool it is one keyword per page.

I have been using the Fresh Web Mentions.  Not sure if that is all that accurate, but pretty much lets me know when new mentions have been indexed.