Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello,

I'd like to start a discussion on link building outreach techniques vs. just building a good website with good 10X content.

I don't like to receive unsolicited emails in my inbox, so why should the people in my industry?

Also, I've seen plenty of evidence of 10X content soaring without link building outreach.

But link building isn't dead of course, so can you tell me your personal experiences either way and the ethics of what you do? I especially want to hear if you've had luck with just building good websites and being successful based on the content itself, but an open discussion of either side is welcome.

Leaning towards just building good websites and letting the Google algo do it's thing.

Would love to hear your experiences either way.

Thanks.

Hello,

I'm starting a web design company doing standard web design, E-commerce web design, and E-commerce SEO. I've been doing the nuts and bolts of an E-commerce business with four online stores, one very successful, for nine years. Since that's my main experience, I'm sticking with helping others with the nuts and bolts of their E-commmerce SEO. I also do the web design, which I've been doing since 2001.

What should I charge per hour for my web design and E-commerce SEO services? I live in Boise, Idaho. I'm thinking $100 an hour for everything, is that too much for web design or too little for SEO? The SEO would be billed exact but my web design estimates are more generous.

Looking for honest opinions. I don't want to over or under charge.

Thanks

Bob

Julie and EGOL,

Some excellent information, and useful for protecting my own stuff as I grow! My client's wife happens to be an attorney and she said exactly what both of you said.

Thanks.

I spoke to the owner. There's only 4 in question and one nofollow now

On the 4, I looked and they're not generating traffic. I'm unclear what you mean by relevant in this case. They are generally related to our niche as, for example, an informational clothing site (backlink provider) is related to a store that sells socks (our site)

We have 81 linking root domains and one nice piece of content if that helps.

What do you recommend for these 4? I'm guessing swapping for an editorial link is your recommendation, but due to not exact niche relevancy, I'm wondering if you'll suggest removal.

Thanks for the awesome advice, btw

Hello,

I was doing competitive research and our top competitor has a clean backlink profile that includes the Best Of The Web directory.

The top people on this Q&A used to recommend them and DMOZ for the only true good directory links.

Is this still true or is Best Of The Web less important now?

We only are listed in a small handful of directories, and not anything recent besides DMOZ.

Thanks,

Bob

Hello,

We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console.

Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup?

We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago.

Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone?

Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin.

Thanks.

Hello,

We have an Ecommerce store and we need our category buttons to be redone and to shine. Unfortunately, I've tried all my places and none are 10X, though none of them cost very much (like Fiverr, Freelancer)

What I would like is some advice on where to go for inexpensive but still very good quality graphics. I'm a good designer, and so far, I can do better graphics than the designers I've found, I just don't have the time as a busy SEO.

Please let me know If you have any gems you are willing to share. I'm searching the community colleges as we speak.

Thanks.

Hello,

I think there is a lot of room for improvement to my SEO packages (analysis) page on my website. Visit it by clicking here.

I've always done SEO for our own business, so I'm new to this. Any help is appreciated.

btw: I'm going to redo the chart on the page. I don't think profit and sales would ever compare like that. Thanks.

Hello,

For both ecommerce and sites that sell services, I've seen a lot of people recommending a blog for SEO.

Should this blog be inside or separate from the main website for the most results?

I can see how adding one to a site would create more unique content and an opportunity for link bait, but perhaps there is a reason to have a blog separate from the main site

Thank you.

Hello,

I like the concept that a directory is good only if you would still want the link if it passed no link juice.

DMOZ and Best of the Web fall into that category.

And so do some niche directories.

How do you determine whether to go with a niche directory or not?

Also, what's the ratio of how many niche directory links you'd want compared to other types of links (being very safe) 3:1? 4:1? 5:1? Does it matter what your other links are?

Thanks.

Hello,

Where do you guys go to get inspiring new ideas for web design layouts.

I'm making a portfolio and need one more design.

I'm thinking 4 is enough sample sites. So far I have 3.

Thanks!

Hello,

Please critique the SEO resume found here.

I'm looking for a job working 30 hours a week making $30/hour in Idaho.

Looking for advice on creating the best resume possible. It's all honest.

Thanks.

I'm going to repost this question searching for companies in the USA or Canada

Hello,

I notice that it is common practice to put the page's keywords directly into an alt tag.

I don't see how this helps the user and how it helps the user using screen readers and such.

Do you think future G updates will slightly penalize pages with alt tags that are just the page's keywords and not a helpful phrase? What do you recommend to put in alt tags in light of future G updates?

Yes I've watched that great mozinar many times.

Hello,

The top article in my niche is

http://www.webmd.com/diet/default.htm

I want to write a better article on the same topic, but on a low budget. The article would be a combination of tools, top 10 diet reviews, and what I already have here.

I'm a pretty good authority on the topics.

Thanks EGOL, that now makes sense.

So all the customer service phone calls and what the client always has to explain to the customer

Closing this question soon.

Hello,

In one of our niches, we have a big site with all products and a couple more sites that are smaller niches of the same niche.

The product descriptions are different with different product names.

Is this OK. We've got one big site and 2 smaller subsides in different niches that cross over with the big site.

Let me know if Google is OK with this.

We will have a separate blog for each with completely different content. There's not really duplicate content issues and although only the big site has a blog right now, the small ones eventually will have their own unique blog.

Is this OK in Google's eyes now and in the future? What can we do to ensure we are OK?

Thank you.

Hello,

I'm helping my client write a long, comprehensive, best-of-the-web piece of content.

It's a boring ecommerce niche, but on the informational side the top 10 competitors for the most linked to topic are all big players with huge domain authority.

There's not a lot of links in the industry, should I try to top all the big industries through better content (somehow), pictures, illustrations, slideshows with audio, and by being more thorough than these very good competitors?

Or should I go for something that's less linked to (maybe 1/5 as much people linking to it) but easier?

or both?

We're on a short timeline of 3 and 1/2 months until we need traffic and our budget is not huge

Hello,

I have a twitter account.

Do I need to make a 2nd twitter account for my business?

My current username is

BobWeikel

If I need a 2nd account, what would my username be? My company is called Bob Weikel & Associates.

Thank You!

Hello,

We have found traffic to increase upon adding content to category descriptions. Our category pages are stronger than our product pages.

Our main categories (the fourty that are in the navigation) have 500 words on them, carefully written helpful content.

We are trying to decide whether to increase (for these 40 categories) to 1000 words per category. Do you think this would increase traffic ? Is it a good idea?

Thanks!

We've done a disavow through Marie Haynes (wonderful work!) a month ago.

I forgot to re-submit the sitemap. Just did it.

We've got a bunch of 302 redirects, btw, I'm replacing them with 301s in the next couple of days.

We've deleted all doorways and paid links

We've added a blog with 8 pretty good articles - though they need more work and we need more content

We track the changes through a Moz campaign and sales volume, which both show we're hurting.

Only one area of our site is ranking (out of 15). Our home page is not even ranking for our main term, one of our internal pages is that doesn't even provide the right results.

We've got some question marks in our internal links

We've got some 404 errors

We've got some too long/too short/missing meta and title tags

We need to improve the alt tags

We've got enough backlinks and DA to be on page 1

Any help is appreciated.

I just realized what we were doing wrong, I'd like some feedback. We were going to go after the informational side of the client's ecommerce site where we have very little experience. I think we need to be unique and draw on the client's strengths. A little bit of those informational side articles would be good, but everyone in this industry is already providing that information really well. I think we need to focus on the client's products themselves, and the client has more experience with that than almost anyone.

Thank you Justin.

So I've got 2 very different responses. I'd like to hear from more people if possible.

Thanks again!

Hi,

I'm targeting Boise, Idaho and building an SEO consulting website.

Right now I only offer 3 things because that's what I have experience in:

1. On-site SEO

2. Content Audit

3. Start a company from scratch.

Ecommerce, Service, or Informational

I know #3 involves all SEO, so it will be challenging, but 1-3 is what I've been doing for 10 years.

What feedback do you have as far as 1-3 being my 3 offers, and is $200/hour fair? I work off quotes by estimating my time at $200/hour.

Thanks.

Hello,

We're trying to jumpstart our new Ecommerce site with a blog. We just launched and have 4 thorough blog posts which I'm working to refine to 10X content. Trying to make all content 10X. As you know, it's not easy.

Our niche has little to no content written by competitors. We are hoping to get to about $5000/month sales with this site.

How many blog posts should we launch a week (10X content) in order to take advantage of boosting our results in the rankings as fast as possible. Does it usually take 6 months?

I know the more the better, but consider we only have so many resources, so I'm trying to decide if one 10X piece a week is enough, or 2 or 3.

Thanks.

Hello,

I'm helping a client put together an FAQ and 5 thorough, graphically stimulating, articles.

The client can easily write his FAQ articles.

However, he's not knowledgeable enough to write the 5 thorough articles, and hiring an expert to write them from scratch would cost a huge chunk of money.

Should we have a writer put together an outline or rough draft and present that to the expert for editing? The client can afford that. Or what's the best way to move forward without costing a huge amount of money?

Hello,

I'd like to improve how I use twitter for pushing a piece of content. Here's what I am planning to do currently:

First, we created a useful piece of content for a niche where we'll be appealing to the humanitarian side of thing. Nothing like this piece of content is on the web. The subject is not mouthwateringly attractive to other websites, but it is good, very useful, authoritative and uses the information we have in our niche. For Twitter, we plan to pick a website carefully that could use our content and

1. of course follow that site on twitter

2. Retweet 2 or 3 relevant good tweets the site has put out. If the person I want to contact has a twitter account, retweet some of his too.

3. Tweet a general tweet about a good article or blog post the site has with a link to the site and the article.

4. Tweet at a specific person in the site's company (or to the general twitter account if there isn't anyone specific) asking if they need help with content if it is well written and useful, then later tweeting introducing our article. Email will also be used.

I'm really new to using twitter for content marketing, any help is appreciated. Facebook liking/sharing as well as blog comment posting along with adding to g plus circles will also be used.

Thanks.

Hello,

My site is bobweikel.com

Article page is here.

Could you guys help me with keywords for new and existing articles around weight loss?

Some ideas, though I'm unsure:

weight loss tips

healthy weight loss

permanent weight loss

weight loss program

weight loss diets

weight loss coaching

weight loss life coaching

weight management

Interested in hearing what others have to say,

but very grateful for your response Miriam. When I say start a company, I find myself sitting down with people who want a more passionate job and doing their keyword research and helping them start their (usually store and content both) and tell them what content to write and how to expand.

I'm done doing it for free unless it's close friend or family member. It's a lot of work. Thus the package. Just for the Boise area.

My experience is taking businesses from zero to $5000/month or zero to $30,000/month in sales so you can see that's small business. I've worked under a 7m/year company, but they kept a lot from me. Consider that I have 10 years of experience but I only specialize in a few things really because they are strong enough for a good ROI for my customer.

Anyways, what is a better rate in your opinion (or anyone else reading this)?

Maybe when I'm offering my useful PDF guide, I can in response offer all 4 of these:

1. A link back on a partner site

2. A link from facebook

3. A tweet of their URL

4. $100 of adwords where I set it up and run it for them.

where they could get any or all of them back if they like.

What do you think, Stephanie?

Link building is challenging. Can you guys read my process below and offer improvements:

This is for marketing an article that is good for target websites for humanitarian reasons. It helps their readers in a way that they really need it. Not to say that all of these target websites are going to want to reference my article. I'm looking for

A. The target website to write, or let us write, a blog post around my article, of course with a link to the article and no other links to my website (unless they want to)

or B. For our article to be listed in a resource section when appropriate

How I'm doing this now:

1. We're starting with a well written, authoritative article with attractive images, graphs, and even a fancy javascript display area that's useful. The article is 3500 words. There's a big image link at the bottom that goes to the article in PDF version. Due to some hosting problems, the pdf version is disallowed in the robots.txt (it won't help to get links to it) There's 2 versions of the article, the one I'm marketing has all of our ecommerce menu and such removed, so that this version has minimal commercial parts in it. There's also a commercial version, which we are not pushing, and the non-commercial is rel cononicaled pointing over to the commercial. The non-commercial article has only one external backlink so far, and the commercial version has no external backlinks yet. We're just getting started.

2. First I like on facebook and follow on twitter. I spend some time with the target site's facebook page and like several recent posts, sharing one or two things to my own facebook page. I then retweet two good recent tweets put out by the site's general twitter account. BTW, we don't have very many twitter followers yet for our twitter account.

3. Then I read their newest blog post. I read it thoroughly. Sometimes I don't pick the newest if there is another recent one that is more similar in topic to our site. I spend some time putting together a thoughtful and helpful comment for that blog post. I submit the comment. I then go on FB and carefull post how I found the blog post helpful and place a link to their blog post. A lot of these sites, though, aren't accepting blog post comments but I always post on their facebook page.

4. I wait a couple of days in case my activity gets noticed. At that point, I go to linkedin and look for people that work for the site. If I find a content/marketing director, or if it's a small site and I find the owner [still not very good at this part], I search google for their email address and/or twitter account. I'm successful in finding a specific person only about 1/3 of the time. These sites also often have phone numbers.

5.  I send out either A. a tweet to a specific person asking if they need help with content, or B. An email to a specific person like:

Subject: Do you need help with content that is very useful to [niche audience]

[their first name]

I hope you are doing well. [add sentence here referencing something I learned about them, I don't know how to do this part well yet]

I'm writing you because we have some content that is useful and important to [niche audience]. It's an article about [our article name and link]. We're wondering if you'd consider, since it would be very beneficial to your audience, to write a blog post explaining and citing that article.

We think our doing this would add to [niche audience] quality of life.

Sincerely,

Bob Weikel
Co-owner
[website]

If I don't find a specific person, I write an email as similar to the above as possible and send it to their general email address or contact form. I send one email, wait 2 or 3 business days, send another email, wait 2 or 3 business days. Then I call. I ask for "Marketing" or whoever is in charge of their blog [I haven't done much of this and am not good at it yet] or if it's a small company I might talk to the owner.

Sometimes I only send one email before calling, especially if I think email's a lost cause. I never leave voicemail. I always keep calling over several days until I reach someone.

When I call and get someone, I say something like, "Hi, I'm Bob from [website]. I was wondering if you would be interested in some content that would be beneficial to [niche audience]."

I know there is a lot of room for improvement. I'm looking for a 10% success rate.

Thanks.

Hello,

A client runs an Ecommerce store.

Doing a "best running shoes" type piece of content in our industry.

I (the SEO) want to be 10X better than the first listing and be honest and fit intent by including  all "running shoes" from all internet suppliers (including nofollow links). It's about 8-10 names. We could list us first when we carry a product. like 6 other site's products 4 of ours, listing who carries the product with our site listed first if we do. We have some of the best. The meta description and top of the article would be like. We analyzed 23+ sites and made some hard conclusions.... But wait, one of the owners doesn't want to list competitor site names even if they are nofollow or even just text. She only wants to include items from our store. I would have to rename the content "Our Top 5 products" and it would be a mismatch in intent and keywords for "best running shoes" and just be for our customers.

What is the most proper SEO thing to do to attack "best running shoes" (if appropriate)keeping in mind long terms sales? The owner wants to hear your suggestions as well. And is a "best" keyword sometimes competition?

Thanks.

Hey Mike,

I've done a few now. Could you critique what I'm doing?:

If they are a blog, I build a little bit of rapport commenting on their blog, tell them if they have broken links (if they do) and offer them a guest post around my free resource PDF in exchange for $100 in adwords traffic & sharing their URL across my companies local channels.

If they have a resource section that I might fit in, I again build rapport with them, tell them about broken links and then ask them if they would list my pdf in their resource section and that I would be happy to do $100 in Adwords traffic and share them socially in exchange.

I'm finding the best person to email - a specific person if possible, but it's not always possible - and I'm doing everything in one email (My outreach has to get results pretty fast right now)

I'm using the buzzmarker and taking good notes

Your thoughts?

A little digging uncovered what they did.

1. They held a $200 sweepstakes that you had to like their page to join and they published press releases.

2. They offer a $3 coupon if you like them on facebook.

Brilliant, but is it white hat?

Hello,

I'm teaching a friend SEO and she wants very basic SEO videos on Youtube. I looked for some but there was a lot of incorrect information that some people were giving out. Does any experienced SEOs know of credible, basic SEO videos that the SEOs that make them don't give out backward information. Good quality videos. I will keep looking, but please, if anyone has some gems send them my way.

Thanks.

Bob

What if we only gave out 30-50 badges to our elite alumni and had them all have different anchor text?

Hello,

We are a niche eCommerce company with a limited budget but time on our hands to make changes and start projects.

For our main keyword we rank 10th. It is a small to medium sized niche.

Without knowing the details, I'm looking at the top 5 things I can do for Rankings and Traffic considering on-site, off-site, keeping in mind google updates.

Also, what's the best or your favorite Ecommerce ranking/traffic articles?

Thanks!

Bob

Hello,

I'm doing some research on Facebook and Google Plus. I have more experience with Facebook.

I'm going to do my own research, but what do you guys think is the best articles or videos for taking Facebook and Google Plus to the next level?

My goals are to engage and promote for Ecommerce and Informational sites. Low budget.

Thanks,

Bob

This question is for EGOL (if he's willing) and anyone else who wants to partake.

EGOL is the best content writer I've ever run into, really. I'm wondering what his top 3 to 5 tips are on how to use graphical layout (font, images, graphics, organization, menu, etc) to make content irresistable.

A couple of assumptions: The content is written really well from a perspective of authority. Also, we're not including video on this one.

Again, anyone is welcome to answer this.

Thanks!

This is very helpful mirabile, there was just so much other stuff above you to give "Good Answers" to. Thank you.

I went with bobhealthcoach.com

Thanks everyone.

Bob

Hello,

Is there a difference between:

111 Streetname #L, City, CA, 84111

and then on facebook it's

111 Streetname #L

City, CA 84111

on two different lines? Note on the first one, there is a comma after #L and on the two line facebook page citation, there's no comma after #L. Should I add a comma on facebook after the #L?

Thanks!

Thanks EGOL. Awesome as usual

My client has about 300 products in 20 categories with a lot of overlap. How many clicks from the home page should we keep the products? We're not doing pagination. I'd been told several years ago that all products should be 2 clicks or less from the home page. Is this true today?

Thanks.

Hi, I've got an issue that I'm sure many of you are good at dealing with. I'm working with an authority in my client's industry. There is the president, who is definitely an authority. There is his wife, who has a name in the field, is an author in the field, but her name is not near as big as the president.

I found a really, really good topic for content that is attracting links in the industry - one of the best content topics possible which really needed to be addressed on my client's website.

I let them know that it needed to be an article of authority, but they had their assistant write it. It's good, she's talented - it's informative, interesting, has 2 embedded videos of the president talking, and is 1650 words. We haven't made the videos yet.

The thing is, doesn't this need to be written by the authority - president. He's a slow writer with zero time, but I think it needs to be his voice with his name on it to attract links.

He's super super busy though.

Should I:

1. Suggest that the president do a thorough editing of the article and put his name on it.

or

2. Have his wife (who has more time) do a thorough editing of the article and put her name on it.

or

3. Leave it as is

or

4. Have the president rewrite the entire article when he has time, which he would be resistant to.

or

5. Have the president's wife rewrite the entire article, which she would be resistant to?

What do you guys think with the little information I've given you?

Thanks Eric,

I'd like to take the second keyword off of the home page to focus on the (first) main home page keyword, which we're slipping for. Do you think the home page strength (with my second keyword) is somehow supporting my internal page with the same keyword (the second keyword)?

Hello,

WHAT WE NEED NOW:

We need 300 product descriptions done. We have reached the point where we're hiring this done. How would you recommend we go about this.

200 products will be rewriting the supplier's product descriptions (one sentence each) and filling out a quicktable. There's just nothing to do there, no information anywhere.

About 100 products will be where the person writing the description and filling out the table will have to google the product's manufacturer and rewrite the information off of that website in an intelligible, interesting, paragraph that is informative.

Would you recommend we hire someone local to come work in our office that specializes in our niche, or are there any GOOD services out there for our case, even if it's just for the first 200.

OUR FUTURE PLANS:

We'll guess at the top few products and do some 10X work ourselves. No hiring needed there.

Once we know the top 50 products we will do some more deep hiring for 10X product descriptions, but that can wait.

Thanks.

Hello,

The following services site

nlpca.com

has a store at

shop.nlpca.com

Would the store be stronger if it was at

nlpca.com/store

(in a subfolder) and included in the main navigation? The moz bar suggests not but I just want to make sure.

Thanks.

Hello,

If you look at the top keyword in one of our companies, and across the long tail, you'll see one thing. Not better companies for the industry. Not companies with better information. Just Trusted names. Trust Trust Trust. Big guys you can trust and little guys you can trust.

So since everything's about branding trust in this niche, how do you revamp a website to instill new trust and thus increase in rank?

Resources are always helpful, or direct answers are more than welcome.

Thanks.