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Ok, got it.  Thanks for your help!

I have a paragraph at the top of my homepage.  I was told I could use css to make the content visually appear at the bottom of the page but it would still get indexed at the top of the page, still giving it the same level of importance.  Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Great, I really appreciate the info.

Great information.  Thank you.

When using keywords in url's for internal pages, isn't it a good idea to use dashes or underscores in the url between the keywords?

I have a two-part question:

1.  I know that bold and italicized font can help keywords rank better.  I have a block of regular text on my site that is really more for SEO than anything else.  If I reduce the font size, will it have an impact on the importance of the text?

2.  If you reduce the size of font enclosed in header tags, such as, reducing h1 text to 8 px font, does that have an impact on the importance of the text within that h1 tag?

I tried what you suggested but it didn't work. I still have a few more things to try when I get back from vacation. Thanks for checking back with me.

Sure Steven, here are some examples:

http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/fleet-management-and-tracking-80%93-the-easy-way/

http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/?p=23&akst_action=share-this

I have tried using both types of redirects below:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/directory/gps-global-positioning-system-other-gps.html$ http://www.rmtracking.com/compareproducts.php

Redirect 301 /blog/fleet-management-and-tracking-80%93-the-easy-way/ http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/2011/05/28/safety-at-sea-with-gps/

I have a number of 404 error pages showing in webmaster tools and some of the url's have numbers, % symbols, and some are pdf's.  My usual 301 redirect in my htaccess file does NOT redirect these pages where the url's have special characters.  What am I doing wrong?

No problem Everett.  Thanks for the information.

Hi Everett,

Good information, thanks!  The reason I think they lose value is exactly what you said, they "drop off the home page" and get pushed back.

There are reasons for this quesiton other than paying for a link.  For example, guest article links where you want to know if your efforts are working.  Also, if you are asking for a link on a site, it would be nice to know that your link will count by looking at current links on the site.

If you are looking for an open source solution, I recommend phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com/).  We have used it for a few years for our forum and I'm happy with it.

Is there a way to find out if inbound links that have been pointing to my site for a year or more are still offering value to my site.

I know the value decreases over time (especially press release and blog article links), but it would be nice to know how much value bring to a site.

Excellent point, and this is the direction I have been going.  Thanks for the feedback.

GPS tracking (vehicle tracking) equipment and software.  We are not a new business.  We have been around since 2003.  Bounce is around 40%.  I haven't seen a 2% increase.  I was quoting from a study done by another company.

ok, I neglected to say this Twitter account is one we have been activly using for about 2 years, and we have posted to it at least once or twice every day for the last couple of years.  And, we are a well established company for the past 8 years, and we regularily submit press releases and have written 2 articles per day on our blog for several years.

I just finished a 2 week test using Twitter.  The person running the test was tweeting for 1 hour every day, but the tweets were broken up into several different times throughout the day.  She engaged in conversations, retweeted, posted interested and catchy topics and linked to our blog.  By the end of the test, we only saw a 7% increase in traffic to the blog.  There was no noticeable increase in sales.

According to an article I read by Business Insider, Applied Predictive Technologies ran a test to help companies like Starbucks measure the impact of social media.  They concluded that social media accounted for a 2% increase in sales.  That's not much for the time and money that goes into it.

What's your experience with social media?

When I first posted this, I neglected to say this Twitter account is one we have been activly using for about 2 years, and we have posted to it at least once or twice every day for the last couple of years.  And, we are a well established company for the past 8 years, and we regularily submit press releases and have written 2 articles per day on our blog for several years.

It's completely visible.  I'm just using "z-index: 1;"  I'm not using a negative number.  It's for a java floating box that scrolls along side the page with the user.  It just makes the floating box stay on top, but it's only covering a couple pixel widths of white space behind it.

I use z-indexing for a floating bar that scrolls vertically along the side of my page.  I'm not hiding anything.  Is this safe or not?

Ryan,

Why do you say z-indexing is a blackhat trick?  I use it for my float bar on a few of my pages just to keep it on top, and it moves with the scrolling of the page.  I'm not hiding anything with it.

The reason I'm asking is because I have valuable links within scrollbar that I need indexed.  Google last indexed it today, but if I look at the "text-only" version, it only shows the visible part of the links.  Here's the page: http://www.rmtracking.com/gps-tracking-installers/gps-tracking-us.php

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Is an "overflow" (scrollbar) seo and Google friendly?  I only ask because it hides part of the visible text.

Great information from all of you.  Thank you!

Is it okay to create a landing page with a different url to get additional traffic to my site with ppc?  The purpose would not be for link building; I would only use it for direct marketing with ppc and people would click through to my main site via a no-follow link.  Is there anything wrong with doing this?

That's even worse.

You can always just have the content indexable on one page and add it to an image for all the other pages.

Is it possible for you to put that listing content in an image?  This would allow you to continue using indentical content on all pages.  However, the content in the image would not be searchable.  If you are just using this content for the user experience, that's fine.  If you want it indexed to add quality to the page, you will instead want to make each listing unique.

Theo, do a search on a company name who offers testimonials.  In most cases you will find their testimonials rank in the top 3 or 4 results.  This tells me that the search engines think it's important to let others know about the experience on the site, product, service, etc.  I do agree with you on one point, and that is that it's not easy to keep that flow of testimonials coming in.  This is the reason I started this conversation.

I don't see a lot of talk on here about using testimonials to build good content.  From what I have seen, the search engines love client testimonials.

I haven't found a good service provider for this yet.  I'm thinking something combined with Twitter or FB that also allows you to show the content on your site would be great.  Can anyone recommend a service like this? I'm checking out a service called, "Quick Vouch" but I haven't tested it yet.

HTML / CSS.  I just found a way to change this setting in my server host (GoDaddy), so it looks like that's all I have to do.  It doesn't appear that I would need to change anything in my htaccess file.

I take the following statement from Google as meaning we should only use the default 404 setting and not direct it to the homepage?  "Another example is when a site redirects any unknown URLs to their homepage instead of returning 404s. Both of these cases can have negative effects.............."   I guess I'm a little thrown off by the word "any urls."

I have the same problem.  I don't see any information in the Google link about setting up a proper 404 page.  Can someone advise how to do this or where to find info on this?

Great information.  My understanding was always the same as Steve's .....it depends on the ratio of unique vs. duplicate content.  A while back, I had read that this ratio was something like 80/20 (duplicate not to exceed 20%).  However, I think I will make each piece unique for best results.

I have about 50 internal pages on my site that I want to add a "Do it yourself tutorial" to in an effort to build the quality of the pages.  Is this going to de-value the content if I put it on all 50 pages?  It's difficult to write similar content 50 different ways.

Is a shared IP bad?  My site shares an IP on GoDaddy.

http://seosorcerer.com/check

I ran an independant SEO test that recommended I do the following:

Missing Header: Cache-Control header missing, should be presentMissing Header: Content-Length header missing, should be presentMissing Header: Content-Encoding - why don't you try using gzip or deflate?Missing Header: Expires header missing, should be presentMissing Header: Last-Modified header missing, should be presentIs any of this necessary?

I regularly post new 200 level pages to my site, so I guess I'm most interested in getting new links.  However, I do see the point that Alan is making as well.  Thanks to both of you for taking the time to answer this.

Should I wait until my press release has been syndicated to post to my press page.  If I post it to my press page first, will it cause a duplication problem?

I think you were right.  I did what you said and found it linked from a flash file.  Since this is the only one showing in the csv crawl report, I think it's fixed.  Thanks very much for your help!

Brad

My SEOMoz stats show that I have duplicate titles for the following two url's:

http://www.rmtracking.com/products.php and http://www.rmtracking.com/products

I have checked my server files, and I don't see a live page without the php.  A while back, we converted our site from html to php, but the html pages have 301's and as you can see the page without the php is properly redirecting to the php page.  Any ideas why this would show as two separate url's?

I have attended a number of social media webinars with tips on getting the most out of Facebook and Twitter.  Now, I would like opinions from someone who is not trying to sell me something.

We post 2 daily blog articles to our Facebook company page which auto re-posts to Twitter every day.  Is that enough, or is it necessary to hire someone to engage people with additional conversation?

If your answer is that additional conversation is needed, are there any companies or individuals that you recommend to provide these services at a reasonable cost?

Thanks Tyler.  I will check out that url.  I also learned of another site from an SEOMoz Sitemap video that makes it easy to create a sitemap: www.Gsitecrawler.com.

Thanks very much for your help.

Hi Mike,

That's a good idea.  I have never done a redirect for a different url.  Below is an example of how I usually do a redirect for a sub-page.  Would it still look like this:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/example1.html$ http://www.example2.com