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The color of the text should have no effect on your site's ranking. As long as you aren't placing white text directly on a white background so that it's invisible to human eyes.
Hiding text within similarly colored backgrounds is an old trick people used to stuff sites full of keywords. As long as your site's text is visible to humans, you should be okay.
Unique content is always your best bet. At the risk of giving a rather vague answer, the best way to get "likes" is to write content that people will like!
Think of a common question or problem that people have, and try to answer/solve it. Become a helpful resource, try not to just regurgitate advice that anyone can find in 5 seconds with a Google Search.
There isn't a lot of science behind it... you sort of have to work with trial and error. Learn your audience, learn what they like and what resonates with them. Over time you can refine it into a winning formula, but each niche has it's own group of people that need to buy in to make something successful.
For a humorous take on this advice, see the following: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes
This is purely anecdotal evidence, so take it with a grain of salt - but I've seen for myself and heard reports of Domain URL factoring in very prominently when it comes to SERP rankings.
That being said, I'm quite the gamer myself... when people search for "guides," I believe they are typically searching for things more along the lines of Walkthroughs and FAQs. What you seem to be offering is more accurately described as a training/coaching service. You can attempt to rank for "guides" if you like, but you'll almost certainly acquire higher quality traffic by focusing on the more relevant keywords of "coaching" &"training" and the like.
Just my 2 cents.
Questioners also probably aren't as interested in the MozPoint system as they are with just getting an answer.
Additionally, inserting yourself into conversations online can be somewhat intimidating to the uninitiated, and it's possible they choose to maintain as low a profile as possible. Thus, they don't post unless absolutely necessary, and refrain from using the "thumbs up/down" or "best answer" post modifiers.
Just my guess.
Edit: Also, if only the person asking the question can mark an answer as "good," what qualifies them to do so? They were the ones with the question to begin with, so unless they act on some advice, they can't be sure whether or not it will work. So, say they act on the advice and it does work... well, they probably aren't as concerned with coming back to SEOmoz just to give some random person +4 points.
Assuming you mean a Google Places Listing.
"I've been doing optimization for our websites and tracking the results regularly but don't really know what the results actually mean."
This is quite a broad statement. I'll take it that you already understand the important parts of the optimization process. So, the first question to address would be: What results were you trying to achieve?
If all you're going for is "more traffic," then you can simply look at Analytics and see whether or not organic traffic has noticeably risen or fallen to get a measure of your success. If your goal is more business, then you need to start looking at conversions and specific page flow within Analytics.
For instance, say you run an e-commerce site... perhaps you should look at the number of hits to the "thank you" page that users see after making a purchase. Is it getting more hits than it has in the past, and if so, does the increase in hits there correlate with your increased traffic, and does all of that together correlate with your SEO efforts? In a perfect world, things would look like this:
I'm sorry if this is all a little broad... it might help if we know exactly what "results" you'd like to track.
Showing off is a legitimate reason (see this guy: http://www.coolestguyinamerica.com/). However, you can certainly monetize traffic by selling ad space.
I would suggest reformatting your URL structure to something simpler before you get too far in to change it.
For example, URL.com/ [area of property] / [date blog published]
Date was just the first thing that sprang to mind, you could use any unique and relevant info about the specific property you're discussing. I would pick something to use initially and try and stay as consistent as possible.
At the risk of giving you a very bland answer, the best way to get "likes" is to create content that people like.
Take a look at your industry or niche... what common questions do customers have? Is there a dearth of information on some super-specific subject that you can assist with? Consider addressing common issues like these in a creative way that will really resonate with your current fan base and encourage them to share!
To find the stats for a single page:
At the top menu, click "Standard Reporting." From there, look at the side bar. Go to Content > Site Content > All Pages to view a list of your sites pages. From there you can find the specific page you'd like to see, and manipulate the data you're shown on it by setting up filters.
To see what sites are referring to a specific page, click the dropdown menu next to "Plot Rows" and select Traffic Sources > Source. If you're already at the specific page you're interested in, this will break it out by how users arrived at said page. You can do the same for each individual metric you'd like to view.
Hope this helped! The best way to familiarize yourself with Analytics is to just poke around in it for a while, I'd advise just playing with it for a while until you get a handle on how it's internal logic works. Good luck!
This seems like largely a matter of opinion and creative direction, so I'd take most answers here with a grain of salt (mine included).
That said, I tend to be a little nerdy, and often detail-oriented... barring actual clips of the product in use, I like diagrams or schematics showing specifically how something works. Bonus points if you can expand on the how, and why your product's method of operation is superior. Still slides would work as well. Someone explaining the product in detail with a whiteboard style setup would definitely bring a human touch to it that some viewers may prefer.
Presumably the people you work with are also interested in the product, or similar fields. I would do a survey of them to see what appeals to them the most, and try to target the video at your audience. This an interesting and open-ended sort of question, so I'd like to hear what more people have to say on it...
I would probably go about this by searching all blog and youmoz articles relating to link building. Click through the authors profiles and see where they work. Also try checking the profiles of commenters who may have insightful remarks.
This approach lets you read their blogs or articles before you make a decision on who to hire, as well as familiarizes yourself with the various tactics they're likely to try, all the while ensuring it's only mozzers you're looking at.
In short, they each have their own benefits
If you'd like to read more on it, here's an article that explains it a little more in depth... I won't bother just re-stating it all here.
http://plussearchmarketing.com/search/2012/03/mobile-urls-for-seo/
By Resolve, I mean that the URL in question actually needs to end up showing the user content and not be a blocked page.
If you go to this address:
http://www.ob.org/_programs/water/
it gets a 403 server error. I'm not sure how SEOmoz handles this, but my gut tells me you'd probably be safe to just 301 redirect that URL to the following:
http://www.ob.org/_programs/water/water_index.asp
However, if that doesn't work, you will need to add content to and allow users to browse that specific page.
Option "2," using rel=canonical seems like the best course of action to me. You may also want to apply a 301 redirect.
Google vocally has a pretty strict policy about not mixing AdWords with organic results. I doubt what you suggested is the case, else G could be in some serious trouble with the FTC.
If you're using SEOmoz's On-Page report card, you can only track one keyword at a time. In this instance, a "keyword" can also be a phrase. If you're searching for "Asheville Landscaping Edible" using the On-Page tool, it'll show zeroes because that exact phrase never appears on the page.
If you try them one word at a time, they each show up.
The godaddy WHOIS report is here: http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?k=IjNPPd3p/1WMnGjSRP2weA==&domain=caiii.com&prog_id=GoDaddy
Shows it registered to someone named Tran Khanh
Email: khanh.tbk@gmail.com
Good luck!