Welcome to the Q&A Forum

...This is a general discussion.

You're certainly on the right track. Starting from scratch is always a fun thing (if you're an SEO nerd like I am). You can set rules and goals in place from the get go and make sure best practices are followed as fresh content is always delivered and updated.

Content and user experience certainly are a big big plus. Make sure to do some good keyword research and tastefully integrate them within your content. Install a good analytics package and monitor user engagement. Social media definitely is another great outlet - make sure to use it effectively, especially Google+. I've seen some pages rank higher just by sharing on G+ (of course there are a lot of other factors, but this is just a correlation, not causation). Even if a lot of people don't use it, it's important to have a presence.

Dont' build crappy links. As you said, stick with quality over quantity - always. The more natural your content and the more quality it is, the more it will get shared and the more it will get linked to.

In short, you're on the right track

I doubt it. The titles aren't hidden at all. It looks good as you said, but it's not purposefully hidden at all.

As you said, there are many reasons as to why you're seeing dropped listings. You're targeting competitive keywords. Perhaps you should try to run a link audit on different websites on page 1 for your targeted terms and see what's going on with your competitors. Maybe they have a better (or worse) linking strategy or social share strategy than you?

Have you done a keyword density check on your site? Try to keep keyword density to around 1-3% (that's what's worked for us in the past).

Of course there are also the fundamentals: make sure you have keywords in all the right places (which it seems that you do - maybe consider putting keywords in the URL).

Hope this helps.

Yes I have to agree. My Adwords advisor told me similar things. Basically he said "we're working on it" and that "I'm not the only one with the complaints. Sad if you ask me. So much data has been lost and it's really hard to get new ideas.

Rob, the old Google keyword tool seems to have been removed from all of my accounts that I manage. There is no more "go back" button as of this morning. It sucks really.

Along these lines, can anyone suggest new keyword research tools to use? Rob, I've never used Bing or Jaxxy - what's your opinion on those?

Hi All,

I'll premise this by saying that we like to engage in as much white hat SEO as possible. I'm certainly not asking for any shady advice, but we have a lot of local pages to optimize :).

So, we are an IT and management training course provider. We have 34 locations across the US and each of our 34 locations offers the same courses. Each of our locations has its own page on our website. However, in order to really hone the local SEO game by course topic area and city, we are creating dynamic custom pages that list our course offerings/dates for each individual topic and city. Right now, our pages are dynamic and being crawled and ranking well within Google. We conducted a very small scale test on this in our Washington Dc and New York areas with our SharePoint course offerings and it was a great success. We are ranking well on "sharepoint training in new york/dc" etc for two custom pages.

So, with 34 locations across the states and 21 course topic areas, that's well over 700 pages of content to maintain - A LOT more than just the two we tested. Our engineers have offered to create a standard title tag, meta description, h1, h2, etc, but with some varying components. This is from our engineer specifically:

"Regarding pages with the specific topic areas, do you have a specific format for the Meta Description and the Custom Paragraph? Since these are dynamic pages, it would work better and be a lot easier to maintain if we could standardize a format that all the pages would use for the Meta and Paragraph. For example, if we made the Paragraph:

“Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area.” As a note, other content such as directions and course dates will always vary from city to city so content won't be the same everywhere, just slightly the same.

It works better this way because HTFU is actually a single page, and we are just passing the venue code to the page to dynamically build the page based on that venue code. So they aren’t technically individual pages, although they seem like that on the web. If we don’t standardize the text, then someone will have to maintain custom text for all active venue codes for all cities for all topics. So you could be talking about over a thousand records to maintain depending on what you want customized.

Another option is to have several standardized paragraphs, such as:

“Our [Topic Area] training is easy to find in the [City, State] area. Followed by other content specific to the location
“Find your [Topic Area] training course in [City, State] with ease.” Followed by other content specific to the location

Then we could randomize what is displayed. The key is to have a standardized format so additional work doesn’t have to be done to maintain custom formats/text for individual pages.

So, mozzers, my question to you all is, can we standardize with slight variations specific to that location and topic area w/o getting getting dinged for spam or duplicate content. Often times I ask myself "if Matt Cutts was standing here, would he approve?" For this, I am leaning towards "yes," but I always need a gut check.

Sorry for the long message. Hopefully someone can help. Thank you!

Pedram

Excellent, it did help! I also emailed their customer service and received an official answer of $1,395 for early bird.

Thanks!

Yup, absolutely playing a role. We are ranking on page 1 on various local keywords in one city, and completely invisible on the same keyword in another city. Basically, it seems that the more local you can custom your page - especially for a local business - the better off you are.

Say you are a golf course in washington dc and you optimize your pace for that keyword. Someone who types in "golf course" only and happens to be in the Washington DC area is more likely to see your page even though the user didn't specify the "washington dc" location in the search query.

The takeaway - localize when you can and make sure all the major directories know where you are!

Makes sense guys. Thank you.

Hi All,

I'm wondering what would be the better alternative - schema.org microdata or microformats. I am aware that search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing recognize Schema.org as the standard. Question is, will it have any negative affect? Our web developer here says that schema.org microdata may result in negative html. I don't think that it will affect our SEO, but I guess that's also something to shed some light on.

So, what's the consensus here - should we implement schema.org or go with microformats - or, does it really make any difference?

Agree with Brady & Adam on this one. Each great responses.

I'll just add that, for the most part, the URL should be for the user first and then the search engine. A lot of times brands have funk looking URLs that have numbers and symbols in them - not user friendly. So, I'd recommend adding your descriptive keyword/producA/B/C into the URL if it'll help the user understand your product and navigate your site better

Hope this helps!