Hi all! Okay, here's the scoop. 33% of our site visitors use Safari. 18% of our visitors are on either an iPad or iPhone. According to Google Analytics, our average page load time for visitors using Safari is 411% higher than our site average of 3.8 second. So yes, average page load time pages loading in Safari is over 20 seconds...totally unacceptable, especially considering the large percentage of traffic using it.

While I understand that there are some parameters beyond our control, it is in our own best interest to try to optimize our site for Safari. We've got to do better than 20 seconds. As you might have guessed, it's also killing conversation rates on visits from that browser. While every other browser posted double-digit improvements in conversion rates over the last several months, the conversion rate for Safari visitors is down 36%...translating into 10's of thousands in lost revenue.

Question for anyone out there gifted in Web design and particular Web Dev....Do you think that it's possible/reasonable to attempt to "fix" our current site, which sits on an ancient platform with ancient code, or is this just not realistic? Would a complete redesign/replatform be the more realistic (and financially sound) way to go?

Any insights, experiences and recommendations would be greatly appreciated. If you're someone interested in spec'-ing out the project and giving us a cost estimate please private message me. Thanks so much!

First of all, I'd like to say, your sight is completely adorable!

Okay, that being said, I have a lot of experience in E-commerce. What platform were you on and what platform did you change to? Were there any changes is the URLs of your site? Did you do 301-redirects? Do you know for sure those 301-redirects were done properly?

I moved a very large site (5,000 SKUs) from self-hosting to Volusion in 2008. We had good traffic up to that point and then, for the first 3 months after we re-platformed everything tanked. But what happened next was quite remarkable. Our traffic skyrocketed and our conversion rate did the same.

Sites replatforming have to prepare themselves for a major "dip." But what happens after the dip could be really worth it. I know it's scary, but it could be that you are experiencing the "dip."

I am interested to know what e-commerce platform you were on and what you are on now. They allhave their own SEO challenges.  I have a lot of experience with Volusion and 3Dcart and some experience with Magento. I'll be interested to know where you were and where you are now. Cheers!

Dana

I have several colleagues in the industry (and some fellow marketers) who have asked me where the best places are to look for and post SEO job opportunities. I personally like InBound.org and LinkedIn. Where do you recommend marketeers look for job opportunities?

D

You are very welcome. Have someone look at your robots.txt file. It looks possible to me that you are disallowing your entire sitemap. If that's not it, my guess is it was a recent back end change. Can you uninstall Premise, undo anything else you've done in the last 10 days or so. Resubmit your sitemap and see if that fixes it. Then, one by one reinstall, or redo the changes you made, but wait a couple of days between each change.

I think something you have done is telling Google bot that you don't want your pages indexed.

I just did this today. It was on a 3dcart store, so this may be over simplistic, but hopefully it gets you closer to implementing what you want (your will have to replace the URLs with your own of course):Immediately after your page tagshttp://www.yourdomainname.com/product-image-url.jpg"/> Then you will need to install the Facebook "Like" button javascript on your product pages. You can get detailed instruction on how to get and install this code by going to Facebook Developers area hereI am not a developer and it is pretty straightforward. You are able to define the size,, style etc. of your Like button on that page.Good luck. I hope this helps!

I had a great English professor whose response to the question "How many words should be in our reports?" was always "As many words as it takes for you to say what you need to say."  I'd advocate these things for your landing pages:

1. Forget about how many words are on the page
2. Target keywords and synonyms of those words
3. Forget about density
4. Write something that contains value for a visitor

The days of calculating density of keywords on a page and having that help your SEO are long gone and it might even hurt you. Just write a great page using words that correctly describe your product, service or main "reason to be." I believe the rest should happen on its own.

Yesterday in Seth's blog he gave a wonderful suggestion for making 2014 a remarkable year. He suggested that you pick 3 people who have influence over your life/work and select three books to buy and give to these them to have them read, and then, discuss with you. Here's how he describes it:

"Identify three books that challenge your status quo, business books that outline a new attitude/approach or strategy, or perhaps fiction or non-fiction that challenges you. Books you've read that you need them to read.

Buy the three books for each of the three people, and ask them each to read all three over the holiday break." - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/12/pick-three.html

Don't worry about whether or not I've read the books you are suggesting. If I choose one, I'll read it first before asking someone else to read it.

Here are some of my ideas:

The End of Business as Usual - Brian Solis [currently reading]

Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

The New Rules of Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott

Positioning - The Battle for Your Mind - Ries and Trout

Influence - Robert Cialdini

Engage - Brian Solis

The Dip - Seth Godin

Keep It Simple - Siegel & Etzkorn

Buy - Ology - Lindstrom

The Long Tail -  Chris Anderson

FYI - The three people I've identified to share books with are my CEO (to whom I directly report), our Marketing Director (who is a peer, but who controls most of the marketing budget), and the Vice President of Retail Sales (He is also one of 5 co-owners of the business and a major stakeholder).

The books you suggest can be the same for all three or different for all three. I think the major challenges we are facing in 2014 is agility, branding and redefining or abandoning old business practices that are costly, time wasters, inefficient, or all of the above.

Thanks everyone!

Yes, for starters uncheck all the boxes. Although I am unfamiliar with this specific platform, it sounds like a setting gone awry. The worst problems are often from the simplest mistakes.

After you uncheck all the boxes, spend a week monitoring your GWT reports. You'll know very quickly where there might be pages you don't want crawled or indexed, like dynamic search results pages on am e-commerce site.

It's great that you have a developer for help.

You might repost another Q & A question here regarding robots.txt for the specific platform you are using. You might very well find some specific help on which boxes to select and which boxes to leave unchecked.

I feel for you! I had a site disappear many many years ago because my host was in another company and sold his hosting company. I lost my entire business, so I really do understand that horrible feeling! I really hope something I've given you here helps. Cheers!

I think adding a Webmaster Issues question category is a great idea polarking.

Yes. Option #3. If it expired in the last year, it may just be in limbo. I'd find out, but don't sound overly interested. if the call forwards to some "attorney" selling domain names for ridiculous prices, forget it and go with option #1. I think if the content was great your hypotheses that people would be less likely to link may prove untrue. Good luck and I want to know what happens.

Hi Bob,

I'd highly recommend building out your profile on LinkedIn (if you haven't already) and then maybe even opting for the upgraded membership for a month or two. Lots and lots of SEO jobs there. Speaking from experience, the jobs posted on LinkedIn are far more "real" than jobs you'll find other places (like TheLadders).

If there's a company you're particularly interested in, call them directly. I cold called the company that I currently work for, they hadn't even advertised for an SEO, and guess what? They created a position for me Nifty huh?

One final suggestion, you're getting into a realm where working for an hourly wage is not really the best approach, IMHO (feel free to disagree). But, I think that if you are looking for a steady SEO job working for the same company or agency, you need to come up with your expected salary and benefits. Keep those close to your vest and don't put them on your resume. The right company will make the right offer Best of luck to you!

Dana

Hi Greg,

Well the fact that you're here in Q&A is a huge step in the right direction. I've been an in-house SEO for over 5 years now, and I never used SEOMoz or Q&A until the last 6 months. There are tons of great tools, but, as you might expect, each has its own learning curve, so be patient with yourself (and the tools).

SEOMoz is amazing of course. Screaming Frog is downloadable software that makes it easy to sift through and sort large amounts of information about your pages. Ahrefs is awesome, but I've never tried the paid version so I'll let someone else weigh-in on that. I have heard great things about Majestic SEO, but again I haven't used the paid version yet...we are planning to go with a paid version with them in the next few months. SEMRush is a great tool to gain visibility to what competitors are advertising.

First and foremost, I'd begin by snuggling up with Google Webmaster Tools. It's free and it's a lot of information. I like the backlinks comparative tools in SEOMoz and Ahrefs better thanGWT because, as you well know, some links are super valuable and some are worthless. It's really good to know which are which. One amazing link can be worth thousands of low-value links.

I hope that's helpful for starters. Chances are you'll gravitate towards some tools and not so much to others depending on your site and what your needs are. Good luck!

Have you loaded the sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools? That's a good starting point because Google will tell you where most of the problems are and give you suggestions on how to fix them. One of the most common things I have seen is having characters in the Product names or descriptions that XML doesn't like, i.e. HTML.

I think that's a personal choice more than anything else. If he really feels that those old pages are detracting visitors from the content he really wants them to be seeing, then perhaps 301 redirects would be fine. But, since the content is unique and his site is ranking very well, I see no harm in leaving them as is. Personally, I'd take them case by case, research how many inbound links they have, how much traffic they get (if any) and make a judgement call. It may be that you get rid of some, keep some and 301 redirect some depending on what the page is. Sorry that's not more definitive, but it's likely no one here knows his content better than the two of you. I'd just say it doesn't have to be all of one thing, whether it's leave them alone or redirect them.

Hope that helps!

Hi Brad,

Great question and I'm glad you asked it because I am planning out which conferences I'll be attending this year and trying to decide where to spend the money, just like you

Here's my personal experience and also what I've heard from asking and talking to lots and lots of people:

Mozcon, to me, is an absolute must. It's also great for me because I live in Olympia, so, no need for a plane ticket.

Last year I attended Jessica Bowman's In-House SEO Exchange in Santa Monica. It was a very different event, specifically for in-house SEOs, very small, but VERY worthwhile. If she offers it, I will do it again.

I have heard that PubCon, while probably of value from a networking standpoint, is not the best conference to go and get great takeaways and learn a lot. Basically, I've heard it's a wild party. In all fairness, I've never been. Don't get me wrong, I love a wild party, but given what I've heard I don't feel right asking my company to pay to send me to that one. Maybe if I paid for it myself I'd consider going.

I've heard that SMX West is good, but that SMX advanced is better, particularly if your intending on learning a lot by attending. That's the kind of thing I'm really lookng for, so, for me, SMX Advanced is probably going to become a must for me this year and probably future years.

The one conference last year I didn't attend and that I really regretted missing was InBound 2013. I was following the blog posts and Tweets coming out live from the event and if the atmosphere they conveyed was anything close to what was actually happening, I want to be there next year, really bad.

For me now, the question is: If I absolutely HAVE to chose one (in addition to MozCon and the InHouse SEO Exchange)....would it be SMX Advanced or InBound 2014? Personally, I am leaning towards InBound, but I think SMX Advanced will be an easier sell to my company because it's in Seattle and they won't have to pay to fly me across the country.

What are the conferences you are gravitating towards?

In the second view, If you click one more time on "Create New Segment" you are taken to a screen that contains the Advanced segments.

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Hi Antonio,

Great question and great example. Yes, Google can see "amdridlive" as "Madrid live." Consequently, I think your URL in option 2 is the way to go for all of the additional reasons you suggest: shorter URL, avoids repeating the word Madrid. So far you have really good instincts. Hope that helps!

Dana

I notice that when I navigate to an interior page, then want to go back to the Home page, that the little hyper-link in the upper left inside the home page logo actually took me to this URL:

http://www.thematstore.com/index.htm

instead of http://www.thematstore.com

I loaded them both into OSE: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.thematstore.com&comparisons%5B0%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thematstore.com%2Findex.htm&=Compare

You can see that the /index.html version of your homepage has the lion's share of internal followed links. This might be something you want to correct so all those internal pages are actually linking back to http://www.thematstore.com

I agree with Irving's suggestion to get rid of those footer links to other search engines.

I disagree with Irving's statement that keyword tags "can only hurt" you. I don't think they are hurting you. But he is correct in that you don't really need them. It does help your competitors discover what keywords you're going after.

Since you are so close to page one, I would do just those things and see if your ranking improves. If it does. Proceed cautiously with Irving's suggestions "c" and "d." I'm not saying they aren't good suggestions, but that if you do everything all at once, and your ranking sinks, you won't have any idea what had the negative impact. I would be especially cautious in removing that page and "de-optimizing" things.

Out of recent personal experience, I decided to "de-optimize" a page that had SEO copy in small text way at the bottom of an e-commerce page. I was #2 in Google and hoped that by de-optimizing I could move up to #1. Guess what? I took out my keyword-stuffed copy, and boom, dropped to #4.

This is why I say proceed with caution. Do one thing at a time and evaluate the results before moving on and changing something else.

Hope this helps!

I would try posting on LinkedIn and possibly also on Inbound.org. As an advanced SEO, those are the two places I look at first when browsing for new opportunities. Hope that helps! 
Dana

Another thing to consider is what kind of businesses this "FollowMe" site sells their services to. It seems to me they are willing to sell to anyone. That means they might end up posting videos from one of your client's competitors along with their's. That's not a good scenario at all. They'd be much better off cultivating their own branded YouTube channel.

Great question. Yes, it would be much better to put the text on the page via the CMS with CSS to achieve the same look as you have right now. The reason is that a SE spider cannot crawl text that is embedded in an image. All the spider will "see" is that it is an image containing whatever is described by your "alt" attributes. If you want search engines to be able to "read" that content, I would recommend going the route of making it actual text styled in conjunction with the image you want via CSS as you propose.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Yes, we have a similar situation for our YouTube channels. In our case, some of the old videos are even for obsolete products. We leave them all, even when we do an updated video on the same product. That total view count for your YouTube channel overall can go a long way towards bulding credibility in a new viewers mind.

Hope that helps a little. Just my two cents

Hi Sergio. Yes, I think you are on the right track. I would make the keyword research, and any resulting changes to the Meta descriptions, target things specifically by category and then products.

I understand your frustration.   Perhaps you can convince him to try one small thing in addition to the meta descriptions (hopefully of your choice), so you can show him a positive impact from something that could have a bigger impact. Just a thought!

Hi Thomas,

I am always learning too and am very interested by your question. Are you based in the UK but hosted in the US? Or are you based and hosted in the US? The reason I ask, is that if you are based in the US, I presume that your target market is US. If you are based in the UK I presume your target market is UK-Europe. If the latter is true, have you considered changing to UK hosting? Although I don't know the whole story, it seems from looking at your site that you are indeed UK based.

I am thinking that you are having a bit of trouble ranking for a more British term because you are USA hosted. I do think the location of your host is a factor in ranking for certain terms. The problem is, I can't point to any proof to support that opinion. I am interested to hear what others have to say about this.

Thanks Thomas!

Dana

Hii bluekite,

You need to make that read more link in your blog a "do follow." This is only going to bolster your internal linking structure, which is a VERY good thing. In your case especially this is perfectly relevant and helpful to your readers. I hope that helps!

Dana

I understand your position very well because I work in e-commerce too, and many times, the only difference from one product to the next is dimensions. I work with audio visual equipment and this is often the scenario for things like power cords, cables, microphone cables, audio snakes, etc.

If all of your product descriptions are the same, then yes, it's duplicate content. If you are super-concerned about that, then that makes the case for creating hub pages with options that allow people to select the size of the furnace filter they want.

Personally, on large e-commerce sites, I'm not sure that spending tons of time writing elegant, unique descriptions for products that are obviously the same is worth your time. Google understands the difference between a site that is e-commerce based and a site that is content based (like a blog).

I would say, set it up both ways and have some users test it. Which way makes it easier and faster for them to find exactly what they want? Choose that one. I think if you choose the one that is better for usability, the SEO will follow.

Personally, I like hub pages. You know, you could do both. Most E-commerce platforms allow you to build a hub page, and then also have individual product pages that just aren't part of the navigation structure. I have used both Volusion and 3DCart to accomplish this. It just means building all the product pages, creating a "parent" page for your hub page, associating the products with the parent and then just not placing those individual products in any categories. That way, they still get indexed and if someone does search by dimension, it's possible the product page matching their search will be the one they see in the SERPs. That's hard to predict of course, but it would at least make that a possibility.

Also, last thought, if you do a good job of featuring the dimension in your page title and meta description, and also on the page, then I really don't think the duplicate content issue will be a problem.

You are most welcome. Yes, you are so right. If you demonstrate your expertise, even if it's just something small, within his budget, you will gain his trust (one hopes). If not, and he tries to take advantage of your expertise (and generosity), then it might be time to move on to a more appreciative client.:-)

Thomas, I've been doing a little research trying to support my hypothesis that the location of your hosting company can effect your SERP results and I found this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

This is probably a great starting point.

Interesting question Boris. There is a blogging tool out there called "Storify" (http://www.storify.com) that uses this concept to help bloggers write posts. I think the reason it works is that it makes it easy to pull things from sources all over the Web and weave them together into a unique story.

I think if you draw from other sites, it's perfectly okay, especially if you give citations to your sources and weave them together in a unique way. For example, if you are the only person who has put together a database on artists like the one you are subscribing, you are effectively compiling existing content in a new and unique way that could be very valuable to users.

I always like to include stories of my own experience. I have a small site I built that has a blog. One of the very first blog posts I wrote was simply a "Top 20 You Tube Videos" for music that was closely related to the overall topic of the Website. Although it includes 20 YouTube videos that I didn't make, this page gets the highest traffic and has the highest page authority of any of my internal pages. I

I think there's a big difference between copying other content and trying to pass it off as your own, versus compiling information, citing your sources and putting it all in one place in a way that your users find useful and interesting.

My only advice on top of that would be to spend some effort at weaving these things together in a way that is uniquely your own.

Hope that helps!

Dana

This sounds like a fun project, seriously (no sarcasm intended here), because you have so many possibilities of getting great quality links that everybody struggles to get. Here are my ideas:

Educational sites - schools (.edu links anyone?), school raitings sites, school stats, etc.

Divorce lawyers - (people often move after getting divorced) - Lawyers also have very specific states where they are licensed to practice

Local chamber of commerce sites

Local storage companies

State government resources for child support, driver's licensing, hunting licenses, voter's registration (.gov links anyone), anyone relocating is going to need new ID and re-establish child support through new agencies.

Just some thoughts! Hope they are helfpul,

Dana

Bonjour Denis,

Ca va? D'accord, je desirerai d'assistez vouz. Je pense que c'est une probleme commun. Je regrette mon francais!

Okay, now in English if you please.

THe path you are on is going to lead to duplicate content and there's no way around it that I know. I would suggest building one fabulous site in your primary language and let people translate it themselves via Google Translate. I'm not sure if that's a ridiculously simplistic view or not. But it's what I would do for my own sites and suggest to clients.

A bientot!

Dana

David's answer is spot on. One thing he didn't mention is that it takes time for the goal javascripts to load. Many times, people who complete a transcation close the "Order Finished" page before the javascripts have a chance to load completely. Consequently, you are getting their conversion but it's not counting in the GA total.

Hi Kyu, Yes, you are on the right track with your approach to 301 redirects. The question you ask about having different Title tags and meta descriptiong completely solving a duplicate content problem is a very good one. For example, say you had to very similar products on an e-commerce site. You decide to use exactly the same on-page copy for the on-page description, but you write unique meta description and title tags. Let's say you went one step further, and even put canonical tags on each of these pages. From the viewpoint of GWT or SEOMoz's crawler, no, duplicate content wouldn't be identified. Googlebot, however, could see this differently and determine that it is indeed duplicate content. Matt Cutts has even gone as far to say that content that is "substantially similar" can be flagged as duplicate content. That being said, even if your content isn't showing as duplicate with some of the tools you can use, if you know it's duplicate, fix it and make it as unique as possible.

Hope that helps!

Dana

I personally prefer using [exact match] instead of "phrase match." The difference is that with exact match a search for [extra large widgets] would return an ad for [extra large widgets] but not for "extra large widgets on sale." Conversely, if your campaign (and I'm making the assumption we are talking about paid ads) was set to be triggered for "extra large widgets" as a phrase match, your ads would be triggered for both "extra large widgets" and "extra large widgets on sale" plus many other variations, like "widgets extra large" or even "widgets white extra large"  I use exact match because it gives me tighter control over my ad spend. However, this is with a keywords set with which I am intimiately familiar. If I was launching new campaigns for things I didn't know as well, I'd definitely use some phrase matches until I started to see what's really working and what isn't.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

The 2nd edition was done in 2008. Have you read it? I have. A lot of the fundamentals there are completely sound, and they stay away from a lot of the garbage tactics that SEOs have done over the last few years.

Interested to know your take on it. Always interested in different points of view.

Ehren, don't just trust my word for it. Read the reviews on Amazon.

My own copy is also dog-eared from constant flipping back through and referring to things.

Hah! Touché Nate, lol - You are most welcome

Hi Antonio,

These are great questions because I am working on 3 WP sites right now too. I have heard that WordPress SEO by Yoast is a very good plugin for SEO, but am interested to know what others think in the comments here.

Personally, I don't think that there is anything wrong with having matching keywords in the URL and the page title. Yes, Google pays a lot of attention to page titles. As long as neither are stuffed, overly repetitive or you don't go crazy repeating those same keywords all over the page, I think having the URL and Page Title in synch is a very effective tactic.

Yes, the input fields on the plug-in you are using are meta tags. Consequently, populating the keywords field is something I wouldn't recommend. Google pays no attention to those keywords and they won't be visible on the page anywhere (i.e. they will not be populating any

,

type tags). The big difference between meta tags and <h>tags is that meta tags aren't visible on the page, <h>tags are. Technically, yes, your user can see the title tag in their browser tab, but technically I don't consider that to be "on the page" per se.

Curious to know what other have to say and whether or not they recommend Yoast.</h></h>

This is really a case by case thing I think. Clearly, "cars.com" is a great domain name to rank for the word "car." But who wants to rank for the word "car?" Certainly not someone who's selling cars. If you're selling cars you might want to rank for longer rail terms containing the singular "car" -  like "buy a new car." But let Wikipedia rank for the plain old word "car" because it's not going to bring you well-qualified traffic.

The second example you give "online datings" is just not what any person fluent in English would type in a search bar. In this example, I'd say definitely don't go for the plural.

You should be able to see the difference in search volume between the singular and the plural in Google's Keyword Tool. That should tell you a lot. For example, look at the search volume difference between "communion supplies" and "communion supply" - there's a big difference.

The last reason I would discourage you from buying a plural version of a niche you are interested would be if the existing company has made a brand out of the singular version. For example, Peet's coffee has the domain Coffee.com  - Some blogger has bought the domain Coffees.com...and it's totally lame...If you aren't careful with things like this you could get accused of cybersquatting or worse, trademark infringement. It's one of those situations where just because you "can" doesn't mean you "should."

Without knowing more details that's about as much as I can say. I hope it's somewhat helpful!

My IT Director and I just had an interesting back and forth discussion about this. I'll spare you the witty repartee and take you straight to a post in the Google Webmaster's Central Blog:

To Slash or Not to Slash?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Quote:

"If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can:

• Consider changing this behavior (more info below) to reduce duplicate content and improve crawl efficiency.
• Leave it as-is. Many sites have duplicate content. Our indexing process often handles this case for webmasters and users. While it’s not totally optimal behavior, it’s perfectly legitimate and a-okay.
• Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris."

We particularly enjoyed Maile Ohye's reference to Chuck Norris. It's handy as a search term if you ever want to find her post again   Hope this helps!

I don't think it really matters. Yes, you could definitely get the browser to match the SERP by populating the <title>Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Company Name</title>

Hope that's helpful Tommy,

Dana

It is my understanding that Rich Snippets are not recognizable by all search engine bots. The advantage to schema.org is that it is an agreed-upon format that works equally well in all the major search engines. Consequently, skip rich snippets and just go with schema.org.

Interested to know what others have to say. Great question!

Search volume can be incredibly volatile from one region to another. I would imagine that "outage notification" as a term could be incredibly volatile, because it's really pretty vague. If there was a major earthquake, I would think that colume for that term would soar...or any natural disaster really. On the  other hand, if things had been relatively quiet and  there hand't been any major seismic or weather events, then that might mean something else.  but that all depends on where you are, and where you are trying to sell.

If search volume in a remote area of Pakistan increases by 5,000 percent, and it's only temporary because of a weird event.....is that something you can build a business on here in the States? Of course not

There are many factors to consider. Search volume is one tiny piece of the puzzle.

I highly recommend Brian Solis' book "Engage" - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470571098?ie=UTF8&tag=pr200f-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0470571098

It's brilliant.

P.S. Also David Meerman Scott's "Real-Time Marketing" http://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Marketing-PR-Instantly-Customers/dp/1118155998/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365800642&sr=1-3&keywords=david+meerman+scott

There's no guarantee that the turnaround time will be as fast as you would like, but have you tried submitting your updated page via "Fetch as Googlebot" in Google Webmaster Tools. Most likely, you've already tried this, but if not, I'd start there. Just make sure after you've done the "Fetch" that you click "Submit."

Other than that, we are all really at the mercy of Google's crawl bandwidth allowance so it could just be that it will take a bit more time. What is the cache date on the current Google listing?

Hi Joel,

If you visit http://www.schema.org you will find detailed instructions about each type of markup and how to code it.  Also, Here's a link to a Google video and help article on the subject of structured data: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170&ctx=cb&src=cb&cbid=-1vinosestbcbn

As you do your markup you will want to use the Structured Data Testing Tool to view how your listing will appear in the SERPs. Keep in mind that it's completely optioinal for Google to display any of it, so they might or might not. It also could take a while for the structured data version of a page listing to begin displaying. Once you are satisfied with how your listing looks in the testing tool, just give Google some time to start displaying the info.

You will also want to establish authorship for your page by joining Google+ and connecting your profile to your Website. If you are a brand or a business, then you would want to establish the brand or company as the publisher. You may have done this already but if not I can provide detailed instructions on how to do that too.

Good luck!

Dana

You're welcome Dan! I just noticed there is also a post in YouMoz on the subject:

http://moz.com/ugc/the-new-adwords-keyword-planner-your-keyword-research-process

Hi Jesse,

I just recommended this book to one of my colleagues here are work. It's Ginny Redish's book Letting Go of the Words

Happy Reading

Dana

P.S. Thanks for tuning me in to Daniel Pink.

I agree with Jeff's suggestion. Although, just for fun I plugged both URLs into Open Site Explorer and they are really kind of a statistical dead heat, One has one more link than the other, and the one Jeff prefers has marginally better MozRank and Moz trust, but not by much. The overall Page Authority is identical at 13. They probably both could use some love, but yes, it appears you might at the very least have a keyword cannibalization issue. I understand how this happens because it usually results from an attempt to address navigation and try to assure that visitors are finding items they want via several different paths. Frankly, duplicate content happens a lot on eCommerce sites. People often talk about "duplicate content penalties." There is no such thing. It might just cause Google to rank one page and ignore the other, or rank both pages lower because it can't tell which one is really the important one....but it isn't a penalty, per se. Still, lots of duplicate content can cause other problems (like interfere with how much of your site gets crawled on a regular basis), so it's good to address where possible. Canonical tags should do the trick in this case. Cheers,

Dana

If you put your URL in the Structured Data Testing Tool http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets  You should see your profile picture from Google+ (or your brand icon if you set it up as a publisher from a Google+ page for business) next to your listing.