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I would go with the first choice, or even something like domain.com/category/product (you could always include the brand in the SEO-friendly URL). The only situation where I would use the second option would be if I had a really tiny site, say 50 products or less. I would do it more from a future-proofing viewpoint than any specific SEO reason. With choice #1, if you ever move or replatform your site, it will be far easier to keep your products organized and to implement any necessary 301-redirects than if you choose options #2. It will also be far easier to sort these URLs in a database and then populate new categories on a new site. I suppose I prefer #1 because it makes managing the data easier, particularly on large sites.

I am not surprised to see a drop in traffic this steep as a result of moving from page 1 of Google SERPs to page 4. You just aren't going to get a lot of people searching and clicking past page 2. I would focus on trying to discover what prompted the drop in ranking. Have you been monitoring the ranking page's bounce rate and visitor engagement metrics. Was the page converting well? Did something else change, i.e. pricing, free shipping or any promotional offers? Did you change anything in the URL, or even in your site architecture?

Last of all, I'd take a look to see how profitable that keyword and the page it led to have been. If they haven't been that profitable, then maybe focusing on longer tail is the better thing to do. If it was a reasonably profitable term, I would start by trying to document everything that occured between the end of November and beginning of December. It actually looks like the trouble began about 11/29. Hope that helps a little!

Hah! Touché Nate, lol - You are most welcome

First let me say that I thought it was kind of funny that you posted a question about black hat/white hat regarding the color green and your last name is "White."

I don't think there's anything wrong at all by putting a more complete description in a product "Quick View...." as long as users seem to be engaged with the page. From that standpoint, my take on it is that it's totally white hat. Now, could that "Quick View" text be written in a way that's ridiculously spammy? Sure. But still, in my view it's not really "black hat" for this reason: The page wasn't constructed to deliberately hide anything from the end user. It was constructed to perhaps be more aesthetically pleasing by using the "Quick View" to make the text available to visitors without having to clog up the page with loads and loads of text visually. If the "Quick View" text was completely invisible to end users, and only visible to a bot....then I believe you'd have a black hat scenario.

In December 2008 I helped a company transition from BV4 to Volusion. Like your situation, our URLs were years old at that point (the original Website launched in 1996).

I really only have 2 pieces of advice:

1. Make sure you've set up your 301 redirects properly (we didn't, and it took 6 weeks to sort out the mess).

2. Hang on for the ride.

Be prepared for a major dip in traffic, particularly if you are re-writing all of the URLs. But take heart. Sometimes the dip is necessary to move onward and upward. Seth Godin wrote a whole book on The Dip. Now might be a good time to buy your CEO a copy.

Cheers! I hope all goes well and that it moves you one step closer to awesomeness!

Dana

Hi Spencer,

I am an in-house SEO to a fairly large e-commerce site (4,000 SKUs) that has the same exact problem. As I am sure you are aware, the META robots noindex tag is only a suggestion to goooglebot. This is something the bot can easily choose to ignore, and it frequently does ignore it.

I would suggest submitting individual URLs that you would prefer to be removed from Google in Google Webmaster Tools to the "Remove URLS"  tool - It's not instantaneous, but it does work.

I hope that helps. I know it's frustrating. We have tons of content that's indexed that we'd rather wasn't. It takes time, patience and intelligent work to get the job done.

Dana

Hi again. I am just touching base to see what the current status is of this ranking drop. Did it recover? If not, I am curious to know if you moved the site to a new IP address when you purchased it? If so, was the new IP located in the same country as where it was originally, or was it different? It could be that you did none of the above. I'm just trying to see if we can rule this out as a potential cause for the drop.

Hi Phil,

I don't think your pages present a duplicate content problem from what's on the page. However, they do present a duplicate content problem from the standpoint of your Titles and Meta descriptions. IMHO, I think Google devalues pages for this and here's why: Imagine you have one of the largest libraries in the world (i.e. Google)...then imagine that you have millions of people in your library trying to find the right book to answer a question or solve a problem. Now imagine, that your library visitor finds a row of books and every single one of them has the same title and short description. Suddenly, finding the answer to a question becomes much harder and the library visitor must open every single book [link] to find out if that particular one actually is the right one for them. You see the problem? I would take a few minutes and write descriptive, accurate and unique titles and descriptions for these pages. Then, I'd say you're good to go!

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Lisa,

In your Rankings report dashboard, in the upper right, there's a dropdown box where you can select your reports. The very last choice is "Export entire keywords history to CSV." You can use this to track keywords over longer spans of time. I also use AJ Kohn's method of creating keywords indexes to then make those reports beautiful for clients. His post on how to do that is here: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/new-ways-to-track-keyword-rank

You may have already tried viewing the historical reports, so I'm not sure if my suggestion is too basic. I hope it helps!

Dana

Ahh, now I understand better what you are asking. So, you still want the same URL indexed, but you want Google to be reflecting the new content.

Yes, in this case, I would use Fetch as Googlebot.

I would also recommend resubmitting your sitemap. That will help too.

Thanks for the clarification! Hope that helps.

Dana

Hi Vikas,

Yes, you are on the right track. Don't use Fetch as Googlebot. Use "Remove URL" in Google Webmaster Tools. It's not instant, but does work fairly quickly. Hope that helps!

Dana

Chances are your Titles were being automatically constructed using the Titles of your posts. Yes, you will probably have to go back through and do proper titles for each one so that they don't exceed character lengths in Google and other search engines, but, take heart, it will be worth it. Right now the search engines are either making up their own titles or using truncated versions of your longer titles.

Take the time, go through and write really great titles for those 2,000 posts. It'll benefit you SEO. Don't worry, 2,000 titles really isn't and insurmountable task. You don't need to rework every page, just add titles of the proper length using a plug-in like Yoast. If you do ten a day you can have it done in a month.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

I'd recommend spending the money (if you can) to get listed in the Yahoo directory, joeant.com and business.com - Then, make sure you have your business listing/citations done. Go to http://www.getlisted.org and make sure all of your business listings are in order, accurate, complete, etc. Then I would recommend searching for blogs in your niche and going around and getting involved in those blogs. Read the posts, comment, get to know the writers, follow them on Twitter etc. Lastly, start a blog yourself and stick to it and show people that you know your business.

Lastly, do a press release to announce the launch of your new business. I'm not a big fan of press releases unless they really are about news....and launching a new business is quite news-worhty so I would go for it. Use a press release company that has something to do with your business if you can. A lot of people don't realize that there are lots of different press release services out there, not just PRWeb. For example, one of the companies I do SEO for is a Christian company so we use ChristianNewswire.com instead of PRWeb.com and it's been great. Search for press releases companies working in your niche. You might be surprised what you find.

There you go. That's a start. I hope it helps!

Dana

Hi Brian,

I am an in-house SEO for two different companies. One is a small e-commerce company with about 200 SKUs and one is a larger e-commerce company with 4,000 SKUs.  The larger one has been in business for 40 years. Because of the nature of our business many of our products change frequently.

Here's what I have to say about changing content, just for the sake of changing content. First of all, lose the "250 words" each idea. Forget about the word count and just write copy that's amazing and engaging, if at all possible. Now, I understand that for something like a 15-foot Rapco XLR microphone cable, writing captivating content could be a bit of a challenge. And frankly, do you really need 250 words to describe a 15-foot Rapco XLR cable? I think not.

Freshening up your content is a great idea. But, I have another suggestion. What if instead, you start a blog if you don't have one, and begin talking about the products (with links back to the product pages) that you are most passionate about?

Sure. Freshen up your content. Make it more accurate. Fix the broken links. Fix the typos. (I can guarantee you if you've got a large site you have plenty of both). Write better title tags and more compelling meta descriptions. These are things that never stop. This is something that should always be an ongoing project.

That's the thing with SEO. I laugh when people say they've "SEO'd" their site...as if it's like putting a new roof on your house or something. It's not something you do once every 10-15 years. It's something that's a constant, ongoing process.

I know, this wasn't a cut and dried answer. But, I do hope it helps a little

Dana

Hi Mike,

I don' t think 50 keywords is too many at all, but of course it depends on the scope of your campaign. I have one niche site that I run a campaign for and it has about 250 keywords. That pretty much covers every possible nook and cranny broad and longtaiil search term for the whole site. On the other hand, I have another campaign containing about 750 keywords for a much larger site, and it doesn't even come close to covering the whole site. It maybe covers two main categories.

One thing I will caution you on is SEOMoz campaign keywords are case-sensitive. I don't really know why. They just are. So, if you have one keyword listed as "This Is My Keyword" and another as "this is my keyword" SEOMoz is going to count that as 2 keywords. So just to be on the safe side make sure all of your keywords are lower case before you upload them to your campaign.

My only other piece of advice is that if you have a long tail keyword, or perhaps even a branded search term that you know you are going to rank #1 in Google for (or perhaps already do), it might be worth leaving that one out and tracking other keywords that are more challenging to rank for.

Oh, one more thing, use the tagging capabilities to breakdown your campaign keywords into more specific groups. It makes reporting on specifics way easier later. For example, if you have several different specific brands inside your campaign, break it down by brand.

Hope this is helpful!

Dana

I agree Brandon. I think Raven Tools had something like this before thir Rank Tracker went belly up. Who knows, maybe SEOMoz will add it in the future, but considering the reduction of importance on tracking specific keywords, developing it may not be at the top of their "to do" list.

Hi Brandon,

In your Ranking reports screen in the upper right there is a dropdown box with Export options. The very last one on the list is 'Export complete ranking history to CSV."  It take a little while if you have a lot of keywords, but once the report is generated you are automatically emailed with a link for the file download. Hope that helps!

Dana

P.S. If you then want to take that data and make it beautiful for your client(s), here are two rocking posts from two people who I admire greatly:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guide-to-replicating-seomozs-graphs-in-excel

and

http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/new-ways-to-track-keyword-rank

Yes, I was aware of the geography "personalization"  I just hadn't ever seen a mashed up search result based on my browser history before. I know language is definitely a factor.

What is the value to the end-user in seeing a search results page mixing two unrelated terms? [That's a purely rhetorical question]

Thoughts?

I think this is another indication that we as SEOs [and our clients] can't get bogged down by the rankings of specific keywords. That measurement of SEO success can no longer be tied to the performance of a handful of specific ["vanity"] keywords.

I am including a screenshot of a very interesting search result I received while InPrivate Browsing in Google using IE9.  I was spot-checking some keywords while private browsing and the first one I searched was "presonus studiolive." Then, I searched a completely unrelated term "communion supplies." I am attaching a screenshot of the search results page I then received from Google.

Interesting, no?

I can't even begin to wrap my head around the implications of a search results page that mixes results from two completel unrelated terms.

Thoughts?

7QNxPHM.jpg

Hi Joseph,

While there's not a way to pull this data out of SEOMoz pre-sorted, this can easily be done by exporting this data into a CSV, electing your datafields and then formatting these as a table in Excel. Then you can simply click whatever header you want (i.e. Google US Rank) and sort from smallest to largest, numerically, then Voila! You have your keywords sorted in order.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Tim,CRO is high on the "to do" list for us in 2013 and I recently had to put together a proposal for a budget. Here are some of the sources I used to help put my proposal together:http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip-7-the-adorable-site-abandonment-rate-metric/http://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate http://www.houseofkaizen.com/resources/calculators/bounce-rate-impacthttp://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/10/17/the-back-story-for-the-300-million-button/http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1691779/benchmarking-average-conversion-ratehttp://index.fireclick.com/fireindex.php?segment=6http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/09/13/conversion-boost-online-retailershttp://www.davechaffey.com/Internet-Marketing/C7-Service-Quality/Conversion-rates-E-commerce/http://www.thinkmetrics.com/benchmarks-for-websites.phphttp://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/research-topics/ecommerce/e-commerce-landing-page-mistakes.html

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/04/06/fundamental-guidelines-of-e-commerce-checkout-design/http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/marketing-insights/average-conversion-rates.htmlhttp://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1695493/declining-conversion-rateshttp://www.baynote.com/2011/07/forrester%E2%80%99s-top-five-e-commerce-trends-still-hold-true/Some of these might be more helfpul than others. It's a long list. If you've never read "The $300 million button" I'd recommend starting there just because it's very inspiring.Cheers,Dana

Yes, I had that thought too. Davinia makes a good point.

Wow! Diane, I am sure there are a lot of SEOs dying to know your secret to this one? Myself included.

Is it possible that you are producing an RSS feed of your content that the BBC News is picking up and then including in their RSS feed? Just a thought.

Here's an example: http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=uk

Dana

Hi Bob,

You are welcome and I apologize for taking so long to respond here but I have the flu

I don't think you need to worry about Google stopping at 100 and not indexing the rest. As long as you have a sitemap you can always submit that via Google Webmaster Tools and Google should find everything from that. If you're site is gi-normour, you may want to submit two sitemaps, one for categories and one for products.

Also remember that you can use "Fetch as Googlebot" in GWT a certain number of times per month. If you have a new product, or a page that has siginificantly changes, this is a great way to let Google know that it would be a good idea to crawl that page. You can select that Google just looks at that one page, or crawls also all of the pages that page links to.

You can monitor your crawl and index reports in GWT. There you can see exactly how many pages out of your sitemap Google has selected to include in the index. If you are ranging at 80% or better, you are doing well. If it's below that, you might want to research duplicate content issues or other problems causing Google not to select more pages.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi sterls,

If the 404s are for pages that are gone and really no longer relevant, don't do anything. Just let them 404. This is perfectly normal. If they are 404 errors to pages that should be displaying, it's possible that perhaps you changed the page URLs, made a new page for old content (and then removed the old content page) or perhaps you re-wrote your URLs to be SEO friendly. In this case, all you have to do to rectify the 404s is set up 301 redirects. Depending on what platform you are using for your site there are usually some easy ways to do this. IN WordPress there's several very simple free 301-redirect management add-ons you can upload It usually involved inputting the old URL (which you can get from your Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors report) and then determining where you want that old URL to redirect to.

Let me know if that's helpful and if you need more guidance I'd be happy to help. Just know that not all 404 errors are bad. Sometimes, it's just natural for old pages to go away.

Dana

Hi BobGW,

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it. Google's own tests have proved that users would rather scroll through large amounts of content than move from one page to another due to latency issues. I assume you are talking about a fairly large e-commerce site. This kind of scenario is common in  e-commerce Once you add the links in the header, footer, associated products, recommended products, etc. I honestly wouldn't worry about it. However, in the interests of always improving, and if it's possible, try changing one of your category pages to using pagination, preferably one with decent traffic but lower page authority. Make the change and determine if there is any impact, positive or negative.

IMHO, I think it's better that you've kept your products higher up in the structure.

I s the only thing prompting you to think about making a change a report from Google that there are too many links on a page? Or are you thinking about changing it based on real problems with the site?

Curious to know as I am very interested in pagination issues.

Dana

Hi chanel27,

I just checked to see if your site is indexed in Google and it is. The easy way to check this yourself is to go to Google and in the search bar type  site:http://www.rollerblinds.com.sg  When I do that I get 17 results. If your site had been removed from Google there would be zero results for that query.

Now, when I take a look at your link profile in ahrefs.com I see that your link profile is making good progress. I can't see the same kind of historical progress in other tools, but I did check some of the article submission sites that your SEO seems to be using to see if perhaps they had been de-indexed by Google, and they haven't been.

Is your site new? Sometimes, when a new site comes out of the gate, it experiences a bit of an artificial bump in ranking before settiling into a lower position.

I don't see any evidence of black hat SEO here. Although, I would caution you from relying on artificial blogging and submitting to article directories and expecting that to produce results. To some extent, this can still work, but if it's working now, it very may well not be working in a few months. I would have a frank discussion with your SEO consultant and tell them you are concerned about the quality, not the quantity of your backlinks. Also, think about complimentary businesses whom might make good possible link partners for you, make a list of them and give them to your SEO.

From what I can see, your SEO is doing a competent job. Hope that's reassuring!

Dana

Greetings te_c

To answer your first question, yes, the search engines would crawl (provided they are crawlable) the internal links linking to other pages on your site.

The second question I would like to answer but I need you to rephrase please? Do you mean robots.txt? You first question implied a meta tag, because that is what would appear in the section of a page.

If your instruction "no follow" is in the of your site, then the suggestion to the search engine is  not to follow. Conversely, if the instruction is "follow" the engine is told to follow. This is irrespective of whether the links are internal or external. To my knowledge, there is no instruction that can be fed to search engines that says "crawl if internal, don't crawl is external." You can accomplish this of course with creative workarounds, but there is no "command" for it.

Also, keep in mind that these instructions for search engines are only suggestions. The engines may do something completely different and follow, or not depending on their "will."

I hope that's helpful!

Dana

I don't think you need to worry about losing your seller ratings. I believe those should be fine. Your campaigns may take a ding on their Quality Scores though, since the account you are moving them to will not have any history for those particular campaigns. I would recommend contacting someone from Google directly and ask them. Usually there is a real human being attached to your Adwords account to whom you can reach out and ask. Is the agency a Google Adwords Certified Partner? If so, I would think the changeover shouldn't be a problem, but I would ask before making the jump just to be sure.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

Hi Andrea and Jason,

I highly, highly recommend MozCon. I attended last year and, because it was the first time I had attended any SEO event, I made a point of asking everyone I talked to about what conferences they attended and which ones were the best. Hands down, without question, everyone I asked said MozCon. They liked SMX too, for the most part, but said that MozCon was different (and better) because everyone had the opportunity to attend all of the presentations. This is in contrast to SMX where you have to pick and choose what you want to attend and if two things you are interested in are going on at the same time, you end up having to choose. MozCon is also great because it's not about selling you anything. In that way, it's not like a traditional convention because there aren't 100's of vendors also vying for your attention.

While I think both are probably great for networking, if you really want to leave a conference feeling like you've learned some seriously important things related to SEO, I have to believe that MozCon is going to be hard to beat. Please don't tell my boss, but if the company didn't send me, I'd pay for it out of my own pocket....That's how valuable I think it is.

Hope to see you both there!

Dana

Hi Diane,

I agree with 100% and his was a great answer. In terms of managing your link-building efforts, i.e. keeping track of who you've contacted where and when and whether or not you earned a link from them or not, I think Raven Tools has one of the best tools to help you organize and keep track of those things.

I love SEOPro Tools and have found them to be indespensible in tracking keyword position, particularly historically. The Forum here of course is one of the best SEO resources anywhere.

Sean actually turned me onto a new tool I'm going to be trying this year: http://www.webposition.com/

As he mentioned, there are a lot of "Get Links Fast" services still out there. To some extent they are still working (one example is Linkvana.com). I would take Sean's advice and steer clear of these. We used Linkvana for a few months and fotunately didn't do it for long so we didn't hurt our business. It was an enormous waster of time for temporary, short-term ranking gains that disappeared quickly. I wrote 84 unique blog posts that were then published to a number of blogs in Linkvana's network. Within 4-6 weeks, all but twelve of those blog posts had disappeared because the blogs where they were posted were removed from Google's index. That's a lot of work for a measly 12 links from poorly ranked (PR 3 and below) blogs. Since we are already a PR3 site, a bunch of inbound links from sites of PR3 and below aren't of any help to us at all really.

I get those same emails every day. They appeal to one's sense of greed. Just don't fall victim to the temptation of finding any easy way. Real SEO is hard work and takes time and patience.

Good luck Diane! I hope this helps

Dana

Hi Boodreaux,

There are numerous reasons this can happen. Remember that the linkscape index is only updated once a month, so the results you are looking at are not based on "real" time stats. That's the first thing to consider. Also, if you are an- e-commerce site or selling a product, did you have a promotion that was in place that recently ended? I've seen sites move up and down just from free shipping offers being turned on and off. So I would look at whether or not the offer or content on your homepage (or the page you are comparing) has changed at all.

Some other things to think about: What is your bounce rate and how has that changed over the period of time ranging from when you were #2 to when you moved to #5? I have seen sites move down when their bounce rates increase.

One last thing to consider: Were there any inbound links from new agencies, or high-profile, high-authority pages that have dropped off? I have seen a company get featured in a magazine like Wired.com and bump up because of news events, and then settle back into a lower spot after the news cycle passes.

Okay, maybe that wasn't the last thing. How new is your site? Did it launch within the last four months? While it may be an Internet myth, I do think that brand new sites discovered by Google and other search engines get a little "bump" in their rankings when they first come out. Then, there is some settling that occurs. This could also be a factor if your site is new.

I know this doesn't give you any hard answers, but I hopes it's encouraging and helpful.

Dana

Darren is absolutely right. However, it seems unclear as to whether or not you set up 301-redirects from your old URLs to your new URLs. If you did, then the drop should only be temporary as Google figures out where the new URLs are and the old authority is passed to the new pages (or at least most of it). If you didn't do any 301-redirects, and you still have access to a spreadsheet or sitemap of your old URLs I'd encourage you to set up 301 redirects as soon as possible. Otherwise, it will indeed be like starting completely over with a new site, regardless of hyphens or underscores.

Hi Cenk,

Yes, it is better to use relative paths when linking on your site to your internal pages. This reduces the number of server calls on a page and can increase your page speed and efficiency. Now, does that factor specifically factor into algorithm? I don't know. But page speed is part of the algorthm, so I suppose you could say that indirectly it does have an effect on algorithms and how your site potentially ranks.

One caveat: Use absolute URLs for your canonical tags. Search engines have problems interpreting relative URLs when they are in a canonical tag. I learned this the hard way!

Hope that helps!

Dana

Oh and one more. I think they've actually won some awards. This site is an excellent example of how to make a boring product extremely fun and interesting:

http://www.newpig.com

One of my favorites: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/indepth/  Maybe it's not so much the design that gets me (i'm not a very visual person...ironically...but their content is ridiculously good and they've got a ton of it).

Thanks Sean. This was a great suggestion. We are going to give it a go. I really appreciate it!

Thanks Sean. This looks like a good possibility. I think the only deal-breaker might be that it appears that their software identifies competitors, rather than letting us define our competitors (like the way it works when setting up SEOMoz campaigns).

Is my evaluation correct? Or is it possible to define specific compeittors for each campaign?

Hyphens vs underscores doesn't make a difference any more. If you're purely thinking of making the change for SEO purposes, I wouldn't do it. I agree that the drop in traffic you are seeing has more to do with replatforming and rewriting all of your URLs. This is pretty normal. Hope that helps!

Okay fellow in-house SEOs, I need some advice please. We are considering an upgrade from SEOMoz Pro to Pro Elite. For a business our size, this is a major investment. I need some compelling reasons why we should go with this upgrade in lieu of simply adding an upgraded membership at SEMRush.

Aside from more keywords tracked and more pages crawled (We only have about 5,000 pages, so I'm not sure more pages crawled is even something we need).

Right now, it seems the only benefit to us would be the ability to track 2500 more keywords. We don't need more campaigns and we don't need more pages crawled. An extra $300/month is a lot to pay just for the sole benefit of adding more keywords.

The reason we are considering this is because we have 6-7 product lines that are all quite different from each other, different keywords, different competitors. All of these products lines are enormously competitive, so of course we want to track each (with competitors) separately so that when I build a Ranking Index (which I learned how to do beautifull thanks to this post by AJ Kohn a few days ago), that my Ranking Index is a truer picture of how we are doing for keywords related to specific product lines, against the right specific competitors. Because of the keyword limitations in SEOMoz Pro (1,000 max), we can't come close to covering everything.

Is increasing our level at SEOMoz really the best, most affordable option to do what we want to do? I realize I might get some bias here, but we are really trying to research cost-effective options, as $4,790 is a huge investment for us.

Thoughts?

Hi Joel,

Since I'm not in the real estate business nor does my business rely on local traffic or business, nor have I been a "local SEO" I feel poorly qualified to answer this question. However, I can tell you this: I moved here in September 2011 and I needed to find a place to live, fast.

One of the top two local real estate companies that kep coming up in searches was this one: http://www.rants-group.com/default.htm  The other one was this one: http://www.hometownpm.com/  However, I should throw in this caveat, the pages that I landed on and that I continue to visit are the "home rentals
 pages here: thttp://www.rants-group.com/residential_rent/res_rent_page_houses.htm and here: http://www.hometownpm.com/rentals.html

Perhaps by studying those two sites it might help you a little? I don't think either one of them have any significant SEO yet those are the top two that I used to help me find a nd rent a house when I moved.

Dana

Hi Joel,

Since I'm not in the real estate business nor does my business rely on local traffic or business, nor have I been a "local SEO" I feel poorly qualified to answer this question. However, I can tell you this: I moved here in September 2011 and I needed to find a place to live, fast.

One of the top two local real estate companies that kep coming up in searches was this one: http://www.rants-group.com/default.htm  The other one was this one: http://www.hometownpm.com/  However, I should throw in this caveat, the pages that I landed on and that I continue to visit are the "home rentals
 pages here: thttp://www.rants-group.com/residential_rent/res_rent_page_houses.htm and here: http://www.hometownpm.com/rentals.html

Perhaps by studying those two sites it might help you a little? I don't think either one of them have any significant SEO yet those are the top two that I used to help me find a nd rent a house when I moved.

Dana

Hi Stu,

I'm going to say this at the risk of being struck down with slings and arrows by my highly-esteemed friends in the SEOMoz Q & A forum. Research and pursue high-quality directory links. Create a budget, research the directory's history, PageRank, check them in OSE, and vet them completely. You will be amazed at what's left. There are a lot of good directories out there and they still matter (ouch! I think an arrow just hit me).

I had a brand new niche site last January. In one year we've moved from PageRank 1 to PageRank 3 and we are little bitty teensy weensy. We are on track to quadruple organic traffic and sales in 2013. We have some good "earned" links, but nearly ALL of our first links were from high-quality directories.

Just be smart, research them, and never pay for more than one year. Next year, that directory could be gone. If you aren't in Yahoo.dir, pay the money and get listed (if you can). Also get into Business.com and JoeAnt.com...there are many many more good ones.

I'd love to raise my hand and charge you a consulting fee to do it for you, but I think you can do this yourself and save a lot of money and get decent results.

Good luck! [and I'm putting on my armor now to deal with the comments that come after this one, lol]

Dana

EGOL is sopt on. You will find the other hat you need to wear is that of "diplomat."

Yes and no EGOL. Their sales tanked, but they still rank really well for some terms for which we are competing against them. I think it's only a matter of time.

Hi Joel,

I don't think there's a hard and fast rule here. The length entirely depends on the subject matter and your audience. If your page is a product page on an e-commerce site and the product is a microphone clip, 2000 words would be silly. If your page is a blog post targeted towards audio-video professionals and is about how to mic specific instruments in specific situations, 2000 words might be too short.

Remember when you were in school and you inevitable got that professor who answered your question of "how long should my paper be?" and they answered "As long as it needs to be to express your point.." ?  It's like that.

Good luck Joel!

Dana

The short answer is, yes, you can do it. It's not easy, but it can be done. I was once the lone SEO for a company of about 100 and I left. They were relying heavily on link-building (via blog networks) and I fundamentally disagreed with their approach (the basically set up fake blog networks all over the place and piled them high with links and over-optimized anchor text.

I am now the lone-SEO at one of their competitors and encouraged to engage in white hat SEO. If you are on your own, the best place for you to keep up with the ever-changing world of SEO is right here at SEOMoz and I'd also follow the guys at Distilled, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, the good folks at Search Engine Journal and if at all possible, attend MozCon in Seattle this summer. It will be worth every penny your company spends to send you.

Good luck Jean-Pierre. Just remember to prioritize stuff. Know what's going to have the biggest impact on your company's business goals and go after that and be able to prove your results. Then hang out here when you get stuck or just need a pat on the back

Dana

Hi Charles,

Rel=publisher is more appropriate for e-commerce product pages or for branded websites. I had to search high and low for an answer I posted to a similar question several months ago because it referenced the best (and only, as far as I know), explanation of how to properly set up Google+ and establish Google ASuthorship for a brand or e-commerce site. Here's the text of my comment including a link to the interview:

"I am in-house SEO for two e-commerce site, one large, one small. Rel=publisher is the way to go both on your home page and your product pages. You are correct in that rel=author is not appropriate in these situations. Andy is correct that Google is not yet displaying brands as authors, but I believe that is going to change over time.

Yes, if you mark up your pages for structured data using rel=author, the testing tool will display your brand image. It's just not displaying in Google search results yet.

Recently, Chris Goward of Wider Funnel marketing interviewed Janet Driscoll Miller (President and CEO of Search Mojo) about this very topic and she had some great advice which echoes what I've said above:

http://www.widerfunnel.com/events/google-and-search-engine-optimization-an-interview-with-janet-driscoll-miller

I have also appealed directly to Google for some guidance with this whole issue because not even expert search engine marketers and SEOs can seem to figure out how to handle it.

Hope this helps!"

Dana

Good suggestion Ryan.