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Hi y'all.

Hoping you can help give some definition here to organic results as I've inadvertantly started an argument in a forum when I was suggesting to some soul in need of advice that he needed to concentrate on the two types of SEO, those being Organic AND Local search results.

So the argument started that Local search IS Organic, and results are classed as either Organic or Paid.

Though to me, the term 'organic results' represents the search results derived from googles main website indexing algorithm,  Not Paid, and not any of the Verticals (Local/News/Images/Video etc.)

So would love to hear what others views are...  if I'm totally wrong I'll go back and graciously accept my education

Me again

Any news on the planned replacement? Would love to have an hint as to whats in store

The only tools you need and SHOULD use are your fingers and mind.

Firstly, there aren't a great deal many to have to go through so set aside a few hours and you should have covered all local yellow pages you can find.

Secondly,  You want to make each submission slightly different when it comes to your business description, so you need to use your mind here to rewrite things slightly differently in each case when you can.  Google will appreciate seeing references to your website on pages which aren't identical in content.  And i've often found as your're thinking about differing descriptions you come up with new ideas and as a result end up with descriptions that read better as you go on.

Thirdly, You want to ensure you can give as much information as possible on each profile you create, and each site you create profiles on will differ slightly in what they allow you to add. Some will be very basic, some will allow lots of information and different sections to be entered.  E.g. Business hours, On site parking availability, photos & images etc.

Hope that helps and leads you to do it the write way

Just thought I'd revisit this discussion to see if there's been any movement.  Any updates for us at all?

I tend to start with good ole Adwords, its free and can give you a very quick glimpse at whats being searched for and whats not.  However the competition bar is less than verbose..

Which is where I, like Damion, use Market Samurai to go that step further and look further into the competition

Shame I cropped the picture a little early, as the site that's in the #11 spot is 100% exact match domain.

As they have no reported back links, except 1 to domain, I still fail to see why google would rank them at all?

If you are only talking about your home page, then yes setup a 301 redirect as others have shown for the entries already in googles index BUT a redirect itself can lose up to 10% of any link juice flowing to your index page.  And if you're building off site links, do you link to your root domain or the specific URL of your homepage?  My guess is the root, i.e. www.mysite.com so unless www.mysite.com is actually a different website to whats found at www.mysite.com/blue/ then I always strive to get my sites working without an initial redirect taking place when someone goes to www.mysite.com

Depending on you choice of webserver, you can specify what the default index page should be, in apache this is known as the 'DirectoryIndex'.

If you add the line

DirectoryIndex /blue/index.html

to your .htaccess (or even better apache site config if you can) then apache will serve that page WITHOUT the redirect ensuring any link juice to your route domain is not diluted.

Then just make sure any links on your own site  that point to you home page DO NOT point to /blue/ or /blue/index.html but simply to "/" or "http://www.mysite.com/"

Hi,

I'm really struggling to see how these guys are number one on google (from the UK) when searching for "picture framers york"

Their SEOMOZ on page grading for the term is an F, so on site SEO is minimal if any.

Their backlinks are almost nonexistant, take a look at the competition report (attached) through market samurai.  Everything I thought I understand about SEO is currently being turned on its head because with the information available, they shouldn't be there.

I thought maybe its the proximity to 'York' center, but they aren't that close to be honest.

So any advice greatly appreciated as to why they are #1 so I know what it is I can do as an SEO.

Thanks,

Dave

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Hi all,

I wanted to bring this up for discussion as I must admit after seeing so many mixed opinions on this and after what I've just watched tonight I am back on the fence and confused as to what I think.

If you are not aware,  the guys at NobleSamurai have just launched a new short video campaign based on what they refer to as 18 months of interviews with expert SEO's in order to give people like me, an individual, an insight into how the pro firms are performing SEO today.

They're on the second video in the series, which has covered article syndication and link-building. Now I know we don't get the same credit these from article directories like Ezine that we used to BUT what NobleSamurai are claiming is that article creation, and syndication is still the BEST method to obtain back links in quantity.   What's worse, and more surprising to me is that they are totally encouraging article spinning.  Although they do say manually review each article before submitting, the numbers of spun articles they are hinting at are way too high in order to manually review each version.

So with that in mind, I'm very curious as to what you guys think about what NobleSamurai have just started announcing.

As I said I'm very much on the fence,  but with regards to my current projects,  Do you agree or disagree with this approach to content creation and syndication.

1. Find an article topic worthy of writing

2. Go ahead and create it for the purpose of hosting it on my site.

3.  Use a spinning tool to create only 3 or 4 other versions(not 1000's!!!) taking care that it still makes perfect grammatical sense however, just using different synonyms and maybe changing paragraph structure a little.

4. Upload the 3 or 4 new versions to different article sites, Ezine etc, of course including links to a. the source article on my site, and b. my sites homepage.

Looking forward to hearing what others think.

Dave

Firstly make sure you have no on-site references to index.html else you'll be distilling your link juice. Ensure all references to you home page are www.mysite.com/

For the redirect try the following:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]

You can still utilise the old way of sharing on facebook from your content with a simple URL..

You could either use an image link, or text link but the main guts is the URL..

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<url to="" share="">&t=The%20Title%20To%Share

That's it in a nutshell. Replace the 'u' parameter with the URL to share, and the 't' parameter with an escaped title. I've added %20 to show spaces in the example. </url>

Ahhh I hadn't considered using the blog to announce the main article.

Thanks for that suggestion.

Hi all,

Whilst adding content to one of my sites quite often I'm left deciding whether I should create an individual webpage for the content, or write it up as another blog post.

More often I write it up as a static page so it fits in with the rest of my website more 'directly'.

However I'm wondering if I'm missing out here as obviously I'm not taking advantage of the benefits of a blog, RSS, Tag Cloud, etc etc...

Just wondering if others encounter the same quandary?

Was about to ask the same question, on my campaign overview the last linkscape update claims to be

Last Linkscape index update: 05/06/2011

Was about to ask the same question, on my campaign overview the last linkscape update claims to be

Last Linkscape index update: 05/06/2011

Great News.

Come on guys, Any chance pro members can get an up to date version?

Very much looking forward to seeing a revised list. Any guestimate when one will be available?

Dave

Personally in this case I would lay back off the level of SEO you are performing if its having a negative factor on the readability.

You want people to read these posts, enjoy reading them and get something of value from the posts and be encouraged to come back to your blog and even promoted it by linking back to it.

If your posts have the air of 'overcooked SEO' on them it may have a negative effect on your efforts.  Sure use some SEO when it comes to the titles, tags, headings etc but of all things make it valuable to the readers.

Regards

Hi David, Thanks for your reply..  Although thats not what I was expecting

As I'm up against BIG law firms with buckets of dosh and lots of content on site, wouldn't an EMD give me some leverage against the big guys as they tend to only use their exact firm name in their domain name choice.

And if Google does eventually down rank sites with keywords in the name, I could always switch back to the firm names as the domain name when that day comes?

Hi All,

I'm trying to decide whether to switch to a more relevant domain name for an SEO project.

For a while now I've already been doing the standard SEO work on an existing website, content optimization, link building etc but I can't help feeling I won't ever get the full benefits of SEO until I also change the domain name.

The current website is for a law firm in new jersey called sandz.net which obviously has no immediate impression it is for a law firm so I'm looking at setting up a new domain and doing 301s to a new site.

My concerns are that as its a highly competitive market,  I've initiated the campaign to target local searches so I'm wondering just how beneficial buying a domain name with the term lawyer or attorney which actually be.

And of course the ideal domain names such as njlawyer, NJattorney  .COMs are all taken so I would be looking at perhaps a .ORG with the intention that all printed material the firm has still contains their original name, sandz.net and by word of mouth they should tell people their site is sandz.net as its easy to remember but for the sake of SEO and links then these should all be focused on a new domain..

Any thoughts appreciated..

Thanks

I'll give that a go thanks Vinnie.

I did some tweets referencing the page but that hadn't help.. a couple of test posts on some forums I run might catch googles attention

Hi all,

After waiting many months I was happy to see a certain site listed on DMOZ, then months later still haven't seen the dmoz category indexed in google.

It makes me wonder if certain categories don't get indexed or blocked or even previously penalized by google.

The category in question is a regional one : http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/New_Jersey/Localities/G/Garfield/Business_and_Economy/

Anyone come across this before?

Dave

Ahh ok, that's good to know..  I'm still going through the Art of SEO, so that will be my next call.

Hey guys,

Would it be possible for you to release some sample documents, e.g. an 'initial proposal' example that can help us newbies when aiming to obtain prospective clients.

I must admit I am much much more technical minded than articulate when it comes to these matters so a sample report would benefit me dearly that I could use as a starting point.

My SEO services so far have been well.. totally free so far whilst I learn more about the techniques involved and determine whether it really is work I'd like to carry out in addition to my day to day development/design tasks.

Now I am faced with a potential new client and after spending a fair number of hours Googling, I'm still not 100% sure how to structure the document and whether an initial audit should be carried out first to give me some statistics for the report.. Or whether the report should simply outline what I can offer.

The samples I've found online, most of which are quite old, mostly tend to come from established SEO companies and have a corporate feel about them which doesn't reflect on myself as a single consultant.

So if you could help out that would be fantastic and I'm sure would be a popular resource for others just starting out in the field.

Thank you

Dave

Hi thanks for your replies.

I've been adding the county name to my page titles thinking that would potentially bring in more traffic for searches from the outer areas.

Perhaps instead, adding the City name to the 'home' page title should be what I'm doing, but as I said I can't see people in Garfield searching for 'garfield attorney, or garfield lawyer' but if having the city name in in the title will affect the places result and indirectly the organic results then I'll give it a go. Well I'll try and keep the city and state on the title at least.

Last week I had my client pay for directory inclusion into a few of the BIG legal directories which hold a lot of authority so when google finally realises we're indexed on those, hopefully that will have a knock on effect too...

HI all,

I've found myself in a puzzling position and not quite sure which direction to push my current SEO project so if anyone who's done this particular type of SEO can offer some suggestions I'd be eternaly grateful.

I am currently working on a project for a Law Firm based in New Jersey.  Lets say the town they are in is Garfield.  What I really want to try and achieve is see them appearing in the number one spot whenever anyone within Garfield or the immediate area searches for a lawyer relating to the individuals need.  E..g searches like "personal injury lawyers", "real estate lawyer".

The problem is I can see how I can easily make it to the number one position if people are specific and enter garfield in the search term but in reality they wouldn't be doing that.

An additional problem is that peoples ISP's in garfield aren't located in Garfield, in some cases they're as far away as Newark so when they're doing a search for 'real estate lawyer' google is bringing up results for the Newark based firms.

It seems using tools like market samurai to look at the traffic and competition is proving useless as searches like the ones I'm doing for local business are so closely tied to the ISP location I don't really know whether to target broad range searches like "Real Estate Lawyer", or to be really specific and include the town name in my page titles, H1 tags etc...

I hope I put across my dilemma and someone can help me chose which direction to go in..

Thanks

Thanks for the replies.  The site is for a law firm so yes, most clients visit the office. So I will stylise  a  vCard formatted address and placing it high up as suggested.

Then will see if the geotarget tool picks it up..

@David - the tool is the seomoz tool : http://www.seomoz.org/geotarget

Hi All,

I ask the question as I was trying to GeoTarget tool which happened to not recognise a business address I place in the footer on one of my sites.

The tool states that including the address on page helps the search engines identify your location, so I'm curious whether a specific format works best when optimizing for local search?

Thanks.