Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you are sure you want to downrank the old site, you can contact the webmasters linking to it and tell them about your new site. Telling them that there is no content on the old site should also help.

Become the sensitive counselling industry 'go to guy'. Be giving advice in all manner of forums and blogs. be the guy with the sensible hat on in the wild and crazy internet!

And then blog about it on a more personal level.

Have you thought of maybe doing a podcast? If giving serious, objective advice is the goal then not everyone wants it on a monitor at work or in their 'favorites' at home. A podcast is also more intimate, your voice going straight into their ears! (Look up the not for the faint of heart 'Dan Savage podcast' as an example, or A Nerd of Advice)

Be a guest on a local radio show - or become their expert. Give free counseling, or at least free counseling literature to anyone and everyone.

Facebook may not be the right place to be as it is a bit discouraging when you see a friend has 'liked' ABC Counseling....

I know this is no SEO advice, but some argue that SEO is turning into ecommerce.

Good luck!

We send out millions of emails a year and are happy with Vertical Response as our provider.

We keep researching the competition and have found that Constant Contact is exceptionally easy to use, Bronto integrates well with all other Social Media / marketing platforms, MailChimp is a joy to work with but Vertical Response just keep cutting their prices!

Hope this helps!

Jez,

You are completely correct. Change the redirect to 301 and watch the link juice flow!

A big drawback for using Google URL Shortener for anything is that it is not private. Simply add '.info' to the end of the goo.gl url and you ahve all the juicy data you need.

The funny thing is that I got 6 thumbs down for that answer - but I think it's still true!

Thanks. This looks great for the one-off, technical SEO, but I was thinking more of meta-tags, descriptions and titles. Instead of having to go into each page separately via the Sharepoint interface.

Anything you have on using SharePoint 2007 or 2010 would be profoundly appreciated!

Both Alan and Charles seem to have hit the nail on the head. On the one hand the keywords have to be in the content, and don't be surprised when you get customers asking you why!

The search engines follow what the human reads. Content that is stuffed with keywords, especially your meta-tags and alt-tags, will quickly get noticed by Google.

My rule of thumb is;

Main keyword - 3 times on homepage, also on every other page possible

Sub-level keywords - 1 time on homepage, wherever possible inside the website

US only - Better Business Bureau. Most other countries have their local equivalent.

Its definitely worth looking into adding to your site as they are a kind of 'quality local business provider' as each member goes through a good practices check before they are allowed to use the logo and links.

I'm not a programmer and our 200+ person company isn't going to change their CMS just because I asked them nicely.

Do you know of any SEO plugin I can use on SharePoint 2007? I just don't want to have to keep going into each of 110 websites time after time.

No shame! It keeps us all on our toes - and employed!!

I use the free and easy to use Screaming Frog software.

Good luck!!

I have a similar problem, 5-10 pages of static content that I need to make look more 'alive' to Google.

Sadly I cannot add too much content as it is scientific specific content and I am a mere SEOer!

I use the keyword tool on SEOMoz. Find out the keywords for your products, put them into the tool, find out who ranks highest for the words and link to them from the product's 'useful links' page.

After a month or so politely email these sites and ask them to link back to you.

Simple and effective.

I think of it in a similar way but slightly different.

Your website is someone talking and the ranking factors are a megaphone. If you are whispering into the megaphone you will increase the volume, but it is nowhere near as good as shouting into it!

My PPC answer was focused on using the keywords for PPC. Google is not set up to focus on keywords for organic SEO purposes. I use the SEOMoz keyword tool BUT we generally have few direct competitors for our high end and niche products so they may be too general for your purposes.

To answer the question - I do not believe (with no stats or info to back me up) that Google has the specific answers as to how many people have looked for 'water bottle' and 'bottle water'. Wherever they do not have the accurate number they fill in what they 'guesstimate' the answer to be.

Hi Debi,

I was using broad search for a long time for a fashion based customer, but I too found that when I mixed up the words within a phrase I got the same numbers.

This kind of surprised me until I realised that there is a percentage of users who will put words into Google in an 'illogical' sequence.

And it's PPC - no click, no pay, so why worry too much?

Google may, or may not, take into account the physical address but I know that the more discerning customer definitely does care.

I recommend to all of my SEO customers to add their physical address, even if it is just a PO Box, as it furthers Google's stated aims of adding truth and transparency to the internet.

Ron,

Whatever EGOL is saying - just do it!

He knows his stuff, and after reading his answers here, and my own questions he has answered, you can be sure that he is giving you excellent SEO advice.

Going back a step, "Average Time On Site' in my opinion, is not a relevant statistic any more as internet connection speed increases.

With dial up connection the customer paid per minute on-line. Now with flat rates for broadband people leave pages open when they step away from their computers - I've had pages open at the office literally for days! That would really muck up anyone's stats. (That's not why I do it though)

Well - 6 thumbs down? I guess I was wrong!

I have no proof about what I am about to say, but using logic and a hunch, I would suggest  that if one were to have direct links to Google, lets say via AdWords and/or AdSense, then your site has a better chance of getting more of your pages indexed.

In theory.

With no proof at all whatsoever behind this idea.

EGOl - again, you have really helped!

You definitely are an SEO Guru!!

Maybe think in the longer run - it might be worth offering $50 voucher towards car seats for the family model car. $100 voucher to babys'r'us for the younger family demographic.

Whatever gets them in to look at the cars!

With the higher ticket item you can expect a longer sales process. 'Woo the buyer'.

Compare it to winning a baseball season - as ready to win as you may be at the beginning of the year you can only do so at the end of the season!

EGOL - thanks again for all of the help. To answer your questions;

The search volume isn't very high - maybe globally in the thousands according to SEOMoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool.

We rank high generally in the SERPs for the important terms.

From all of the answers here, and obviously knowing how things work in my company, I'm leaning heavily towards focusing my energies on link building with a secondary focus on creating new content.

If you are still focused on PR then the quickest and best way to do it is quite simple through original and relevant content with an ongoing link building strategy.

Simple eh?

Thanks EGOL for your answer.

We have:

little content, (I am working on fixing that)

few competitors in this, an exceptionally niche market

some inbound links from .edu and .gov sites but nothing astonishing

Basically I can only do actions to all or none of the sites as they theoretically receive the same level of attention from me.

Thanks for the help Asim!

Luckily our keywords are quite niche but content is difficult to get hold of because of this speciality. I'm going with linkbuilding and social media on this one!

I'd suggest sticking to creating a new email account yourself or from your customer. Its easier for you to compartmentalise what is happening, especially when there is a flood of links!!

I think it is also ethically more correct to use a customer's email address, you after all creating the links for them, not for yourself.

We have over 50 highly varied and niche sites in our company. Each website is for an annual event spread across the calendar.

I am the solo SEO person here and was wondering what your opinions are about what would bring in the greatest SEO power in my limited daily allotment; link building? Keywords? Content?

Oh, and to make my life even easier - its all based on SharePoint 2007!