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Just tell them you want a link inside an article or at the end of an article (up top is best). See if they have any paid text link advertisements on the websites. Usually just asking is the best method. See if advertising in the print magazine will result in some sort of advertisement on the website, usually if you do the print magazine, online is a bonus, etc... they're using that as upsells nowadays since print is taking a hard hit.
I understand where you're coming from, I really do. However, you're always better off going the harder route. I know that isn't what you wanted to hear because your client is paying you to do a job.
However, how pissed are they going to be when one day they pull the switch on the EMD's and they lose their ranking overnight? You're back at square one and your client will feel like a bait and switch was pulled on them.
There is absolutely no reason why you cannot rank a brand website within a few months. It's just a matter of high quality content, on-page optimization, and then link building. Work in the social aspects and you'll easily get them up there with the big dogs.
If you chase the algorithm, you'll be left high and dry.
Just my 2 cents! 
I think people need to stop fearing Panda. If you have high quality content and are unique, there is no reason that you will be affected. Remember, the sites affected mostly were sites that had tons of dupe content, scraped content, and horrible content.
Craigslist is a classifieds site that wasn't affected at all. If you don't scrape stuff and the content is original, you'll be fine.
Focus on being a brand, focus on user-generated content that is unique, and then just don't scrape!
Do NOT go with an Exact Match Domain. Focus on building up a brand. EMD's will one day be going by the wayside and you'll be left with nothing. Trust me, building a brand is the best method to use. You won't get the SERP boost an EMD will give you, but you can easily compensate by using super amazing content that is relevant and doing some nice link building.
Focus on the brand, amazing content, amazing links, and they'll be ranking in no time. Seriously!
I don't use any tools, I manually check the top 5 Social Media sites and run thru a manual audit process looking for specific KPI's (Key Performance Indicator's) to gauge if they could benefit from social media services.
What they're using is rich snippets.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html
You can read about it there. I would recommend using it if possible, they do make it nice for the end-user and result in higher CTR's in my experience.
I would set your post title as the H1. That is my personal preference and what i do for my clients.
H1 gets a little more weight than an H2, though it is not much simply because it's too easy to stuff.
I would use Linkscape and Majestic SEO and then just compare the data month over month to see what results are new. Make sense?
I do not keep an SEO blog. Our company blog is just for generic info that we use to bring in new clients and also for existing clients to see us sharing information openly about the best practices and tips. Honestly, since we redid our website, we have one or two blog posts and never blog and didnt even finish our website, we are too busy with client work. Speaking of that... we need to finish our site lol.
The benefit a SEO blog would bring is fresh content (Google loves it), attract new clientele, share information to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, city, and client list!
I think the only way to do it properly is with your clients full permission and knowing that they understand the full ramifications. Honestly, my clients would never go for it. The last thing they want is their strategy or their secret weapon (my company) to be known to their competitors. The link juice is minimal unless you have an exceptional blog.
My rule is to never expose a clients name, URL, or strategy unless it's completely anonymous and literally no chance of it getting back. However, you may find some clients okay with it, in that case... GO FOR IT
I'd love to post some of my best work but my clients are pretty strict on me releasing that information, so for now I'll have to keep my trap shut.
In my experience and opinion, it's because Google tries to cover and hide backlink counts from them.
To try and gauge it, use this command:
"yourwebsite.com" -site:yourwebsite.com
Exactly as it appears there, copy that line, switch out URL, and paste into Google. Not 100% accurate, but can give you a general idea. You can also look for code with ahref tags and your website, etc... otherwise use Linkscape, it's been working amazing for me and my clients!
I understand exactly what you mean. Like underneath the product there is a box that has basic info and 5 tabs that say "Reviews - Detailed Info - Etc..." and when you click on the tab it shows you more content. This is perfectly acceptable for SEO. Just make sure that the tabs work in a way where all the content is there in the HTML and the tabs use Javascript to hide it/show it, so Search engines see it no matter what. Make sense? In other words, set your user-agent to googlebot and turn off everything and take a peek at your site and see what content you can see. YOu can do this via Webmaster Tools as well!
You can try reporting the bad links to Google. Communicate with them, it'll help. What kind of links are they where they'd cause a penalty? Generally, you can't penalize a site for links otherwise I could do that to a competitor...
Give me a few examples of the links?
Outbound links don't really help in SEO. However, if it adds relevancy to the end-user, it WILL help. Instead of focusing on what you think SEO should be, focus on your end-user. Be RELEVANT.
For your type of website, I would honestly focus your attention on social media and user-engagement/interaction. Having your trailers shared on FB 300 times would GREATLY improve your SEO, traffic, and relevancy more so than any type of link, whether it's inbound or outbound.
Does that make sense?
Can you give me an example of "tabs"? Generally, drop downs and other forms of navigation do not hurt you. But please show me an accurate example so I can give you reliable information.
http://www.coffeecup.com/web-calendar/
They MIGHT do the job. Are you by chance using WP or Joomla? Good calendar systems for those out there.
If you ping the links you've built, generally see SERP movement within a week or two.
There is nothing wrong with using a third party service for link building (it's the same thing as having an internal SEO do it for you, regardless of what people say). However, you need to make sure they're building WHITE HAT links. There IS a difference between a white hat authoritative link that is RELEVANT and links that are spammy. Get samples of their work and test them out on a dummy site first and see if it's XRUMER type linking or real manual links. That's my thoughts on it.
Generally after I change a site structure or do a redesign, some URL's are broken and not working. In those situations, you need to do the following:
-301 the broken URLs to new URLs
-Take an accurate snapshot of where your link building efforts are pointing
-Make sure you don't mess up a page that has tons of highly authoritative links
After you do that and change your structure, it's a great idea to build links to your NEW structure to build back any lost authority and start ramping up those ranking efforts.
Does that make sense?
I just built a brand new website (brand new domain), built it, SEO'd it, and built links and it;s ranking page 1 / page 2 for a medical term that gets 40,000+ exact searches a month. Only been 8 weeks. If that gives you any indication.
I'd say give it 3-4 weeks, then start building links and/or looking at your SEO strategy.
Try http://proxify.com/ or www.hidemyass.com -- you should try and find out why you're blocked and resolve the overall issue, but use one of these two in the meantime.
If you change your architecture, properly 301, and do it the PROPER way, you wont see much difference. Within 30 days, you'll be back to normal, in my experience. I've done this quite a few times with a Joomla site and WP site(s).
I personally like using /%category%/%postname%/ --- but to each his own
You'll be fine. Good luck and let us know how it goes.
While I don't have specifics, your competitors site may have fewer links but they may be more authoritative. Run your competitor through www.opensiteexplorer.org -- look at his top 25 links vs yours, chances are, he has more authoritative links. That is usually the case, in my experience.
Generally, it's nice to have one page per keyword, as it's the best way in my opinion. However, you can easily target multiple terms on one page using link building and anchor text!
I would say another page never hurts, just write some outstanding content for it and you're good to go!
Well, I tried bringing up your website in OpenSiteExplorer and according to OSE, there is no data for your website. It could be due to the fact that your website is too new, has no backlinks, has never been crawled by linkscape, or maybe you recently changed domain names or something of the sort?
Do not waste your time using the meta title, we've run experiments and found no boost whatsoever using meta title, just focus on regular title tag, links, and fresh high-quality content.
It does NOT matter where in the tag your title tag is, but personally we put it right after the opening head tag for a good practice and to have a cleaner code layout. But, it matters NOTHING.
Good luck!
Depends on what you are wanting to do.
First, get rid of META KEYWORDS, it is not used anymore.
Second, robots and description are plenty. Ranking factors are centered around title tag, backlinks, and a little of on-page.
I'd work on your links to move up the ladder!
Definitely option 4, from my perspective and opinion. That is the same structure I use for my site and all clients website.
/Services/SERVICENAME
/BLOG/CATEGORY/POSTNAME or /BLOG/POSTNAME
I'd go with option 4!
There is no way to force a crawl, that I am aware of. I actually have 4 SEOmoz accounts that I use for various clients for crawls and their websites. Never seen a way to force a crawl, simply because there are tons of sites in the queue and they can only crawl so many sites so fast.
I'd just try to be patient and see the results on Monday or Tuesday! Good luck.
As long as the new content is relevant to a user and is even loosely related, you'll be fine. Just make sure you still focus on the main aspect of your website so that you don't get overrun by competitors. Build out your main theme and the sister themes at the same time, just dont value one over the other. You'll be fine.
First, stop worrying. It's not that easy to get someone slapped for paid links. Chances are, Google isn't even aware. I doubt the client is the size or notieriety of JC Penney
Second, start link building heavily and getting a large diversification of links.
Third, you need to do some high quality link building and get organic links from better sources. Bury these top 3 links in a sea of even higher quality links that are organic and I guarantee it wont affect a thing.
Get some press releases out there with PRWeb and get some links from large media outlets, should easily replace those links!
Good luck.
When choosing a term to rank for, in my experience, choosing a term that has low competition means finding sites that rank top 10 that do not have high domain/page authority scores, relatively low moztrust/rank, and of course really low backlinks. If a site has 10 backlinks, as long as they're from sites that are under 50 DA, they're easy to rank for.
The reason you get different results from KW Difficulty Tool using quotation marks is because that tool pulls the top 10 google results for whatever term you put in. Generally, the top results are different when using quotations. I recommend you NOT use quotation marks when using the KW difficult tool.
I would do your own research and optimization and stay away from using someone elses work/data, to me, it seems prone for errors and miscalculations which lead to loss of money, time, and other potential fallout.
Hyphens are always best! Good luck.
I do not have a concrete answer, perhaps someone may. But, in my experience, as long as the keyword is there, it counts. Similar to how exact match domains are such a boost, you know? I am pretty sure as long as the keyword appears, regardless of format, it'll count for that keyword. However, there are other metrics surrounding this to add value like the content around it, where the link is from, etc...
I agree with this! If not possible, use my link!
Exact match domains are still very powerful in Google. Matt Cutts said the team was going to look at them in 2011, but that has not happened yet to my knowledge and even if they do, no guarantees of if or when they'll make an algorithm adjustment.
It is an exact match domain because the term "company formation" is in the URL, it's just the words are switched. But the phrase still appears in the URL and none of the other URLs are like that.
Right, they're only ranking because of their domain, at least in my opinion. Their DomainAuthority is very weak otherwise compared to the others.
The best way is to make sure you're using the tag properly and that you have all your angles covered.
There is actually some good posts on SEOmoz about canonicalization, I'll try and find those for you.
I looked up the domain you're referring to.
The easy answer? They have an exact match domain. They have a somewhat okay title tag, and they do have backlinks.
Exact match domains are way overpowered and I think this is the case for this term!
It's not blackhat, just taking advantage of EMD's.
Your plan sounds good but here are a few things I'd like to add.
Make sure the dupe pages you're getting rid of are not the main traffic sources. If that is the case you'll want to redirect only a few at a time and slowly go around fixing that. You don't want to switch to new CMS, throw up redirects, and lose 85% of your traffic. Just make sure it's not your main traffic source.
Make sure you use the proper methods of canonicalization. Don't half-ass it.
On the new site, because you have a large and deep site, make sure you have a proper sitemap generated fresh all the time and that the proper weights are assigned and proper structuring. Less levels = better.
Watch your Webmaster Tools.
That is all I have, I think you'll be fine.
Not that I know of. You'll have to use the tools to find websites to get the links, but it's up to you to figure out who is best to contact to negotiate for a link!
Good luck!
I would recommend against using ".html" in your permalink structure and also categoryname can cause an issue, it's generally just "category".
It's usually a good idea to stick to one category, but if you do need multiple, you can easily adjust the permalink in 2 seconds right on the page after you click "Add New Page" or "Add New Post", it's above the post title, just click EDIT and set it to what you want.
You could do what you wanted by creating filters in GA.
However, for WP, your permalinks should be: /%category%/%postname%/ (custom structure)
Then, whenever you add a new post, you should just click on which category it goes into and it will automatically append the URL like this: www.yourdomain.com/CATEGORY/POST-TITLE/
You'll have super clean URLs, perfect categorization, and it'd be easier to report on in GA.
That help?
Don't really see a way around it. Only force HTTPS on pages that need it. If you can operate at 80% HTTP and 20% HTTPS, that is much better, as people rarely link to HTTPS pages.
So yes, change it
Meta Descriptions are not used for rankings, so you would be fine by just changing out the state. However, I feel it's a great strategy and best practice to handwrite every meta description to insure the best conversion rate and CTR possible.
If I am understanding this correctly, campaign keywords are keywords you track for rankings and the on-page report shows you pages that are optimized to those keywords so you could be tracking keywords for pages that are not built, does that make sense or am I smoking something funny today?
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