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I'm looking for a recommendation of a provider that can completely manage the submissions to Google, infoUSA, Localeze, and Axciom for a business with ~300 locations.

Anyone have a good recommendation?

To be a tad more specific I have a site that is a simple calculator utility that allows visitors to look up tire variations that are close to their current tire size.  The site was created in 2007 and has some back-links including some references in wikipedia.

My goal is to build a simple calculator that encompasses the core tools into a widget that other "car" sites can use at their sites.  My hopeful out come is to build 5-15 new inbound links from sites that will use the calculator on their sites.

Im planning on building a small utility widget that my site will distribute to related sites.  I plan on implementing this with JS and including a small anchor link back to my site.

In the new penguin world, will the possibly be destructive to my SEO efforts? Any do's or don'ts when developing a widget/badge for distribution to lets say a dozen sites?

I'm working on a recently hacked site for a client and and in trying to identify how exactly the hack is running I need to use the fetch as Google bot feature in GWT.

I'd love to use this but it thinks the robots.txt is blocking it's acces but the only thing in the robots.txt file is a link to the sitemap.

Unde the Blocked URLs section of the GWT it shows that the robots.txt was last downloaded yesterday but it's incorrect information.  Is there a way to force Google to look again?

So the real question I'm getting at is this.  Do you feel the that SEs might be evaluating the date as a sign of un-fresh content it a new page is created with a 2007 date in it?

http://www.quora.com/Are-dates-and-months-in-the-url-of-a-blog-post-detrimental-to-long-term-SEO

http://www.seobook.com/do-you-put-dates-your-urls

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/url-configuration-wordpress/

http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/avoid-numbers-your-url/

I've come across a case where I'm asking myself what the best direction would be to go and while there is no right direction I would like to here some feedback from others.

I'm working with some great content pages all about wine.  As you probably know the difference between a 07 wine and a 95 is vastly different and up to this point I'm using the full year in the url much like this: grapesinyourtoesexample.com/2007-cellar-pod-viognier-adelaide-hills/.

What I'm worried about is my use of the year in the URL.  I feel it's very important for it to be used in the page title and on page but I'm concerned that it might be setting me back with my use of it in the url.  My concern is that search engines might be interpretting it as a datestamp rather than as a informational piece of data describing the asset.

Looking at my competitors, my content is one of the only sites using the year and in most searches for various wines my content is in the second half of the SERPs.

If you were creating this content would you use the year?  If you were working with current content would you drop the year across all of the site and implement to necessary redirects?

Just to be clear this is a client related project so my use of "my site|my content" refers to the client's content.

I wouldn't say that the advice you were given was wrong but like anything there is good ways to do things and there are always better ways to do things.

For instance lets say you are a small business with a low budget and the idea of re-working your entire site or theme isn't a viable solution.  Or maybe your site is just a single page and there isn't the need for a heading.  That said implementing an H1 as an image with appropriate alt text isn't a horrible solution.

What is not a good solution is implementing an H1 on an image just to hide overly spammy and descriptive alt text underneath the image and slide it in as an H1 on the page.

It's a lot like anything else, start by researching your competitors are work backwards.  Open Site Explorer will be your friend in this case and hopefully you will find a couple of resources that your weren't aware of.

Beyond just your competitors I also found it valuable to search for businesses in other regions/cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco to see where they are finding citations.

Without knowing more about your site it's really hard to say.  There are a number of "right" ways to do it depending on your site architecture and site-search architecture.

I personally like the idea of having a single "Brand" page and leaving the sorting to a search experience that is "walled off" from being indexed and crawled which is something Rand covered in a WBF about two years ago.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation

Like Ryan said you are going to want to use a good analytics tools.  I would personally recommend Google Analytics as it's free, continually is getting better and has great reporting functionality as well as customizations.

Using Google Analytics here are a couple of reports that might help you find what you are looking for.

First is the Top Content Report. Ex: https://skitch.com/dotcar/fe68r/top-content-google-analytics

This allows you to see the top content on your site. If you see (other) as the top page you likely have a large and very long-tail website.  Else wise you will see the top pages of your site sorted by pageviews.

Next and probably more important when taking into account SEO is the Top Landing Pages Report. Ex: https://skitch.com/dotcar/fe6ex/top-landing-pages-google-analytics

This report allows you to see what pages your visitors are entering through.  Think of it like how many doorways you have to your business and how many people are coming in them.  This same report becomes extremely helpful when you apply custom segments from Google Analytics to only look at Search Engine visits or to only look at direct visits.

Hi Guys,

I'm looking for any good examples of small business sites that you've come across that do a good job at converting potential visitors to clients.  I'm primarily thinking about service oriented business such as Doctors, Dentists, Salons, Clothing stores, small restuarants, car detailing services, local photographers, etc.

I'm just trying to digest other examples and look for new inspirations.

Participate participate participate.  If you are sincere and leave great comments it will help.

I've reviewed the various presentation and blog posts from SMX advanced regarding local SEO and I didn't see any mention of Schema.org and microformats.  Has any research or case studies been presented supporting that implementation of Schema.org microformats will improve local results?

Here is one example where I've implemented the basics in the address info of the footer.

http://bit.ly/lZQYeg

Any tips on how to further optimize with schema.org markup?

I'll be honest in saying I had a couple of sites affected by the panda/farmer update but saw no changes in image search so I really don't think this has anything to do with these updates.  Additionally many have said that if your query drops were not on these update days then you should be looking elsewhere.

Have you seen anything that indicates any loss around the dates shown in my original attachment?  I have a few other similar niche sites which both more and less content than the above described one which saw no changes which additionally says to me that this has nothing to do with the farmer updates.

If anyone else has noticed losses in image search I'd be very interested in sharing data.  And the same for anyone who's simply seen a loss of "image search" queries at anytime.  This is a first for me and I'd love to find someone who has been in the same boat (the image boat).

Hi Seth,

It's an car niche site and we're talking about 100,000 images.  They are all still in the index, just lost their visibility.  Any experience in dealing with "lots" of image search results?  Have you seen an image query results drop like this where the results remain in the index.  Think "farmer" just images and no one else

The site does not have any duplicate content and does not have overly excessive inbound links.  Anchor tags on the inlinks are reasonable distributed.  As to what took place before acquisitions I don't really know but the entire site is in the index and now I'm working hard to improve relevancy for valuable search queries and to increase conversions.

The site is nearly a year old.  The fact that a random page of the site is climbing the ranks for the keyword says to me that Google is not treating the homepage equally.

Looking for any help in understanding what I can do to get my images back up in the images index.  My site took a hit last month which I've been working to get back up but nothing has seemed to push the needle.

Has anyone else experienced such a loss in the image index before?

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I have a site that ranks high on the first page for it's main keyword at both Bing and Yahoo but horribly at Google.  It's a domain I recently acquired and am in the process of optimizing.

My goal is to improve the relevancy for the site in Google so that the site shows up better for it's main keyword.  With that said I've been working on building valuable links to the page and I would like some opinions on why the homepage is not ranking for the main keyword.  Instead I have a junky content page that is ranking for the term.

So in the event that you have a exact match domain showing up very high in Bing and Yahoo but not in Google for the homepage, what factors would you look at?

Add in the complexity that a page other than the homepage is making grounds on the exact match keyword having moved up from "not in the top 100" to the 50's, what's my best solution to ranking the homepage? The site is optimized well and most inbound links predominantly point to the homepage.