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"spamming keywords"
I think that "spamming" occurs when you have keywords in the title that are not descriptive of the article.....
or.... when you just make a big list of keywords without composing them into a coherent question or statement...
I think that "Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help." is not in the "spam" category. (although I might shorten it down to about 60 characters)
"Why is my back sore? I have spinal pain and need relief and help."
I like the above for the reasons below.
-- I believe that questions elicit clicks better than statements.
-- You have lots of potential keywords in the title tag. Will work great for pulling in long tail traffic
I believe that the succinct title is good when you have a very powerful site and are gunning for a very basic and difficult keyword. However, if you use that succinct title on lots of pages then you will run into duplication. The longer title will diversify your optimization and pull a greater diversity of traffic.
To get into google news you have to convince them that you are in the news business, that you are an "organization", that you are publishing original, news-worthy content and that you are not a guy or two trying to toss pages into their news SERPs.
If you have a simple press release getting it into google news will involve going straight to a website that already appears in google news and getting them to feature your story. A very small number of press release sites can get their releases into google news. Check with them before you submit to be sure that they can make it happen.
Poor conversion can be cause by many things...
- unprofessional copy
- high prices
- high shipping
- bad checkout procedure
- out-of-date merchandise
- difficult to navigate site
- great offers by your competitors
- low quality traffic
Consider the above and compare your site, your offer, your prices and your conversion funnel to what your competitors are doing.
There is a lot more to making a sale than getting good ranks.
I think that if you have an important, impressive, well-known brand that you can boost your SERP click through rate and conversion rate by including your brand in the title. However, for a relatively unknown brand like mine there might be more valuable things to include in the limited title tag space.
These might include:
- free shipping
- kick ass price
- free ebook
- fast delivery
- biggest selection
- free beer
- a couple of extra keywords to pull traffic
All of these can elicit clicks and put the buyer in the mood to do what I want him to do when he gets on my site.
I am not out to compete with Microsoft on branding. I am out to get visitors onto my site and covert them - so I believe that in my situation the title tag space can be more wisely spent.
Yes, posts with a high "helpfulness score" or "SEOMoz endorsed" can become a great archive and documents that can be linked to.
A knowledge base is being built here... a way to sluice the gold as it flows through will yield a treasure.
I agree.... I see a couple of options
How about a link or a side bar area that shows the threads that I have participated in that have received new replies? (I'd like to keep my email inbox uncluttered and use it with a different browser. You can still offer the email notice for people who want it and that way have the best of both.
Or, when a thread gets a new reply it goes back to the top of the list? (I particularly like this option because great discussions are getting buried. It will give everyone another chance to jump in. Some forums have great threads that have been viewed thousands of times and have a hundred comments. Here. the best and the least popular are rolling off the bottom of the page.
Why guess? Try it and see if they pull any traffic from the SERPs.
Slap a couple of keywords onto the end of the title tag.
I would not spend time making them. If they are nofollowed they are not supposed to be helpful for rankings.
Also, a lot of the blog comments with links that I see are very ignorantly worded and make the owner of the target website look like an illiterate fool. And ignorant comments on a spammy blog might put a bad odor on your site.
They might be more valuable with the competitor's link on them. 
How big are you talkin' about?
If you look at the wikipedia article for Philadelphia you will find a really long page. I took the sentence for the Postal Service that appears at the bottom of the page and found that Google indexed it from wikipedia and many other websites - over 2/3 of which were omitted because they were similar. See SERPs Here.
This tells you that Google routinely indexes content of that length. You can try experiments for pages of even longer length to see how they are doing.
I have a lot of long articles on my site (4000 words plus) and they pull a ton of long tail traffic. And, I like these really long pages because I believe that the huge content impresses visitors and earns links. That's the SEO value of a big page in my opinion.
Thanks bookworm! Interesting ideas.
Jordan, Thank you for sharing your experience on this. Glad to hear you are getting good results.
E
I really like .com domains compared to .net domains.
I also don't like hyphens in a domain. They are very hard to communicate and hard to remember. Lots of people will type your domain and forget the hyphen - so lost traffic.
I think that SuretyBondSoftware is easier for me to remember.
If you know that your market is software for the long term then I would probably move to the new domain. However, if I had a lot of SEO in place on the old domain I would be a bit nervous about moving and suffering a some loss in the SERPs.
I thought about leaving it there and launching brand new content on Domain B... but need to get the action on the more appropriate domain before summer traffic arrives.
Thanks Steve,
I agree.
I have redirected a few domains with good to great results... just never tried it with a single page.
Let's say I have a nice page of content on Domain A, which is a strong domain. That page has a nice number of links from other websites and ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some good keywords.
However, I would like to move that single page of content to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Domain B is a slightly weaker domain, however, it has better assets to monetize the traffic that visits this page of content.
I expect that the rankings might slip down a few places but I am hoping that I will at least keep some of the credit for the inbound links from other websites.
Has anyone ever done this? Did it work as you expected? Did the content hold its rankings after being moved?
Any advice or philosophical opinions on this?
Thank you!
I think that with your knowledge and enthusiasm you will quickly earn enough MOZ Points to get free access to the Q&A Forum so the decision will be based upon how much you get out of the tools.
My opinion of risk goes up much higher if this is a directory vs a site with original content articles.
"(which will presumably have more SEO benefit)"
I agree. I would go with putting the KB in a folder on the clients domain. That way, links into the KB will be hitting the main site instead of a subdomain.
I have no factual data on this... just going with my gut....
Based upon how Google is acting these days I would not take chances with having two copies of the same site in the SERPs for an entire month. I would not want to see any pages on the new site filtered for being duplicates.
Most people don't get a new site indexed and those redirected domains normally go fairly well. So, I would be pleased with that and not take chances.
Safety might be better than going for some unknown gain.
I would go straight to other webmasters - especially if they have a local blog that might cover your contest or sell you a banner ad.
Give nice prizes for the first ten entries that meet your rigorous specifications.... The first entries will set the tone for those that follow. You want to start with some kickass stuff and not a bunch of slackers.
Advertise these as a "mystery contest" on local websites (use local websites because those people are already online and can click straight away to your site,)
Be friendly and encouraging but let them know that you expect good stuff.
Great content means beating the info sites.
So, go out to visit the best content sites in this niche and decide where you will beat them.
Content sites usually clobber retail sites in the SERPs so the best way to sell is to defeat them on one topic after another.
These content pages will pull traffic and links and social activity.
Plus they will feature your deep expertise. People believe and like to buy from experts. 
I like Alan's idea.
You could also create a large number of "value propositions" for your product and those could be rotated automatically on your homepage daily or on whatever schedule you determine. These would be sales pitches that might increase conversions. And you could have a link to a page with the entire value proposition collection at the bottom of each tip.
Also, since your blog seems to be successful in social media maybe you could strengthen your sales pitch and calls to action there.
If your competitor has exact match and I have exact match + (kickass price or free shipping or top secrets or free beer) then who is going to get the clck?
If you move up in the rankings you will almost be guaranteed a higher CTR. So, moving up will bring you a return.
But will that return make a profit?
I believe that it is important to consider who is above you. If you are a tiny local business at #4 with 22 backlinks and the three positions above you are Goliath Brands at #1 and #2 with 1,000,000 backlinks and Major Publisher at #3 with 900,000 backlinks then you might be attacking the US Navy with a slingshot.
In those situations, all is not lost... you still have your title tag that can be used as a lethal weapon. What is your value proposition?....
-- offer a kickass price in the title tag
-- offer immediate free shipping in the title
-- tell them you have the "Secrets to Success"
-- tell them you have "Free Beer"
These will get potential customers onto your website.
If you have something to brag about you should be using the kickass title tag all of the time... but it is especially important if you want to elicit clicks away from the site that ranks above you and that you have little hope of beating.
Wait (or pray) for postcard verification to come back...
... or... change your phone number to one that will work. How about your cell phone number?
We just went to expense to acquire keyword.com domains to replace equivalent key-word.com domains that we were using for a few years (keyword.com was already registered when we started our sites).
We believe that all other factors being equal, google will rank keyword.com higher than key-word.com.
Also, imagine how difficult it might be to tell someone your domain when it has a hypen it it. Instead of telling them londonparis.com you have to tell them london, hyphen, paris .com and they say..... WHAT WAS THAT? HUH?
I would place the blog in a folder on the same domain as the website.
That way if the blog attracts links then those links are hitting the same domain as your website.
If the blog is on a separate domain then only a portion of the value of the link will flow through to your main site.
It all depends on what other websites are on that shared server with you. Some hosts will stack a lot of websites on one machine.
To reduce the impact of other sites on your speed a dedicated server would be better - but also cost more.
There are many other things that you can do yourself to improve speed.
The forum or blog could improve rankings if it is on the same domain and attracts links from other websites.
I believe that you will do best when you have all of your efforts and all of your content and all of your links focused on one single site.
You want all of the the content there to impress the pants off of any visitor - and thus earn natural links. That impressive content will also earn trust, sales and clients because you look like an authority.
You want all of the links hitting there to give the domain max authority. One site with 50 links will outrank 50 sites with one link each.
And, you want to put all of your effort into one site to make it the best possible site in your niche.
Smart generals have always used the "divide and conquer" principle in battle. Building multiple domains divides your forces for the enemy.
If you could "manufacture rankings" by tossing up a thousand domains then everybody everywhere would be doing it.
It doesn't work.
The links on these "manufactured domains" are worth very very little to nothing.
The only way to get true power is to get links from outside of your own network of websites.
These extra domains have no external links of their own and that gives them no power to pass on to your main site.
And, if you can get links into these extra domains then you should instead have those links hit straight into you own website. Passing them through these extra domains is like trying to kill a rabbit with a ricochet.
Google is too smart to allow this to work.
Thanks
Most are probably trying to stay under the radar so Matt doesn't get 'em.
The late G-Man might not be the most famous but deserves mention.
Loved and missed by all.... even tried to go under the radar of Matt Cutts.
Try here.... I bet if you use the phone you will get a really nice and enthusiastic person...
(First... have you been updating your WP promptly when updates are issued? I assume that you have but just askin'.)
If you have a tiny site with very little traffic this host might be OK. However....
Be careful as they offer: "UNLIMITED GB of Site Transfer" (their CAPS, not mine).
With this type of offer once your visitor counts get up to a few thousand per day you might see service outages because instead of throttling your BW they instead limit your "processing units" or some other parameter.
UNLIMITED BW is often true but there will be another variable that will throttle your site.
Some sites require a dedicated server and terrabytes of BW per month. No host will give you that for $6.95/month.
Hello Rand! Thanks for the new format. I think that the New Q&A is really going to take off. I am looking forward to it.
Nice job to all who were involved.
Hi Doc, Thanks! I am enjoying the new format of Q&A.
Look forward to reading more of your work.
I really liked... "The Power of Words"... a YouTube video...
The two most recent Whiteboard Friday videos on the topic of correlation showed that the top-ranking webpages in Google generally have a healthy amount of social media exposure. This suggests that Google is using social media data to determine rankings.
Based upon that social media promotion can legitimately be considered part of SEO. So the answer to your question would be "both".
However, I don't think that having a team of people or robots bookmarking content is the best way to go. Instead if you have content that gets bookmarked on its own merits you will not have to go to the effort of bookmarking.
If you have great content tossing it out to social media sites will be like tossing gasoline on a fire.
I believe that having something new on the homepage when returning visitors arrive will make them come back more often.
To accomplish that we have a script that rotates content through a few of the blocks on our homepage. The script runs every hour so if a person returns later in the day they will see different items. We have enough content in this rotation that the typical visitor could make many visits before seeing the same item a second time.
Also, on most pages of our site we have links to our ten most recent blog posts that match the category of the page. These update every hour as we make up to ten blog posts per day. We also have lists of "related articles" that rotate hourly.
All of this keeps almost every page of our site constantly changing. I don't know what google thinks of it but adding these rotating content features has increased the visitor engagement level of our site.
I think that this will strengthen as we get to know and respect one another.
I agree... "Barrier to entry" was smart smart move. 500 mozpoints and paying members are serious people who don't want a forum full of noise.
The spammers and bottomfeeder SEOs have burned me out on another forum where I have posted for a long time.
