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Built a small website.  Nuthin' happened.

Read about SEO.  Tried something.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.  Rankings dropped.  Couldn't remember what I changed.

Started writing stuff down.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Stopped doing SEO.   Instead spent time improving website and writing content.  Got better results.

I have hundreds of articles on my site and they range in length between 500 and 4000 words - with lots of photos.

My retail pages usually have several hundred words of unique relevant content and they often link to article content (500 to 4000 words) that explains how to use the product, how to select, how to repair, etc.  These are clusters of content around retail products.  In my opinion, it is the best way to rank.... but sometimes your articles will rank better than your retail  --  but, that's OK because we have house ads on those pages to let visitors know that we sell the stuff.

I would tell programming that their access to the Keurig is invalid until they get this figured out.

Guess we have to set up a second CMS, content etc.

OK... submit to them.

If I ran a plumbing site and one brand tried to tell me how to run my biz I would do an analysis and determine where they fall into the market importance.   I might decide to....

A) quit selling their CrappyBrand Plumbing Supplies

B) quit selling all other brands and focus on their CadillacBrand Plumbing Supplies

C) continue as I am and see if they cancel me

D) build a little outhouse to sell their crappy stuff

E) keep my current site and put a lot of effort into a site that sells only their brand

Consider doing an analysis before you spend any effort to kiss their feet.  My crystal ball says there are going to be hundreds of sites selling their CrappyBrand Plumbing Supplies and nobody is going to be making good money from them.

The aim is not to manipulate the rankings,

Your client might not be trying to manipulate rankings.   But the plumbing manufacturer is trying to flood the SERPs and manipluate vendors.  My decision making would not be.... "Yes Sir".... or even binary.

a second website selling the same products from a separate domain with the same descriptions etc.

Duplicate content.  BAM!   One site will probably be filtered from the SERPs.

If they are linked together Google will spot that and totally kill one site almost immediately. Google has been killing duplicate content sites, linked together for about ten years.  Ten years.

Even if the sites are not linked together google will realize that there are two identical product pages competing in the SERPs and filter one of them.

Your thoughts and advice for best practise would be much appreciated.

If client's original site is not absolutely dominating the SERPS.  The time and money spent on a second site usually returns a lower ROI than working on the original site.

This client is attempting the lazy approach.  Just toss up duplicate pages and think they will make buckets of money.  Google figured that out ten years ago.  Everybody was doing that. Google figured that out to keep their SERPs clean.

I bet if client improved the current site by sharpening optimization, improving product descriptions, adding better photos, adding "how to do it" articles.  This client is in plumbing, the perfect business to produce informative content for accomplishing a repair and recommending the parts, tools, supplies and books needed.  There is where I would spend my time.

Ryan has offered some great ideas.  Lots of those are not normally considered until after the problems hit.

As a general rule, if you merge multiple websites, you unite their strengths and assets.  This is done by placing a 301 redirect on each of the existing domains so that any traffic that enters the site will be redirected to a destination on the combined site.

If you have a main website like LakesidePrimaryCare.com, then each physician would have a personal profile page on that site.  I would redirect each of their former sites to their personal page on the combined site.   If you do that, their personal page will receive the strength from their previous site and help their personal page rank for queries like... "Dr Egol in scranton PA".   (Some benefit would also go into the entire site for any query that they are optimized to rank for.)

If all of the redirects go to the homepage of the site it will give maximum power for the new site rank for "doctors in Scranton PA".  Which might be more beneficial for all but might be less satisfying individually.  (I would want this if I was one of the physicians, but I tend to be a team player rather than looking for maximum individual benefits.)  I believe that this option gives maximum benefit to everyone.

In my opinion, and others will disagree, the old domains must remain on hosting with DNS pointing at them permanently and that 301 redirect must be in place permanently.   This can be done without paying hosting for all of the domains, if you have a server where multiple domains can be routed.  If this is not done any link popularity will be lost.

Perl programs can be used to count clicks.   You can also write perl programs to scrape your feedburner feed and republish it into a serverside include that can be displayed on your homepage or any other page.  That same program can scrape your category feeds and republish them into serverside includes that will appear on any page of your site that is related to that category.  You can also use php in similar ways.

I don't share URLs but have described this in lots of detail.

Getting content on the site should be your most important goal.

However, if you have a small staff it is difficulty to maintain a steady stream of great content.

When I started my site I had zero content. So, the first thing that I did was to find a great selection of content on other sites that I would be proud to link to.  Then as visitors arrived at my page they immediately left, but I learned something from that.  I learned what type of content was selected with greatest frequency by the visitors.  That is what guided my content production.  I made new content to replace what visitors were clicking.

Now, that I have done this for ten years, I know what types of content my visitors consume and when I see a link to a news story on another site getting enormous attention, I look for opportunities to produce similar evergreen content for my own site.

I do not mind giving visitors away, because if I do a good job of giving them away they will return, many of them every day to see what I am recommending.  This enables me to be their daily "go to site" for information.

Background... I have a website that might be considered an industry portal...

About ten years ago I started a "news" blog and wrote a post of a few hundred words a few times per week.  A few people subscribed.  The pages pulled traffic from the SERPs for a few weeks, then almost no traffic.  I decided that this was not worth the work because it required a several hours per week.

About eight years ago I started making four to eight very short posts per day (five days per week).  These were a title, one or two unique sentences and an icon image that indicated their category.  It was an attractive page.  Subscriptions to my Feedburner feed and daily emails shot up.. to a five digit number after a few years.  Hundreds of linking root domains.  At least 100 people per day came to my homepage and clicked the link to the news.  Between 500 and 1000 people entered the site through the news page every day.  It ranked #1 in google for the equivalent of "autism news".   The post pages were not indexed because they were so short, but the category pages pulled in a nice amount of traffic.  Maintaining this took about two hours per day above my personal news reading time.   I don't allow comments because this is a niche where people will get nasty.

One year ago, I wanted to cut the amount of time required.  So I now make one post per day.  That post has links to about eight news stories on other sites.  Eight hyperlinked headlines.  That's all.  Each post has a small stock photo image (about 200x150 pixels) that matches the title of one of the more interesting links.   I still have lots of subscribers and lots of people still arrive at the site daily and click to the news.  I deleted the category pages because my daily posts didn't fit into a category, so I lost the traffic that they pulled from the SERPs.  I still have top ranking in google for important industry news queries.  Maintaining this takes about one hour per day above my personal news reading time.

This type of news page can result in lots of people contacting you to have their stories, videos, etc. included.  You can get lots of great items this way and acquire a few "helpers".   I get excellent leads from universities, government agencies and trade associations. There will also be a number of professional shills who bug you regularly with total crap.   I occasionally receive nasty emails from people who think I am doing a biased job of picking the news or are angry because I don't mention the crap that they send.

I don't know how much news is out there for autism, but if you do a really good job at this and pick the right kind of items to include, you might have physicians, mental health professionals, government employees, professors subscribing.... or with a different emphasis you might have parents, teachers and mental health professionals.  It depends if the items that you link to are professional or personal content, though some cross-over in subscribers would occur.

Bottom line...  You will succeed or fail on your ability to pick the right items to include in your news.   You must decide "WHO IS MY AUDIENCE" and hit them with items that they believe are relevant, important, interesting, timely.   If you don't do that you will have a hard time getting subscribers and if you stop doing that you will get lots of unsubscribes.

I agree.  I am old enough to do this.  

I get a lot of full URLs as keywords.

I think that people copy / paste them into the search box, or just type them because they are simple

egol.com/bananas/

egol.com/baloney/

Here is a thread where "finding an appropriate SEO is discussed".

http://moz.com/community/q/where-do-you-find-an-individual-freelance-seo

I am talking about  off-site SEO: PRIMARILY link building, but also social interactions, image and brand building, etc. When would be the right time to start those?

All of those should have been started in the planning stages.

If you want links, social interactions, brand building, etc... all of that was best planned before you even decided upon the topics of your content, selected keywords, started writing, or determined the navigation structure and internal linkage of your website.

In my opinion, SEO should have been started in the planning states of your project.  Before you started writing content and before you published anything.

Keyword research, website structure, style of coding, content topic selection, are all things that can be optimized by an SEO.

So, instead of thinking about $250/month.  I would think... "I got  $3000 for 2015" because a healthy spend on planning now might save you from doing some of the work over again.... or allowing it to persist in a suboptimal form.

This is just my experience and opinion.

I am an old white geezer in his seventh decade who has lived rural most of that time.  I don't have any idea how the diversity of people on my website are going to behave because when I see what they do on CrazyEgg it always surprises me.   So, I can spend my last few years blowing buckets of money on PPC or I can ask someone who has looked at the behavior of people on Thousands of websites to take the first stab at it.    The folks at services like SiteTuners will take a look at your page and tell you how they would change it for not a lot of money.  I am going to predict that it is cheaper to have them put some education into it than for an old fart like me to guess.

I have no affiliation with ST other than paying them to tell me how to fix a few pages.  There are plenty of other companies who do this stuff.

...hire for specific tasks....

This is what I have always done.  I find someone who has demonstrated expertise for the work that I need.  I have gotten paid help from 10-20 people, each on different types of work.

Every person who I have ever hired for consulting, SEO, or technical work on my websites has been a person who I have learned about in an SEO forum.  There you can see many things about a person.  These include:

1. their ability to communicate clearly

2. their areas of technical expertise (htaccess, CMS set-up, programming, etc.)

3. do others respect their work ("good answer" votes from members, "endorsed answer" votes from Moz staff, articles published in YouMoz or the main Moz Blog -- some people at moz have hundreds of "good" and dozens of "endorsed" answers)

4. their personal style (generous, thorough, etc.)

If someone can give great information here at Moz Q&A for free, imagine what you might get when you pay them.

For about 15 years, I have repeatedly gotten paid assistance from forum posters.  I have never been disappointed because I knew who I was hiring and seen their good and generous work repeatedly in advance.  In my opinion, people from forums are a lot lower risk than other sources of assistance.

Read the person's Moz profile, check out their website.  Most people say if they are available for work or not. (I am not, I only work on my own sites, so not hoping to find work here.)

In my experience it is pretty easy to find good help at a place like Moz Q&A.  Look at their endorsed and good answer counts on the right of this chart.

In my opinion, a title tag that quickly communicates what you have on the page is very important for clickthroughs. It can also focus your optimization. How to Handle this? There are several options, all dependent upon your individual situation.

If your title tags look like this....

<title>Blue Widgets: Huge Selection and Free Shipping | MyBrandNameThatNobodyGivesAHootAbout</title>

Then I would cut the brand, but lots of people will argue with me. If your standard title tags is just a keyword melange then I would start rewriting them. If you have top rankings in all of your SERPs and people are buying stuff like mad then I would ignore the error and go out for beers.

I see the same thing.

I rank #2 in the organic SERPs for a really good money term... and I have a really low  clickthrough rate.  But, there are lots of ads above me.... and image results above me.... and shopping results on the right....  and more ads on the right.

I bet google is making buckets of money from all of those ads and the big beautiful images in the shopping results.

I strongly agree.  These guys call me a lot.

When google calls they use the word "google" once - and without panache.  When these guys call they use the word google multiple times in a way that bends the ear.  Honest.

** So I guess a question would be how to get any results when your competing against the big guys on a limited budget.  **

For this, I imagine a battlefield from the 1700's or 1800's where troops lined up and faced one another.  Where to attack?   You pick a weak spot in the line and attack there.   Better, is a weak spot in the line that is in front of a valuable asset.

So, I look at my business, decide where we are really good at producing content and where we have energy to sustain a very long content campaign and where there is a lot of traffic and money to be made.  Once that is identified I direct a large amount of force there.

For the past few years, I have been attacking the same point in the line.  This is a single keyword niche (category) where I am launching article after article after article, systematically saturating it with content, building a content library for the people who are fans of that space.  At first I had success getting a few keywords to the top of google, then broke through the line and got top rankings for the short tail keyword of the category.  I'll be attacking here hard for at least a couple more years.

I've been working with websites for about fifteen years and most of that time has been spent mainly on a few sustained attacks that have focused on a group of related keyword categories where we have the ability to produce content that is the best on the web or nearly the best on the web in a continuous stream without fatigue.   If I can beat their content, I attack without fear regardless of the competitors' metrics.

So, in your original question, you were asking about work on a project that was started in December.   I am not even looking for results after a few months.  I have not even begun to excavate the base.   I am attacking people who have a fifteen to twenty year head start.  I expect to be hammering at them for a year before I figure out if this is going to work.

I will say that in the past, that competitors generally didn't respond in kind to the content attack.... but that is starting to change.

I do know that, occasionally, Google will be very helpful to individual webmasters.

If this is really a person from Google, I would grab the opportunity, because it might be very beneficial and lead to additional help in the future.

But, I would want to confirm that this really is google.  Can you reverse look-up their number, or did they send you a follow-up message by email from a google address?

I think that the blog has nice content.

Many of the posts are competing for queries where there is very little search volume.

Go to this page... http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog.aspx?destination=india   read the titles of the posts.   Are people are searching for those topics?

I think that the blog posts will get more traffic if their titles align with search volume or if their topics align with search volume.

To give a well considered reply, a lot more information is needed and a lot of time is needed for study.  So, I would not bet very much on advice given here without that.

Just tossing out one example.... are you paying these people $10 per month or $10,000 per month.  Big difference  there in the amount of work they are going to give you and the expected results.... but, even $10,000 per month might not be enough to produce results depending upon the condition of your site when they take over and the competitiveness in your niche.

I would take the "aggregation" route.

Instead of having lots of pages for each make and model of vehicle, I would make single pages that list all of the vehicles of a single make and model.  These pages would be more substantive, permanent, impressive, useful, competitive, than a lot of skimply single pages that appear and disappear from your website.

Competitors are probably not doing this because it is difficult instead of easy.   Put checkboxes down the side of the page that visitors can "check to compare".

In the past couple of years, google has reduced the number of queries where multiple pages from the same site are displayed.  However, it is still possible to obtain multiple listings on page one of the SERPs.

What do you think to the theory typically for competitive terms Google wont usually rank you more than once on page one?

I have two pages on the first page of google for lots of queries.  Many of them are retail money terms.

I mean they have been trying very hard to remove duplicate results so I am sceptical that I will be able to achieve page one for both.

If your site and both of your pages are strong and have great content compared to the competition then you have a chance of getting them both on the first page.

Your first goal should be to move one page up.  Pick that page.   Improve the content.  Improve its competitiveness as much as you possibly can.

I have had two pages ranking on page two of Google for a while now for the same term.

Nice work!

I have tried dedicating a page to it but as the other has a url with the search term in Google is ranking both it seems.

This means that google respects both of your pages enough to rank both of them.  This is not a bad thing as long as the content on these two pages is not duplicate or close to duplicate.

How can I without deindexing one of the pages help better tell Google which one to rank? I imagine if it only ranked one page I would get a higher result rather than 2 weaker ones?

If you deindex one page, you deindex one page.  I would not do it.  I enjoy this when it happens on my sites.  I have lots of queries where two pages rank #1 and #2 on the first page.   If you do that it sometimes turns into sitelinks - which is a huge plus.

Before they advanced to the first page of google they looked like what you described on the second page.

Would a canonical tag be worth it here? the page is however getting some traffic itself for other terms so I am reluctant to do that.

Use canonical when you have duplicate pages.  If you don't have duplicate pages then don't use it.

In my opinion, you are on the way to kicking ass.  Keep the hammer down.

I think that is a very interesting idea.  If everyone everywhere uploaded their disavow files then it might bring Moz metrics into better alignment with what Google is probably using.

The problem is, that very few people will bother uploading their disavow to Moz.or even want to upload it.  So, anyone who uploads a disavow might look synthetically puny in the metrics in comparison to the rest of the world.

Some people use the Moz metrics as a way to track their personal progress.  Other people use Moz metrics to compare their own site with their competitors' sites.   Unknown disavow numbers might make these uses of Moz metrics less meaningful.

I think that Moz cooks a bit more info into the Moz metrics than raw link data.  So, it would be interesting to hear the thoughts of someone who knows a lot about the Moz recipe.

Jobs like these might go undone for many reasons.... lack of time... other pressing work... lack of skill... IT guys are cranky... afraid of making errors.... forgetfulness..... somebody on the staff nixing your work.     So, offer to do these jobs for them, charging a fee, of course.

Tell them that you will implement immediately so that they get the full time value of your recommendations done correctly.  Explain the loss of potential revenue by not getting the improvements on the site right away.

They might be very happy to get this work done quickly.    I would pay extra for implementation.

I agree with Keri.   You already  have a site with traction.  Improve it.  Add pages that compete for new products, new keywords.  They will be immediately competitive.

Why start a second site with ZERO traction?   It can take a few years to get a new site ranking well.

I think that the "by line" should be....

Joe Schmoe, Chief Widget Designer at Widgets.com

Check out Samuel Scott's recent YouMoz post... and be sure to watch the Copyblogger video.   Samuel's post and the copyblogger video are a fantastic pair.  (I am really surprised that the post has only gotten a few thumbs up so far.... but like most things that require very hard work and talent, people either "don't get it" or "ain't got it"... and a gem goes unappreciated.)

http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-approach-owned-and-earned-media

(To fully understand the Copyblogger video you got to know about "The Guiding Light"... "Marvel Comics"... and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and how content creation, content ownership, content revenue generation and retail products can form a constellation - wikipedia articles are recommended but you only need to pay attention to who owned the content and how movies, TV programs and comic books were used as enormous advertisements.)

What you have produced has a fantastic appearance.  What isn't obvious to me when I land on this page are....

**1) Who Should Care?  **

Tell visitors who will constitute your audience? ...who should read your stuff?   is it experienced SEO, small biz owner, somebody new to SEO who wants to know what an experienced person like you thinks they should know about and what they should be reading.

If you intend to use this page as a way to keep clients and potential clients up-to-date with changes in search and internet marketing (or whatever subject) then stating that very clearly at the top - even as the big bold text at the top of the page, then I think you would get a better following.

2) Your commitment and a way to subscribe.

The people who visit my page have the opportunity to sign up to receive it by email or rss feed through FeedBurner.   I have a very obvious announcement there... GET OUR UPDATES FIVE TIMES PER WEEK.  That's my commitment.  They can see each daily post has a date at the top and six to ten entries and maybe a video.   They see I am running an active daily service.

Over ten years I have accumulated thousands of subscribers because they know I am going to feed them the news. About 1/2 subscribe by RSS and about 1/2 by email.  When I mention an article in my news the website with the content can get hundreds to a thousand visitors immediately.  It is a great way to launch my own content.

**3) Who you are gonna be. **

In the blurb that you use with each entry you can step into a pulpit and show your voice.  You can give  guidance.  "Every small biz person competing for organic traffic should read this."...... "Remarketing is a way to give repeated calls to action for the folks who have visited your website.".....  "Don't make this mistake on your blog".... etc.     "Lots of people are doing this but it sets off my BS meter"

You can be the guy to recommend, diss, endorse, suggest.  If you assume that role, I think that it might help build a following.

I publish an "industry news" that links out to six to ten pieces of content on other websites several times per week.  I have been doing this for about ten years and the service has accumulated a lot of followers by email, RSS and direct visits to my site.

At first I composed lots of unique text for each entry with a great image, then I dropped down to a sentence or two and a thumbnail, now I just use link text like you see on the major news sites.  People still want it.  It now takes me minutes per day instead of hours.  The followers seem to value the recommendations highly and the work that I was putting into it was not a factor.

So, what are you offering.  Are you offering recommended guidance from an experienced person?  Or are you offering a pretty page that does the same thing?  If I would have started out with a list of links, I might not have gotten traction, but now that the traction is there I the pretty stuff seems to be superfluous.

If you have great content and a competitive service, do not fear competition.  Because, where there is a lot of competition there is usually a lot of money changing hands - and ranking lower in higher competition will often yield more traffic and more sales than playing for peanuts.  And, many times when comparing high search volume to low search volume, the same strong competitors are in both places.

So, I just decide where I want to be and attack.   For "odor removal service" and "odor eliminator" , I would attack them both with one page and as much energy as I can put into it.

There are many opinions about this.

Photographer sites often have very little text on their homepage.  They think that is smart because it allows their work to be uncorrupted by text.  I don't agree, but they don't like it when I offer an opinion that more text will bring in more traffic.

Newspaper sites usually have enormous amounts of text on the homepage.  Today the New York Times has over 5000 words on their homepage.  The LA Times and CNN are also huge.

Today, my info site has about 2000 words on the homepage.  I know from experience (before google used "not provided") that when the site had very little text on the homepage my long tail traffic was a fraction of what it is now.  So, I have found a correlation with a lot of words on the homepage and a lot of traffic from search.

Today, one of my retail sites has about 700 words on the homepage.  That is the amount I need to tell people what they will find in the different parts of my website.   I don't worry about how many words are on the homepage and don't worry about what other people say is "best practice".   I bet on myself instead of being swayed by other people talkin'.

Now... I do listen to people like Ray-pp when he says... "I recommend adding enough content to your home page that clearly explains why someone would want to use your product and the benefits they will receive from using the product. If I can get that from your home page, then it is a successful user experience."

That makes a lot of sense.  Why would you try to sell someone half a pair of pants?

The search engines probably value these links in some way, but nobody outside of the search engines nobody knows exactly what their value might be.

In my opinion, it is essential to have these types of links on your pages.  They decrease bounce rates and help engage visitors.

If you go to almost any of the most important news sites you will see links to their related content in  the side bars and immediately below their articles.  You will even see them within articles.  They are often accompanied by interesting images, beautiful images, provocative  images, all to get your attention.   These content blocks can direct visitors to  related content, most popular content, most shared content and serendipitous content.

Some websites even make money by displaying links to content on other website using services such as outbrain, taboola, and others.

Promoting your own content in this way is a very important thing to do.   Promoting the content of others might be a good idea to make money, but it might be a better idea to promote your own instead of giving your engaged visitors to other website for a few cents.

I would not worry one bit.  Not one bit.

Those recipes have the names of your products in them as ingredients, thus they are related.  You probably link from recipe pages to product pages, that increases the relationship.

If I owned your site, I would have at the bottom of my cinnamon page a link to every recipe that uses cinnamon.  On every recipe page I would have an ingredients list and beside each ingredient I would have two links... one to the page where I sell that ingredient and one to a article page that tells a lot of information about that ingredient.

In my opinion, the key to successful online retail is NOT running a retail site, but instead, running an information site that also has a store.  All of my retail sites have more content pages than retail pages.  Sometimes that content is perfectly related one-on-one to to retail products, sometimes it is tangentially related, and sometimes it is kinda loosely related, but all of that content brings people in and some of those people buy and some of those people engage with the adsense that I have on the content pages.

Lots of people type my domains into search engines, not because they want to buy something on my site but because they want to read something on my site.  Google sees these people asking for my sites by name.

If anyone should be worried about you offering content on a product site it should be your competitors.

Wow, you do have a lot of fantastic photos of interesting subjects.  Why doesn't McDs have those nice burgers at my local restaurant?

This is what I would do if I owned your site.  My goal with these would be to attract increasing amounts of traffic.

1. Unlike most photographer sites we see here, you have a nice amount of text content.  That is great.  My goal would always be to kick it up a little more and say a bit more about each photo or  a bit more of an introduction or a closing piece for each page of the site.   I know that you took a lot more photos than what are posted here.  Maybe comment on why you like each photo, why you selected it, more about what it shows.  Every additional diverse word related to the topic on the page has the opportunity to attract more traffic.  Place names can be especially valuable.

2. The Archive Pages VS Category Pages. At the top of your blog you have links to archive pages.   I think that you would get a lot more browsing by visitors if those were replaced by your category pages.  That is my assumption.  I would test it to find out if my site gets more pageviews per visitor with categories instead of archives in the top navigation - or you can include both archive and category in the top nav.

I used to include archive pages on my sites but from experience they attracted very little traffic from search.  Why?  Their title tags did match very many queries in the search engines.   You can check your analytics to see if this is true.  Are they pulling in traffic from search?   In comparison, my category pages pulled in a lot of traffic from search.   Also, my archive pages were not viewed very much.  So, I removed my archive pages from the site.  That directed all of the power that originally went into them into other parts of the site and I believe that elevated the performance of the site overall.

3. Linking between your topic pages.   I don't see a lot of linking between the content pages of your site.  If you have other pages with related photos, related locations, related topics, etc. you can lift visitor engagement by linking to them.  Also, the text links in your content are simply slightly darker font.  I would change that to a bright blue and underlined.  That shouts the presence of the links and attract attention.  That should move more visitors between the pages of your site and up the engagement, maybe up search performance too as google finds more keyword connectivity between your pages, lower bounce rate, higher browser rate.

4. Title tags.   In my opinion, your title tags are brief and very often include only very common words such as "Behind the Scenes" and "Lunch in the Clouds".  These generally don't perform as well in search as titles with the nouns of products, geography, people, organizations, etc.   Consider changing "Lunch in the Clouds" to... "Lunch with Mt. Fuji and Tokyo Through The Clouds".   I think it will get more traffic from search.  I would do this with lots of the titles if this was my website.

I hope that you find something useful here.  I offer this information to be helpful.  I am not looking to be hired because I have enough work on my own sites.

You can get a lot of great help from Moz Q&A.

The best way to accomplish that is the same as pulling in traffic to a website.   That is to start with relevant titles on your questions and then giving a generous description of what type of assistance you need and what you hope to accomplish.

For example, you are looking for help with the technical aspects of wordpress.  If you use "Need technical help with wordpress" or  "Need an SEO check on my wordpress site" as the title of your question, that will attract people who know about wordpress to read it.  Then, in that question give generous information about the current state of your site and what you have done to enhance wordpress so far.  Are you using categories, tags, etc.  The best would be to share the URL so people can actually see what you are doing.  If you are looking for paid assistance, state that.  If you just want people to provide opinions, state that.

Keep in mind that Q&A can bring your experienced advice from highly qualified people but it can also bring unqualified kibitzing.   Its up to you to decide what advice is best suited for you.

Q&A always works best for specific questions, rather than a broad, dig into my website and write me a thesis on how to improve it.  People here might spend 10, 20, 30 minutes looking at your site and giving you a reply.  That can be perfect for specific questions, but can be fatally shallow for a deep evaluation.  So be as specific as you can for best results.  The deep evaluations are best done by someone you have paid for their time.

You mention that you have a photography site.  If you search Q&A you will certainly find that there are hundreds of questions asked by people who own photography sites.   You might benefit a lot by reading them, seeing their questions and reading what type of advice was given.  Photography sites are some of the most frequently discussed types of sites in Q&A.

Good luck to you.

OK... that's good.

Currently the way it's structured is if you click "Voice" you get a full description of each voice service we offer.

Does this mean that the info is "hidden" until the visitor clicks?   If that is the case that info is not being used by Google and possibly other search engines.

We removed all of the "click to view" elements on our sites a couple years ago because the traffic on those pages went to crap.

Huge improvement Alan.  Nice work!

I bet you get lots more clients.

I think that your "hub" pages can be category pages and more.

Imagine a hub page for widgets with.... "how to do it" articles down the left column, "widget reviews" down the center column, and tips on "how to enjoy widgets" down the right column.

These could look like your sample page or look like the homepage of Slate.com... or any other news site's homepage or category pages if you have enough content.

Nice, I think that is going to be killer.   Let me know how it works.

"...use "hub" pages that link to all my other content. "

Yes, exactly.   That is actually what we are working on next week.  We are going to create hub pages for the entire website.  They will link out to all of the best content for their topic that is both "on the blog" and "on the website".   These will also link to product pages.  We are going to use big juicy images on these hub pages to quickly communicate the topic and make them look colorful and fun.

The order of the items on these pages will be determined by what is getting clicked.  So, stuff that is hot with the visitors will move to the top.  These hub pages will also link to a few product sales pages that have generous amounts of informative content.

Heydarian, great to see you here.

This is a complex question.  The answer of what to index and what to not index varies from situation to situation.

Let me give you examples and a little history for two sites...

**BLOG A ** (an industry news filter, kinda like Metafilter for an industry)

The site that I spend most of my time on has a blog that receives very skimpy posts.  "You gotta see this widget".  "This widget is really cool".   "Acme invents a new green widget".   Three years ago, I had post pages, category pages and a home page that all received lots of traffic.   Then, after Panda, those skimpy post pages did not perform well and actually damaged the rankings for the entire site - because I had thousands of them.  So, I noindexed all of the post pages and even deleted thousands of them a couple times per year because they were mostly "newsy" content.  The category pages and homepage still received lots of traffic and the rankings for the rest of the site recovered nicely.

Then, I think google started looking at category pages that link to skimpy content pages and they started performing poorly.  So, I changed the blog format to eliminate the post pages and the category pages.  Now there is only a big homepage and pagination pages.  This blog still is very successful because lots of people continue to visit it directly and subscribe to the feed - but I intentionally abandoned the post pages and category pages because Google has changed.

BLOG B (a product blog for a retail website)

On this blog the posts are detailed product reviews, detailed descriptions of how to do something, detailed quashes of misconceptions, etc.  Each post has several photos and 500 to 2000 words.  At first I was using about ten category pages, but after a couple years they still were not getting much traffic.  Other pages of my site (not on the blog) competed with them and performed more strongly.  So, I deleted the category pages from the blog,  HOWEVER,  I began to generously link to the topic pages on other parts of the website.  The results have been positive.

So, the bottom line.  I think that you have to look at many things:

1. Are your category pages pulling in traffic?  If not, delete them, don't just noindex them unless lots of people are reading them.  They are power sinks if you still have them on your site IMO.

2. Do you have superior pages on your site for the same topic?  If you do, then give them your attention and promote them on your blog posts.

3. How does google treat pages like yours?

Then you gotta place your bets on a strategy.  Hope that it works.  Keep watching the analytics.

Good luck.

I would do analytics to identify which of these sites performs better in search and then put a big effort into making a massive improvement in content.  This effort would be to make both sites absolutely different from one another and the site that is getting this effort absolutely superior to just about any site that is out there.

If these sites perform differently in different niches, I would divide the effort being placed into them niche-by-niche.

I would start with the most profitable niche and focus on the product pages on that site first, then move down on the basis of profit priority.  I would make the best product pages possible, detailing all of the important features and giving tips for use that might stimulate sales.  You are not just beefing up for the search engines, you are beefing up to benefit the customers.

I would also do an assessment of which products generate the most customer service questions.  For those I would produce informative content that answers those questions in great detail.  This would not be skimpy blog posts.  It would be substantive articles with photos and data that clearly answer the questions.  The goal is to produce a library of this content.  Then customer service people can simply refer people with questions to those pages.  Some people will find those pages on their own and that should reduce the customer service effort.  This should produce great content that will be shared by customers and save you employee time.

I would also look into products and pages that are unproductive.  These are dead weight on your site and not worth the time needed to improve them.  This is a good time to prune and weed.

1. Is it possible to get the same product pages on page 1 of the SERPs for both sites?

Yes, but you will benefit more by getting one page to the top of page one rather than getting two on the bottom of page one.  My goal would be getting one page to rank as high as possible.

2. Should we be canonicalizing (is that a word?) products across the sites? This would get tricky - both sites have roughly the same domain authority, but in different niches. Certain products and keywords naturally rank better on 1 site or the other depending on the niche.

The intended use for canonical is to attribute identical content.  My focus on this would be to make massive improvement of  the content of one site.

If you use canonical attibuting product  ABC to just one site then you will have only one site in the SERPs.

If you are going to come up with yet another product in the market, you will not survive in the market for a longer period of time.

I really agree with Moosa.

Much of the time, people who need help don't know what product they need.  They need a smart person to diagnose a problem and carry through with the work of fixing it.

When I have a problem there has never been a product to solve it, the solution is usually finding expertise and that is a custom solution every time.

If the Spanish government is smart it will reverse or revise these rules.   If they don't reverse or revise their publishers will be starved of revenue and with that their quality must drop - if they don't go out of business.