Yeah... Try FREE BEER in the title tag too.

So now we are looking to build a Q&A, but I don't need to tell you how much of an investment that will be.  And with our experiences its difficult to walk down that path not knowing if it will make any difference, and what ROI we can expect.

I would do this for some of your very best products.  See how it works.  My ROI might not match yours and it is very possible that magazines do not have the same potential that exists for hobby, tool, craft, construction and other industries.

I have a page competing for a popular keyword with these stats...

2,200,000 impressions

18,000 clicks

CTR of 0.8%

6.7 average ranking

The clicks and CTR agree with my analytics.  This KW brings me about 500 to 800 visits per day.

Competitors above me are:  Google with huge site links and two positions, Apple.com holding two positions, wikipedia, sometimes a news entry, sometimes some adwords above the SERPs.

I think that I have a kickass title tag in comparison to everyone else.

So, I think that my numbers are about like yours.  It simply shows that ranking at #7 isn't worth much these days... and if the positions above you are industry leaders it can be really hard to get the click.

I think that my potential for moving up in this SERP is limited.  Downside potential is huge because google subdomains, and other biggies are below.

Is it some EMD update or what the hell is it coming back and hitting me every week on these two days.

I think conspiracy theory is hitting you. 

I approach this problem by building an information site with a store.

That requires a huge writing investment to produce articles, photos and videos on how to select the products, how to use them, how to fix them, etc.   However, every article/video that you create starts pulling in traffic and over time your long tail keyword reach becomes enormous.   Your site will be EVERYWHERE in the SERPs.

If you do a good job lots of people will share your content, link to it from forums.  Manufacturers might link to it if your content is better than theirs.  Trade associations, clubs, professional groups, bloggers, forum posters might link to you.  People will share on facebook if you have great content.

Over time, if you track the entry page of your conversions you will learn the types of content that pulls in sales and that will inform future content development.

This method is slow work and really expensive but has a great payback over time, in my opinion.

Make your site the "go to place" for anybody anywhere who wants to learn about products, how to use them, how to select them.  Other people in your niche have probably not done this and people will buy from you because you are the widget man.

Right!

I think that we will get a larger number of really interesting questions.... and will be great to see associates posting.

All of the SEO tools help you to conduct research and analysis to enable you to make decisions when doing onpage and offpage optimisation.  The purpose of the tools is to help you make the best decisions based on insight so you can improve your sites performance.

There's the answer.  The tools combined with an investment of time and carefully study - they apply what you learn - are what you need.  No magic bullets.

Even if you learn everything and apply it perfectly you might not have success.  The reason is that - at difficult levels of competition, SEO becomes a battle of resources.

Yes.  Same name.

It really isn't a new image.  It is the old image with an edit or two.

Just edit and reupload.

I report on industry news with a blog.  A title link and a sentence.  Twenty to forty items per week.  It attracts lots of subscribers, the category pages pull lots of traffic, the main page and category pages have attracted lots of links.

For products I write:  how to select, how to use, how to enjoy, how to repair articles - often with videos.  These all attempt to lead visitors to a purchase page.  "How to" articles get lots of forum, facebook and twitter action.  Really valuable content that makes you look competent, generous and trustworthy.

I edit my images frequently without seeing problems.    Just edit the image.  Don't change the size or the file name or the file type.  Sometimes they might disappear for a day or a few but are back in the rankings.

We are assuming that when you add new pages, their low authority contribute to decreasing the domain's authority.  Is this the case?

If you are shoveling manure onto the blog I think that your site is going to stink.

But if you are carefully crafting golden blog posts then you authority has no where but up to go and will probably happen fast.

Take your time adding new pages.  Make them great.  Keep your density of gold to crap as high as possible... preferably zero crap.

It might not hurt a big site like SEOmoz that's already in the 90's.  What about a site in the 20-30 range?

It really hard to move the needle when you are up there at 90's.  But when you have 20 to 30 a little manure or gold will make a big difference.

Go look at the SEOmoz blog.  The gold is off of the charts.  That's how you get 90 out of not that many blog posts.

The phone number is the most prominent...

Right... slap their face with what you want them to do.

Talk to the clients to find out what essential pieces of information should be gathered to  respond to the client properly..... or essential information to weed out the time wasters....

..... but some people have a different style and just like  to get them on the phone.

Talk to the client about this.  You will get a different answer every time.  Some of them might have never thought of information gathering or weeding.

Let me know if you find a good one and I'll end their freelance work.  

Seriously... if they are any good they are not going to be freelancing for very long.

If I was going to purchase SEO services I would need more information than what you have posted.

In my opinion you should not buy SEO as if it were a commodity.

Let's say you invest in rare coins and I offer you a rare coin for $5000.  You should have many questions...

What country is it from, what coin is it, what denomination, what date, what condition.

So, if someone offers you posts, articles, press releases, directory submissions, bookmarks, videos.  You need to know more.   Especially video... how would you like brand on YouTube with an idiot talking about your fine company - for 90 seconds.

.Now, looking at your package.  Would I purchase it?  Absolutely not.  The only thing in that list that I might want is a video and I would rather pay $1500 for one great video and I would go to someone who knows what they are doing instead of buying it from someone who is selling spammy SEO packages.

If you have $1500.  Consider spending it on a nice digital camera and lights or a nice video camera.   Then start taking great photos to illustrate your website with fantastic photos of your products, how to use the, how to select them, etc.  Videos work great here too.

I would spend the $1500 on assets for my website that will make people talk about it, share it, like it, link to it.

This is how I spend my time.  I think that guest posts are crap unless they are a fantastic article on a website with millions of interested visitors.  Syndicating content can get you in penguin and panda problems and  social bookmarking is worthless unless it is being done for fantastic content in front of an audience who will salivate for it.

Do you have a digital camera"  A video camera?

How many articles do you have on your site that are the best on the web for their topic.

If you don't have those , that is where to spend your time and money.

Once you have that in place then you have a website that is worth marketing.  Then you are offering people fine wine.  If they are not saying "Wow!" then your marketing is not getting a good return.

...this will only hurt the competitor and not my client...   Is this true?

No

Is there any risk to my client?

Yes

Should we take action?

Maybe

If copied content is placed on a stronger site or simply a site that Google likes better it can...

1. outrank the original site

2. pull traffic away from the original site for primary and long tail keywords

3. acquire links, likes and tweets that should belong to original site

4. cause Panda problems for the original site

So, if the competitor who took the content is strong then your client could have a huge problem.  If the competitor is weak then you probably don't have a problem now but could have one at a future time.

Go out looking at the SERPs for short and long tail keywords to see if this site is competitive.

It's not too late for you to start your next career, Robert.

You know how new ventures can be fun.

Or, you can simply do stand-up at the local pub for tips.

lol

Loved the "hanky".    I'll laugh about it all the way to the office.

Thank you, Robert.   nominated for humor of the month award

but not showing up at all

If this is true, and the current SEO has been on the job for a few months, then it is time to evaluate their performance.  I am not saying that they are screwing up, just saying that at least a trickle of traffic could be starting to flow.

White hat is slow to produce - especially from a standing start.

You can hit Panda problems doing this.  If you have lots of this content the rankings of your entire site could be damaged.

Best to write your own content, or use this content on pages that are not indexed until you have replaced with original content.

Or you could publish it to get in the index and replace as quickly as possible.

The site you are getting this content from could be damaged as well.

It depends.

If you are an MSRP seller and two deep discounters are above you then you will probably be wasting your money.   If you are a light discounter with two MSRP sellers above you then you will likely get a lot of sales.

So, it depends who you are, who else is in the SERPs and who is lookin for something.

I have wordpress blogs on a couple of my sites (installed in a folder) and the results have been great.

If you optimize them properly your pages will rank just as well as static pages.  You can also use feeds to distribute your posts and google will discover your pages and rank them immediately.  Posts are often indexed, ranking and pulling traffic within minutes if you have a strong site.

I agree with placing wordpress in a directory but would avoid using /blog/ or /wordpress/ simply because that might make you a slightly easier target for some robots.

Go to this page and you will see that CNN, NBC, CBS, TechCrunch and other primo sites are using wordpress.  If it was crap they would not be using it.

http://en.wordpress.com/stats/

I have videos on youtube and embed the same youtube videos on my product pages and article pages.  I also link to my youtube channel in the top navigation of my website.

I am all about showing people that I have the content that they are looking for.

Traffic flows between my youtube channel and my website and back.

If they go to youtube and search for keywords associated with my products they will  find several of my videos on the first page of the youtube SERPs.

Since I have done this my conversions are up.

I don't know exactly how youtube ranks videos but I do believe that the views accumulated on my website help the videos rank better in the Youtube SERPs.

Anybody know for a fact if that is true?

If you brand your youtube channel and make it a busy place it can bring business to your site and help your brand

I tend to have serious trust issues in general.

However, I don't normally suspect any problems with sites that the top of the SERPs.

I might have trust issues in the SERPs if I was looking for something like  "cheap airline tickets" or "escort services" but I am not looking for either of those.

If you have content on your website that gets action when shared on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Slashdot, Reddit and similar websites then you have something that might get a little attention from Eric Ward's service.

Value to the visitor.

If you have that then it might be worth the $495.

See, it is more up to YOU than it is up to Eric.  He is simply going to share your site with another circle of people.  He doesn't accept every person who is willing to pay.

I used his service a few years ago for relatively new sites that I felt had very good content.  I think that I got ROI but it can be hard to measure. Since then social sharing has really taken off and I just allow that to happen on its own.

If you become a huge success on bozzie311.pro you can expect a very large percentage of your hopeful visitors to type in bozzie311.com.

If you are serious about your venture and going to charge out with intentions of winning then my recommendation is to find a great .com.  Lots of domains are not being used right now or being underused.  Paying $1000 or $10,000 or even more for a great address is worth every penny IMO.

Although there might be 100,000 of these domains registered, most people will say "huh???" when you tell them your web address by phone.  Most will forget and type in .com.

I have not gotten to the ranking question and this is a 'no go' for me.  However, I think that a .pro will be just as easy or difficult to rank as any other type of domain.

The upside might be fewer robots trying to scrape your content and spam your blog.

You have a website up.  That's a great start.  Now start keeping records.

Create a great page of content that you think your visitors will like that is about a valuable keyword topic.  Or better yet start a blog about phone accessories, explaining topics that are fairly evergreen.

Then watch where the pages initially rank... keep records... install google analytics and see what keywords and referrers are sending in traffic.  Don't obsess on this just check once a week and write down your observations.  If you are doing the right things you should see rankings slowly rise along with traffic.

I am working on DFP ad server today (have sunk several days into setting up and fine tuning)... trying to optimize that... a lot of SEO principles apply - just in a different way.

I know about our customers and our products and weed through them accordingly.

Absolutely.  Thumbs up.

If you know your industry or topic niche very well then you probably have a good idea of what people need to know, want to know, and are asking about.

Those are generally the best topics for search volume. But.... the best topics for attracting links likes and mentions are what people need to know but don't know that they need to know and are not asking about.  Now, if that topic is something that they will not understand then that should be place on your back burner until people are ready for it.

My experience is that keywords in search suggestions and KEI lists are not the best things to chase.

Videos?

If beer does not work try "free popcorn"!

In my opinion, a phone number in the title tag is a waste of very valuable characters.

I would use that space to compose a title tag that is rich in keywords and elicits clicks.

An extra keyword might qualify you to appear in additional SERPs.

You can also bring people in by posting a kickass price.... offer to tell them the "secrets" of your trade.... tell them it "ships today".

Shout your value proposition or your interesting content.

My personal favorite is "free beer" ... guaranteed to increase your CTR.  Try it and see.

thanks for this report

How about other people hotlinking images from your domain.  Do you think that google sees them pulling content from you via the image link and gives you a small credit for that?

I don't know the answer.  I assume that the value is low to nothing.  Do you have any ideas on this?

Here is what I have at the top of the "start-up" page on my work computer....

Creating New Content is the Only Way to Earn Money!

Thanks, Paul.  You are correct.  These are all-new pages with articles of very substantive length.  Mine are typically 1000+ words and several images.

Depending upon subject area they can bring in good amounts of traffic from long-tail keywords and when/if they rank for their short tail the traffic can be huge.

A lot of the content that I publish and forget starts deep in the SERPs for primary terms.  But it slowly climbs and a year or two later is at great position.

It loos like nothing bad will happen, but that you lose a lot of SEO benefits from having images stored locally and getting the proper attribution.

I agree.  I don't know how much SEO benefits come from hot-linked images.  But, in case there is any benefit we have all of our images on our own domain and that requires terrabytes of BW per month.

Right.   That's why I have all of my images on the same server as the domain.

hmmm....  To me, this sounds like moving your whole office because your trash can is full.

More and more people are placing their images and other large files on cloud servers because they sometimes offer a cost advantage and they sometimes allow a website to load faster.

Because of this I don't think that Google is going to give a site a huge penalty if they are pulling content from a second domain.   This is being done by some of the highest quality and most popular sites on the web.

However, I think like you and have all of my images on my own domain.  Then if people are hotlinking them they will be coming from my site and I will get any credit for that - if google smiles about it, which I am not sure that they do.

My favorite method for increasing the traffic into a website is to do keyword research and then start writing very useful and interesting content for topics that people are searching for.   If you can do that your traffic will start to climb.

Also, my personal belief is that when google sees that you have content for everything that anyybody anywhere is searching for they rank you a little higher.

I spend zero time linkbuilding.  Zero.  Instead I put up a sustained content attack.

For me this brings great results as long as every page of content that I produce is one of the very best documents on the web for that topic.  These articles each require a couple days to a couple of weeks - with staff helping me with art and photography and research.

This will not work if you are publishing crap or even pedestrian-quality content.

This approach is time consuming, expensive and slow to produce results.  But if you persist at it your site will become very hard to beat and visible in the SERPs throughout your niche.

This approach is not for everyone because few people have the resources, faith and patience needed to do the work.

Most of my sites are EMDs and I get my ass kicked all of the time.  It's happening right now and has been going on for years.

Also, I am beating lots of EMDs in their primary SERPs.

When someone outranks you they usually deserve it.

So, start fighting for what you want.

Thank you for helping me find them.

<a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">target</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">='_blank' href="http://www.weitzlux.com/mesothelioma_438.html" rel="nofollow">Mesothelioma</a>, <a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">target</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">='_blank' href="http://www.weitzlux.com/asbestos/attorney_433.html" rel="nofollow">Asbestos Attorney</a>, <a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">target</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-tag">='_blank' href="http://www.weitzlux.com/orthoevra/patch_7852.html" rel="nofollow">Ortho Evra</a>

When I view the source they have "nofollow", which should remove their value for ranking a website and make these links OK with Google.

Would not bother me if my competitors were doing this.   In fact, it would reveal to me that they think they are makin' munny.

asked enough questions to know that now I need to focus on content at this point

Great!  Spend all of your day working on content.  When you produce that content be sure that your page is going to be one of the very best on the web for your topic.  Then spend five minutes to compose a great title tag.

When you want to take a short break come into Q&A or look at the SEOmoz blog.  No more than an hour out of a day.   Ask questions.   Keep records of what you do and what works and what doesn't.

If you are working on a single site, once you have it set up and running then creating content - enough to saturate the SERPs in your niche will keep a steady flow of traffic coming in for new keywords.

As long as you are creating best on the web content (don't bullshit yourself - it gotta be really good) then all you need to do about SEO is to spend five minutes on each title tag and spend no more than an hour a day keeping your ear to the ground.

Your greatest danger is producing pedestrian content that will not draw attention to your site.

When I go to the  WP and find a page with a box of links labeled "Featured Advertiser Links" and I then view the source code of  the page I do not see those links in the code.

Is that what you see when you do this?

I agree with Mike.... and beefing up those descriptions can bring in a lot more long-tail traffic if done smartly.

blooming bows

bloomingbows.com

http://www.bloomingbows.com

These anchor links would not bother me very much because they are either the domain name or the domain name in words.   Local PR companies and guest blogs scare me a lot more.

If this was my site I would be working on writing very unique product descriptions that are of substantive length.

I would also explore dropping individual product pages for product groups such as "bitty bows" to a single page.  Before I did that I would be looking to see if they were pulling in traffic (pre drop).  If they are not pulling traffic then those product pages would be merged to show many of these similar products on a single page.

Doing that will reduce the  number of pages on the site and make each remaining page more substantive.  An alternative would be to use rel=canonical to attribute the individual pages to the category page, again, I would know my analytics and traffic sources before doing that.

IMO it is impossible to give good content modification advice without data from analytics.

For the past year or so, Google has been using two algos to identify sites that they want to hold back in the rankings.

PANDA targets sites with lots of duplicate content.  That content can be duplicated on other sites or duplicated from page to page on the same site.  Retail sites have had problems because many of them use product descriptions from manufacturers or data feeds.  They also have very similar content on many pages because the products are very similar.

You may have a duplicate content problem.  See here.

PANDA also targets sites with lots of thin content.  Many of your product descriptions are quite short.

PENGUIN targets sites that have done link manipulation.  If you have lots of links with keyword anchor text or lots of low quality links from forums, blog posts or article syndication.

The two most important parts of diagnosing these sites is determining when your traffic drop occurred.  If you have google analytics the answer can be there.  If you have log files they can be analysed to look for the answer.

There are free quizzes here that you can use to input information from your site to quickly determine if you are a candidate for these problems.  In my opinion you are close to a Panda problem because of thin content that has been duplicated on and off of your site.

"for sale in arizona" at 301K is broadmatch.

So, this niche might not be as rich as you expect.... and conversions using that query - even if combined with "homes" or "houses" or "real estate" is going to be really low.

Do you really want to target this?

Thanks for your thoughts, Marie.

** And I think that sometimes Google gets it wrong as to who is the more authoritative.**

I am confident that they are very often wrong.

**Basically, when Google sees a duplicate of a page they will assign the page's links to that site.  **

Oh.... do you think somebody could grab an article from your website, post it on theirs and kidnap your linkjuice?