If you really own that brand shouldn't your URL be brandname.com?

Keep in mind that some people innocently use

tags for formatting text.  These folks are building websites because they have a message to share without any regard to SEO.  And some of these websites pull an enormous amount of traffic because they are built by content area experts who write with enthusiasm and verve.

I don't think that google is pulling out a stick to beat these people.

Car insurance is one of the most difficult markets on the web.

PPC ads can cost $20 or more per click!

You are competing against companies worth billions of dollars who must aggressively defend their position online against other companies who are even larger then they are.

They have been working to compete on the web for many years and they have teams of people who work on the content, design, function and promotion of their websites and their brands.

Do you honestly have the resources to compete?

Wow.  That must be one of the lowest keyword diversity industries that I have seen!

If I had a site like that I would put my big effort into getting into the local search results.

Then I would start working on the organic.

I would hit adwords heavily and get some catchy ads above the SERPs.   I would be looking for smart, strong, experienced, gentle with thousands of successful moves who is going to take good care of my precious instrument!

PR from every link will flow into your site - except those that are linked with the "nofollow" attribute or go through a link that spiders are unable to cross (such as a link processed by a program).

However, the impact upon your rankings will be determined by the quality of the link.   That can be influenced by the relevance of the article that contains your link.  If the article is highly relevant and your link is within content  then you probably get a lot of ranking credit.  If it is not relevant then the credit might be zero.  if your link is outside of the content then the credit might be a lot less.

The first few links will carry the most ranking value.  After you have several links from a single domain the value of additional links seems to decline rapidly.

I don't know how much SEO has already been done on your site...

... but if I was just starting out I would hire a pro to do a study and recommend on your site.  You explain your goals and your site and they spend an hour or two reviewing your site and your SERPs, then prepare a to-do list that they review with you by phone.

That's better than shooting in the dark.  You get immediately actionable items that should produce ROI.

The best way to stink up a great article is to foist an arbitrary wordcount onto the author.

If the author is finished and still needs 300 words then he is going to bullshit and blather to reach your goal.  Yes, that BS will have an odor.

If the author reaches the wordcount and still has a lot to say then you just might have lost the web's most authoritative content in that niche.

Would I do this if I had a world-famous brand?  Yes, because the brand itself will elicit clicks and conversions.

Do I do it personally? No, because the optimization effect of stuffing another KW in the title might have better ROI.

lol

If you are selling MD 20/20, TBird, NTE or Rip you can probably leave the year off.

If you have single pages - by vintage - and people use the year in their searches then it could be an important way to differentiate your site.  And, possibly a way to keep your single pages straight.

I have multiple H1 tags on some of my pages and don't see any problem.  Just telling my observations.

If this is your site and you have concerns about multiple H1s....   maybe the developer needs to know that he is being paid by the hour and you are being paid on the basis of results.  So if he wants any more hours he better not be  messing with your results.

My personal belief is that this counts for a lot.

Think about it.... You know that Google has this data and if NOBODY is clicking on your entry then you are wasting that space in their SERPs.

You asked for the best way to get these pages to rank well.

If you  want them to rank well the best thing to do is rewrite that duplicate content.

Then getting links would be helpful.

What is the best way to get these pages to rank well and not have the duplicate content issues and be ranked down by search engines?

Start writing.

What is the reason for the disparity between the domain analysis and actual performance?

They measure different things.

If you want to know who is accumulating the most Google Swack then just check the SERPs.  You get a really simple presentation there.

Not trying to be a wise guy... just sayin'.

I don't think that this is "blackhat".   It is simply duplicate content that has a low chance of being filtered because it is on different domains which do not compete for identical keywords.  Also, different phone numbers are used.

If you think that this method is highly effective you can do it too.

But, if you do it, you will still face the challenge of getting those sites to the top of the SERPs where there is a little competition.  And, you will have some duplicate content risk.

If you have all of your different communities on the same domain you have an advantage on this company because you only have one domain to promote and any links that you get into that domain will benefit each of those communities all on one site.

Honestly, it sounds like your root problem is that you are unhappy that you must write unique content for each community.  Maybe you should hire someone to do it for you?  Or, if you are a real expert, why not write it yourself and give lots of useful information that might impress your potential clients and attract links?  If you really want to smoke those guys maybe that's what you should do?

Just saying... if you do that you will still need offsite SEO to beat these guys.  IMO they did some work to get these positions and you will have to match/defeat them.

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And, you are correct, Google currently seems to give a little bonus for keyword domains.  It's not that great of an advantage.  If you think that it is effective you can go out an buy a bunch of them and do the same thing as this guy is doing.

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If I was in your shoes I would be busy writing my content and looking for potential links in each community where you want to compete.  You have the more effective strategy IMO, but you have not earned your SERPs yet.

This site gets a lot of image search traffic.  I can not tell you if the captions assist with that traffic.  But I do know that kickass images on a same-topic page will get traffic.

If there is a small amount of duplicate content on the bottom of some pages there should not be a problem.  I have small cross-selling blurbs on the bottom of lots of pages on multiple sites.  These blurbs are generally small in word count when compared to the other content on the same page.

Lots of people do this.  I think that google might view that as part of your "content wrapper".

I'm not going to say percentages.  The more important thing is that the top content  on your pages is unique and substantive.

Hundreds of factors determine your rankings.  I don't think you can point to creating a second geographic location and say that was what tanked your SERPs. For all you know google could be saying... wow! these guys have two locations now, they must be successful... but other factors tanked the rankings.

Would I build a second site for a second location?  Only if the service was completely different... Like if I had a beer joint in Utah and a knitting club in California.

But that's only one opinion.

Just saying what happened here...

I had about 80 pages about topics that are similar to glossary entries.

I tossed them up with an image and two sentences.  That was 3 or 4 years ago.  Some of them ranked on the second or third page of google and they pulled a little traffic.  Not much traffic a few visitors per day for most of the pages.

Then, after a year or two I started upgrading them to a couple paragraphs and one or two nicer, larger images with captions.  Within a couple of months rankings went up (I don't build links on this site). Some of them were on the first page of google but most not.  Traffic shot up like a rocket.  Not that much from a ranking increase but because now there were lots more words on those pages and they interacted with queries to bring lots of long tail visitors.  The result was each of these pages started pulling a few dozen visitors each day.

Now, I am slowly upgrading these pages to articles of 500 to 3000 words and three to twelve images with generous captions, some with data tables some with a video.  Rankings on the ones that I have improved moved up significantly and are now in the top 5 of google.  Traffic on the pages that I have improved now hits a few hundred visitors per day per page.  I am working on another one today.

Bottom line... When compared to trivial content, substantive content pulls in lots more long tail traffic and will sometimes rank a little better on the basis of the richer content alone.  An investment in richer content will immediately increase your traffic.

Thanks.  I was reading about that.

If I was the boss at Google I would put my engineers on....

- ranking small specialty sites with superior content above the huge authority sites with skimpy content

- killing scraper and spinner sites that are using the content of others to make money

I get lots of image search traffic.  Lots.

I code my image something like this....

  (file name and alt describe the image in simple terms)

The most important factor, IMO, is a kickass image that lots of people like enough to click.

Being absolutely honest... and this is only my opinion...

I think that you have a business model where you don't have enough resources to be competitive against other similar sites who have invested $10 million or more and have a ten year head start.  So give the assistant ten weeks pay and let him use the time to find a new job.

Yes, you will need internal links to establish your site navigation.  Then, external links if you don't have enough PR flow from within your site.

Some powerful sites can support these millions of pages with internal links.  If you have a site like that congratulations!

Thanks!   You enjoyed the chewing spiders?

The short answer...

Link deep into the site at multiple points with heavy PR.

The long answer...

If you have a really big site you need a lot of linkjuice to get the entire site indexed and keep it in the index.  You also need a good site structure so that spiders can crawl through the site and find every page.

If you have several million pages, my guess is that you will need hundreds of links of at least PR5 or PR6 linking into the site.  I would direct each of those links to a deep category page.  That will funnel the spiders deep into your site and force them to chew their way out while indexing your pages.

All of those links must be held permanently in place.  Because if you pull the links the flow of spiders will stop and google will slowly forget about pages that are not visited by spiders on a regular basis.

If you have weak links or not enough links your site will not be thoroughly crawled and google will forget about your pages as fast as they are discovered.

Big sites require a PR resource.

You say that this is a very good site.

Instead of worrying about it I would be yelling YEEE HAAA! out the window on every morning that those links are still there.... and depending upon who owns that site I would send him/her thank you gifts of wine, imported beer, chewing tobacco or roses just as a thank you.

That's what I think.  Others might disagree.

Meta Keywords is not used by search engines

Meta description is used by search engines part of the time.

I have avoided using a line break by putting the product name in a single cell table and constricting the width.

Just an opinion... if the page is a weak PR6 or better I don't think that there will be any problem.  That should put enough spider activity into the page.

from say # 30 to 38

This could be normal flux.  Hang in there.

One thing we are having trouble with is our meta description and meta keywords for each page.

Meta keywords is meaningless.

If you have concerns about your site maybe a consult with a Drupal Expert would put your mind at ease and correct any real problems.

If Apple was using that for a clever optimization trick their alt would not be "Picking up where amazing left off."

I would not model my SEO after Apple.

These types of estimates are baloney in my opinion.

If you are asking these questions here at last minute....  then you are giving the client a wild guess.

I think it is safer and  more honorable to go without estimates.

You mention a 4% conversion rate.  In many industries that can only be attained by an extremely experienced webmaster who is selling the product at the lowest price on the web on a trusted site that is  widely known for that product.

These short articles are a great resource.

If this was my site I would place each article on a separate page.  I would also find at least one image to display with it (a photo or graphic) - and write a generous caption to appear under that image.

This makes the article page a little more substantive.

The value of these pages in my opinion is the potential links that they will attract.

I would also create a side menu that has links to the other short articles. I would also look for opportunities to link to them with in the text of other articles.

Also, if these articles are getting a lot of bounces I would ask myself if they should be more substantive.  Lots of people think that 300 words or 500 words is fantastic for an article... but to my standards that is skimpy.  My goal would be to make each of these articles a best-on-the-web resource for that topic.  That is how links are earned.

Would you use images inside H1 tags?

Absolutely NO.

Does anyone know any benefits of doing this?

NO.  You never know... it could be a negative.

I don't have any inside knowledge of how search crawlers work and have not done tests that confirm that all of the links on my pages are getting crawled.

But, I don't limit myself to 100 links per page.  I have sites that have over 200 links per page on every page and they do great in the search engines.  I am not saying that I am doing best practice.  I probably am not doing best practice. I am just saying what I am doing and these sites are doing great.

I have a number of pages that are nicely organized industry directories.  They link out to hundreds of external websites.  They rank at #1in Google for their targeted terms beating .gov .edu and same-industry heavyweights.  If I limited the number of links to 100 these would be multipage lists that would make visitors cuss loudly.

I believe that when you mention indexing category pages and index pages you refer to titles only.

I use the title and about 20 words.  I use WordPress where that is possible.

For now, the CMS is indexing each entire article in the monthly archive page. Which can create quite long pages as articles are not truncated.

I would try to use the first 20 words or first sentence if possible.  If not possible I would move to a different content manager.

Just my two cents.

I believe that Google is smart enough to know that millions of blogs have article pages, category pages and archive pages.

If your blog posts are unique content of substantive length and you only include a snippet on the category and archive pages then it is unlikely that you will suffer a duplicate content problem.

If you do have a duplicate content problem it will more likely come from scrappers grabbing your content or republishing your feed (that has full post content).

My approach is to allow indexing of article pages, category pages and index page but block only the pagination of the index and category pages.

If I blocked indexing of category or article pages I would lose thousands of visitors per day.

I am not seeing any measurable results from Google +

In my opinion a Google + button is a waste of page real estate - at least for the topics that my sites are about.

I am really disappointed that I can only give one thumbs up point to Robert's post.

Nice.  Congratulations on this success.

When the phone is ringing too much you can raise prices by 20%.

Use the extra money to hire one Yoda.  Problem of new staff is solved.

Just saying what I would do.... many will disagree...

I would put ALL of them on one page to create a huge huge list.  When people arrive they will say WHOOOO!  Look at this!

1. YES!  Especially from your homepage.  Tell everybody that visits your site!

2. YES!  Every quality links helps the authority of your entire domain.

3. If you have superb linkbait then share it will other people by tweeting to your friends, posting on facebook, ask your mum to tell visitors to her blog, share it with reddit, put a sign on your dog.....  but I don't think that I would buy any stumbles... because if your link bait is really good it should get tons of stumbles without paying for them.

1. YES.  Great link. Fantastic.

2. I would be singing hymns for those folks, not taking them to task because of the anchor text.  Write to them and say THANK YOU!  Its PERFECT!

You were covered nine times by the same media source for doing the same thing nine different times?

These domains can be very difficult to beat.

I currently have an entire website of information that includes articles, videos, products, printable resources and more, yet some thin content on a guide page of About.com and a product page on Amazon are above me.  My site is way better than what they have in every possible way.

Domain authority is hard to beat.

Your homepage is probably less relevant than this interior page.

Using your homepage is a short-term strategy.

Using the interior page is a longer-term strategy but probably better if your site will have many keyword topics.

I would do on-page optimization for the homepage.  And put full effort into the interior.

That is generic advice.

I would attack with both.  Improve the content on the internal page, sharpen the optimization of the homepage.

Any advice on getting accepted into the premium directories the first time?

If you want in then don't waste their time with a half-done site.  There is plenty of trash on the web.  You should be trying to impress them.