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I work in SEO for almost 5 years and just don't understand how is it possible to create one page for every single keyword.

Some people are focused on the short tail.  That's good!

OK... you have some keywords picked out.  Go to Google and search for them and decide if you can compete with the people who currently own that turf.

If your competitor is the two other plumbers who fix sinks in Bugtussle, WV and they don't even have a website then you have a fightin' chance....

...but if your competitors are New York City real estate agents then you really have to decide if you have the resources to compete.  Resources include content, skills, domain, design, links, access to properties, ability to sell or get listings, its a pretty long and steep list.

I'd like to cheer everybody on here and tell them to go out and kicksomebigass... but reality check is something that should always be done.  I don't want to cheer you into bankruptcy.

How does it look out there?

The singular and the plural are often used with different intent.  Here is an example... Microscope - microscopes

People searching for the singluar are typically students looking to learn about the parts of the microscope, its history, or how it is used.

People searching for the plural are typically shoppers.

Which one should you purchase or use?...  If possible I would try to purchase BOTH of them because some people will not be able to remember if you are microscope.com or microscopes.com.

However I would prefer building on the plural - even if I was building an information site - because I believe that the value of the domain would be higher as a retail site rather than an info site.

My question is if you had to hire someone to do guest blog posts how would you go about finding the right person to use?

I would go out to blogs in the home and garden niche and hire one of the best...

.... but instead of giving that fantastic content to everybody everywhere I would place all of that content on my own website.  This will build the equity in your site and you will not have to hire a person who is both a great writer and a relationship builder.  It's hard enough to get a great writer.

You probably think that this guest blogging is going to get you links.  The approach that I would take is hire someone who produces specific topic article content that will attract links to your site because the content is so fantastic.  I would want widely known GardenBlogger guest posting writing specific topic articles on my site and mentioning on his blog that he just did a blog post article on xyz on the Goodwin blog.

What would you expect to pay for this type of service?

If you are hiring a highly skilled and knowledgeable person you will need to pay them enough to give you their fantastic content instead of putting it on their own site where it will make them a lot of money.  If this person is really good you should be willing to pay her at least as much as you make because she will save you a lot of time.

Hopefully you will be able to afford her.

I love analytics and have used lots of different programs.  None of them agree.

So, relax and know that the numbers are approximate.  Nothing to go to war about.

I can't guarantee first page rankings for my own sites.  So, how can I guarantee anything to you?

but the #1 in the most important keyword for my company is a very bad website only with frames. What they are doing? Could anyone give help?

They are probably not doing anything special.  They are probably winning even though they have an unattractive design and use frames.

That is good news for you because if they were really smart they would be even harder to beat.

Keep working if you want to beat them.

Robert:  What a generous and detailed response.  And it is full if immediately actionable improvements.  Nice!

Will:   You are entering a niche with a lot of competition.  They have been working for years.  They have fought to attain the high ground and have now turned to face challengers.  They are entrenched, sandbagged, fully loaded and ready to defend.

£500 a month?   I am working almost full time with an experienced employee to attack much much easier turf (in a USA market).  We have been hammering for over a year and feel like we are just getting started.

I am not familiar with the UK competition for your product niche.  £500 a month will move you up when you are deep in the SERPs.   However, I don't know if  it will make you dominant.  I am betting that you will soon climb to a level where everyone above you already has you severely outgunned and is spending more than £500 a month.    The question will become.... Is your SEO competent enough to move you into a level of profit that will fund a more vigorous attack - and still pay you will for your personal effort?

Good luck with the site.

Some affiliates can sell millions of dollars worth of products per month.

The real question.... is your website, shopping cart, product range, pricing, conversion rate and commission percentage worth it for a superaffiliate?

Just a warning... there are a lot of young, hungry, highly skilled, smart, well financed affiliates with the resources needed to rank quickly for very competitive terms.  Once they get a foothold in your space the level of competition could go up several notches.

Where will that put you if you decide not to support affiliates?

To be a competent SEO you need to know a lot about code, because that is where the optimization is done.  So an important thing for you to do is learn enough about code to do the optimization work  and if you can learn more than that it would be even better.

In my opinion it is good that your company wants an in-house person to be involved with the site redesign.  Perhaps they would be willing to give you time away from other work to do reading and study to improve your skills.  Ask for it, get as  much as you can.

Getting the right designer is really important.  Some of them know a lot about SEO and are extremely competent at it.  Some of them know nothing about SEO and will become defensive if you stick your nose into the code.  Others think that they are the designer and will make you a site - AND YOU ARE GOING TO LIKE IT.

So, find the right designer.  One who really knows a lot about SEO and one who knows that you are the boss.   That will make all of the difference.  You don't want this job to be like pulling crocodile teeth.

You could hire a conversion optimization company such as SiteTuners.  They can help you improve your site and your  sales pages for better conversion. Or you can read Tim Ash's book (SiteTuners CEO) "Landing Page Optimization" and try to do it yourself.

Or, the best approach is what I did... read the book twice, attend landing page optimization workshop, work on the project yourself, then have them help you kick it up a notch.

It will probably not cost as much as you think.  Just have them to a study and recommend and then two one hour on the phone with you sessions.

Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does.

Just opinion.... I would not worry about this if it was on my site.

I have really strong feelings about hyphen domains and domains other than .com.   Most of this is from running retail sites on hyphen domains and trying to explain to people by phone about the hyphen and hearing from them how they went to the wrong domain when trying to visit.  The last customers I want going to the wrong domain are the people who are typing it in!

So, after hearing this stuff for a long time I paid hideous sums to get the unhypenated domains and the guys who I bought them from told me that their typein traffic was rising every year.

But, I have those domains now and am happy... well... there is one more that I would like to get. 

They say that converts are the worst type of fanatic. 

I would make a temperature chart of the year for lots of big cities, showing on them the "air conditioning season".  Post these on your website but more important give them to other air conditioning businesses to post on their website (with their branding and a linkback to you).  These would be locked .pdf documents that you produce.

My reactions to this are.....

You are successful.

Slap adsense on those pages to make a little money.

Examine the quality of those pages to determine if they are likable linkable tweetable.  How could you change them to make them more sharable?

Maybe your best  talents are not in air conditioning?  Would your time be better spent writing a website about fun topics?  

I don't know how it will help your site... but the spammers will know how to use it to help their sites.

This will attract spammers like bugs to a Georgia porch light.

Have the florist make this call.  The news people don't know you.

If I create articles with my keyword phrases and find sites to post them on, will this help wiith my search engine rankings for keyword phrases?

It will invite new competitors into your SERPs. Are you up for that?

I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site.

A penalty for internal anchor text?

I've never heard of that.

I used to have sites with hyphens... and all of my hard work was enriching the guys who owned the domains without a hyphen.  The harder I worked to make my site popular the more they enjoyed it.   I finally gave in and paid big bucks to get those domains.

So when you are workin hard to make Rons-KickAss-Site.com  AND RonsKickAssSite.net  huge successes they guy who owns RonsKickAssSite.com will be smiling as lots of your customers land on his spammy site and click ads to sorry domains.  Not a good customer experience and not good for your wallet - because the people who remember the name of your site well enough to type it in without a hyphen were probably going to buy something. Nice you just lost that $2000 sale to someone else - and he thinks you went out of business.

So, spend a little more time coming up with a kickass domain or be willing to spend some money to get the domain that you want.  Because if you own RonsKickAssSite.com I doubt that anyone is going to look for you at Rons-KickAss-Site.com

Here's a couple of quotes from Rand's post..... at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-domain-name

and while directing traffic to a .net or .org (as SEOmoz does) is fine, owning and 301'ing the .com is critical.

Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to give your domain name verbally and falls down on being easy to remember or type.

Just within the past few weeks I've started to see lots of "author photos" showing in the SERPs.  A couple people who I trust tell me that they are getting big traffic improvements where their author photo is showing.

I still don't have an author page (I don't like to build content on other websites unless I enjoy it or am being paid) but am starting lean towards making one.

I think that it is a mistake not to have one.  It's on my job list.

This is for an information site....

I go to Google.com and search for the root keyword that I want to rank for.  I look at the top ten sites and ask... "Can I defeat their content?".  If "yes" then I attack trying to make content that will be far superior to the best that is out there.  I don't look at their links or any other metric, if I can beat their content I jump into the fight.

For a retail site I do the same thing but place house ads on the content page that funnel visitors to pages where I can make money.

If I was making your list for one of my own sites, I would make just a couple of changes.

Before I begin I would ask myself and ask the SEO these two questions.....

A) What can I do to make my site more linkable, likable,tweetable?

Very few websites are easy linkbuilding jobs.  In fact, I think that most clients need a magician rather than a linkbuilder. So, before you start burning money on linkbuilders see what you can do to make that job easier.

B) What can I do to make my site more effective at converting visitors into customers?

When just starting out it is usually easier to double your income from current visitors than it is to double your income through new traffic.  What changes can be made to your product pages, shopping cart, navigation that will produce sales?  Can you improve the trust level of your site in eye of the buyer by adding trust seals, satisfaction policy, etc.  What can you do to cross-sell more effectively.  Increasing the size of your average shopping cart by 25% could produce more profits than doubling your sales.

Do A and B as soon as possible to get the most out of your spend on an SEO.

Now for your list of work.

1.  Quality back links with a MOZ grade higher than mine.

I would change this to "quality backlinks".  Don't limit your link potential.  As  the strength of your site grows it will be really really hard to get links if you maintain this requirement.  Also, I would want relevant links.

3.  A weekly report of the sites that have created a link and its MOZ ranking.

Allow this to be done monthly.  Let your SEO do SEO work and spend less time on reports.

I'm told that client information is confidential and couldn't be release.  If I'm in a completely different sector of retail, would that matter?

It is often easy to get a few references.  However, I would never want my site being used by an SEO to market his services.  And, you don't want your SEO showing your site to me because I might be inspired by what you are doing and become a competitor.  Lots of people feel differently from me but there is a lot of young hungry greedy energy in the SEO space.  Don't paint a target on your wallet.

I need to establish a strong brand so being invited to write becomes an honour and people would jump at the chance.

Fantastic attitude.  You will kickass!

I would not publish these duplicates if my site was weaker than other sites where they will be published.  From what I have  seen the strongest domains with these articles will display in the SERPs.  Weaker domains will be filtered.  I don't believe that timestamp or original source is very important. Plus, if you have a lot of dupe content rankings across your domain could be reduced.

Most analytics attribute sales instantaneously.  Adwords can attribute sales from a cookie that was set days ago.

then ... my traffic stopped!

What traffic?  All traffic?  Google traffic only?  Even visits from your mum's blog?

If you search  for your domain can you find it?

and added a few advertisers on my real estate site

Do you have nofollow on those advertiser links?

Go to Google webmaster tools and look for a message.  If you don't have the site on webmaster tools then add it.

If this was my site I would drop affiliate links.  Then  be sure I am in compliance with all webmaster guidelines, then slap up adsense and submit a reconsideration request.

If traffic comes back find a wholesale source of the product, add shopping cart buttons and ship orders myself.

(I would start workin' on a new site in a different niche right away because this one could be down for a long time.)

CNAME is a DNS trick.   It isn't a redirect.

Lots of hosted shopping carts use CNAME records to make it look like your customers are checking out on your own domain instead of checking out on something like ultracart.com.

The destination of the move is usually a subdomain such as secure.egol.com.

If you are going to do this you need to have someone who really understands how these things work to confirm that the set-up that these folks suggest is going to work property for SEO.

I don't know enough about it to advise but I do know enough about to say that it probably isn't as simple as you describe.

I am betting that this results in an SEO inefficiency.   If I wanted the press releases to look like they are on my server I would just put future releases on my server unless the PR site has some powerful reason to keep them on their server and redirect to mine.

There are tons of people running their own wordpress sub domains with similar sites but not sure where I would find these kind of people.

Go out looking at these blogs, find one that has great writing, offer that person a job.  That gets you someone who has done the work for a long time - probably because they enjoy it.  If you post a job announcement for applicants it can be hard to tell what you are getting.

I would do #3.

Interesting...

I don't know how "private" selling prices are in your area but maybe a couple pages on your site like thiese.....

WHAT YOU CAN BUY IN YOURCITY FOR $100,000

This would be a point of reference for buyers and sellers.  Where I live there is a huge divergence between askin' and sellin' prices.  They ask for the moon but get something a lot less.

RECENT SALES PRICES IN YOURCITY...

Nosy people would love this.

I think that patches could be powerful powerful in social media.  Patches - both directly and indirectly - are a social connection badge.  So if you can get people to start sharing it could lead to a lot of traffic and sales.

OMG.... then they will need more make-up!

Find the wrecks and do a time-lapse of making them pretty.

I just went to the site and reread your question.... visited some competitors too.

You are looking to add navigation to the homepage of the site that links straight to deeper category pages.

If I had a site in this niche I would do KW research to learn about the most often searched types of patches.  Then my homepage would be a gallery of fantastic images - one for each of the most often searched categories. When a person clicks the image they would go to a fantastic presentation of patches of that type.

Google knows everything that everybody everywhere is searching for.  My belief is that if your homepage has links to internal pages for everything that everybody everywhere is searching for then that is kickass optimization because it clearly says that you are relevant relevant relevant.

This type of gallery would immediately get people drilling deeper into my site and finding that we have done patches for the organizations and themes that they are looking for - so it should be good for conversions too.

======================

<unsolicited comment="">  I see the animation on the homepage... I don't know what your site looked like before that.  But I am wondering if the percentage of people going to deeper pages and placing orders dropped after that animation went up.  If this was my site I would be looking into that and be ready to retire it if the data looked that way. </unsolicited>

My bet is that if you have a "gallery of work" on the homepage as described above that the site will rank a little better and sell a lot better.  Just sayin my gut because I find it almost impossible to focus on other information while that animation is running... and although that animation is a really good one and amusing, I would find out if it is makin' any money.

I agree.

Zero subdomains here.

oh...  OK

I was only 1/2 way through reading your post and I am thinking... "This is the best stuff I've read in a year."

Looking forward to more of your posts.

What google wants is authority, relevancy, quality and engagement.

This part is great.

ha ha...

I am just sayin' what I would do.  Not sayin' that it is the best.

I am waiting to get a lot of thumbs down for that post.

I really REALLY like Valery's answer.   (Who gave that a thumbs down?  I hope that you are my competitor  

Lots of people here seem to worship SEO tools.

I think that you gotta be careful.

Becoming a slave to SEO tools will dull your wit and damage your ability to think out of the box.  It also resigns you to a position where you hand over your most important money-making decisions to "somebody out there" who produced a tool.

The tools here are SEOmoz are really good but there are a lot of tools out there that were build by people who are really good programers but bumbling oafs when it comes to SEO.  Do you want them as the Captains of your ship?

Q: If millions of webmasters are using the same kickass tool who will win?

A: The smart guy who thinks for himself.

OK..... your original question was "How strict should you be?"

My answer to that is... don't rely on tools.  Develop your skill to a level where you can rely on yourself.  Use tools to check things and when you find a really good one it might be handy to optimize a million database pages - until you have time to tweak the best ones yourself.  Don't be afraid to doubt tools and go with your gut.  Once you become a better-than-average SEO you are better than most of the tools.

Use your brain. Bet on yourself.  You will not defeat your competitor by mimicking him.  You will beat him by doing something that is clearly superior.

If all of your competitors are slavin' to the tools you have a chance to make a lot of money.

I would use it. 

.... because it is bombing anchor text at all of those pages.

Who is going to bet against Michael Gray?  I think that you should listen to him.

I would give his answer one tweak.  He says....

If the product goes out of stock forever, you have a couple choices. You can leave the page up with a discontinued notice on the page. IMHO that’s not the best way to go for search engines. Ideally I’d like to not lose any link equity and 301 the product page to a similar product, category/department page, or home page.

I would do exactly what he says 99% of the time, however, if that page is pulling a lot of search engine traffic and same manufacturer has a replacement product or something close that substitutes, I would leave that page in place and use it to explain...  "This product has been retired but a new and improved widget is available... (then give the sales pitch for the new model with a buy button).  This approach would be especially valuable if the product is something like running shoes where repeat customers with very high loyalty are looking to replace their favorite shoes up to several times per year.

When this shoe was replaced by Addiction there was a mad scramble to buy up all existing stock...  (I am probably only person posting here old enough to have worn out a couple dozen pairs)

Before you launch a new website be sure that all of your major on-page optimization elements are in place.

These are things like <title><h1> <h2> alt= breadcrumbs and anything else that you have used to optimize your pages.</p> <p>It sounds like you have been careful and have done things to kick your optimization up a notch.</p> <p>If your design improves the visitor experience your rankings should go up as your rate of earning tweets, likes links, etc increases.</p> <p>Toss it up and Good Luck.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p></title>

They might search like that but if you don't have a website on that domain you will not get the traffic.  It is highly unlikely that significant numbers of people are typing in for word domain names for websites that do not exist.