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I am saying this as a business owner and as a former employee who has foot prints on his back....

The business owner should be well aware of the number of clients, the amounts that they are charging, and the number of people who are on staff to do this work.  It seems to me that a choice is being made to collect payments rather than to provide service.

Some people might not like what I am going to say, but if I was the employee here, I would find another job rather than work in an effort to improve this company.  Their actions are likely deliberate.

You have a very generous attitude and ethic that deserves a better work situation.  I hope that you discover an employer who deserves you!

I wish you all the best.

This is a really good answer.

Don't allow your clients to learn how many hours per month they are getting.

We have a minimum design width of 300.  Add 10 pixels to each side of that for margins, and we are at 320.

I'd like to know what people are using for a max desktop width.

Wikipedia will span the full width of any desktop monitor and be responsive down to at least 300.

The Washington post is about 1200 wide and is totally responsive down to about 300 - by abandoning columns.

The New York Times is about 1000 wide, but does not respond until the browser width gets down to about 500 - allowing content to be lost off the right side of the screen.

If the question is about the "visibility" of a page for a specific keyword then visibility does not need to be weighted by volume.  But, if you are asking about the visibility of a page or a website for a basket of keywords, expressed as a single number, then keyword query volume becomes important.

We add appropriate internal links in all of our articles.  Although we don't syndicate or grant permission for our articles to be republished, many webmasters copy/pasting quotes into their content have produced thousands of backlinks.

Google will treat /destination-page and https://website.com/destination-page the same.

Some webmasters always use https://website.com/destination-page. That way, if someone copy/pastes from their site into a forum or into a quote on a blog, the full urls will produce backlinks.

I think that you have a good approach.

If you are a homebuilder then you could get photos of homes in the actual neighborhoods and post them on the website with street address and nearby landmarks.  Doing this will build a portfolio of homes that people can view online or drive-by.

It can be kickass if you are writing for a real estate site or a tourism site or a site about the local community.

If you are writing a page for a welding service in Chicago it will probably not be as valuable.

If your service is all about the city of Chicago, these words on the page make your page relevant for the city.  They support the fact that you wrote unique information for the page and probably know a bit about the area.  They can also combine with other words on the page to bring in long tail traffic.

The most important thing to know before you do this, is that these words need to be incorporated into information that is valuable for your visitor and they engage the content.  It might keep visitors on your page longer, cause they to share the page.  This is why you don't want to hire an oaf to produce these pages.  They gotta be good.

This stuff will not produce miracles.  You gotta have a good site that is valuable to visitors.

Webmasters get lots of requests for links.   Webmasters who own good websites get so many link requests that they are tired of them.  They quickly start deleting these requests and cussing about them.  Why?  Because most of these requests want you to link to a trashy little site that has no interesting content.

"Please link to my website!"   DELETE

If the site does not have good, unique, interesting content then nobody is going to link to them unless that person is paying you.

"Hello Mr. SEO Blogger, We just published an article that explains how our team earned #1 rankings for the keyword "widgets" by publishing a group of comprehensive articles about widget history, manufacturing, appraisal, uses in commerce, collecting and more.  Perhaps you would be interested in sharing this on your "SEO Success Blog".   Let is know if we can help."

So, if you want to build links and have a good chance of being successful, then your site needs to have something great on it that other webmasters will want to share with their visitors.  Sharable content is the first step of building links (without buying them).  If your site doesn't have kickass sharable content then you need a magician and not a linkbuilder.

Today errors of grammar and spelling raise suspicions that have averted terrorist attacks and financial crimes.  Two thousand years ago, the inability to properly pronounce the response to a night sentry's greeting was used to foil enemy attacks.

I've deleted many email solicitations because they have bad grammar or spelling.  I've left websites for the same reason.  Have you ever done that?

I believe that you will have two worries.... 1) what Google thinks, and if they will demote for this; and, 2) what visitors think, and if that causes them to engage the site less.

The more visitors that the site has who care about grammar the larger the impact from engagement and perhaps Google cares more about good grammar for some subjects than others.

there always a lot of different opinions

Yes, indeed.   There will always be lots of opinions.

If you hire a person to review what you do then you will get ONE opinion.  In my opinion, a lot of the opinions posted online either in articles or in forums are flawed (including a lot of what I post).  Nobody knows everything and a lot of people sell SEO services who should not be selling SEO services.  Be careful.

My method is to depend mainly on myself, then when I am going to do something really important, I get a paid opinion.  I don't use forums as  a substitute for opinions on things that are more than a simple one-topic question/answer.  People who are posting in forums generally are not going to spend hours doing a deep review your site and making complex decisions.   You will not get good advice on a topic that requires a deep and detailed knowledge of your website and your business.  People posting in a forum generally don't have that kind of extra time and we should not expect that type of service in a forum.    I also believe that this type of information should remain private and not be discussed in the open in a forum.

How to find someone?   My suggestion is to look at a Q&A forum like Moz daily and read lots of the questions.  After doing that for a several months you will learn a lot.  You will also see the range of people who give answers.  Some might not seem like a person you would want giving you advice, others might be much more appealing because of their ability to explain clearly, their generosity and how you perceive their knowledge of what they are talking about.

Every person who has given me advice or done SEO or technical work for my website me is a person who I have met in an SEO forum.  I go to different people for different types of advice and I often get two opinions on important projects.  I am not telling you this because I am looking for work.  I never give private consultations or do SEO work for anyone.  I also never recommend people to work on the websites of others.  These are things that you should decide for yourself.

Get educated about SEO.  Learn who gives good advice.

I bet the ranch on this a long time ago and told folks about it here.

If your site isn't generating positive visitor behaviors it does not deserve to rank.  Google can collect data on them from browsers, Adsense, SERPs, devices... a very long list of data collecting methods.

In my opinion it is bad to allow infringing content to appear on other websites.   These are duplicate content.  It is possible that they will outrank you in the SERPs or result in your page being filtered from the search results.   Also, if you work hard to produce this content then you want people coming to your site to see it - not to the websites of others.  If it appears on websites all over the web then why should people visit your website?   Finally, if these folks use the content and give you an attribution link, that communicates to everyone who sees it that your content is available for reuse.

Google says that they are good at recognizing the original source of content, however, I know from experience that they are far from perfect.  Some SEOs believe Google, and advise clients to distribute their content as a way of earning links.  I would not listen to them.

We tell infringers to take our content down and when they don't comply we either submit DMCA to Google, their revenue source and their hosting - or we have an attorney send them notice.    We are sending out three notices today.

I assume the budget is £12k in total?

They might need £12k just to get a proper understanding of the website and an audit of the content, on-page, technicals, and competitive space.

X backlinks and X pieces of content doesn't say much.  In competition, quality is everything.    £12k might buy four very high quality articles that are extremely valuable, 60 decent product description pages that improve your web presence (but will not rank for much unless you have links or a strong site to place them on), or 1000 pieces of pedestrian content that get you a Panda problem.

To me, it makes complete SEO sense to combine multiple practice areas into a single site.  The larger site will probably become stronger over time than a small single-practice site.   And, clients who receive good service with their traffic tickets might recommend him to their friends who have DUI problems.

The only problem that you might have is client acceptance... if he is trying to help DUI clients get their charges dropped then personal injury clients might be highly offended.

David Butler.   I've been reading a lot of your answers  recently.  I think you are a wise man who gives some of the best answers in  Q&A.  Nice work!

A lot of webmasters have tried to produce stars but have never received them or have seldom received them - even on pages where a reasonable person would think that stars should appear.

Why?  I believe that a person who tries to force stars by plastering schema markup all over the website - and specifically on pages that do not meet the criteria for receiving stars - will be denied stars across the website.   Simply stated.... I think that there is such a thing as spamming schema and Google doesn't like it.

Disclaimer... I don't know how anyone would prove the above unless they could get Google to say that it is true.

I spend much of my time improving articles on a long-established site.  Most of these articles are already long - 1000 to 3000 words - with multiple images.

The improvements are usually adding a new section to beef up the length and give the article relevance to a new suite of keywords or make it relevant to topics in the recent news.   Do these help the rankings?   If the site is already near the top of the first page for the root query, it usually doesn't.  If it is deep in the SERPs at position 50 to 90 it usually does.

Regardless of how the ranking for the root keyword changes, these improvements often increase the traffic - because they expose the site to new keywords.

but then within the updated, shortened copy, integrating more target keywords naturally.

If you do a good job of this, I think you will get more traffic, and it might be a better result that moving the rankings up.

If you are going to split part of the site off,  the auto makes the most sense since it is local.  Usually local is much easier to rank for than national, but that depends upon the competition in your geographic and product areas.

To become visible in the SERPs, and to make money from those rankings, requires a lot of work.   If you split your time between multiple sites a lot more time will be required to bring any of your sites into money-making rankings.

So, until you have a site that is dominant in its SERPs, the best use of your time is probably to spend all of your energy and resources into a single site.

Once you have a site that is dominant in your niche, you can then afford a second site - and use the original site to give it a few links and get it ranking.

You can pick any activity... blogging, guest posting, infographics, video, whatever... and you will find evangelists and naysayers.

In the end, it does not matter "what you do"... instead the impact is determined by how you do it and how well you do it.

I don't know anything about your business model or your clients, so I can't give good feedback on what you are doing.  Only the end user who you are successful at putting your page in front of will be able to judge if you have a good product or are wasting your time.

I think that the list of "Top Moz Community Members" shows only those who have been active in the past 30 days or so.

Your will probably be back on the list tomorrow because you made this post today.

We see a lot of people creating a second website, trying to rank for the same keywords as their main site - when their website isn't ranking well enough to do anything.  That is crazy.

You are in the perfect position to make a second website and use the popularity and power of your first site to drive it.

Promote the second site on your main site, refer traffic there, link to it, advertise it, ask your tribe to help you.

Change hosts as soon as possible!

If you don't you will shoot yourself when you finally find out how much traffic you are losing by not having each page optimzied with the proper title tag.

This is not gospel.   It is an old fart kibitzing....

Nofollow is supposed to mean... "we don't vouch for this"... or... "these people paid us"... or... "don't count this"... or.... "we don't trust this"....    So, on that basis, I would not add nofollow these links if I wanted them to be helpful.

I used to write title tags that contained the proper keywords.  I used to be a keyword stuffer.

More recently, I have started trying to write title tags with my main keyword on the left but the remainder of the title tag has been written to present a value proposition, share something interesting or simply elicit the click.   These types of title tags will not blast your page to the top of the SERPs, but I believe that if you do a good job, your page will slowly and steadily climb the SERPs to a position where it is competitive.

I also try to make the description as interesting and clickable as possible.  I think that google places more importance on how visitors react with your listing in the SERPs and if you can deliver what will hold them if they click into your website.

Looks like you have been in business since 1975.  You probably know enough about these products to "write the Bible" on them.   You are the experts.  Start writing about what people ask about them and what they don't ask that they should be asking.

My answer would depend upon two things... 1) the strength of your website, and 2) the number and strength of your competitors.

If you have a really strong site and weak competition then I would have a small number of pages with a lot of products on each page.  It will probably rank well against the competition for even the very specific queries.

However, if you have a weak site and you need highly optimized pages to get the traffic, then I might keep things "as is".

We started out with the first option and that worked great for years.  Now the competition is getting fierce and we might go with a larger number of pages to keep holding them off.

Hi Belen,

I am sure that lots of people saw your very detailed and well-considered question.

I don't know why others didn't reply.   I can say why I didn't reply.

Is google plus really useful?

To me, the answer to this is "no".  I have no use for Google Plus.  I find no value there.

How many times do you encounter a Google Plus page when you are searching for information?    For me the answer to that is almost never - and my use of the word "almost" is generous.

How many people do you communicate with through Google Plus?  My answer to that is zero.

I believe, and I might be wrong, that Google started Google Plus to offer an alternative to FaceBook  -  and very few people have adopted it and stayed with it.  I know very few people who put any effort into Google Plus.

I started using Google Plus when Google suggested that authors of web content should make a Google Page and authenticate their content by linking it to their Google Plus page.  Google did a few things to benefit the people who did this but then any visible effort by Google to continue this effort disappeared.  So, I stopped using Google Plus and it is currently completely off of my radar.

That's the input that I can offer.  I know that I am not representative of web users in general or web marketing people in specific.

I hope that someone can add information here that convinces me that I can move some of my efforts to Google Plus and find a greater return that what I receive by putting that effort into my websites.

I think that Google knows what (keywords) your articles are about - so there is less need to stuff them into a title tag.

However, matching the keyword to what the searcher has in mind and will see bolded in the SERPs is still important.

"providing variety within the SERP when compared to other results"

Exactly.  You need to stand out.  Show that your content or product has special value, inspire the searcher to click on your page.  I believe that title tags can move rankings if you can get the visitor to click and hold them after they land.

I still think that there is no problem with having title tags that match your H1 tags.

Ten years ago, I wrote title tags that focused on keywords.  Now I am writing title tags that focus more on presenting something interesting from the article that might elicit clicks.   A lot of the old title tags remain on the site but I revisit them every time I update or rewrite a page.

I've changed my mind on the answer that I gave above.....

BBB called me yesterday and I decided to give them a chance to convince me of their value rather than hand up on them.

When I asked them what value they will they produce for my business the number one answer was the "SEO benefit" of getting a link from their website.  This was over half of the guy's answer and he yapped and yapped about it.  So, it seems that the BBB is in the business of selling links, but when I went to BBB website for my region, all of the links to businesses were "nofollow".

BBB called me yesterday and I decided to give them a chance to convince me of their value rather than hand up on them.

When I asked them what value they will they produce for my business the number one answer was the "SEO benefit" of getting a link from their website.  This was over half of the guy's answer.  So, it seems that the BBB is in the business of selling links, but when I went to BBB website for my region, all of the links to businesses were "nofollow".

This isn't an anomaly.  It occurs when one domain has two pages that Google feels are both relevant enough and strong enough to earn a position on the first page of the SERPs.   It used to happen a lot more often but you still see it a lot today - especially in niches that are not extremely competitive or where one site is far more powerful than others for the niche.

When one domain has two pages that are strong enough to earn a position on the first page of the SERPs, the second page will position right below the first and this can result in 1,2 or 2,3 or other consecutive position on the first page.   One site occupying three or four positions can be found but are much less common.

Some sites that are strong in their niche can intentionally produce these double listings by publishing two very strong pages that are both optimized for the same keyword.  In your situation it is a competitor's interior page and homepage taking the first two positions.

The client knows that you don't go snowmobiling in your swimsuit and you don't ride a dirt bike in your underwear and no helmet or gloves.  The client will advise people to buy the right gear and know that all of this gear has a cost.

I face limitations with the CMS (no blog abilities and technical issues that are out of my control)

I'd tell him that I need the proper equipment.  He is asking you to run the cross country dirt bike race butt naked and no helmet.

Tell him that.

I generally agree with George and Nicholas.

I also think that the strength of your site vs the strength of the competition is important - along with the difficulty of the keywords.

If you are going after long tail keywords against weaker competition, then six shorter content pages targeting six different keywords would be best.  However, if the competition is strong and the keywords difficult then one big kickass page will have the best chance.

Finally, presenting one comprehensive article with all of your text and photos on one page is better for link-earning than breaking it up into six short pages.

This is a complex question asked simply.  We could also consider the ad impression opportunity of getting the visitor to click through six pages.

Writing very generous product descriptions can answer questions for the buyer.  They can facilitate the buying decision or prevent purchase of items that are poor fits for the shopper - and thereby reduce returns.

I would tell them that I only want the high quality links.  That I am not paying for the low quality.   Stop making low quality and reduce my fee.

Google can also crawl these subdomains and index them.

Maybe there are some more issues we could face where I didn't think of?

The issues that you are thinking about here are only issues that might impact example.com.

You need to think about issues that impact your clients.  Your clients' domains should have the only copy of their content being indexed by Google.  Allowing their content to be indexed could cause problems for the client.  The duplicate copy could cause pages on their domain to go into the supplemental index.  The duplicate copy could also cause some of their traffic to go to your site.

I would not use a hosting service that allows it.

So my questions basically are:

1. How much will this influence rankings for www.example.com

Just stop this practice of publishing client backups.  Find another backup method.  The impact that you should be worrying about is clients who are aware of this problem finding out about it and complaining loudly.

The content, both text and images, must be absolutely unique and not exist anywhere else in printed or digital form.  Content that has bee rewritten, paraphrased or complied from existing sources will not be accepted.  All rights to the content will be assigned to us and it may not be resold or used to produce derivative works.

I think that you could give this new blog a technology spin, mixing food with educational tech...

-- what code monkey's eat

-- phish and chips

-- water hole attacks

-- restaurant networks

If you have the ability to do this you can make a small profit by "selling the service", but a very much larger profit by "running the website".

The problem is when the writer thinks that he knows about hydraulic jacks, but he doesn't know that he doesn't know enough to impress the people who might link to his work.

I think you need a content area expert and a qualified editor who knows just a little about SEO.