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Nobody knows for sure but Google.... however, since that tool was built to serve people spending tons of money on Google advertising it would be in Google's best interest to show complete and reliable data.

Personal opinion... even if they left the logged in data out it probably would not make much difference in the ratios that you see between the keywords.  I think that Google's holding some information back is great fodder for bitchin' 'n complainin' - and that's about it.

The pay is $30 - $40p/h depending on experience.

This rate is way way low.

It might attract someone with very little experience - but if you are trying to build a digital agency and build expertise for you and your staff then you should be hiring an expert.

Consider multiplying your rate several times and hiring someone who will get you started properly.  Take out a loan or work a second job if you must.  You need someone who really knows what he/she is doing.

I like these... they present the keyword and then a value proposition.

The most dangerous competitors are the ones who have yet to arrive.

Prob not a good idea to post client URLs.

If I owned the brand I would acquire the domain.  If it is a good brand the $10,000 would not be a deterrent.

If the content is any good, post adsense on the site and see how much it earns.

I have been using SEOmoz PRO tool from last two months but I am not happy with the SEOmoz PRO Ranking Report.The results are very inaccurate and I am not able to understand why there is such a difference in the ranking  results when SEOmoz tracks and when I track?

(This response is copy/pasted from another thread where the same question was asked.)

I can sit at my desk and open different browsers and see different google results...

I can sit at the same desk and remote to a PC on the other side of town and see still more different results searching for the exact same keywords in the exact same browsers...

I can open my iphone and see yet more different results... same if I get out my ipad....

I have not left my chair!

My question to you is... which are the "right results"?

These reports are valuable for  tracking your progress over time.  That is why SEOMoz gives you a history.

Don't worry if you see different things when you search.  There are personalized results, localized results, experimental results (did you know google serves tons of different experimental results every day?  - read "In the Plex" if you want to know more) and much more.

Just saying what I would do here... not giving advice...

I would do the 301.  In my experience the homepage usually 301s quickly and correctly.  Its the interior pages that might lag.  (You said that the homepage is really the only important page for this site.)

If  you don't want to take a chance then take the new site down to avoid dupe content and put it back up after your important ranking season is over - then do the 301.

The more powerful your site the faster things happen, so it is not possible to give you an exact amount of time.

In the past 18 months I have 301ed two sites and two subdomains.   These were all PR5 and within 48 hours some of the new URLs of the most important pages began replacing the old URLs in their exact position in the SERPs.  Some of the less important pages and PDF documents required several days to switch.

A couple folders of pages had some difficulty and were in and out of the SERPs for a couple weeks.  These were retail pages and we lost some sales.

Within 30 days everything was back to normal.  The websites that were 301ed performed as usual but the subdomains that were redirected to a folder in the root had large ranking gains.

I use videos on retail and information sites and think about it this way....

If my competitor and I had identical pages and he had videos and I did not, who would google think is a better webpage and rank higher?  Who would visitors think has a better webpage and tweet, like, bookmark or link it?

The answers are very clear to me.

I do believe that google ranks pages with embedded videos higher than identical pages without them.  A better approach is to have your own YouTube channel where you can control the branding and have links there that will lead visitors to your website.

Do I have anything to gain by allowing these comments to stay on the page?

Probably not.... and if those links are going to bad neighborhoods you can expect your blog to tank.

You are going to use different html mark-up for the image and the h1.

They are not equivalent.

If you use the image you can add alt text but that is not going to be the same as H1 - less effective in my opinion.

If you can't get H1 into your site any other way then loss of the H1 will be part of the cost of your redesign.

If this was my site I would not give up H1 for an artsy image.

I agree with Simon.

The upside from this is that when the internal page starts ranking again you might have a double listing in this SERP.

There must be 100 links commented out in your code... Here is an example...

<a href="[http://www.oxfordmshomes.net/condos/a-southern-place-Oxford-MS](view-source:http://www.oxfordmshomes.net/condos/a-southern-place-Oxford-MS)" class="main">
<span>A SOUTHERN PLACEspan>a>li>

The short answer...  I don't know for sure.

Clarified answer...  At the present time I do not believe that there is a huge difference in how Google and other search engines treats H1, H2 and H3.  However, just to have things straight... I would make that

Acadia Court an H1.  You can change the appearance using css.

You didn't ask but when I looked at the code of your page I was shocked to see so many link tags commented out.  I would be getting rid of those if this was my site.

I would not use 1x1 pixels to give links or anchor text.  That could get you in trouble with search engines for trying to hide something.

I honestly doubt that this is helping your competitor and is certainly more risky than helpful.

Just stay the course on improving your site.  You will beat them when Google thinks you deserve it... or when Google drops them for trying to hide links.

In my opinion, any answers given without knowledge of sales and profit data are dangerous.

Also, relative strength of the sites and their competitive markets should be considered.

If either of these are important sites that support a business someone who really knows what tehy are doing should be studying the options - which are greater in number than 3 or 4.

No opinion here.

In late 2010 we redirected to popular subdomains to folders in the root.  The results have been kickass.  Kickass.

Let's say you have a landscaping company who does work in several small towns.  You could make a separate webpage for each town and fill it with amazing photos of the work that they have done (with permission from the featured property owners) in each of the geographic localities.

This would serve not only as a page that might rank in the search engines but it would also be a great way of building credibility in that community.  If website visitors see that the company has done landscaping for the library, medical plaza, and some of the best homes then they will have greater confidence in hiring them.  So you get two benefits from these pages.

Important - be sure that you put the addresses on the site for all of these properties. 

These pages will have substantive content  and tons of BIG juicy photos with extensive captions that describe the plants the mulch - everything about the job.  These types of pages  might rank better than Joe Schmoe landscaper who has a skimpy webpage with yada, yada, yada Belmont landscaping.... yada yada yada landscaping in Belmont.

Make this site a gallery of work that shows that your company is active and doing all types of work for everyone who is anybody everywhere in the whole freekin' county.

Google attempts to give top rankings the best and the most relevant.  The "official website" means nothing.

Every article will appeal to a different population.  So a single article will appeal to some people and not to others.

When I landed on this article and saw the graph I though that it was a study based upon data... but there were only four cities listed and the article didn't get right into how the data was collected.

Then I saw the marketing message and that was a turn off... then saw the attempt at humor.

If you are creating a scientific study or an attempt at humor you need to make that very clear with your opening graphic and a slap-their-face-with-it first paragraph.  This story might fly better if you had an angry bird or cartoon of people throwing f-bombs at the top.  Get a good cartoonist to set that tone if that is what you are shooting for.  But, I honestly don't think that the current article or subject is not very funny at least not funny enough for me to tweet it, email it, or even read it very far.

If you are trying to create linkbait you need best-on-the-web content.  Nothing less.  When you have humor that makes people's side hurt or puts tears in their eyes then you have something.

Just opinions...

The first three sentences are not linkbait... they are a combination of chest thumping (we are gift-giving authorities) and  marketing (buy our F-bomb).... then some BS (we decided to visit every city in the country),

If I could not have the blog that is going to receive massive work in a subfolder I would be looking for a different platform for the site or a different method of creating the blog.

Placing that blog on a subdomain or on a satelite site is like tossing away great content imo.

Wikipedia can be really really really hard to beat.... did I say really really really really hard to beat?

Just keep working on your site like wikipedia was any other competitor. Build great content that gets liked and tweeted.. .stuff that engages your visitors.

There is no special bullet for killing wikipedia.  You simply must overpower them by brute force of a great website.

Good luck.

I can't say anything about robots.txt

.... but one of my competitors tossed up a new design with nofollow, noindex tags on every page and their site immediately tanked out of Google.

... it took them a couple weeks to figure it out but once they yanked that line of code they were back at topSERPs within 48 hours.

... this was a relatively strong site and I would expect that type of site recovers faster than a PR2 site with little connectivity.

We sell a group of products that people search for in a variety of ways.  They might use a formal term as the keyword, a slang term, an archaic term or an ignorant term.  We have separate pages optimized for each of these as the populations of people who use these various terms range from hillbillies, to average people, to geezers like me and on to industry professionals.

Will this move hurt their rankings?

I am not going to guess.

If the larger website is authoritative and powerful this merger could be kickass - like uniting the clans.

However, if the larger website is weak, or spammy, or linking to bad neighborhoods, or inefficient...  the power of the small site could be lost in the (abyss, mess, crap... select appropriate word).

If the larger site is nothing special my guess is that their rankings will drop as linkjuice and authority of the small site seeps into the larger mass of pages.

To be honest... for a given amount of power I prefer to fight with a small compact site rather than a large expansive one.

Bottom line... if the small site belonged to me and was making lots of money I would continue to enjoy it and not take the risk of change - and I would simply link from the large site to the small site to let visitors know that you have another property.  Maybe the larger company has other allies who would be willing to do that too, thus making the small site even more powerful.    

I agree with Yannick that search engines currently seem to be viewing subdomains as separate websites.... and... for that reason... I would place this content in a folder in the root domain rather than on a subdomain.

In early 2010 I redirected two large subdomains to folders in the root and the results have been kickass.

What do your visitors think of these gadgets?  Do they use them or are they warts that distract from your website?

From a content perspective you should use gadgets only when they are a positive contribution to your site that is just as interesting or more interesting as the rest of the content on your page.

From a technical perspective I've seen some sites have so many warts that their pages take forever to load.

From a social perspective the gadgets should help people communicate about your content rather than be simply a doorway out of your site to a weather site, a social site or some other destination.

So... think about these gadgets.  Do you your visitors need them?  If not then don't use them.

Just opinion here...

Big brands are often arrogant and presumptuous that you will look for their website before clicking - and they are often correct with that thinking.

The little guy often must stand on a chair, waive his hands, jump up and down while shouting to get the consumer's attention away from the big brand.

... and most importantly... these aggressive little guys are often very smart.

(this post is written assuming that the little guy is advertising his own brand name and NOT the brand name of the big competitor)

Different search engines use different ranking factors to determine the position of webpages in their SERPs.  That is a fact.

I think that google has done a better job of ranking this website for the "private jet charter" query while bing and yahoo seem to be influenced by the keyword domain.

btw..... Are you trying to hide text off the bottom of the page?

Is the email content bragging about your inventory or your blog?

If inventory then link to it.... if blog then link to it.... if both then link to both.

Just so you know... google does not care about links in email messages and I doubt that they will be counting the traffic from that source. 

I would try again in a couple of weeks.  I bet you get different numbers.

When optimizing the navigation of your site it is best to consider the strength of the site at the same time.

If you have a powerful site it is possible that you could put MORE links in the navigation in an effort to expand the reach of your site.  Anyone who is dominating their keywords should be able to expand navigation and not contract it - no matter how big it currently is.  (If I owned walmart.com I would be comfortable adding more links to the flyout nav - they are getting more powerful in the SERPs.  Amazon has been there for ages - they are very hard to defeat in the SERPs - but authority is responsible for much of that and not their linkage IMO)

If you have a weak site that is being defeated everywhere then the best action for you is to get working on the strength of your site.  At this point you should have a navigation that makes sense to the visitor.

I cannot figure out how large sites cope with this.  As far as I can tell they are using side nav that disappears after selecting a category of item in which the navigation is replaced with filtering tools

I think that they simply have different left navs for different categories and subcategories of the site.

On my sites we solve this with server-side includes... with wordpress you can do it with php... and you can also do it with custom programming that rewrites includes or the nav section of entire websites.

Is there a way to find out exactly what they are doing because I am trying to explain this to our IT person and I just get a response that our site is fine how it is and these navigation links don't affect anything...even though each page starts off with the same 100 follow links of navigation.

lol..... I think that you need to teach your IT person about SEO and your IT person needs to teach you about how websites work.  Or... maybe better, I would recommend hiring an SEO to solve both of your knowledge gaps.  You both need to know a lot more to run a competitive website.

If you have an IT person who will not accommodate your efforts to improve the SEO of your site then one of you needs to be looking for a new job.

If you have one website, you will only get one location in google places. If you have more then one website you will split your ranking efforts.

I agree with Alan.

I would be helping my partners rather than treating them as competitors.  Have you considered helping them with great content for your products? Or linking to them so people in their locality can find them more easily?

In SERPs where I hold #1 and #2 organic rankings and bid high enough on Adwords to be dominant - about 25% of my traffic for relevant keywords comes from Adwords.

Should I Just Copy A Competitor's Backlinks?

With most competitors this is not possible because:  1) they control the sources of those links, or, 2) those links were awarded on the basis of merit and you probably don't merit.

You rarely win by mimicking a competitor.  You win by doing something superior.

I can understand why shorteners are handy for twitter where the number of characters available is very limited.

Beyond that I don't use these shorteners.  Why redirect anything unnecessarily.  It risks a drop in anchor text value and linkvalue.  Also, some people hesitate to click shortened URLs because they could be hiding a nasty destination.

I am not using them.. no way.

OK... it sounds like you are learning a lot.  There is value in that.

Good luck!

This reply is worth a LOT of money.

Would the best tactic be:

Develop and optimize two pages.  One for each of these similar keywords.  (Clearly not the best UX).

or Try to optimize a single page for both.

I would develop and optimize one website.

If this website is important for running a business, I think that you should stop listening to this website provider and get help from a professional SEO.

Your post reveals several problems and it is very likely that there are more lurking.  Probably more than anyone is going to be able to evaluate in the quick look that they can afford to give in a Q&A reply.

I am not trying to bash anyone.. just saying what I would do if this was my website and I was in your position.

Would anyone know where i could fund affordable, reliable blog post writers who would be able to produce quality posts at affordable rates?

Unless your website is about some yada yada yada subject I would only accept this type of advice from a person who is knowledgeable about your content area.

So, to find qualified authors go out there and find out who is already writing about this subject with enthusiasm, authority and verve and see if you can convice them to write for you.

.... and about your "affordable price"... you will have to pay them what they want or take your chances with getting content that will make you look like a fool.

We have also seen a bump in traffic for sites when using Google Site Search because Google indexes the site more often

This hits really high on my BS meter.