Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Maybe you have an opportunity to walk away with all of the apples?

Instead of talking about this and guessing.... just toss up an ad with the promo code and see what happens to your clickthrough rate  and conversion rate.

Maybe the recipes and the quizzes will attract lilnks?  Lots of sales sites are powered by links to freebie content.

Offer the visitor something else to read.

Make highly related content and offer links to it with colorful thumbnail images and inviting text descriptions.  Place these links in obvious locations within the content and beside the content.

Go to top newspaper sites like NYT and LAT and note how they have links to "what's hot" "Recommended" "most viewed".

If blog.domainname.com/page.html gets a link it will pass some value to www.domainname.com if there are links on blog.domainname.com that connect to www.domainname.com.  However, most of the power will stay in blog.domainname.com.

If your goal in blogging is to strengthen www.domainname.com by the addition of fresh content and acquisition of natural links then your blog should be located at... www.domainname.com/blog

Maybe a better way to get an author is go out to see who are the very competent bloggers in your industry.  There you have someone who is excited enough about the subject because they have a message to share.  You get to see the quality of their work and perhaps their personality.

One reservation that I would have about hiring a copywriting service is my concern that they might not be experts in the topics that I would ask them to write about yet accept the job and produce content that might have flaws or that might have a tone that anyone with experience in the field would know that they are winging it.

Can you place it into the design of your site but limit the number of ads that you have on that page?

There your domain/site gets the branding exposure but the smaller number of ads places greater focus on your content.

When I have something that I think might get some linkbait attention I give it the same ad density that any other page on my site might receive - but I do understand what you are saying.

Ryan has a great idea. Think about who will link to your site. Will people want to link to a "cheap flights" website or would they prefer to link to a magazine?

Using Ezine as a source of content will load up your domain with duplicate content.  These pages will not pull traffic unless your domain is stronger than any other domain that has the same content.

If you submit content to Ezine that will put the content on a lot of other domains, most of them will remove your links and the rest probably have links that are almost worthless.

I think that Ezine is a good recommend to your competitor.

Great to hear that your rankings are up!

I bet that FB has little to do with it... I would be betting on some juicy links taking effect.

As you know, Google does not release their analytics data.

However, I have a site that started losing a lot of traffic when google started putting the shopping blurb in the #2 position.  Also another site that started losing a lot of traffic when they added the "Brands" and "Stores" lilnks above the #1 position.

Perhaps the best that you can tell client is that lots of webmasters see the same thing happening.

Keyword difficulty numbers don't mean much to me.... however, if I go out to the SERPs and see big brands, government institutions, and other heavyweight sites then I can get some idea of what I am up against.

Also, I take a look at the content that is ranking and if I can create content that is vastly superior then I get a great feeling that I can win.

Who is up there and what is up there make a lot more sense to me than a number.

If you are wearing your successful business person's hat or your successful SEO's hat then you will probably decide not to make any change - because there could be some loss of linkvalue on a redirected page.

However, if you are wearing a compulsive web designer's hat and having tidy URLs make you feels so much better that you are willing to risk sacrificing some ranking power and probably some income then change the URLs.

Just an opinion...

I don't use these products.  I believe that any link that can be obtained by anybody using any form of automatic submission is not going to be worth much.  I believe that those sites will be stuffed so full of manipulative links to manipulating sites that their value will be zero.  I honestly would worry that having a bunch of these links would put a bad odor on my site.

I would prepare very high quality content pages - best content on the web in their topic area - and use them to build links, earn rankings and pull huge traffic.  These types of pages will usually outperform sales pages.

However, you can have "ads" on these pages that direct visitors to where items can be purchased.  Placing those ads immediately adjacent to relevant content can be very effective.

Another question, how important do you think a blog is, compared to a twitter feed and Facebook page?

I have a blog and each blog post automatically posts to FB and TW.  People who want to follow our blog then have access.  So, if you do the blog and share the feed you get the other two free.  Also, if other folks, such as homeschool parents or groups like your content they might republish your feed to their tribe.

I'm wondering, what kinds of things will we tweet blog about?

My bet is that your real following will be parents and tutors and teachers who steer kids to the practice site.  So I would post tips for them on teaching, motivation and making learning fun.

Please let me know why so much effort is put into getting backlinks to internal pages.

Because they are out to kickass and make money by getting internal pages dominant in their niche.

All of My SEO has had a long term goal of strengthening the home page, with just enough backlinks to internal pages to have balance, which is happening naturally. The home page of our main site is what comes up on tons of our keyword searches since it is so strong.

How many people do you have working on this?  Imagine the result if you had twice as many?

I always write the way that I would talk or the way that I would write if the article would be in print instead of on the web.

The best way to turn a great article into a good article is trying to write it for search engines or try to hit a specific wordcount.

I would be careful.  Are these sites trading links with other websites that are heavily involved in manipulative linking?  Are these sites incestuously linked to one another?

The best way to get in trouble is to link to trashy websites that are manipulating.

But would the domain name http://widgetsblue.com also get a bonus in the serp for "blue widgets" ?

That's not exact match.

Also, i would like to know if it is a bad idea to point three or four keyword1keyword2.com type domain names at your main domain in an attempt to boost rankings for those keywords.

This will not produce the desired results.

But, for the ALT tag, YouTube simply uses the word "thumbnail".

lol... It is really hard to look down the microscope, every day, at every employee.

I pay zero attention to keyword density.  I write naturally - when you are trying to write well that is a big enough job.

Setting KW density goals is a good way to screw up a great article.

You might be in a close battle!  I would improve optimization if possible and try to get more links!

Does it apply to footer links?   I would say "Yes"... but your footer links don't look too bad... Some look like they go to valuable and interesting content that could be promoted higher on the page?

While the topic is hot in the news, that is the time to submit to reddit, slashdot, digg, etc...

Your idea of commenting on newspaper sites is a good one... pick the highest traffic ones.

===========

Do this with all of your content... watch the news carefully... swiftly draw the proper sword at the proper time.

Its your sword.

Attack like an alligator.   He lays on the bank of the river with just his eyes and nostrils sticking out of the water (think about the shape of their head.. eyes and nostrils stand up in positive relief      When the wild deer approaches alligator waits patiently until the deer kneels to drink and then.... swiftly... the gator lunges.

For your tools... or for any linkbait.... publish it on your site and sit patiently... wait until something related to your topic happens in the news... then promote with great aggression... just like the alligator.

Do this with all of your content... watch the news carefully... swiftly draw the proper sword at the proper time.

I think you are digging in po.

...the question is what is the best course of action to try to retain as much value as possible from the existing links.

To me, those links would not have any value.  I would not feel better about them if they were moved from the homepage to a deeper page on the same site.

I know that you are not asking what to do for new links... but if this site was mine I would forget about the current links and look to what can be done in the future.

It sounds like a lot of the existing links are not natural and probably paid. My bet is that they have been devalued. If this was my site we would stop "building links" and start "earning" them.

I have ampersands in lots of title tags... have not seen any problems.

Lots of people have ampersands as part of their brand

http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%26

I believe that this issue is so important that I would be willing to change designers or hosts or whatever is needed to get the blog in a folder. I am out to win, not fart around.

**The legacy homepage was very long, and had a lot of text (thousands+ of words) in the body, with about 450+ links (internal/external) on the page. A ton of graphics, etc etc. **

This sounds like the homepage of my site... I started out with a small homepage like you describe and then added a little more to it and visitor engagement went up.... added a little more and visitor engagement went up... added more and visitor engagement went up....

Now my homepage looks like the latimes.com.  The actions of my visitors are hard to argue with.

If you read lots of Q&A discussions here you will find that http://www.celynnenphotography.co.uk/blog is recommended the most.  My blog is in a folder.... SEOmoz blog is on seomoz.org/blog and YOUmoz blog is at seomoz.org/ugc

About a year ago I redirected two subdomains to files in the root and the results have been kickass.

I don't think much of social bookmarking.  Instead I think of social sharing.

If you have a fantastic new piece of content.  One that is best-on-the-web for its topic.  Submitting it to a social sharing site such as slashdot, digg, reddit or stumbleupon could bring a LOT of traffic.  If your article becomes popular on one or more of these sites you will get a LOT of visitors, lots of tweets, likes, bookmarks, etc.

The results can be impressive, with extremely popular content getting over 100,000 visitors in a single day - often crashing your site if you are not on robust hosting or dedicated server.  There is even a special name given to this type of traffic wave - the slashdot effect.

It is not easy to have this quality of content.  I spend up to a week or more on a single article and only have a few that get the slashdot effect per year.

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

Another thing that everyone should do is make social sharing easy.  One way to do that is by using AddThis.com buttons (or a similar service) on every page of your site.

Thanks!   Interesting that newegg is bidding on its own brand to make this offer.

Slashdot effect

We occasionally have content that engages the visitor on one of these community sites.  It can start on one -such as slashdot - them move across several social sites such ad digg, reddit, stumbleupon.  Great content can pull 100,000 visitors in a day from these sources alone - plus generate a lot of links, likes, tweets, etc.

I enjoyed your connection between pushy people and rubbish.  lol

That is very true.   Most of the people who have contacted me about sharing an article with my website visitors have articles that are either total rubbish filled with links... or are chest thumping attempts at marketing.

I think that pushy and rubbish can be extended to other things as well.

To create www.myurl.com/blog... you will simply upload the wordpress file packet to the /blog folder of your website.  There are lots of informative articles and videos out there that describe this in detail.

Also, there are lots of highly skilled people who will install the software and customize the "look" for you for a small fee.  If you are unfamiliar with this type of work and your blog is an important project, that is what I recommend.

Just tossing out a couple of cautions...

It sounds like you are setting this blog up because you think that it is an easy way to get links to your website.  If that is one of your primary motivations then it would be better to place this blog on your main website.  Why?  Because then ALL links that hit the blog will FULLY benefit your main site instead of your main site getting a tiny leak of linkjuice through a few links on the blog.  This will also increase the domain diversity of your main site rather than just having a lot of links from the single domain of the blog.

Be careful with content exchanges.  The content is usually low-quality, potentially infringing garbage that the author wants to load up with links to sites that are engaged in strong manipulation.  Giving access to contributors can be really dangerous.  Do that only with people who you know well and trust.

Blogging is a great way to strengthen a site with great content and attract subscribers who want to read your next post (I use feedburner).  It can also attract links and earn a reputation for your site.  A very valuable activity.

Good luck.

We have a busy blog with lots of very temporary content.  About once a year we delete a couple thousand posts.  However, before we do that we look at analytics to see which pages are pulling traffic from search.

For pages that receive regular traffic, we first try to recycle the post.  If that is not possible we create a page with evergreen content so that a 301 redirect can be done.  All other pages are 301 redirected to the homepage of the blog.

Keep in mind that above the fold you have your site logo, persistent navigation, search box and other assets.

I think that your ratio should be considered after the above is subtracted out.

After that it depends upon presentation.  If the visitor is slapped in the face with two big ad blocks and has to scroll down to read content then that is too much.  However if ads are on the edges of the site and content is front an center than that is a lot better.

Ad format can be considered too.  If your site is heavy with images then big image ads can compete with the content.

My goal is to be sure that content is the most obvious thing within the design of the site and ads are subordinate.

Would people want to link to ads or link to content.  Make sure that your presentation makes them linking to content.

I have a high pagerank blog and link to informative sites every day.  I stopped linking to a couple very high profile sites that are household names when they started opening popups on my  visitor and having ads more obvious than content on their pages.

I really don't think that the answer is in these numbers...  I would simply...

-- improve content

-- sharpen the optimization

-- get more backlinks

-- make social sharing easy

My quick research here had a 100% ewww factor.

Did you ever consider the impact of your domain name on some potential buyers?   Some might think it is cute but some might see it as something else.

There are many other reasons why people might have a short visit.  Lots of people price shop. As you state, lots are looking for information.  And, lots are looking for something that you don't offer - such as "ink" for refilling - that is what they searched for, right?  "HP 3050 ink"

I really like Eric Ward and have used his services more than once and recommend him.

However, I would still place all of my topic-related content on a single site.  Any links that are attracted to that content will then hit your primary domain and all of their value will strengthen it.

If you place the content on a satellite domain then the links that hit it will mainly help the satellite domain and only a tiny fraction of their value will help power the primary domain.

In my opinion it only makes sense to build a satellite site after your primary domain completely dominates your SERPs and then you use links from the primary domain to power the satellite site.

I think that you will have much much better results by posting all of your content on the same domain.

Lots of businesses build three sites because they think it is a good way to kickass on their competitors.  It can be really hard or even impossible get get them to give up on that idea.

I am going to guess that you have a second issue... they have links on all of these sites point to each other because they think it will help their pagerank and SERP position.  Really hard to talk people out of this practice too.

If I owned these five sites I would shut down four of them and redirect all of them page-by-page to my best ranking site... and it would become my preferred domain.  There is something else that you might try to talk this client out of.

Good luck!

In low competition, on-page optimization is very important.   However, when the competition gets really tough you enter a "battle of backlinks".

I don't know where that 2% number comes from or what it really means... he might be tossing out a low number just to make a point.

Keyword domains are not invincible.   I bet them all of the time.... and I own a couple that are not #1 for their exact match query - these are highly optimized sites with a lot of high quality links.