Welcome to the Q&A Forum

What questions do your customers have? Answer them. What do they find interesting? Create content around that.

This is just off the top of my head, but since you do heating oil, diesel, etc, you could create posts about the future of petroleum products, projections for supply or cost, the history of heating oil, the origin of diesel, etc. Just because nothing is happening doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of interesting things about your company or industry that you can create content around.

I mostly work in analytics, so as you'll see, my focus is much more on the research side as opposed to the implementation side.

Your client is New Airline X. They want both link and social shares.

1. Pick a few competitors – Delta, AA, etc.
2. Get an export of their Twitter followers.
3. Get an export of their inbound links.
4. Look at who follows your client, has a website and doesn't link to them. That's one target list.
5. Look at who follows multiple of the competitors, but not your client. That's another target list.
6. Look at who links to multiple of the competitors, but not your client. That's another list.
7. Crawl the competitor websites and find where people are linking to broken/nonexistent pages on their sites. Cross-reference with the Twitter export, and you've got a list for broken link building with built in social media information.

If you have access to a large list vendor, you can cross-reference your Twitter list with theirs to see if you can automagically get email addresses for these people so that you don't have to hunt for them, but honestly, I generally prefer not to do that because I don't like the idea of working with list vendors, and too much of their data is just not good.

You can do something similar to the process above with Author Crawler & G+, but I find that it's not as easy to work with, so I rarely go through that additional process.

I was at an agency that had an account, and I was really the only person that ever used it, so the account was under my name. I left the agency and contacted the SEOmoz helpdesk to see if they could migrate my blog posts, comments, etc to a new account and just keep the paid account with the agency. They said that they unfortunately don't have that ability. As such, I now keep my own account open regardless of whether I'm working with/for a company with its own account.

When I get a response like that, I typically send a canned reply that can be summed up as, "Because we want to stay clear of Google's guidelines about not paying for links and because we made a choice not to do sponsored posts, we are not paying for guest posts at this time. Sorry. [Link to Google guidelines on paying for links.] Unfortunately, sponsored posts don't pass the link equity we're hoping to build, and paying for posts without having them marked as sponsored could incur both our site and yours penalties in the search results. I'd still love to do a post, but if it needs to be sponsored, no worries. I still appreciate your time."

Most don't even respond. Some say, "Oh, I had no idea. Thanks for letting me know. I'd love a guest post."

As far as the question about paying someone and punishment goes, I think about it like this. When I'm in a new city and need something to eat, I can ask someone on the street where to get a good pizza. If they're a regular person, they'll say XYZ pizza because they love it, know that it's popular, or for some other related genuine reason. The importance there is that their response is unmanipulated so I'm more likely to get a fair response. If that person though happens to work for ABC Pizza, there's a good chance that I'll be told ABC Pizza is the place to go. Now, did I really want a response colored by association? Or, did I want a personal response?

If I drop a paid link on my page and don't tell you it's paid, I'm not necessarily sending you to the best infographic, or marketing company, or local pizza joint. I'm sending you to the one that paid me. If enough people do that, the manipulation of the link graph moves equity toward people with money to pay for links and away from people that might actually have the best endpoint for internet users. Google can fight this by doing their best to identify paid links and devalue them.

Reverse proxy – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo

That should do it for you.

Hey, Tina.

I second what XNUMERIK said, and given that I have worked with a number of nonprofit clients not all that far from you, I'll add this...

I previously worked with 1,600 nonprofit clients and fully managed sites for maybe 100 or so. For those clients, we budgeted a certain amount of changes into their monthly contracts so that, while yes they were paying for them, they didn't feel nickeled and dimed every time they wanted something updated, a new page created, etc. In some of those cases, we gave clients minimal site access, but not enough that they could potentially mess things up – delete the home page, take down the whole site, and so on. Hopefully, you at least have the ability to create new pages and content yourself. If not, you might consider moving to a provider that will give you full content access... if that is an option of course.

If you choose to move, you have a lot of different options – Wordpress, Squarespace, Drupal, and more. All have their advantages, and all of them have a plethora of design and site management shops dying to find new clients. Unfortunately, in my experience (and maybe yours as well), recoding for a new platform can be very cost-prohibitive, and then depending on how you have your contract set up with your vendor, getting technical help can also be expensive sometimes... not to mention that choosing the wrong provider is not only a huge headache, but also costly.

All in all, your site looks good, but that being said, there are things that I would change – move context setting to the top, increase font size in most places, merge the blog into the site, change the nav items, put much more emphasis on getting email sign ups, and so on. If you haven't gotten one already, apply for a Google Grant. I used to run one for a client that did somewhat similar work to yours, and for only the cost of my management time, we were getting +$18,000 in monthly GIK AdWords spend from Google, which sent over 26,000 monthly visitors to their site and added to the positive increases they were seeing in donations, email sign ups, social media activity, and more. If you're not doing that already, you probably could be.

I hope that helps. Best of luck.

EdgeRank Checker is my favorite free/paid tool. PageLever is awesome as well in my opinion, but it's not free.

This is a little like saying, "What will get me further – more gas in the tank or a better engine?" when we don't know what car you drive, how much gas you have, what the quality of these inputs are, etc.

That being said, just creating content though without generating some interest in it (social shares, links, and so on) might increase search traffic due to increased relevancy to searchers, but it might also simply give search engines another portion of your sitemap to ignore. It's tough to say without having a lot more information unfortunately.

That all being said, you can rank #1 for all of your key terms and still have no sales if the UX is bad, there are no good purchase CTAs, etc, so you kind of have a third consideration in here – content creation, link building, and CRO.

Unless I've been doing things wrongly all these years, your h1s should be what the page is about.

If it's your home page, it's probably about the company, so make the h1 the company name. If it's a page about buying smoked bacon, make the h1 "Buy Smoked Bacon" or some variation of that because the page isn't about Bob's Chunky Bacon Store. It's about buying smoked bacon.

Check out the attached video.

If it were me, I would look at the link profile of the pages that could potentially change and, assuming I didn't find something that told me to just keep it as is, I'd make the change and then 301 all of the underscored URLs to the rewritten URLs.

watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k

You're right that it's difficult. They have to look for patterns that are out of the ordinary. Does a site have an overabundance of specific anchor text, links only from certain types of sites, links from a narrow niche of PA/DA, etc and then compare how your site looks against your competitors? Even when they find something out of the ordinary, it's not an immediate signal that a site is paying for links, but it gives them something to work with.

Internal pages are almost always more relevant to specific phrases than is the home page. If you run a website that sells doors, the home page is going to mention regular doors, french doors, etc, but when someone searches for French Doors, the SE is going to send them to your french doors page not the home page because they're not looking for doors of all types. They want french doors.

If your home page is still relevant to the keyword, keep it there. Just don't keyword stuff.

It can take a while for a site to settle into its place in the rankings. Are you logged out, set as being in Houston, etc when you're doing your searches? I logged out and went into private browsing and didn't see your site at all in the rankings.

Does WMT say that it's indexed all of your pages? I'm seeing 39 pages and quite a lot more images. While you're at it, you might as well submit your sitemap to Bing.

Fwiw, you appear to have 8 H1 tags on your homepage. Generally, you want to have just one if you can help it. Also, I don't see a canonical tag, which you might want to put in place, and you're not rewriting your URLs. If I type photogbykelly.com into my address bar, your site returns photogbykelly.com. If I type www.photogbykelly.com, your site returns www.photogbykelly.com. You should be rewriting your URLs to either the www or non-www version so that, for example, I get back www.photogbykelly.com when I only type in photogbykelly.com.

The last few things that come to mind are that... you're using meta keywords on your pages. Those don't help your rankings, but they can harm your rankings if you appear to be keyword stuffing. On your homepage, it looks like stuffing. And, you have some odd pages like photogbykelly.com/backlinks.html that make it look like maybe you're reciprocal linking or something like that?

Think about it like this. The average visitor to your site is going to speak Slovak, right? If you link to a page in English, or Russian, or Urdu, or whatever, the search engines have to make a judgment call about the likelihood that a visitor to your page will find that linked page valuable. My guess is that they would value a link to a page written in a similar language or English more than a link to a page written in a very different language because the average visitor to your site speaks Slovak, probably has some knowledge of related languages, and might also be able to read English, but they probably aren't able to read Kazakh or Spanish.

The reason I say that is that Google knows that my site, for example, is written in English, but that I talk a lot about French and German, so there's a good chance that people that visit my site have at least a passing knowledge of those languages, so if I write a blog post about a new German movie and then link to a review of it in German, I would guess that that link would pass more equity than if I linked to a review in Chinese because a link to a Chinese review holds no value for my average visitor.

It is acceptable and completely common. Imagine you had a 100% flash site. The bots can figure out some of the content, but not a lot, so they actually need you to serve up a different version of your site so that they know what's there and can index you properly. As long as the content is the same, it shouldn't be an issue.

You need to give SEOmoz time to recrawl your page. Watch the blog for the next index update. It happens about once each month.

It sounds like your blog manager assumes the search engine algorithms have no intelligence behind them...like it's all a matter of gaming or following a prescription. Whether you're trying to preserve link equity or not, you have to consider what the end user experience is... just as Google and other search engines say they're trying to do.

As the bot crawls your page, it recognizes a URL (whether it's a link or not). Then, it asks itself, "Is it easier for the reader to copypasta a URL or to simply click on link?" The answer is always click, which is one check against you in the multitude of things search engine bots look at on your site.

Changing this one thing probably won't affect your rankings much, but it's lots and lots of little things like this that sometimes make the difference.

TL;DR. Tell your blog manager to stop making the reader experience worse.

Matt Cutts has an answer for that question.

watch?v=EnVEERmbdpo