Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Everyone,

Long-time SEO'er first time poster here. I've been doing SEO for around 5 years but since starting my company The Search Ninjas last year I've been so bogged down with client work that I feel like I'm starting to fall behind on what's still effective from a link building perspective since all of my clients are local businesses and since we've been focusing so much attention on Google Places.

My question is- are there any general article sites that you still use for SEO since the Panda update last year (that you firmly believe still offer "juice"), or do you mainly focus on niche sites and guest-blogging?

I'm looking for ideas regarding how to find content submission opportunities for clients for link building purposes. I'm familiar with Ontolo and the Whitespark Link Prospecting Tool in terms of ways to find opportunities (and of course cherrypicking competitors' links using OSE and SEOSpyglass), any other recommendations?

Best,

George

ps clients are in legal niche for the most part if that helps you out, but this is mainly me looking for everyone's general opinion.

As a small SEO agency, we also handle hosting for some of our clients. Our clients' sites are Wordpress. We set them up with a Bluehost account with a dedicated IP address, and spend a lot of time focusing on load times (implementing a CDN, optimizing images, installing W3 Total cache and using recommended settings, etc.).

Last month, we had a client inform us that they are bringing their web marketing efforts in-house, so they switched to a new hosting provider and took their (existing) site to the new hosting company.

They kept their old Google Analytics code installed, so I can still see how much traffic they're getting. Since switching to a new host, despite the load times taking longer, no CDN, and other errors that came up prior to us spending time "optimizing" the website, their organic traffic has increased by 26%. Same exact website, same inbound link profile. According to Webmaster Tools, their impressions and clicks have also seen dramatic increases.

So now, obviously, I'm considering looking into other options for the hosting of our other clients' websites.

From your experience, and especially when it comes to Wordpress websites, do you think that a hosting company can make that big of a difference in terms of SEO? I've heard of positive results from people who have used WP-Engine, and other Wordpress-dedicated hosting companies, but I just find it hard to believe that we spent so much time on load-time-specific ranking factors and come to find out, a different hosting company would have made a huge difference. Any thoughts/feedback?

I own a Wordpress website which covers soccer in the DC MD VA area called DMV Soccer http://www.dmvsoccer.com/

We write weekly recaps where we tag a player who has scored a goal or performed well in a game. For each player, obviously, a tag is created. What I'm looking for is a plugin or solution that would allow me to tag a player, but also automatically assign a team to that player so that the team name and player's name are optimized on the individual player's tag page.

So if I were to tag George Murphy on a recap, and I assign him to a team, let's say DC United. The tag page would have a title, something like:

George Murphy Soccer Player for DC United

and the meta description:

George Murphy, soccer player from MD who players for DC United archives

Or something similar, if that makes sense. Should I skip using tags and instead start assigning each player as a sub-category under each team? I'd like to try to avoid that, because not each category will be based on a player. Any suggestions in terms of existing plugins or other recommendations?