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I still see related searches.

Try Google Trends for your search KW - http://www.google.com/trends/

Scroll down the page, right column - shows a list of related searches...

I've often wondered if these designers inform their customers that random outbound links on their webpages may affect their search rankings.

Website designers who place hallmarks in the footer section of sites they create, in my opinion are taking advantage of non-tech savvy clients.  Years ago, it probably was a much bigger benefit to the designer, than it is today with the algo changes.  But, it probably still bears some weight.

Chris - Nicely said.

Take a look at this option: http://www.cloudflare.com/features-security

I would use the disavow tool as a last resort.  Which would mean, first getting some sort of notification regarding unnatural links and only after all else failed trying to remove those 85 external links by attempting to make direct contact with those sites and asking for link removal.

This may be a good place to start: http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended#link-building

I think he means, themes that have been reworked for resale...Like some of the vendors ColinSV mentions..

Not sure if it would be a good idea to submit the same release to all services (if you were planning on doing that).

Public Relation firms have been around before the internet.  Like SEO firms, you'll find large agencies that charge a monthly retainer (usually pretty costly), to the one man band company and everything in between.   I guess my point is PR agencies, like any other business will charge you for their time and from my experience its not cheap.

You may be better off selecting one wire service, paying the fee and sending your releases through them yourself.  In the past we've used BusinessWire and PRNewswire with success.

If its generating converting traffic for you - I would not fix what was not broken.

I've seen many websites sites that were not at all graphically pretty, or even laid out in a way that was very user friendly- they were simple design, with a strong message that generated millions of dollars in revenue.  It is pretty amazing.

Thanks, that presentation was great.

Besides the standard Yoast for SEO plugin tweaks, I'm researching best practices when setting up a wordpress blog.

In this instance, the "front end" of the site would be hardcoded static pages designed for an e-commerce site, while there would also be a /blog/ attached to the site - for blog posts, fresh content, etc.

We have been members of the BBB of Los Angeles (Southland Chapter) for many many years. Within the last few days, the chapter we belong to was expelled by the National BBB Council - this affected tens of thousands of businesses in the Los Angeles area.

It is unprecedented and quite honestly pathetic.  We put our trust into an organization that builds trust with consumers.  I don't believe this has ever happened in the history of the BBB.

The National BBB council has set up a temporary website with all Los Angeles area businesses registered with the BBB - although ratings for every single Los Angeles business is blanked out.

I would agree that the Google Trusted store would be a good place for them to start, very convenient.

They could also use ratings from other review sites, like Yelp, etc.  and possibly even social signal via Google Plus, Twitter, etc.

That's a good question.

Interestingly enough, Google says that Press releases will have no positive impact on rankings.  The biggest benefit would be from journalist, bloggers, and other people who take your release and write their own articles and post/linkback to your site.

But this company did a test and had different results, http://goo.gl/KMywv

I guess it really boils down to that nobody really knows with one hundred percent certainty.

Thank you, that was a great response!

Be wary of agencies offering Cookie Cutter services, chasing the latest search algorithms.

While the below method is not as easier as just hiring a seo firm - in the long run you will have more control over your entire campaign - content, links etc.

Find yourself a good writer -they can write guest blog posts, articles and even your press release for at least  1/2 of what an agency will charge you.  Use the writer when you need them.  Chances are you won't need them full-time.

Use a search engine's advanced operators to query and find relevant links related to your industry.  Can't do it to yourself? learn how to do it, than hire someone and teach them how to do it.

Find a company who specializes and video creation and have them do it for you.

I feel its better to do it yourself or in-house if you have employees/resources.  You will have more control and accountability.

Why not use - www.domain.com/your-key-word.html

This is a good start - read this book: http://www.ericward.com/book/

Consider using .htacces to rewrite the url?

Hi Chandubaba -

This is probably a good start to learn SEO - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo

Re-writing the content would perhaps be a good start.

When you say blogs do you mean blog posts?

I would think that they are all one in the same as far as search engines are concerned if you run everything off the same domain.

Blog posts are a very easy way for an e-commerce site to build new content, write articles and attract new visitors.   Look at your stats to see how many visitors are hitting your blog posts.

Where applicable, from your blog posts - refer visitors to relevant content/products on the e-commerce side of your site.

If a member of a search engine web spam team were sitting over your shoulder, would you still embark on your campaign?

Since you are specifically targeting .edu domains, to gain higher rankings - that in itself seems like manipulation on some level.  That's just my opinion.

Wordpress is a great platform.  We use the Yoast SEO plugin - among others.  We recently added  W3 total cache and integrated it with MaxCDN - site loads instantly.

Subscribe to Ward's linkmoses email newsletter, and purchase the archives.  The insights you will gain will be invaluable.  I'm not sure that a single link will "turbo boost" your sites rankings.  His email archive spans over 2 years and is about 300 pages - a much better investment in my opinion.

I would check your server for a https folder.

add a robots.txt file in the root of the https folder:

User-agent: *
Disallow:/

My guess is that the spider is following a link somewhere within your site that links to a https:// url.  The spider is than re-indexing the entire site using https://

My 2 cents for what its worth.

I'm glad I stumbled on this post.

I strongly believe that their should be a disclaimer on sites that rank other companies services who pay for the listings.  In this case, unsuspecting business owners searching for a bona-fide SEO company can be easily misled by choosing a company with a top rank - when in fact the only way the rank was achieved was by paying for it.

Any credibility in my opinion of the site accepting payment for a listing as well as the site paying for the listing  - is thrown out the window.

We use the standalone version from XML site maps which generate our sitemaps daily - (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/).  They have a free version on their site that you can use to generate a sitemap from the web.   Their are other services like theirs out there.

After adding Google's +1 script and call to our site (loading asynchronously), we noticed Yslow is giving us a D for not having expire headers for the following scripts:

https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js
https://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com...

1. Is their a workaround for this issue, so expire headers are added to to plusone and GA script?

Or, are we being to nit-picky about this issue?

Our recent experience with the AddThis buttons/script - is that it slowed our page load time down tremendously, so we removed it.  Did not try loading it asynchronously, which may have helped.