Welcome to the Q&A Forum

How are you doing your backlinks? Can you focus on a more narrow demographic target?

I recommend updating content once or twice a week, make sure you don't go overboard with keyword jamming. content and photos are key to longterm success.

true, I'm pretty desperate for clients tho.. i'm willing to put in 4x the hours that I actually bill.

lol yeah any form of marketing I could see being extremely competitive!

I decided just to do a more localized focus , but I just showed them that link and said they are getting a good deal!

Well, I know having P.O Boxes is against the Google Places guidelines making them a negative local ranking factor. so lets throw that idea out.

I found the best method was local directories and backlinks on local pages with proper anchors.

I'm interested in seeing what others suggest. This may also help: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

If I may be so blunt: What do you ask people on the mechanical turk to do? estimated costs?

yeah into HTaccess, did it work?

I have a client I'm doing a proposal for.... that does insurance.

makes me want to charge a higher rate.

WoW! thanks for sharing that link

I agree with peterm22, but I'd also wanna know where are your targeted customers?

Although I think its poor taste, I think Google just looks at it as a sitemap name (placeholder), the content is what really matters.

I can only tell you from my personal experiences, every time I outsourced link building ... it didn't seem worth it. Sometimes it was even a negative impact...

nofollow it?

Just curious

Any reason why you don't wanna use a 301 Permanent Redirect Sub-Page from one domain to a Sub-Page on another?

I agree with Nick. Also to help prioritize your subpages other than with sitemaps in the eyes of Google use external linkback anchor texts (whitehat of course)

My unprofessional opinion would be to use robot.txt on some areas. I'll also be interested to see what the pros here say.

Post on the Google forums for help if you haven't yet.

I also am in the group of, don't take it down. People just need to see the publication date and make their own judgments.

Can you drop some of the code for us to analyze?

yeah, the structure of the site can get confusing.

I believe I remember Rand answering this question with 'badges' as the response.

Wordpress works great for amateur to medium size clients, anything that needs a solid professional build with data-basing requires something more robust from my point of view.

I've heard nothing but horror stories....

I would work on the load times, I'm a small sample, but it was a very slow load time.

*not sure why I got 2 thumbdowns, google takes site speed very serious.. look in webmaster tools.

The best method I've found is to create tons of keywords in my video tags/descriptions. The type of camera I used, the lens information, tons of details about the topics.

Has anyone been to SES Chicago?

With all the porting of phone numbers, I'd think it would be mixed all over the place and not a great method to punish someone. Prehaps consider getting an 800 #

Ouch! My suggetion like others here on the forums: create a press release saying how you were ruined by an evil employee and throw your twitter name all over, make it almost viral to help you?

What did you use for scanning him?

Not really MORE, but a better mix of backlinks may help shift from page 2 to page 1 also, wouldn't you think?

Anyone else buildling their website using Ruby on Rails? If so, are you also using any memcaching?

Do you have any tips on memcached concepts, tricks, caveats, and experiences. How are you also doing SEO, any tricks for generating traffic and some Google love?

Any well known SEO/SEM events in the midwest?

Thats what I hear from chatter from the google employees, they are too busy working on new features to look back at how people are exploiting them. I think we'll see a big change in the future now that it got a bunch of press.

Subquestion: Is it bad to follow a bunch of people on twitter, to get followers too?

Thanks for the response Rand!

I'm really looking for industry recognition, if any traffic make it to the site for a sale, that’s a bonus.

It just feels so spammy to following a bunch of people, to get them to follow me.

I find books out of date soon as I read them, the online resources and forums like this are your best bet!

Hey Guys,

I created a facebook fan page and I created a twitter account. I'm following about 175 people on twitter and 30 people returned the follow.

Now what? How can I keep building? Any tools to help me?

if you wanna analyze: http://twitter.com/culinitweets

image sitemaps is the way to go, Google is loving that lately

I'm finding very conflicting results with my clients thinking that they are ranked higher or in some cases lower than what a non-related fresh computer network shows. The social results really are changing the landscape of seo!

Thanks mark, i'm looking into both of these sites. I agree that bloggers and journalists probably don't care without using other factors

looks promising

Thanks Barry, great information

excellent tool! thanks

Are you talking on-page optimization? is there such thing as an off-site optimizing for local search?

Isn't Google smart enough to have a list of common proxies and not count them for any changes?

I'm trying to figure out the best method for externally linkback anchors to my site for local results.

What would be the best way to do this for some local SERP love:

Cheeseburgers Chicago, IL

Cheeseburgers Chicago

Cheeseburgers Chicago illinois