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I have had experience with all three.

To answer your question, I think Localeze is the best for distributing your NAP, however, there is no substitute for or better value than manually claiming local citations. It also takes awhile for the listing to get distributed across of their local search platforms.

In my opinion, Yext is overpriced, but is valuable in claiming major citation sources. The number of profiles available are capped. David Mihm recently posted on this: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/yext-local-marketing/

UBL is good, but I only spend the $39 core syndication annually since they have access to the Acxiom database.

In short, you can pay for all three, but don't just set it and leave it. Always claim and manage as many citations as you can manually. You can take advantage of all of the local search platform's features without overlooking anything.

Personally, the only reason a pingback is useful for me is for the notification that someone is linking to me. When you "accept" the pingpack it displays it on the blog as if it were a comment. When you view the pingback in the comments on the post page it really doesn't make any sense at all and doesn't really have any value to the page or those looking at it. I typically just delete the pingback and go forward now knowing another site linked to me.

Also, there is the possibility that Google may crawl the link in your comments. In that case it will now look like a 2 way / reciprocal link, where there have been several cases that Google has discounted / devalued those types of links. Hope that helps.

I am familiar with your industry but is there some connection between what people you market toward actually do on Thursday and Friday? I notice that my weekend traffic is the worst on Sat and Sunday, because my target market is enjoying their weekend and not working, surfing the web. Since it is consistent I am thinking that it is something related to your market.

Hey-

I have not used this site before but heard good things about it. It's affordable, but the directories are not super high quality. PR 4 or so. I think they have different tiers for better directories. This isn't auto submission, it's simply a service that submits manually for you. Also, they vary the anchor text I think up to 10 times I think?

http://www.submit2please.com/directory-submission.html

For awesome directories - I always submit my client's site to Best of The Web, Business.com, and the Yahoo Directory. They have similar guidelines to Google so they are very well trusted.

Hope this helps!

Google can definitely see and crawl that link. It will be up to them whether it passes page rank or is indexed based on whether or not they think the link is deceptive to users or manipulative to Googlebot. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353 

In my experience, I had a client with the positioning like yours. We created the Places account and it just went into the local / maps results. The good news was that the SERP didn't contain any other organic listings at the top. If you have prominent and consistent rankings and are confident in your strategy, then you might not need to create a places account. Just be aware that moving down 1 spot could really be 8 or 9 spots on the real estate of the SERP. Moving down to #2 organically could mean being below the entire local results. You will need to judge the risk / rewards. Hope that helps.

I just did that search and I am seeing you right at the #6 spot. Since you have tried incognito I am wondering if Google is demoting your result based on geographical location.

Have you tried searching from a proxy or other service like https://startpage.com/ that strips your IP? You can narrow it down that way. Definitely odd but the good news is that I can see you right there.

It is against the Google Places guidelines to setup a Google+ Local page if you are not a business owner or representative of that business. They may never approve the listing.

Places / +Local listings are meant to give the user / searcher direct access to the business, not their affiliates or advertisers.

If you want to promote your clients' businesses then you should help them get it setup under their own accounts with all of their direct information.

There are ways to market local businesses online but in my opinion (and I' pretty sure Google's) a inauthentic Places page is not the answer.

There are a couple of options for site owners in your situation. The first option is to create a 301 redirect from the "duplicate" page to the "preferred" page. This will eliminate that extra URL and forward it to the preferred one. If that's not possible for whatever reason, you can specify the rel canonical tag in your head section which basically tells search bots to prefer the page you specify in that tag. Here is info on rel canonical: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

"In summary, is it correct to say that H1 and H2 tags are stronger signals to the search bots of what the page is about?"

Absolutely. These tags are strong signals to search engines as to what the page is about, along with title tags and meta descriptions. You can prioritize content and break down the page with H1 through H6 headline tags. SEOmoz has a great on-page best practice guide for setting up the page, which makes sense for your users as well as search engines. Try not to spam keywords anywhere, just make sure it is "keyword friednly" but at the same time readable and would make sense to a human.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/on-page-factors

Since people will not be able to visit the locations of your driver's addresses, I agree with you that you would not want to use that. Also, it will be a bad idea to setup home based service area businesses at your drivers' houses since they will essentially be able to control the listings you create. You will need to come up with some sort of space that is controlled and utilized by your business in those locations. It doesn't have to be a large space but it will have to be a unique address. Even though customers may never come to it, you'll still need to get it setup. Then, in Google places set the business up as a service area business with the appropriate areas that your drivers in that area can legitimately serve. Click the "hide address" box and you'll be good to go. You'll want to setup local phone numbers for each location as well.

Then you can create unique content around those other areas where you can do business directly on your website. Have localized content (services, reviews, phone number, etc) specific to each location. Set the URL for the places pages to those specific area locations on your website.

Edit: spelling and grammar

I like Vinnie's response! I would 301 all of the expired pages maybe to their lowest level category? I'm not sure how the taxonomy of your site works but once the post is deleted I'd have it 301 all of the way down to the lowest level of categorization. This will keep the URL as specific and relevant to the user and also keep your category pages indexed

There are a ton of things you can do. Some of my favorites:

• Optimize the page speed to load as quick as possibly. Good plugin: W3 Total Cache, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

• Setup your theme and templates to use structured data in the HTML. This will tell Google specifically what your pages and products are best categorized as. http://schema.org. You can use this especially for product reviews which may show up as rich snippets in the search results.

• Setup Google Authorship (rel=author) and/or Google Publisher tags for your blog posts and or/pages

• Change your permalink structure to %postname%

• Use the Redirection plugin to track your 404s, 301s, and other typical server response codes: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

• Yoast has an Analytics plugin with many customization options for tracking

There is obviously a lot you can do since WP is an open source platform. These should get you started and busy for a while!

Matt Cutts did a video on this exact issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8

Generally, you should just stick to either underscores or hyphens and not mix the two.

If you want to change all of the underscores to hyphens then make sure you 301 redirect all of the old urls to the new ones. This can be a total pain if your site is huge, but would be necessary if you change the URLs.

John, I think you definitely are right. If you 301 all old pages to their new destinations, search engines will count each link from the old page to the new page. This will help your PR/mR much better than a contextual link.You can then get the benefit from 2 or more links per old page rather than just 1 optimized link.

Also, consider the domain registrant of oldsite.com and newsite.com. If they are the same, then those links won't pass as much value if you place a contextual link on the page

You might want to post your jobs on Inbound.org. I'm sure you can find amazing talent through there.

http://www.inbound.org/jobs

If you are going to 301 your niche/micro domains over to the main one, make sure you let Google know that you have moved the domain in Webmaster Tools.

Google says to 301 all pages to their new corresponding pages.

If your niche sites were structured like your main site, but those sites were penalized by Google, then you will probably experience the same effect with the 301s. Google won't penalize you simply for the fact that you have more links to deeper pages than your homepage, they'll penalize you because the links you are acquiring are spammy in nature.

I always stick my "sweet spot" keywords in the title tag of the home page. My most profitable keywords (aka products and services) are best displayed on the home page for both users and search engines. I would focus on getting links with great anchor text for your most profitable keywords on your home page from authoritative and relevant sources.

Just to open a discussion, I would imagine that Google will not put a lot of weight into the domain name listed on the places page. They are already looking into exact match domain names and their ranking ahead of others, so I would assume that the same would be places. I know for sure that distance from centroid, number and quality of reviews, and categories of the listing have the most weight in ranking in places or maps. Sorry i don't have a straight answer but thought I would give a point of view? Hope it helped

Definitely use the Yoast SEO plugin for anything regarding WordPress, it handles titles, meta, canonical URL, sitemaps, internal links, and much more.

As for themes, you're better off going with one of the premium providers, studiopress / Genesis framework which you mentioned it good as well as any of the Woothemes. These work well with the Yoast plugin. Themeforest themes may look nice but the code and development will be poor and not up to standard which will cause plugin conflicts and other theme issues.

Sometimes Google will display the title and meta element of a DMOZ listing. If you are listed in the DMOZ open directory project, simply put the following to your head section and it will default back to what you actually have on the page.

Sometimes, Google will also change the Title and description elements in the SERPs for user experience. It's difficult to see how or why, but it does happen. Does this help?

These are redirecting, but they are redirecting to a page that is not there. So the result of your 301 ends up as a 404.

Are you using your .htaccess file to perform 301s? If otherwise, let us know so that we can further address the problem. If you can, copy your .htaccess file contents here.

I don't think it would be a good idea to claim all of these profiles. Google will most likely just suspend your account. Claim only the best one with the most/best reviews on it. On all of the other duplicate profiles use the "report a problem" link and choose the "place has another listing" option. In the comments, give Google the direct URL to the claimed profile.

I am unsure how they will handle reviews for this, but at the very least you'll have a starting point with the best profile these previous "SEOs" did.

I would put your most profitable keywords in the Title, and use meta description and on page (h1, h2, etc) elements to rank for your company name. Also, remember that your domain name (not sure what your is) will also have a good ranking factor if it is your company name.

Yes- I did not mention this in my other response. Adam is correct also, it could be that Google has an outdated index.

Although the filename will be duplicate, the content on those filenames will be okay. Google will look more at the content on the page rather than anything else. There are sites out there that have weird file structures, like:

/index.php

/services/index.php

/products/index.php

Some CMS's will automatically do this, but they rank fine because they have quality content, even though the index.php is technically a duplicate filename.

You should be fine with this method.

Categories should depict what your business is (e.g. Hospital), not what it does (e.g. Vaccinations) or products it sells (e.g. Sony products or printer paper). This information can be added in your description.

Although it does not say "don't add a location" to your categories, there still isn't a good reason to. Google is well aware of your location, so the only reason any SEO would put the location in the category would be to manipulate Google. Once you do that, your listing is going to suffer. Based on experience, do not add location to our client's category listings. And to be blunt, if you're working with a Local SEO who insists on adding it your category, you may want to explore other options.

If you are ranking #1 for your company name already and your domain is your company name then i think you might be okay to remove it from the title. You could possibly get away with not even putting it in H1 or h2 or if you are weary of doing that then just combine some keywords with your H1 and h2 and company name. You could also use lower headings tags for your company name and I think you would be fine.

It looks like what you are missing is links from other sites. Anyone can launch a website and make it relevant for any keyword or keyphrase they want. But even the "perfectly" optimized page won't rank in Google without any links pointing to it. Links give your site authority. According to OSE, your site has one external link. If you're new to SEO and link building, some easy ways to get some links right off the bat is to check out the SEOmoz Link Directory. Submit your site to the most relevant directories in the most relevant category. Don't submit your site to every directory here, it's not meant for that. Plus. you'll go broke.

Also, check out the link building category on the SEOmoz blog. There are a ton of articles from the staff, associates, and members of the community who post literally hundreds of creative ways to get others to link to your site. It's good you have a blog, use that as a link building tool by creating good keyword rich content that your users and prospects will find useful. Add some social sharing features to help get the word out there.

I wish there was a magic button for link building, but there isn't. It is what separates the wheat from the chaff in the SEO world. But at least you are in the right place! Good luck!

Is there any particular reason why office location, phone number, reviews, and ratings need to be on 4 separate pages? I could see there being a lot of thin content which won't really rank well or provide a ton of user value. Can you give some more info as to why this would be? I could easily see all 4 of these pages combined into one.

With that, you can focus your URL structure into categories or local regions or both, depending on how dynamic you want the site to be. For example:

http://www.lawyerz.com/nevada/personal-injury/dr-al-pacino

OR

http://www.lawyerz.com/personal-injury/dr-al-pacino

OR

http://www.lawyerz.com/nevada/dr-al-pacino

Unless there is something that I missing, I think no matter how you structure your URLs, thin content just won't rank.

Definitely add the Room H and update it with all of the citations you currently have. Also, "S." and "South" are different and will throw off the consistency, same with "St." and "stree" or "suite" vs "ste" vs "#". Make sure you enter the same information everywhere.

You should probably make sure that the canonical URLs box is checked in that particular plugin. The reason why you are getting those duplicate content errors is because Google is seeing those tag pages as different URLs with the same content which will possibly penalize you.

This will help with most of the issues. Also, you can edit your tag and category archive pages to display links to the different articles without displaying a lot of the content. Although there might be user consideration for this.

Also, maybe try SEO Ultimate, a plugin which has additional options for you regarding your author, date, category, and tags archive pages.

I actually have used BuildMyRank. The good thing about it is that it's affordable, the bad thing is that the links are usually very low quality. Some of the links do have pass a high PR, but the quality of the content isn't very good. My advice is if you are going to use BMR, write your own content and have them distribute it. Otherwise, having them write the content for you will give you poor quality articles!

Ok gotcha- well if that is the case, then think about how the user will navigate to the end result if they started from the home page. Logically, you could assume the following

If URL structure is as follows:

www.lawyerz.com/office-locations/dr-al-pacino

then /office-locations/ should contain links to all office locations of multiple lawyers.

But with this structure

www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/office-locations

/dr-al-pacino/ should contain links to the 4 other pages. **This option will probably be your best structure. **

Probably not a bad idea. Also maybe focus on making your other elements / keywords more important for search engines if they aren't already? just make it very easy for search engines to read your content, use and headings where applicable and relevant around your keywords

I've never been able to find one...they must not have one? The only way I've ever found cached pages on Bing is to click the arrow next the listing on the SERP, then arrow down to cached page.

Google has always changed title in the SERPs to what they think is best. In some cases, it can be a total nightmare. Search Engine Land posted this article yesterday on this exact same issue with two different companies: http://searchengineland.com/google-title-wrong-157819

Hopefully, Google will allow webmaster more control over their listings in the SERPs!

It also might be a good idea for you to place these links in context in the footer.

"This site is in association with...."

Also, if the sites are on the same IP address or C block then Google will probably figure out that there is a real relationship between the sites and the people who run them.

Also, put those links in your Google+ profile. That's another good way to give Google the signal that there is a relationship. If you're not trying to manipulate or deceive anyone or Googlebot you shouldn't have much to worry about.

I think Google will count both filter and filters as the same search terms as they are just variations of each other. But just to be safe you might consider furnace filter because it has the most volume. Use variations of filter both singular and plural on the visible page. Google does not hold a lot of weight in the variations of these words and will display results accordingly based on relevancy and authority. Focus on getting text links with both variations of the word, you can't go wrong with that. I don't think you will need to choose two separate optimized pages since they are so closely related. I could image there would be a lot of duplicate content issues with that?

I have a client who operates 13 stores across 3 general locations. Each store has its own page with unique store information. This site uses breadcrumbs to get back to home page and a sub page listing all of the locations for that particular area.

Our homepage also has a list of all of the locations, but it is feasible for tis operation since it only has 13 locations, obviously this might not work for your model.

As far as bounce rate, the average store landing page is about 63%. Although it seems high, I believe that the user is getting the information they need (phone numbers) and calling the individual store, asking questions, directions, etc and leaving with the info they need to move on. They have confirmed that their call volume is much higher since we started optimizing and their walk in rate is rising also.

I think it's a good move to post the breadcrumbs, it offers better user experience and like you said some linkage to the rest of your site.

I agree with this. The closer the IP addresses between sites that link to each other the more likely they are that the two sites have a relationship. Not that this is bad, it's just that links that you get from your relationships are usually easier to get than those that are freely and naturally given, so they discount them.

Ok cool. I think what you are referring to are links that are redirected to a URL via JS. The case you have is clearly not, since

link text

is a traditional text link, it is just being hidden by JavaScript to incorporate the design of your page.

To clarify- if you have two pages, one optimized for furnace filters and the other optimized for furnace filter, i would imagine you would have a lot of the same content on those pages, not to mention that you would also probably be wasting your time since Google will treat those two keywords the same since they are variants.

To answer your other question: You should probably optimize for those filter sizes also. Thats a great idea for long tail keywords.

Also, when determines whether or not you should optimize for the singular or plural version of the word, optimize it on that page based on what product you are selling. For example, if you are selling a budle of 3 filters, focus on the plural version of the pages, that way users searching for multiple filter packs won't come across a page with just 1 filter. Does that make sense?

If you look at the source in chrome, the isn't matching color of the <title>. I think you are having a validation issue. I think its up top in the HTML section:</p> <p><span>xmlns:og</span>='<span>http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/</span>'</p> <p>Make sure that you are using quotation marks instead of the apostrophe. So it is ="content" instead of ='content'. </p></title>

In short, domain authority is calculated from the authority of the domains that link to you. If a 49 DA is inadequate for your ranking then you will need to chase links from domains who have much higher DA than who are linking to you now. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

Im assuming your client has online competition? Show them their online competitors and what keywords they are ranking and optimizing for. Your client will love it if you outrank their competition! You also now know that you aren't going to be wasting your time and have an end goal.

You will typically get these errors when Googlebot is unable to access your site. This usually happens when your website is down for whatever reason. You might want to check your server logs or talk to your web host and see when your website was unavailable. If it is down often you may want to consider moving web hosts.

Having a blog is definitely a smart idea. Even though you are using Open Cart, you can just create a subfolder on your host called 'blog' and run WordPress out of there. This way, your main Ecommerce site will be on example.com and your blog will be on example.com/blog. Google won't care that you're running two different CMSs. You are creating the content on your domain and as long as both CMSs are linking to each other then both your blog and Ecom site will gain benefit to any links.

Since Open Cart and WP are both open source, with the right development (or developer) you can actually tweak both systems enough to share the same template files, this way they look the same from a design standpoint. That's really another question in itself, but to summarize, yes, you should start your blog and definitely use wordpress for it if you are comfortable with it.