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When I built my rank tracker I was originally going to get 50 per page, then noticed the results are much different from 10 results per page.  That was at the beginning of March - not sure about before that time.

They tried to sell it to us...let's see:

• "custom facebook page" = worthless
• Social analytics = get through SEOmoz
• Easily post to social = a multitude of free services

I'm not sure how it integrates with their press releases or if you get anything I'm missing/they didn't mention...anyway, unless I'm missing something it's not worth much at all.  I probably wouldn't even try it if it were free.

Edit: I did find one thing: Publicity Alerts tell you when a journalist is looking for expertise or atestimonial from someone like you. You can then respond, introducingyourself as a source for their story to potentially earn bigpublicity. You can also get your own story in front of journalists bysending them an easy online news release about your business...that may be useful if anyone's using it.

Also, it says "Our online news releases don’t just grab journalists’ attention. They getyou in front of customers on the search engines they use every day. Themore you publish, the more visible you can become on Google or Bing,where people are looking for businesses like yours."...do they give you free press releases?

Huh, I didn't even know that was an option, but I see it there on the quality guidelines now.  Definitely what the photographer should do, list their home address, then hide it.  Good answer, I learned something.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

Well, you aren't supposed to have a business address that customers can't visit, so no...plus those photographers with home addresses shouldn't have their home address listed unless they actually operate their business from there (studio in their home).  From the Google Places Quality guidelines:

Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. If you operate from a location but receive mail at a mail box there, please list your physical address in Address Line 1, and put your mail box or suite number in Address Line 2.

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528&topic=1656880&ctx=topic

I used to do on-location photography and listed my home address for a while.  Google called me to verify it and asked some questions regarding if people could actually visit it.  I gave answers like 'I occasionally do photography there'.  He acted annoyed but let it go.

Meta keywords do not matter to search engines anymore.  Use meta keywords to tell your competitors exactly what keywords you are going for

When I do a wordpress blog I use tags to describe whatever the post is about.  A category would be a broad category, whereas a tag could be 10 words you'd use to describe the post in detail (for example...a post about panama city in March you'd expect to see tags like...college, spring break, panama city, florida, beach, ocean, march).  Many times those tags will end up being the keywords you are focusing on for that page, if you developed your content well.

We moved up 2 places this morning for the main keyword for our niche (number 11, gah so close to first page!).

OSE is not 'live' data...it's archived data.  What you are seeing is the web as it (mostly) was as of the beginning of May.  Next update scheduled for May 29.

Please take it for what it is, advice from a wannabe SEO.  I'm basically a newbie at it, but here's what I think:

Use directories, not sub-domains.  Sub-domains basically tell google to separate everything.  They work well for people that have user generated content, like wordpress.com because if one user posts horrible dupe content with pages of links it doesn't hurt the whole site.  On the other side of things, that subdomain does not get favoritism from google because it's on wordpress.com...

So, for your site, I'd recommend against sub-domains.  It's pretty, but it doesn't bode well SEO-wise.

Also, dont forget to 301 those domains to the appropriate URL when you change things up

Subdomain will receive less authority because example.com/omaha will receive some benefit from being in the parent domain.  Are you saying you want to get rid of the domains that have been in place for several years?  What are you wanting to accomplish by switching these sites?

Campaigns > Settings > Go to bottom and delete (or archive it so you can get the data later!)

I'm all about the keywords at the front of the title, I think it helps CTR as well.  One thing I will say is that you should expect a decline in placement when the titles first change.  I've changed the title of our sites before and it always hurts at first.  Of course, your results may vary - but if not, resist the urge to go back and just stick it out.

One category per industry...so category=medical, which would include doctors, pa's, nurses, medical billing, etc.

Get the Yoast SEO plugin and in the settings there's an option to no-index the tag pages.  Do that and it'll solve the duplicate content issue.  For me it's more about user experience...I personally like and use tag clouds when browsing.

IMO, people worry too much about 'how many keywords', etc. I like to design for the user, then go back after I create the page and figure out if I've used enough keywords...as far as tags go I wouldn't worry about what you're using the title and just make it natural, but that's just me.

Also, I'm not sure if you're making $ from the site yet or not, but I'd look at getting another host.  Your site is kind of slow from where I'm at and people bounce fast these days.

Personally, I think the way you have categories set up is good, broken down by broad category (ie. finance).  Though I'm not sure that 9 to 5 type jobs fits in with that.  There's got to be a category that each of those jobs could fit in.  Overall, I think that the categories you're using works out well for your site.  The way I think of tags is like free keywords that do not need text around them...more specifically for your site, for the ob/gyn article I'd use the tags: obstetricics, gynecology, ob/gyn, medical.

I have no idea about outsourcing...but I have no training in graphics and little experience and was able to create a pretty decent infographic.  This was back in March and I'm still seeing tremendous traffic from it today.  It's also the highest pagerank page we have, and it gets about 4x the traffic of our homepage.  However, I'm not sure about your niche, but I have found that nobody is converting to sales.  It drives a lot of traffic which is great, but I'm not sure we've gotten 1 lead from the traffic it has generated.  Not sure how to fix that, but thought I'd put that idea in your head.

Also, you asked about tools...I used Illustrator and Photoshop.  Illustrator is a pain to get started with but look for some tutorials for graphs online and you'll find some pretty easy to make graphs that look really nice.

If you're not at all graphic minded, I'd look for someone on odesk.com to do the work for you.  As it will take quite a bit of time if you want it to look good, and the graphics programs you need will be costly if you don't already have them like I did.

Well the canonical will be different for every page...so if your page is:

www.jeremygower.com/contact/index.php

your canonical would be:

Basically, what that says is..."hey google, it doesn't matter what URL you think you're at, make sure that the only one in your search engine is the one in the canonical tag"...therefore, be very careful with it as well.  If you simply put www.jeremygower.com as the canonical for every page, google would de-index every other page of your site.

Anywhere in the head is good.

IMO, unlimited ends up being a bad thing...the way those things work is that godaddy (or whoever) puts a ton of websites on the same server, so think about the 500 or so other sites with 'unlimited' bandwidth using your server.  It makes it slow...for instance there's about 400 domains on the same server as my domain, and yes, it's slow a lot of the time...the cheap plan on a small orange I'm sure is similar but I'd expect better quality than godaddy.  (they dont have unlimited)

header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');

header ('Location: http://www.whatever.com/whatever.php');

--------

As far as I know there's no difference...to Google a 301 is a 301 no matter where you tell it.  Would still be a pain in the butt, though - and I'm not sure 100% efficient....the best thing (i think) would be to have a canonical on every single page, then that will take care of it from the search engine standpoint.

However, I'd still go somewhere that allows rewrites...that's just crazy.  Even my godaddy shared hosting allows htaccess.  Dont go to Godaddy shared hosting - it's awful.  Not sure where to get cheap hosting with htaccess, but I'd venture to say that most hosts support it.  I'd look into a small orange, it's offered as a pro perk through SEOmoz for 3 months at half price and it looks like they offer $20/mo plans for business - or if you wanna try it $35/yr plan as well.

From my experience, as long as you do it correctly, changing hosts will not affect your SERPs.  We actually moved in January and saw nothing change.

Well, 301 would be best...but I suppose in that situation what I'd do is use the canonical tags...but that's a pain as you'd need to do it for like every page...

In short, that's just whack...I'd find a new host.

Edit:  P.S. Why can't yahoo just die already?

http://degree3.com/  Very cool.

For an open source solution http://www.osqa.net/

It will probably be in the root folder for your site as .htaccess or in the vhosts folder on your server for your domain in the vhost.conf file, but not sure...I found this on the bluehost website that gives a good example of a 301 redirect:

https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/htaccess_redirect

It may be helpful in directing you where you need to look.

It looks like something is wrong with your redirect...what does your redirect code look like?

You should have a 301 redirect setup so that everything goes to one address, ie. www.jeremygower.com....so that no matter if they type index.html or www.jeremygower.com/ or jeremygower.com it all goes to the same place.  Other than that, an easier method (and you should probably do both...just put a canonical tag on that page, then no matter what the main page will get the link juice.

And yes, it probably will - either way, you should fix it.

Thanks to both of you for confirming what I had believed.

We have 2 offices within 20 miles of each other, and we are getting ready to launch a facebook page (or pages)...

I'm not sure whether we should put up one page or two.  One office is our 'corporate office', and the other a 'satellite' office, both are very much open for business, but there will never be a need to post something on one and not the other...the two locations are just too close for there to be a need for that.  If something is relevant to one town, it is relevant to the other.

I am really leaning toward one page for both offices for many reasons, but it seems like facebook wants me to have 2 pages (ie. I can't put in more than one address).

Any help is much appreciated!  Thank you!

I'm sure they have something worked out for their sake, but I'm not sure how it would penalize the website being checked if it is being scraped.  Send a bunch of keywords to google and scrape their serps, they have no idea what site you are actually looking for.

Personally, it's only helped me as it's knocked down a couple of truly horrible backlink spammers in my niche...but I still think Penguin is bull.  I should not be able to hurt competitors, period.  And for all of those that say "A good backlink profile will trump the bad links"...that may be true for Amazon and SEOmoz, but for the Barbecue Restaurant in a Pop. 20k town on the interstate, it can mean disaster.  It's bad enough with all of the fake reviews going around, but add in the fact that 20 bucks can get your competitor 20k bad links compared to their 5 good ones, it's going to make a huge difference.

Search engines cannot should not operate like this.  They should be moving forward instead of backward, it's simply not fair to the real businesses that try to do good.  They need to focus on rewarding the good instead of punishing the bad.  Heck, regardless of fairness that's just good operant conditioning technique.  Anyway, there's got to be a better way...

Sorry about that, I should have looked, was in a hurry...the good news is I found the one that I love!

http://www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php

Again, the main reason I like it is because I can put in my own website 10 times, so that it's not a fluke if it's slow/fast at a certain time...

Well, they're all going to be at different locations, going through different routes to get to your site.  It can also make a difference what is the load on your server at the time.  I like to use one that allow for multiple URLs like

http://seobyindia.com/tools/website_speed_test.php (just found on google, couldn't find the one i've used in the past)

This way you can get a good picture by doing 10 tests in a row...average them then there ya go.  I had to do this when we moved servers to get an idea of the speed increase we received.

Hey, just wanted to let you know that I've made my own solution available on Codecanyon.  I'm sure it will need some customization for most SEO's, but it works great for me...Hate to publicize on here about my own product, so dont want to share a link, but PM me if you're interested.

I used Joomla long ago, so not sure how much help I'll be...

But I'm 99% sure that Joomla does not do this inherently and if they did it would actually be a feed and not a duplicate page.  My guess is that you either have a plugin that is putting those pages there or there is something funky going on with a mod_rewrite.

I'd also note that on your sitemap you can see that there are other duplicate page issues (yes, they even show up on your sitemap)...those pages with trailing slashes and without trailing slashes.  There may be a way to fix those with a joomla plugin or you can check out http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html on tips on how to overcome the trailing slash problem.

Do not repeat it.  The structure of web-design/price-cost-calculator is good and will get the keywords you want in the URL.  On the other hand, if you lengthen it out and say the keyword again you'd be more likely to lose keywords in the URL because of how much of the URL google actually shows in the SERPs.

The drop in rankings could be just because you changed the titles.  For some reason google doesn't like it when you change titles, perhaps because it signals them that you're trying to change them in order to rank?

Anyhow, I've changed titles on one of our home pages twice in the last 3 or so months.  I wish I would have just left it alone...each time my rankings dropped, then started to climb.  I'm basically where I was to begin with now before I changed anything and I'm leaving it alone now!

Anyhow, I'd make one more change to get rid of most of the duplicates and then leave it alone.  That said, I like:

Upload Name - tag, tag - Brand (fileid)

I think they send all of the info they have to Google quarterly so you are talking about maybe 6 months before your competitors actually have a chance to bid.

/sarcasm

My guess is that you aren't going to find a lot of people paying $99 / mo for the service telling you they are worried all of their secrets are being stolen.  I trust SEOmoz.

Heck, google can probably read your mind, they dont need SEOmoz

an actual answer:

Here's the privacy policy, where SEOmoz says that it can give your information to parties dependent upon certain circumstances (ie. subpoena), but it doesn't say anywhere on _this_page about protecting or _not _disclosing your information that I can see:

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/terms-privacy

I believe that bold/strong has minimal effect at best.  USE HEADER TAGS!  I haven't heard anything specific to what you're asking, but I'd venture to guess that Google will see font-weight:bold the same way they see <bold>tags.  They are smart and I'm sure they've put in methods of accounting for the probably millions of sites that use things like (assuming that works, not sure).</bold>

Short story: I wouldn't worry about it, unless you can find direct evidence to the contrary. But, for goodness sake, use header tags!

I dont fully understand, but it sounds like you're trying to rank for specific keywords and rank for long tails of those keywords for each state?  I'd categorize by state, then tag with the keyword.

Yeah, and we have no idea what's at play.  I mean, if we look around the net and see who is abusing with CSS hiding and who isn't my guess is that 95% of people abuse it...and if I'm Google I'm going to go ahead and put it an automatic point deduction somehow based on how many of those I see, then hope that people who manually rate these sites 'undo' the auto deduction.  At least, that's what would make the most sense.

I wouldn't risk it, but that's just me.  I'm sure the alt tag in the h1 would do just fine and doesn't 'hide' anything...Although...you could certainly abuse that as well since it's mostly hidden, lol.  Just use a flippin google fonts or a cufon font replacement and make it as close to what you want as possible.  The less images the better!  My competitor could easily make their h1 image into text and it would probably look even better than the image they use.

I get it, just not sure that it's 'ok' to do...anytime you're hiding something, it cant be good right?  Anyway, I'd do something like:

 <code>#  <img< span="">src="whatever.jpg"  alt="whatever"  /></img<></code> 

That should work right?  At least, I think it's your best bet.  I will say that I do have competitors that do what you are wanting to do and some are higher than me in rankings, so...your call, but I wouldn't.

Why do they have to be H1?

Anyway...Matt Cutts says no CSS hiding!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBLvn_WkDJ4

http://www.google.com/trends/?

I can only tell you about our experience...we had the same server (in house) for probably 5-6 years, then we moved in January to an off-site host.  I paid close attention to the rankings because I was actually wanting to see an increase because the new server provided faster load times.  With the exception of normal fluctuations, we saw no change in rankings from the switch.

Be sure to check out opensiteexplorer.com, and not just the SEOmoz site...at the moment (because the update was yesterday), opensiteexplorer.com has more fresh info...for whatever reason the SEOmoz site lags behind.

I agree with Russ.  I've used many rank checkers and they're either weekly (seomoz) and work pretty well, or they're daily/hourly and are not reliable.  I remember finding SEscout and was very pumped...until 2 days later when I looked at the charts...it would show us as rank1-5, for a few hours, then drop off the map, then at 300, then back to 1-5...it just wasn't reliable at all and confused the heck out of me when trying to analyze anything.  So, I decided to build my own program that I was planning on releasing as a service, but I'm reconsidering...still building it, though.  Anyway, it works brilliantly which is much more than I can say about...pretty well everything else.  If you have the resources, build your own Custom = Best.

I probably phrased poorly...simpler question: If there is a page that nobody knows about, it hasn't been submitted, there are no links to it...the only way the outside world would ever know it exists is if they looked at a rel="canonical" tag...will google follow that canonical tag and index it?

Say I have 2 pages with duplicate content:

One of them is: http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage

This page is the one I want to be indexed on google (domain rank already built, etc.)

http://www.originalpage.com is more of an ease of use domain, primarily for printed material.  If both of these sites are identical, will rel=canonical pointing to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage" cause it to be indexed?  I do not plan on having any links on my site going to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage", they would instead go to "http://www.originalpage.com".

I've only been doing SEO for my company for the last month and I've made some headway but what is really frustrating me right now is a couple of competitors that have OBVIOUS spammy links ranking in the number 1,2,3 stops all over the board for the keywords i'm going for.  One competitor in particular has anchor text links EVERYWHERE that make absolutely no sense...junk like...

"I have never been more saddened by anything in my life than when my grandfather got cancer.  I told my uncle he needed to buy some auto insurance.  I really like pork."

I mean, these links are the pages with the most page authority and page rank out of all of the ones they have...and I'd venture to say that almost all of their backlinks are like this...well, half of them are just random links with good anchor text on the sidebar of a bazillion spam websites (diapers, toys, fake blogs, etc.)...while i have about 3k links and most of my top competitors have about 5k links...these guys have over 33k.

Worse yet, when I look at something like Alexa rank, they have pretty high overall traffic rank but it shows traffic rank in MX (mexico) instead of the US...these guys only sell in the US!  I mean, they're black hat if I've ever seen such a thing and they rank superbly on all keywords.

What can I do to compete with this junk?

Pretty sure it's due to the update...all big name sites I look for look good but when I look at my own and competitors the results are all jacked up.  My guess is that things will be OK by morning.  Haven't been around long so not sure if this is the way it usually goes or not.

http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

Showing January 4th.

I wish I knew...I cannot get our main site rank on bing for a particular keyword, yet we also have a site under a different domain that we have done absolutely nothing with that is ranking in the middle of the first page on that keyword on a consistent basis for months now...I guess bing just really likes that crappy site that provides next to no good content...

From my experience on a couple of sites it also looks like bing really favors wordpress, but who knows?

On page makes a HUGE impact, at least from my (limited) experience...We have gotten a few backlinks over the past month, but most of what we have done is on page optimization.  We've went from page 7 to 2 for our main (very competitive) keyword and we're number 1, 2, 3, 4 (or all of them) for a lot of the long tail keywords we went for.

If you haven't yet, make a sitemap (I've been using gsite crawler), then submit that to google in webmaster tools.  Granted, it's taken some time....I haven't actually done very much in the last couple of weeks but we're still slowly coming up the rankings.

Like so: Cupertino, per:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/iPhoneURLScheme_Reference/Articles/MapLinks.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007894-SW1

In case you're interested, for Phone numbers go with:

["tel:0845 365 0000"](<span)[>0845 365 0000](<span)