Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The general rule used to be around 300 words of copy on the homepage, but so many new websites now have very little copy, if any, on the homepage.

Has the best practice changed here? If you include keywords in the title and header tags, is that enough to support strong SEO on the homepage...or do you need a few hundred words of copy still? Would love to hear what others think.

I think it could be easier for a site's design to have them separate if it serves two very different functions. And you could position them as separate which would create less user experience confusion (or more if the sites are designed poorly).

I agree about domain authority - it would be harder to link build to multiple sites and the secondary site(s) would probably have a lower authority.

Hi Travis - Actually not referring to local businesses but a national firm with different business functions. An example would be Marketing Profs, who has their main site and then a MarketingProfsU domain. I've also noticed some people separate their blog from the rest of their site on their own domain. Any thoughts there?

I'm wondering what the implications are for having multiple domains for different service areas of a company?

I realize having multiple domains for one company can be troublesome because of the possibility of duplicate content, keyword cannibalization, and linkbuilding to multiple domains. But when the domains are for very different service offerings/unique business functions that each serve  their own purpose (and have  different positionings), is there a downside to having more than one domain?

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

I'm talking the least relevant and incredibly spammy. We've all done site audits and stumbled across some ridiculous ones.

The funnier the better.  I'm compiling a list of hilarious links that sites have gotten. Any input would be great!

I use the Keyword Difficulty Tool daily. Because of the troubles with Google's API I can no longer see the search volumes. I still want to use the tool for difficulty numbers because I think this is a much better number than the Google Adwords Competitive bar.

If I use the Adwords keyword tool for volume numbers, will that be sufficient?  Is this the same as what Moz usually provides? If no, where is the best place to gather volume numbers?

Thanks!

Today I met with a firm called Localeze that provides local directory submissions.  I understand the importance of this service if your site is competing locally, however I'm not sure the effects of local SEO for a national brand.

Our firm gets most of our traffic from across the country, not just one location, and our business is scattered (which is a good thing).  We rank for service related keywords that are not tied to a location.

We do not show up for local results so our business in our immediate location is weak.  We would like to increase our local presence in search engines but I want to make sure that this will not take away from our national presence.

Will optimizing a site for local search negatively affect general rankings?

Thanks

Thanks Aaron.  The client listed about 16 cities that they do business in.  Do you think limiting that list to about 5 cities is a good idea?

thanks

My client is a kitchen remodeling company in Sterling, Virginia and is trying to rank well in local results.  I am struggling with keyword selection mostly because I am still learning about local SEO.

The city the company is located is Sterling, however their business comes from several other close by cities like Reston, Herndon, and Fairfax (Nobody lives in Sterling so they don't care too much about owning that in search engines).

Is the right strategy:

1. Choosing one city and focusing on that (kitchen remodeling in reston, VA)

2. Optimizing for multiple cities (kitchen remodeling, reston, herndon, fairfax...)

3. Optimizing for an entire region (kitchen remodeling, northern virginia)

I know it's hard to answer this with little information but gut reactions would be appreciated.

I am a new SEOmoz member so excuse me if this question is too specific for this forum.  I'm still getting a feel for the community.

Thanks!

Sean