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Thanks Guys, I think I just wanted validation that I'm doing the right thing.

This is my biggest client yet and my paranoia about damaging their London Google Place page has gone through the roof :D.  Ho Hum.

Thanks, I think you are agreeing with my course of action of having one brand page and a verified page for each location?

It is 1 company - it is a nationally recognised brand - but each city/town will have it's own page.  Is that what you recommend Francisco?

(just double double checking)

Hi All

I'm looking for a bit of a steer on which direction to go in here.

I have a new client and the client has a 'branch' in London.  The brand is about to be franchised across the UK.  They currently have a google places page in London (old style Google places, not a plus page) and nothing else on Google +.

I don't really want to touch the Google place (local page) because it ranks well for their business and far higher than their organic search result.

In terms of adding to their social presence, I think a Google Plus 'Brand' page would work as a generic brand, with several additional local pages being created as franchisees come on board.  They have a safe and strong brand and have plans to reinforce through social.

I'm about to set up the brand page and wondered if anyone has any thoughts, words of warning or points to consider?

I don't know why but I feel somewhat tetchy and fearful of Google places that have yet to be merged.

Thanks

Thanks all for your help, I was de-blacklisted this afternoon - phew.

I didn't check the dates  The site is less than a month old though.

When you say logs, I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for.  I use cpanel so have access to various logs, but I have to admit, I haven't spent any time in there and now I'm conscious that this is something I need to educate myself on quick.

Any suggested resources for which logs to use for what?

Thanks, I'm not so sure!  I'm a freelancer and I wok on my own so I have nobody to really bounce ideas off, so this community is great for that.  Glad to know I'm doing it right

I'm not a bit lover of plugins and I try to keep to a minimum, but I've removed anything unessential - even my beloved Flare sharing buttons, for now anyway.

I'll let you know when Google come back to me

Thanks all for your responses, much appreciated.

I installed the timthumb vulnerability scanner and it says no instances were found.

I'm going to go through and ditch the unnecessary plugins...I use woocommerce and they have  recent upgrade but its not compatible with my theme so I can't update it, which is a giant pain.  I hope its not that.

Thanks for your help.

Good morning.

Just done my WMT ritual morning check and one of my sites has been blacklisted for malware.

It's a wordpress site - I've run various scans, e.g. http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and also installed wordfence and scanned with that and wordfence produced some offending files which I have now deleted.

I've also installed website defender in the hope that it wont happen again.  I'm pretty good with staying on top of updates and rarely let a few days pass without upgrading new version of wordpress or plugins etc.  I've also checked my users to make sure no new admins or anything and also changes passwords.

I've asked for a review from Google and just wondered how long these reviews take?

Also, has anybody got any advice, is there anything else I should be doing?

Thanks

Tyr this post too...

How to add an image to google images

whoops, I didn't spot that, I just saw the example and didnt read the finer details!

Hi Laura

I just took a quick look at the page and did some analysis with the SeoMoz toolbar - you can download that as a chrome extension and its brilliant for a quick healthcheck on your individual pages.

The first thing I noticed was that you have the Title tag <title>as your business name - The Electric Heating company.  I would start with immediately changing that to Include your keyword at the beginning.</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">I only checked a few of your pages, but all were named with your business. A classic no-no as Google definitely uses the title tag to find out what your page(s) are about.</p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Another thing, you have a couple of images on there named radiator3 and radiator4...consider renaming those images and adding alt tags to include 'electric radiators for conservatories and EHC Electric Radiators.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">I also noticed you have a wordpress site.  I'd really recommending adding the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin.  That trains you how to optimise your pages and I have had great success with that.</span></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Hope that helps - that will definitely help you get ranked for the term.  </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Thanks</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Jo</span></p></title>

I just wanted to add my views.

I don't think there is such a thing as 'Google Images'.  Google is returning a search result of images that exist on peoples websites, with links through to those websites.  The purpose of those images is to drive people to those sites they are attached to, not to take directly from Google.

If your posts are along the lines of 'what to do in this city', you'd be better off approaching the people and asking if you can feature them on your site?  e.g. if one of the things you are suggesting is 'visit this theatre, or visit this restaurant, I'm sure the theatre and restaurant would be delighted to get a mention and willingly let you use their images.  You should link to their sites and they may well give you the benefit of linking back to you as you are featuring them as a 'good things to do when you are visiting x'.

The bottom line is always ask permission.  Chances are, if you are giving credit to the photographer, or the owner of the images (i.e. the restaurant, theatre etc), they will be happy to let you use them as you are promoting them.

You can get into some hot water by just taking them and it's not fair on the owner not to receive some credit for their work.

One of mine does that for a particular search term...I haven't manipulated anything just followed the best practises of SEO across each piece of content.  If I had done any sort of dodgy manipulation, I would have been picked up by panda and penguin.

I hope they are not mistrusted because of it. If it were me experiencing it, I'd definitely remember them and probably look.

Let's face it, all SEO is manipulation of search results!  Anybody who follows the best practises is hoping that their competitor is not and will therefore rank below them.

There are many, many ways that SEOmoz can help improve your sites performance in SERPS but none of those are direct.  Having a pro subscription to SEOMoz, or any service will never affect your rankings.

SEOmoz is really just a set of measurement tools to show you how well your optimisation efforts are working.

So, if you are optimising one particular webpage for one particular keyword you can set that up as a campaign and watch how you are progressing, allowing you to monitor against your competitors.

All of the SEO tools help you to conduct research and analysis to enable you to make decisions when doing onpage and offpage optimisation.  The purpose of the tools is to help you make the best decisions based on insight so you can improve your sites performance.

Use all the tools available in the Research tools section and learn how to use each one.  Also there's a lot of help in the beginners guide.

You can use the tools to show you any errors on your site, duplicate content warnings, keyword analysis etc.  All of this will help you go back and make your site a better place.

The report card tool is exceptionally helpful.

Hi Dusty

That is correct that a 301 does pass link juice and a 302 does not.

I would go into detail, but SEOmoz has a very detailed description here!

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Hope that helps

Jo

You have to create content that people will link to.  There is no such thing as boring either.  I manage social media and SEO for nuts and bolts companies, so i understand what you mean but you have to find your market and build the links there.

Also, why would a guest post be any less boring than posting on your own blog (re your advice on this post)?

edit.. added this link about borings companies creating great content.  

Also check out what Ladders online are doing on Google plus.

Hi

For the official line on meta keywords form Google, I've attached this link:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Google officially announced in 2009 that meta keywords was not a factor in ranking at all.   I also believe that the description isn;t a ranking factor - the reason you need to focus on the description is to ensure that it has a strong hook that accurately reflects the content of the page to entice the searcher to click on the link.

Hi Robert and welcome

I would definitely include Bloomington Illinois as searches are going to be for your specific local service.

Have you checked out the Google Adwords Keywords tool for some suggestions yet (not that it's  the be all and end all).  I just had a quick check and some suggestions were along the lines of 'back pain specialist', 'back pain clinic', 'back doctor', that sort of thing (with the local town name included).

I would also strongly suggest setting up a Google Plus Business page and linking it to your website - when you have set up your page you will see an option in your 'about' section to do this.

Google Pages are showing up more and more in local search, so a Google Page is pretty essential. It should also be well optmised, i.e. full profile details and a rich description of the services you provide.

Good luck and if you need any further help with that page, let me know!

Thanks for your reply, very helpful.  I'm trying to do the same with rel publisher to get my clients logos appearing from their google plus page.  I mainly use wordpress sites and using authorsure plugin, but I'm still getting to grips with it and running lots of tests.

I think the ghostwriting is the best option.  The director of the company will be happy to use his image, but he doesnt (or didnt) have a google plus profile.  I've just set him one up.

Does authorship really only benefit by showing you the face of the author is or there actually any additional 'google points' for it being a highly engaged and highly circled account?

Thanks for your response anyway, much appreciated!

Hi All.  Just wondering what your experience is with using Facebook graph search?

I have a site that ranks highly for a good number of keywords on google, yahoo etc, but when you use the facebook graph search, it either doesnt show up at all or is buried away in page 5 or something.

I'm talking about the 'Web Search' bit where it returns web results rather than searching for pages likes by my friends etc.

Any thoughts?  Why is my site way behind the competition in Facebook?  I'm a white hat kind of girl and can't think what I might have done to offend!

Have you come across any good resources advising how to optimise for facebook graph search for web?

Thanks

Jo