this got posted whilst I was writing my long winded version below else I could have just commented on this post with 'what he said'

Hey Paul, that  is one confusingly worded question

it's really pretty simple though, you want the user to land on the page that best serves the intent of their search. So, to go back to tried and trusted SEO coloured widget example.

• if client searches for widgets we want them to land on the homepage
• if client searches for green widgets we want them to land  on the green widgets page
• if client searches for green widgets, we don't want them to land on the homepage as they then have to click through to the widgets page and they may not bother.

Forget about link building, forget about SEO, think about your user and what is best for them and let that colour your actions. If you are looking at this from a link building perspective, then some links to the homepage with green widgets would be a terrible thing but ideally you want these to point to the green widgets page.

Hope that helps, it is an overview as without examples, it is hard but if you have any questions, just fire and ill try to help.

Cheers!
Marcus

Exactly (the everything is important bit, not agreeing with me).

If you have to ask that  question, I would say you are using too many.

The on page tool looks for one instance of a keyword in either a strong, bold or em tag so if you are doing this for SEO, the prevailing common sense  would be that any more than that one is too many.

If the highlighting provides some kind of benefit for your users then you can do more but if you are looking at bolding lots of text for SEO - then forget it.

The best  answer is to just use common sense and create something that is readable with the important keyword highlighted if you can do so in a natural way.

Hope it helps. 
Marcus

Hey Barry

Having a bit of insight into your problem from our email discussion, I think you will find that making the changes will be enough and your site will just pop out of the filter when the problems are resolved.

I may be wrong, it's a one way flow of information with Google on this so definitely make the request but expect anything up to the seven weeks. Though, even post panda when i  guess they were getting hammered, one site I helped got responded to in around 4 weeks so... 3 is a good bet.

Cheers

Marcus

I'll fire you an email buddy.

Competitions are always good but really, you want to have a rich social presence that is driven by your content strategy.

So, you post great content on your blog - people read you and follow. They may even then tweet it through your social plugins and you may pick up more readers / followers.

You have a strong presence on twitter, post interesting things, interact with other interesting people to build relationships and ultimately pick up more followers like that as well.

Then, you have strategies for getting followers like competitions where  people have to follow you.

Really though, get some good content on the site and tie in twitter very closely with your content strategy and be active on twitter and you will start to build followers.

No silver bullet really, like everything else, the real answer after all the bluster is simply - hard work.

Marcus

Hmm, not entirely sure, can you provide a link?

I have seen something a little odd recently with page titles. We are working on our new site,  was going to use Joomla and the Zoo CCK but unbelievably, whilst they have a really cool blog system built into Zoo, you can't set page titles so all article titles are the same and it uses the blog title.

But, we are seeing google take the article titles from the H1 and create it's own title tags from these to return the page in the results with a good, clickable title.

Obviously, we are going to change this and go back to Wordpress as it's a dealbreaker not being able to set page titles but the behaviour we have seen from Google in this instance is interesting.

So, sorry, waffling, are your page titles exactly as  you have put them? Is it trying to add anything? Do you have any special characters or anything that is causing problems?

I have just  done a bit of a random google and I can see lots of page titles getting cut off at around 58 characters in where the page title is longer than that. Lots of other full titles seem to be coming in at around 62 so there must be a slightly earlier breaking point now. Doing a bit of googling it looks like you can get snipped at anything over 64 so I would just work on getting them a little shorter.

Hope that helps!

Marcus