Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Basically you are looking for a writer excellent writer who have all the SEO knowledge and know how to explain your concept on paper. I don’t think it is hard to find a guy like this as they are many I know who can do this but honestly speaking the budget you suggested is too tight to get the quality work.

I will suggest you two to three things keeping your tight budget in mind.

-          Get the writer from country like Philippines or Malaysia. Here you will find great writers who know SEO stuff for cheap.

-          Instead of paying them on week, try to make it per edit or something this will be easier for both of you people.

-          Increase your budget, if you are really looking for quality work done.

Hope this helps!

I am not sure what your client industry is so I am pitching the idea in general and then you can change it as per your industry.

Why not you put something interesting and valuable to your audience instead of a coming soon page... like provide a FREE guide to something what most people in your niche are looking for!

This will help you get some natural links from different multiple domains and at the same time this will increase your email list that you can later use to increase your sales ratio and more...

#justathought

I go by the basic rule here, if the two different URLs displaying identical information then this will be considered as duplicated content but including no-index, no-follow tag is also not a good idea as this will affect your traffic and conversions.

All websites are fetching the data from the central resource but you got the ability to display it differently! Like try to display only the related information about the properly and in the rest of the page you can add UGC, content related to the property, some tips or something similar kind of content and more…

In the ecommerce world, we tend to see different websites selling the same products and that is why the pages become identical sometimes so in order to avoid that we try to add extra content like UGC, tips, videos or more to make the page unique in the eye of Google as well as a little more interactive for search engines.

Hope this helps!

EGOL sir, you probably nailed it!

Whenever creating titles and descriptions you have to think about two areas

1. Your search audience
2. Search Engine Rankings

Id I would be at your place, I would list down all the important keywords in one document and then map the keywords on different pages of the website accordingly. Once done and I know what keywords I should be placing on each URL/page, I will move accordingly.

Once I have keywords mapped, next thing is to divide the pages as per the priorities. Important, Less Important and rest of the pages

Start with important pages, than move towards less important pages and then the pages that are on the website but not your priority at all.

As EGOL said, dedicate some time in your day may be half hour everyday (if you have another person to do the job in that case its different) and get the job done. This way it will be more efficient and closer to what your audience is looking for

Hope this helps!

I don’t think there is a way to get the DA of a sub-domain as sub domains are the part of the overall domain and this is why it contains the same domain authority as the main.

The way to check the power of the sub-domain should be checked by PA in my opinion (for that URL only). I do understand that Google count sub domains as a separate entity but i don’t think this leads to have a different DA of a sub-domain then the main domain.

Just my opinion!

I am one of those who have spent lot of time on Guest posting and looked at it from many different perspectives...

As a matter of fact all my post are good (IMHO), but I can churn out only 2 or 3 masterpieces per month.

The number in this time seems like your posts are really worth reading for your niche and you deserve the wider eye balls then you are currently getting but I still think that Guest Blogging to high Authority and Trafficked websites for you is important and you should offer your content to highly quality blogs in your niche.

At the same time you should have some attraction on the blog that grab the readers and visitors attention and make them visit again and again...until your over all authority go increased in your niche.

Once you have kind of name then you can always skip the guest blogging to 3^rd party websites but at the same time you will get offer from other bloggers to allow them to write on your blog.

So, Guest blogging allow you to build your authority and chance to get more content on your blog for free.

I think Guest Blogging does not offer you links only but it offers you to brand yourself in your niche which is more important than anything else.

EGOL nailed lots of points here so I will quickly go though it again before going further.

-          The title tag is not optimized. You should have to have around 65 characters of a title that that also includes your targeted key terms. Also craft your title in such a way that it pleases humans and not bots only.

-          Meta description tag is not optimized as well. May be Google no more look in to it but still you should use it as a way to increase CTR from organic search. My advice would be to re craft the Meta description tag that encourages real audience to click to the link and get in to your website for more.

-          Keywords tag is present but I don’t think there is any need of this here. Bing might consider this as a signal so having few keywords that you are targeting on the page is a good idea.

-          XML Site Map is also missing

-          Website contain good amount of duplicated content so the advice here is to create a content that is unique, original and focus the targeted audience.

Few other things you can do to get to the first page of Google for your targeted key terms are:

-          Get yourself register to Local Citations and Yellow pages with the consistent NAPs.

-          Make sure you are not getting a link back to some lousy or irrelevant websites. If you are, then you have to clean it up or penguin might attack you.

-          Get some quality links from different relevant websites.

Also, my advice here would be to look for a SEO consultant and get the audit done for your website. Once you will have the problems at the front of you, next thing you need to do is to fix the problems and see how your website is getting better it terms of rankings from your desired key phrases.

Hope this helps!

I am not very good with facebook Ads but as a user if I will look at your banner, I probably will not convert and like your page. Why not share some information that is valuable to your targeted audience and instead of boosting page why not boost post that contains some valuable information. I am not saying you will be able to get tons and tons of like but atleast the results will be better than 2 a day.

Just a thought!

I believe Wedding Photography is a competitive keyword and ranking on local for this kind of keyword we need to think and act beyond basics.

Miriam Ellis did a great post on Moz that illustrates guide on local SEO rankings: http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide

Please take a look and go from there accordingly.

Hope this helps!

I believe no index is a good option and in my practices I haven’t seen the quality score changes due to no-indexing of the page.

I would highly recommend not changing the title tag to add something irrelevant as title tag have a direct impact on quality score!

This answers all your questions... please let me know if you need more help regarding this!

I don’t see any reliable tool when it comes to bad link checking but if paid is an option for you then I have personally use Link Detox and it works great for me. Link Risk is another tool that I would recommend as I know the people behind that tool and they are amazing brains of the search industry.

Hope this helps!

I see you have planned to slowly poison your website in the longer run as many of the tactics are very low quality or give no positive value to the website.

If I will be at your place this will be the following plan I would have preferred. (Plan always get changed from industry to industry but I am considering this as a general plan)

• Research and gather the list of all the important and high quality directories that are relevant in your niche and get links for all (it won’t be more than 50 ~ 60).
• Find the blogs in your industry allow me to write a guest post on their blogs, shortlist the one that contain more social, traffic and DA and will target them for guest posting. 4 to 5 a month will be fine.
• 6 to 8 Posts on your own website blog (no micro sites) is great, keep the promotion plan on... writing a blog is not enough.
• 1 Slide share << go for it... no harm in it but remember it should have to have a value or else it’s like dumping your time in to waste bin.
• Manual Outreaching fir links.. This can be like link sleuthing, promoting any viral stuff that is available on your website or may be following the competitor’s links wisely.
• Press Release should not have a number... use this only when you think you have something new regarding your company that will attract users. Use it to entertain users and not get links...

I know the plan available here is not complete but still way better than the one you have! You plan give a strong feeling that it revolves around getting links (many tactics you have mentioned will offer your low quality links only.) and my plan is more towards users and targeted audience so that you get only high quality links naturally.

SEO has changed a lot not instead of building links you have to create scenarios and situations that attract links naturally.

Hope this helps!

As far as I see your website I see images are getting indexed (not all of them but they are in the Google search index). Why are they not appearing in the search results when someone type in related keyword is a different question. If you are looking for that my advice would be to use proper, optimized and natural anchor text instead of targeting keywords all the time.

Also try to change the name of the images to something more relevant. “liposuction.jpg is much better than big-imagejpg”

Hope this helps!

I totally agree with Dana, Google consider this mobile friendly website as part of their ranking algorithm. If you would asked me few months before I would have said its important to have a mobile friendly website as it will serve your users better but from the ranking standpoint, its ok to live with the current version of the website but now after the Google official announcement its must to go either responsive or a separate mobile version of the website.

Whatever you choice but if you don’t have a mobile website it will hurt your rankings no matter what.

Hope this helps!

There are really tons of SEO companies offering snake oil services. When people ask me how to find a good SEO company I give them a step by step process and here is what it looks like:

-          If you have a big budget, Moz have the list of companies “List of Recommended Companies” just go there and choose anyone of them and you probably will find the one you are ideally looking for.

-          If you have a small budget lesser then $1000 a month most probably no good SEO company is going to touch you unless they are new and wants to build a reputation or you cut a good deal with them.

-          If you have decent budget, here is how you should go about it.

1. Choose the list of companies and check their expert level. Blog and their presence on social media will help you judge that.
2. Instead of email communication, try and talk to them over the skype and voice. Understand their vision and find out more about what they can do for you in terms of ranking and conversion.
3. How will they do it is very important. If they are not transparent and open about their process, cut them from the list, otherwise go for it.
4. Set clear goals and deliverables. We will provide you rankings and not sure about conversions is not a good deliverable. They should set goals everywhere that includes traffic, rankings as well as conversions.
5. Give them independence to do everything that gives your business a positive bump.

If any company you are in contact with is fulfilling all the requirements then you probably should go for it.

I looked in to your website and this is what I found within the first 30 seconds:

-          The website design is boring and does not allow audience to engage. My advice is to try A?B testing of your website design.

-          From the ranking perspective I don’t see many problems. You are ranking well for many keywords (just not only on the first page). You need someone to work hard for you and take these rankings to the first page of Google so that it starts converting.

-          Links are not bad either, just need to kill some links coming from Press release websites.

I think overall you are in a better situation than most. All you want is a company who can help you improve your website CRO areas plus hep you get the rankings on the first page of Google.

Hope this helps!

Building links was never a race for me it was more like how quality my link profile is and this is how I beat my competitors and rank over them again the money making keywords.

It’s not about how many links your competitors have and how many links do you have... after the panda and penguin update it’s quite clear that its more about the quality of links your competitors have as compare to you!

I would advise you to build some high quality, valuable links within your niche so that you can easily outrank your competitors for the desired key phrases.

If the sellxgadget.com is your domain and all of your keywords contain sellxgadget in the keyword with “v1” or “v2” or “v3” in it then as per my understanding, the best approach would be to go with the first option.

That is: sellxgadget.com/v1

Here are few of the reason why I will go with the first option:

-          The overall size of the URL will be small and it’s important for the URLs to be not too long. The URL is covering all your keywords and yet small in size.

-          It didn’t seem spammy to me! The keywords are in the URL but not over optimized.

Hope this helps!

Mike, your question is not clear!

Are you trying to ask whom you should contact if you want to remove incoming links from Lower DA?

If this is the question, then I would really answer this in two steps!

Step 1:

Why do you want to remove links from lower DA? If you think that lower DA means lower quality then this concept is highly inappropriate! A website with Higher DA can be a lower quality websites if you really want to remove low quality websites from your link profile then you should audit the website who is linking to you to see if it really a low quality website.

You can check the design, UI, UX, Link profile, onpage SEO, search their brand name in Google to see if they are ranking 1^st for their brand name and similar tactics...

Step 2:

If you really think that the website is low quality so in that case you have to find the contact email of the website and email them to request a link removal.

**I am hoping that this is something you are trying to ask if there is something else please explain the question in detail and I would be happy to answer you!

If you have two different domain contact exact same things (products, descriptions, contact and more), there is no other way other than the possibilities mentioned by Dmitrii.

Even the canonical version will only allow Google to index one domain and remove other one from the index so from the SERP point of view you will only have one domain instead of two.

Hope this helps!

This is not really irrelevant... I mean I have a website that dedicated offer SEO service, and I have few links coming from good web design websites and this is not irrelevant because somehow there is a connection!

Similarly, here the links that are pointing to the website have some connection... I mean if the websites that are link back to your website have a bad health, then you must stay away from their links but saying that the links are simply irrelevant is not true!

As far as my understanding goes about SEO the way you are targeting the keywords on your pages is not the correct approach. My advice is to list down all the keywords head and long tail keywords and then map the keywords on different part of the website accordingly.

I usually target one to two keywords per page and then set the page content accordingly. Once done you will have a clear idea if what pages to target against which page when building quality links back to your website.

It is best to hire a SEO Consultant that can help you with these issues and help you get better visibility in search engine form the keywords that you ideally want to target. If you go with this approach you might not be able to outrank your competitors.

Hope this helps!

A Directory according to Moz SPAM checker tool looks clean to me but the process you are talking about is known as reciprocal linking!

According to Google guidebook reciprocal linking is not ethical and it’s not a good practice to build quality links back to the website.

So, If a directly ask you to do reciprocal linking, its probably a website you should not get a link from but if they are offering a one way link and the website backlink profile is clean then you probably should go for it!

Hope this helps!

I always use a very simple logic when it comes to redirections. You have an old website and blog that you want to redirect to the brand new website. If this is the case, here are the few things you should consider before coming up to any final decision.

1. Users Reaction: You said that old website has some traffic, when you are going to redirect to the brand new website, how users/visitors are going to react? If they will be fine, just go for it, if not just leave the idea immediately.
2. Link Profile: If the link profile of the old website/blog is clean just go ahead and 301 redirect to the new domain. But, if the link profile contains some spammy links, you probably should leave the idea as it is.

If users and link profile support the idea, probably search engine will also like it and if not, you probably should avoid the idea as a whole.

Hope this helps!

Although Google didn’t really like Paid links but the method you explained sounds like a link against a donation with is a pretty decent activities to many within the industry.

This post by SEO Book tells you a little more about it: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001455.shtml

I personally do use this idea based on client’s link profile. I believe if your link profile is supported by other good links as well these links are only going to help instead of hurting you in most cases.

Just a Thought!

First, there is no problem from the SEO point of view if you 301 URL A, B and C to URL D but obviously you have your website for users and not for search engine only which is why your first concern should be users.

If I would be at your place I would have thought about the following before coming to any final conclusion.

URL D will entertain users the same way as A, B and C was doing and they will find all the answers that previous pages were answering. If yes, I will go for it and if not, I would consider other relevant options I may have.

Link profile of the A, B and C URL is clean, if not I would prefer not to redirect but if the good links are pointing to those pages, I would prefer redirecting. No matter what the decision will be I will check the links that are pointing to those URLs.

If the users will not misguide and the link profile on A, B and C URLs is clean, I probably will go for it and if not I will choose other options accordingly.

Hope this helps.

There are few tips that people discuss over and over again and in my opinion they are obsolete and does not work anymore.

Keyword Density: The idea of using exact keyword in the body tag certain time is something that tools like Yoast and Moz still recommend but in my opinion they aren’t important any more.

I mean Google is smart, they know what the page is talking about regardless of the fact that you are using exact match key phrase or not. For example if your exact match keyword is “excitement” and in the body you use synonyms probably Google will still find out what you are talking about and rank you accordingly.

Exact Match Domain: Again, a boring idea. I mean they maybe a small effect of having a keyword based domain name but saying that this will help you beat your competitors or that will take you to the first page of Google is nothing but a crazy talk.

These are the two ideas that I think people should stop talking about and focus more on creating something that their actual persona want.

Adding my 2 cents.

totally agree with EGOL.

Also, if you are an ecommerce company where products go out of stock for some time and then comes back, why 301 redirect at the first place. My idea is to add pre-booking option or may be a subscribe button for a user so that they can subscribe to get a notification when the product will be back in stock.

Btw, this will also increase your email marketing list that you can use in multiple ways. #justathought!

Ok, here is the easiest way to understand this (As far as I think)!

1. 404: This is the status code that browser give when the page on the website is not available.
2. 302: This is the status code of the page if it is temporary redirected to some new page. This simply means that old page will not pass the link juice to the new page but when user reach to this URL will drive them to a new location.
3. 301: This is the status code which does almost the same work as 302 but in that case old URL passes its link juice as well. This is commonly known as permanent redirection.

Websites usually should not use 404 as this disturbs the user experience  of the page but upon requirement and keeping scenarios in mind use of 301 or 302 is always an intelligent approach.

Well there are several things you can do:

Leave it as it is: and Google will re-crawl the site and eventually remove the pages from the search engine.

The SEO way: It will be good if you put 301 redirection to relevant pages instead of a 404 page, so that user may find a reason to stay on your website. Juice of that deleted page will also be shifted to new page and it is quite possible that your new page appear to rank better and more visible in SERPs.

Update the sitemap: Another good way is to update the .xml sitemap and update in GWT to let Google know what the status of the current website is.

And if you want to kick them out on urgent basis, then the formula is to use the URL Removal Request in GWT and your URLs will be removed within the next 24 hours.

I don’t find your idea as very smart but 1^st part of your move is right! You have to find niche related blogs and bloggers and you have to contact them, but directly asking them to link back to you didn’t make any sense to me unless you have some great Authority and Value in your Niche.

There are several ways you can get Link to the targeted blogs:

1. Offer them a Guest Posting

Simple but You actually have to write 500+ words of detailed and well researched post just to get a single link or may be 2 pointing it on your website.

2. Run a Contest for Bloggers in your Niche

If your budget is high then offering a competition for bloggers and then through badges and other stuff you can get a link pointing to your website (most badges usually get site wide links)

3. Create Infographics and Email them

Another idea is to create infographics on your site and email them the update about it. If the piece of graphic will be informative and well designed, chances are that they will link back to you!

4. Interviews

Try and target influencers in your niche and Interview them and post it on your own blog. As they are influencers so chances are that you will get lots of natural links to your site (depending upon the fame of the influencer and blog itself!)

These are just few of the ideas! Link Building is way too big and the only boundary to link building is your own personal imagination!

I completely read every word of your description and i would say it actually is a good idea but its a long term game and you have to decide how much dip in traffic you can afford because once you are going to change the keywords the traffic that was coming from previous keywords will fall down and new keyword (as its new) might not send you any traffic at all.

If you can afford to loos traffic then this is a perfect idea to change the keywords and start optimizing fir links! But if you can’t in that case you should content marketing plan first and then slowly move towards the change!

If I would be at your place I would have created another page that should target the new keywords and start getting quality links to that page until it start ranking for the particular keyword. Once it will be on the desired position, I will then slowly change the content of the home page and redirect that page to the home page so that all link juice can be transferred to home page... This will also hit traffic negatively but the dip will not be as serious as it can go if you do it without doing this!

Hope this helps!

Bounce Rate for Google Analytics is that a visitor hits the page and gets out without shifting to another page, it will be considered as bounce rate.

In your case, I agree with EGOL to add a thank you page so that technically it should visit another page and your bounce rate will come to natural again!

Hope this helps!

My company has the Domain Authority and Page Authority of 80 but we are still not ranking on all the keywords that we should be ranking for… I know the case is not similar but what I want you to understand is the fact that DA or PA is a good way to understand the Authority of your page or domain but this is not everything there are other factors that counts that includes powerful content, social media value and obviously it also depends upon the strategy that websites are following above you and even more...

Redirecting the existing domain to a new domain can be a crazy idea and you might lose the trust of your audience or I would say it is too much depends upon the nature audience.

In the previous company my EX boss did a smart job by building a new unique website ‘website B’ contains similar services as ‘website A’. On ‘website B’ with the logo it says ‘Powered by website A’ and start push the website B with A, audience who had a trust on website A started to believe on B as well and slowly and gradually they move to make website B as their major website… (I would say long but effective process).

I would suggest not to move just like that but try to be slow and effective that should be love by your audience.

There should be no problem if two wordpress blogs are using separate data bases to and are under different folders but remember when you are making updates or changes in the website that you want to see all over the website and blog then you have to make all the chances twice.

For instance you are installing Google Analytics or any other plugin that you want to use all over the website then you have to make sure that the same GA has been installed on both folders in order to get the data of a complete website.

Hope this helps!

WOW! Scott, this is interesting!  And here is my take on it!

I am taking some lines from your description! That says,

‘and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.’

I will question that.. if it is exactly what they said then in my opinion they were putting the link on the website that they can control and this can be a site of their network! If lot of links are actually coming from the network sites then I must say that Google was nice to you!

Changing the content improves your long tail but your main keyword dropped even more! In my opinion here is what you should be doing!

Remove as many low quality links as possible!

Get in to your link profile, get your hands dirty and remove it… you don’t have a choice or else the slap can be even harder!

Get more social

Google take social as a way to find the website’s credibility, get yourself active on social media accounts like twitter, facebook and G+

Create Link Baiting Campaigns:

Start the brainstorming process, sit with your marketing team and come up with any idea that is link worthy! Start a Quiz, Contest, Award or Badge! Something that allow your industry bloggers to talk about you and link to you!

Get Press Links!

You can even connect link baiting and press links if you are creative enough! Do something that becomes a story. Journalist likes stories, approach them and get a link from PR and news websites!

Start a Blog!

Share your expertise and start a company blog, it will give you a hard time but you will be able to get some great links, content that will eventually get you SERP benefits!

I always recommend people to open your eye while buying links for your website because of the fact that sometimes it’s cool! But sometimes when you buy links with eyes closed you came under the spot light of search engine.

Links from famous directories are fine BBB and Business.com are the great websites to get a link but if you want to get a link from a niche related website with a desired anchor text then do check that websites reparation in search engine and try to get natural links instead of side bar or footer links.

#myopinion

As far as my experience goes in the local SEO, if you have 3 physical offices available and you are putting it on your website, there is no harm in it. Make sure you have your offices registered on Google Local and on other yellow pages and data aggregator websites with consistent NAPs.

Hope this helps!

A landing page without the form is very much dependent upon the industry you are working with. In my experience deals that contain big dollars convert better on the phone.

I know form can provide you phone numbers as well but when person check the website their enthusiasm is different which might or might not be after some time (hours of days) when you call them back! My opinion would be to take a look at the industry and see if this is a website where phone is better than a form.

I guess link should be provided as this allow user to better understand the company and product/service you are trying to sell but obviously your call to action should be powerful and eye catchy (use eye tracking here) that users stick to it and call.

Hope this helps!

I have to agree with Ryan that not much data is available on this but let’s look at the theory for a while...

As far as I know 301 is a redirection that allows visitor to redirect from old page to a new page and pass all its link value to the new page… this means Google knows your old page and the fact that it had a penguin hit.. Chances are that the penalty will transfer to the new domain as well…

I have one of my client website hit by penguin and the problem is that many of links pointing to the website got a hit by penguin…

I think the best idea is the hard way… I mean get in to every link check if this link is not low quality or Spam and in case of yes contact them and do almost every effort to remove links that are coming from SPAM or low quality sites….

Checking out for RIP off and Scam reports are great and if you didn’t find any even greater! But here are few things that you must consider before handing over a project to them!

• Community Contribution

If they are a company who understands the SEO of the 21^st century and if they know how Google is changing from time to time they must knew about the power of sharing content to the community and get most out of it!

Ask them about what and where they have shared the content with the community? If they didn’t have any valuable content that they have shared with the community then you must consider a change!

• Real Time Community Interaction

This is another thing that can’t be faked. Go through their Twitter and Facebook account and see how they are engaging with the community and especially influencers. If their personal company profiles are dead then the doubt is valid!

• Discuss the Project!

No one can guarantee results and this is quite common but do they discuss the project? And do they think that your goals are achievable (that you have mentioned here)? If not then they are not the ideal people to deal with!

But, if they have a sound content that they have shared to the community and if they are contributing real-time with the community and influencers in the similar niche and above all if they are taking interest and discussing in detail about your project then they are the ideal people to invest your money!

Best of Luck!

Hey, expecting Google to settle down against low quality content and links in my opinion is a lousy thought! I think it’s great to check your profile and remove the links that looks SPAM!

In all honesty, guest posting links are usually fine unless they are on blogs that contain solid SPAM back link profile.

I would recommend removing the links from the websites that are no more available in Google index!

Other these the above advice I would highly recommend to remove the site wide links and add some good textual links from the profile… Rankings may fluctuate a bit but its way better then getting hit by any black and while Animal!

Miriam is a super women when it comes to Local SEO... nailed it!

There could be like tons of ideas here but I will try and list the few that I commonly use from time to time.

-          Instead of writing description to include keyword in it. Try to write the description that talk more to audience and encourages them to click. This will literally increase your CTR level to greater extent.

-          Get in to the mind of the people and come up with titles that attract them and encourage them to share with others in their circle.

-          Make sure all your technical parameters and SEO is in place as this can lead to better CTR level as well as actual clicks.

-          URL optimization. If your URL will be optimized properly, this will have an impact on your click as well as CTR ratio.

There could be much more ideas but above are the one that are easy to optimize and have a great impact on Your CTR level.

Above ideas are all based on SEO perspective. If you want to increase your CTR level using PPC, then this article sounds like a perfect fit for you. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/50-strategies-increase-click-rate-via-ppc-advertising/85019/

Hope this helps!

To be honest, I f i would be at your place I wouldn’t have used that and if it was available I would have delete it till now for few specific reasons...

1. This has no impact from the SEO point of view and search engine is not getting or collecting any information from this...so why write more?
2. If the Meta Keyword tag is smartly inserted then it can be dangerous and this is because you are seriously helping your competitors to see what keywords are you targeting on the page and then he can alter his strategies accordingly to outrank you in search engine from the desired key phrases.

Hope this helps!

Well the reason why I might say No are due to the following two reasons!

1. PR of Google does not update regularly so even if the contractor is working it might not help in meeting the KPI!
2. Generally moving from 1 to 7 in a year is even not doable target in my opinion

I think the target should be set which are effective for your business as well as for contractor! This can be:

-          1^st Page ranking from the head keywords in a year

-          Certain amount of increase in traffic and conversions.

-          Brand Value in different online medium that include social!

And similar KPIs that can be set after the detail analysis of the project from different angles!

Kevin, while analyzing your competitors and also while building your own strategy, the most important thing that you have to consider is quality.

Usually good amount of links from fewer domains is not really helpful and it is always advisable to earn links from different domains….

I think your first step must be to figure out the quality of domains from where your competitors are getting a link, are they relevant websites? News websites? High authority? And other important factors…

Step two is to design you strategy in which you have to think that can you acquire link from the websites where your competitor’s link is present (if they are credible website this is a good strategy to start.)

You also have to design strategies that allow you to get links from different domains like guest posting, info-graphics, interviews and more…

One of the finest thing I did when I plan to quite the job and start to offer services, I started to treat myself like an annoying client who have a less budget and expecting big! I started giving myself timelines for my own projects and targets that I have to achieve within that timeline.

Once I pass through that exam I start with a service that was easily scalable and was producing value to the overall picture.

My advice to you is to do the same, test your skills and talent, challenge yourself and once you pass your own exam, you probably will be ready to offer services to your clients. If you really care your client’s money and your reputation and wanted to play safe start with one service that adds value to the big picture and then let your clients suggest you to start full service consultation.

Just a thought!

My advice would be to research your industry, plan few titles and test accordingly.

Let’s talk completely about branding, I would never recommend you to go for .co domain when .com and co.uk is already taken by other companies...

It’s always an advantage to me to add keyword in the domain name but don’t push it too much if you are not getting it focus more on branding and choose a domain name that is easy to remember.

For separating keywords in the domain i would say do not use it and if it is necessary then use ‘-’ instead of ‘_’.

Hope this help!

I have this kind of experience in the past and as per the best of my knowledge you have to be very planed before executing stuff or else you will see some not easily irrecoverable damages that will create a problem.

Here are few things that you should plan

• Plan the redirection

As you said your complete URL structure will be changed this means you have to create and excel sheet to note all your current URLs and set the new URLs in the next column and set 301s accordingly.

• Picking the right eCommerce Platform

This is critical, I have worked with Joomla (I hate it), Wordpress, osCommerce, Zencart and Magneto and I have a good time playing with Magneto and Zencart.

There are actually several things to plan before switching from one platform to other keeping SEO on the safe side!

The best advice is to heir a person with good SEO (eCommerce) experience and he can do the good job for you!