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Boxed navigation is becoming pretty common navigation style these days. Many large corporations such as Rackspace, IBM, and Cisco use this format.

Best practice is to have on average not more than 150 outbound links on the page so try to maintain your on page links around this number.

I would not be too concerned on where you put the content on the site as long as the content can be crawled by the search spider. Blog is the best place on a website to provide good quality content to your users where they can subscribe to RSS and follow your work. It can also increase chances of generating User Generated Content on your website which will ultimately benefit your rankings.

Jared,

I would think more about the user experience and less about the search spider when changing the site / url architecture. If your users are able to find the information they need faster and easier with your new architecture then I would go with that.

Using "services" page does sounds appropriate and you can always use right keywords in the URL while 301 redirecting your older URLs to the new ones.

Not sure if I understand your point correctly. Are you saying you will be dynamically feeding keywords on the pages with tabs?

I would suggest to go for yourwebsite.com/location since it will be better experience for your local visitors and will save an extra click.

Your most recent Google cache is showing the target as Toronto,Ontario confirming your concerns.

The challenge you are facing is similar to sites like Yellowpages.com, superpages.com and any other location targeted sites may face. The way these sites have worked around is by adding relevant static content to the website.

By adding relevant content to your home page your will be able to minimize the location targeting effect. Plus, search spiders already know that you are not limited to the location of IP because they have indexed multiple pages from your website.

I also noticed that your home page outbound link to content ratio is upside down. You have too many links on the homepage and extremely limited content. Additionally, the text blurb on the top is not user friendly and stuffed with too many keywords. You can easily replace this text with user friendly static content such as your website USP.

Analytics coding can get tricky at time and there can be instances where you may see wrong data being reported. I always recommend more than one web analytics platform so you can have data in the instance of failure of your primary analytics tools.

Yes. You can certainly have more than one analytics platform and continue to have correct data. Both Clicky and Google Analytics are owned and developed by separate entities and there should not be any interference in data collection or reporting.

There might be a web page code conflict instead of analytics tag conflict.

Can you post your web address so I can review the codes?

Font size impacts user experience and may impact SEO in certain cases. Providing users multiple font size options to choose from i.e small, medium, large helps user experience. Search spiders do look for usage of bold, italics and H1 tags on a web page. Better user experience generally lead to better SEO.

Can you elaborate on the issues you are facing?

I checked the header for both URLs are they are indeed giving me a 200 ok header code which means this is a page canonicalization issue.

Page canonicalization happens in cases where www or non www, .php or non .php , .asp or non .asp pages exist.

The solution to this is to do a 301 redirect of http;//search-engine-upgrade.com/default.asp to

http;//search-engine-upgrade.com using htaccess file.

Please this line of code in your htaccess file

redirect 301 /default.asp http://search-engine-upgrade.com

or you can the following rewrite code

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /default.asp\  HTTP/

RewriteRule ^default.asp$ http://www.search-engine-upgrade.com/ [R=301,L]

I would assume you are referring to site architecture. If this is the case then there are several good tools in market that are used by dev / designers to map out the site artchitecture or sitemaps.

Microsoft visio http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/

Power mapper http://www.powermapper.com/

Smart draw http://www.smartdraw.com/

I have used smart draw for flow charts and found it lot easier to use.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Sameer

Hey Vineesh,

I would suggest you should perform SERP analysis (http://seomoz.box.net/shared/g3vz0kxbbp) on the top 10 listings for your target keywords. It is quite possible that backlinks is not the only key issue here. There could be several reasons why your website is not ranking and some of these are

1. Authority of the domain

2. Authority of the pages your are trying to rank

3. Total number of backinks

4. Quality of the backlinks

5. Social syndication by users (mainly Twitter / Fb)

6. On page optimization

Identify the pattern using the statistical calculation mentioned in above linked excel file and focus on the gap.

Thanks

Sameer

I checked the header for both URLs are they are indeed giving me a 200 ok header code which means this is a page canonicalization issue.

Page canonicalization happens in cases where www or non www, .php or non .php , .asp or non .asp pages exist.

The solution to this is to do a 301 redirect of http;//search-engine-upgrade.com/default.asp to

http;//search-engine-upgrade.com using htaccess file.

Please this line of code in your htaccess file

redirect 301 /default.asp http://search-engine-upgrade.com

or you can the following rewrite code

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /default.asp\  HTTP/

RewriteRule ^default.asp$ http://www.search-engine-upgrade.com/ [R=301,L]

Google will automatically detect the origin of the keyword request based on the IP and will localize the result. The new local SERP is blended result which is a combination of local places, local directories, national / global listings, news , videos and other media.

The first step is to find out if a keyword search for "appliance repair" results in a locally influenced search results. If you are seeing the Google places listing for this keyword then move on to the next step which is optimizing your on and off page elements for the target keywords.

I looked at your Google place page and noticed that 100% of your website reviews are Google reviews. If you look at a recently conducted study by SEOMoz there is a bigger correlation between high local search ranking and reviews from third party review sites than Google place review. I suggest you should ask for reviews on other sites like yelp.com, citysearch.com, judysbook and similar.

Diversity of review is also important as much as the volume of the reviews.

I would certainly rate this strategy as grey if not black and avoid it. This is one of the area in search marketing where lot of sites tend to get away with but may soon face consequences. SEO / Link building companies mainly located overseas rely on this technique heavily.

It is definitely painful and unfair when a competitor with spam links ranks well for highly competitive keywords set while a professional SEO spends months working hard playing the clean game. However, the reward from white hat is unmatched.

One last thing that I would like to point out is links from website hosted on the same IP blocks are less valuable links from different IP blocks. This is same as the domain diversity concept.

Cache tags are associated with caching of the page for faster downloads .

instructs the browser to download the information from the local cache instead of getting information from the network server allowing decreased load time.

The exact opposite is  where the browser will not use the local cache and download the information from the server.

As a best practice, cache should be controlled through HTTP headers ("Expires", "Cache-Control: max-age" and "Last-Modified") instead of using Meta.

The other option is to use .htaccess code for caching of images and other content to speed up load time.

Directory submissions are a total waste of time. Personally, I would not use any software solutions that offer mass directory / article / comment submissions because these fall under grey area and search engines don't value these anymore like they use to years ago.

Local directory submission to websites like angielist, superpages, citysearch, yelp is certainly useful for local rankings.

We recently (Feb 2011) completed a major domain migration project where we moved Rackspacecloud.com to Rackspace.com/cloud. Both domains are high authority websites and moving over thousands of pages was a challenge in itself. What we learnt from the process was that authority of the domain matters a lot during domain migrations.

If you follow all the steps in the migration process to the T then chances are you will regain the ranks/juice pretty quickly (domain with higher authority regain faster).

During our migration we were able to transfer atleast 30% ranking to the new domain in about 72 hours. The new domain is now ranking for more than 80% of the keywords that the old domain ranked for. We also found that the new domain is also ranking for some of the top keywords that we were not ranking with the original domain because of the combination of massive link juice, proper redirections and new links.

It took 3 weeks for major search engines to index 90% of the new pages on the Rackspace.com/cloud site and during this transition we continued to receive SEO traffic through the old index pages. (some of the sub domains on the original website are not migrated yet)

The most important steps in the process are

• proper 1x1 301 redirection

• Web master tools update (change of address)

• sitemap updates

• request your top backlinked websites to change the TLD

• drive new links to the new site more aggressively

As far as the usability goes, short URLs are beneficial but I really don't see major difference between smallbusinessdoer.com and smallbizdoer.com.

Google will automatically pickup the reviews from other sites but you can increase the speed of sync by making sure your profile is an exact match on the review sites. It is highly recommended that you take over the ownership of your profile on each of the top local review sites and optimize your business information. We have tested this technique and it worked well.

Here are the details of the test.

Sample -

Business A - New Google Place account and exact matching Judysbook.com + Citysearch account (exact headline, address, and tel#).

Business B - New Google Place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account with a different headline but same phone number and address.

Business C - New Google place account and JJudysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different phone # but same address and headline.

Business D - New Google place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different address but same headline and phone #.

Submit each Judysbook.com + Citysearch account landing page to Twitter and digg manually one time only after reviews have been added. (Spam free Twitter account with 2000+ followers and clean Digg account with 50+ followers and regular diggs)

Outcome

Google picked up the reviews from Judysbook.com for A and Citysearch account for B.

Note - Google only picked up 1 or 2 reviews for both A and B from the review site so there could be some special algorithm in place for selecting the reviews based on quality.

I will be writing a blog post on my blog on this study soon.

Hope this helps.

Sameer

As a standard practice, a webpage will not be considered duplicate if the content is 60% unique. However, having a "id" tag on the indexed pages is not a good user experience and Google certainly will not like too many pages will the id tags.

Here are three options that you can follow -

1. Go to "Parameter handling" in Site configuration settings in Google webmaster tools for your website and add "id" as on of the parameter. There is a good chance that Google will read this and ignore all the pages on your site with the parameter "id". We have tested this and found to be successful for ton of the parameters we use on our website including campaign tracking codes.

2. Continue using rel canonicals for duplicate pages so Google bot may not index it.

3. Make changes to your site code to each time a user creates a new page it will be created as a seperate url without any "id" parameter (similar to url shortners like bit.ly). This will allow you to tap in the UGC easily.

Thanks

Sameer