Welcome to the Q&A Forum

within the div is fine. the search engine spider will see it.

Trying to find common links among your competition is a good start (if they all can get a link for site A, you should be able to as well). Divide any potential candidates up into groups depending on how likely you think you are to achieve the link. Try to spend more effort on the one that you feel likely to pan out.There are some obvious things to rule out like links from sites that appear to have been dead for some time and old news articles/posts. If you run out of good options on your direct competition, you might turn to other places that you don't directly compete with, but that have similar real estate.

Another idea is to try to find some good real estate blogs and write a couple of interesting to read guest posts that you can submit. This method works really good. You offer up interesting content to the blog and in return you get a link back to your site.

Now that looks like the place to live. Should I ask what real estate goes for there?

You might make sure that you have localized links in any real estate related directories. You should be able to find some worthwhile places to list if you spend some time searching. Run any competitive sites that also sell real estate in your area through Open Site Explorer and see where they have gotten their links from.

The purpose of your sitemap is to tell Google to go out and index the pages you specify. The purpose of the robots.txt is to tell Google not to index the page. The warning is likely just a precaution to let you know that you may have by accident requested them to block something in robots.txt. If you remove the URL's from your submitted sitemap the warnings should disappear. If you leave them, you will have warnings but Google should not index the content since your blocked it in robots.txt.

What has worked best in the WP world for me is always sticking with a www.somedomain.com/{category}/{page}. This seems along the lines of what you have shown with domain.com/blue-shoes/blue-shoes-tampa. I like this permalink structure.

Definitely avoid going too deep: www.somedomain.com/clothing/lowerbody/feet/shoes/blue-shoes-tampa

And avoid being too repetitive: www.blue-shoes.com/blue-shoes/blue-shoes

Other than that, I think you are on the right track.

Build interesting and useful content and people will link to it. You have probably heard this a thousand times if you have even begun looking into link building and SEO. While it is a great motto to live by, it won't get you started. Without some initial link building effort your website will be as good as the tree that fell in the woods when nobody was around.

Step 1) Some tips for getting started... I always like to start each new site with a blog. I take a little time each week away from my standard work to write a single highly interesting blog post in the topic area. It is important than you don't just write filler posts, but actually focus on interesting titles and topics that will grab a reader. After each post, use any social media connections that you have to distribute a link. Now go back about your business. You will be surprised how this can help your site get started. If the posts are good, you are likely to get at least a few initial links. Google also likes to see the regular content updates and it helps you to build some rapport.

Step 2) Know your competitors and make sure that you are offering better, more interesting content. If you don't have better stuff, how can you expect to win? Once you have the site set up, focus on building links until you get a regular stream of traffic. Try whatever non-tacky links you can obtain. I would recommend a few easy directory listings and try to do a couple of guest posts for a blog related to your niche.

Step 3) Once you have some visitors flowing through your pages regularly, it is time to knock the competition out of the park. This is where the "Build interesting and useful content and people will link to it" comes into play. You should be asking yourself constantly what do my visitors want that my competitors don't have. Try to come up with any ways to get your visitors to interact more with your site, and encourage them to share things via social media. If you have the right effort, this is where your link building will really take off (and you aren't even focusing on link building).

Hope this helps.

Thanks Keri, you got me in the right direction. I think I got to hung up on nice distribution of locations. On looking further each of the direct hits was coming from amazonaws.com (must be a bot of some sort). Has anyone seen Roger? Was he out drinking again last night?

I think this depends a lot on what the text of the body looks like. If in general, the first couple of lines of the body is a good introduction that would inspire someone to click on the search result, then that would be a fine way to go. Otherwise you may want to trust Google. They do a pretty good job of selecting some relevant text for you.

If all of these are product pages, another option may be to dynamically create a generic yet enticing first sentence that the name of the product could be inserted in to and follow it with the first line from the body. So something like "Our <insert product="" name="">is the greatest thing since sliced bread. <insert custom="" text="" from="" the="" body="" to="" fill="" rest="">". So you would yield results like "Our door slide is the greatest thing since sliced bread...." and "Our black cabinet knob is the greatest thing since sliced bread....".</insert></insert>

Note my choice of initial phrase was more for comic relief. I would especially avoid that if the store also sells sliced bread

It is really bizarre to me that I couldn't find two direct visits to the same page from the surge. While it is not uncommon to receive some direct traffic to internal pages, the direct visits are typically to just a few of my more popular pages. I haven't myself purchased any traffic as this particular site is purely informational and driven by Adsense clicks. I am waiting for the email that says "Hey did you see your traffic surge last night, pay x amount and we will keep it coming."

I don't think it was a social media related post due to the fact that all traffic is showing a Chrome browser. The natural spread of visitor locations has me ruling out a bot and such. It's more of a curiosity thing at this point (as long as it does not return).

Yes it is not that massive since it stopped, but if continued, it would consist of the majority of my site's traffic. I'm under the impression that if you get huge amounts of unnatural traffic that are constantly bouncing off your site, it is a red flag for Adsense  publishers but I may be wrong on this.

Again it's more me being curious than anything. I don't mind being unproductive if I learn something along the way.

Build interesting and useful content and people will link to it. You have probably heard this a thousand times if you have even begun looking into link building and SEO. While it is a great motto to live by, it won't get you started. Without some initial link building effort your website will be as good as the tree that fell in the woods when nobody was around.

Step 1) Some tips for getting started... I always like to start each new site with a blog. I take a little time each week away from my standard work to write a single highly interesting blog post in the topic area. It is important than you don't just write filler posts, but actually focus on interesting titles and topics that will grab a reader. After each post, use any social media connections that you have to distribute a link. Now go back about your business. You will be surprised how this can help your site get started. If the posts are good, you are likely to get at least a few initial links. Google also likes to see the regular content updates and it helps you to build some rapport.

Step 2) Know your competitors and make sure that you are offering better, more interesting content. If you don't have better stuff, how can you expect to win? Once you have the site set up, focus on building links until you get a regular stream of traffic. Try whatever non-tacky links you can obtain. I would recommend a few easy directory listings and try to do a couple of guest posts for a blog related to your niche.

Step 3) Once you have some visitors flowing through your pages regularly, it is time to knock the competition out of the park. This is where the "Build interesting and useful content and people will link to it" comes into play. You should be asking yourself constantly what do my visitors want that my competitors don't have. Try to come up with any ways to get your visitors to interact more with your site, and encourage them to share things via social media. If you have the right effort, this is where your link building will really take off (and you aren't even focusing on link building).

Hope this helps.

My keyword rankings did not update. It says updates every Thursday and the last update shows as Aug 23 (which was the original update). Any idea why this would happen and how I can get the updated info?

The purpose of your sitemap is to tell Google to go out and index the pages you specify. The purpose of the robots.txt is to tell Google not to index the page. The warning is likely just a precaution to let you know that you may have by accident requested them to block something in robots.txt. If you remove the URL's from your submitted sitemap the warnings should disappear. If you leave them, you will have warnings but Google should not index the content since your blocked it in robots.txt.

I think this depends a lot on what the text of the body looks like. If in general, the first couple of lines of the body is a good introduction that would inspire someone to click on the search result, then that would be a fine way to go. Otherwise you may want to trust Google. They do a pretty good job of selecting some relevant text for you.

If all of these are product pages, another option may be to dynamically create a generic yet enticing first sentence that the name of the product could be inserted in to and follow it with the first line from the body. So something like "Our <insert product="" name="">is the greatest thing since sliced bread. <insert custom="" text="" from="" the="" body="" to="" fill="" rest="">". So you would yield results like "Our door slide is the greatest thing since sliced bread...." and "Our black cabinet knob is the greatest thing since sliced bread....".</insert></insert>

Note my choice of initial phrase was more for comic relief. I would especially avoid that if the store also sells sliced bread

Trying to find common links among your competition is a good start (if they all can get a link for site A, you should be able to as well). Divide any potential candidates up into groups depending on how likely you think you are to achieve the link. Try to spend more effort on the one that you feel likely to pan out.There are some obvious things to rule out like links from sites that appear to have been dead for some time and old news articles/posts. If you run out of good options on your direct competition, you might turn to other places that you don't directly compete with, but that have similar real estate.

Another idea is to try to find some good real estate blogs and write a couple of interesting to read guest posts that you can submit. This method works really good. You offer up interesting content to the blog and in return you get a link back to your site.