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You just confirmed everything I suspected. Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I do some SEO work for a personal injury attorney, and due to his profession, he gets cold-called by every digital marketing company under the sun. He recently got called by a company that offers packages that include posting in multiple directories (all on domains they own), creating subdomains for search listings, and PR services like writing and distributing press releases for distribution to multiple media outlets. The content they write will obviously not be local. All this and more for less than $500 a month!

I'm curious if any of you have any experience with companies like this and whether you consider them black hat. I realize I'm asking you to speculate on a very broad description of what they offer, but their linking strategies sound risky to me. What experiences have you had with companies like this? Do you know anyone who has ever gotten a penalty using these tactics?

Thanks, in advance, for sharing your thoughts.

Thanks, Ryan! Yeah, I'm not going crazy with geo references in the copy. I just don't want to miss out on searches for "general contractor burlington vt" when the difference is negligible. Good advice. Thanks again!

Are you already networking with other site owners who blog about similar content, and if so, have you shared or linked to their stuff? I would reach out to influential site owners you've helped by amplifying their content. Write a professional email that demonstrates that you've read their stuff and know their audience, and make a great case on why they will appreciate the piece you are writing about. Make it as personal and professional as possible, and your chances of earning a link are greatly increased.

Hope this helps!

I am optimizing a site for a general contractor in a small market -- Chittenden County, Vermont -- and I'm struggling with how to label his local identity on-page. His registered place of business is in a town about 12 miles outside of Burlington, which is the largest city in the county and state. Nearly 80% of geo modified keywords go to Burlington, and most people consider Chittenden County to be "greater Burlington."

I am wondering whether it will help or hurt SEO to use "Burlington" in the titles, headers, etc, even though their actual location is a few miles away. They don't get customer visits -- business operations are located in a residence and all inquiries come in over the phone or email -- so I'm not worried so much about confusing visitors. Also, their official location will be available in the footer and contact page.

If I go with "Burlington," how will this impact search rankings and G+ Places when I start focusing on citations in various directories. Will this slight geo discrepancy cause problems with organic and local SEO?

I've been wrestling with this for a while. Your input is REALLY appreciated. Thanks, guys!

Thanks for your responses, everyone.  Sorry my post was vague.  I should've run that through the meat grinder a few more times before posting.  The problems with the site are many and varied.  Lots of duplicate content pages, duplicate titles, missing metas -- most of which are pretty minor league.  There are tons of pages where the only content is nothing more than a large graphic between the header and footer, with no descriptive alt tag, and this, I believe, is causing the duplicate page issue.  The pages have no h1, h2, etc.  Just graphics.

There are many superfluous pages, as well.  They have a restaurant page, and instead of linking out to those restaurants they link to another internal page that just includes a logo and phone number.  Just to make things interesting, the site is also trying to be bilingual.  They are using a WPML translation plugin and several of the pages are duplicated in French.  I need to dig and see if that is contributing to the crawl errors.

It's amazing to me that this site just launched.  It's one of the worst WP hack jobs I've ever seen.

Now that I've gotten in the dash and seen the menus, I have a better sense of what all these pages are and it's not quite so daunting.  I just need to dig my way out, one page at a time, like you said.  You guys are the best.  Thanks for your help!

An agency referred me to a client who wants a proposal for SEO.  The website has been recently completed, but it a complete train wreck.  I just ran a Moz crawl and I'm looking at 303 issues to fix out of a site with 377 pages.  I just downloaded an xml sitemap, hoping to prioritize what needs to be done, however I'm not getting a clear sense of the hierarchy.

In your opinion, what is the best way to attack a project of this size?  I am clear on the client's business goals, so I can work on the most crucial pages first, but I can't leave the rest of the site a mess.  Should I start by gathering for links that have no user value and plan to block them with meta tags?  I'm used to optimizing much smaller sites, so any advice on how to approach this proposal would be much appreciated.  Thank you!

Makes sense.  I forgot to mention that each audience type will have it's own blog.  Is it okay to house more than one blog under a single domain?  Thanks for the feedback, guys!

My client has created a product that he wants to market to two, very different, audiences.  The goal is to funnel them through the site and get them to purchase.  My question is about the best SEO strategy on how to do this effectively.

Since they are distinct audiences with little in common we've recommended building two microsites, and optimizing each with unique content and different keyword focus.  I realize it will be harder to optimize two sites rather than one, but it seems to make sense from a user perspective.  But once the users goes to a "non-audience specific" page, like any page that is about the product or company and not about the audience, should we build yet a third website that houses the "company/product pages" and channel the conversions there in order to avoid having duplicate content on the two other sites?  Or should we put the same "company pages" on both the Audience A and Audience B websites, only vary the text so it doesn't look like duplicate content.  Or is the microsite strategy flawed all together?

Please keep in mind this is a brand new product and it has national scope.  There is no local focus.  We will be building their rankings entirely from scratch.  I REALLY appreciate any insights you may have.  We have been going around and around about this.  Thanks

Are you already networking with other site owners who blog about similar content, and if so, have you shared or linked to their stuff? I would reach out to influential site owners you've helped by amplifying their content. Write a professional email that demonstrates that you've read their stuff and know their audience, and make a great case on why they will appreciate the piece you are writing about. Make it as personal and professional as possible, and your chances of earning a link are greatly increased.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for your responses, everyone.  Sorry my post was vague.  I should've run that through the meat grinder a few more times before posting.  The problems with the site are many and varied.  Lots of duplicate content pages, duplicate titles, missing metas -- most of which are pretty minor league.  There are tons of pages where the only content is nothing more than a large graphic between the header and footer, with no descriptive alt tag, and this, I believe, is causing the duplicate page issue.  The pages have no h1, h2, etc.  Just graphics.

There are many superfluous pages, as well.  They have a restaurant page, and instead of linking out to those restaurants they link to another internal page that just includes a logo and phone number.  Just to make things interesting, the site is also trying to be bilingual.  They are using a WPML translation plugin and several of the pages are duplicated in French.  I need to dig and see if that is contributing to the crawl errors.

It's amazing to me that this site just launched.  It's one of the worst WP hack jobs I've ever seen.

Now that I've gotten in the dash and seen the menus, I have a better sense of what all these pages are and it's not quite so daunting.  I just need to dig my way out, one page at a time, like you said.  You guys are the best.  Thanks for your help!

You just confirmed everything I suspected. Thank you!