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**If my decision is bad then they can gloat when I return to pay them to redo it their way. **

this genuinely made me laugh! hey but at least you do this in the end if you do find yourself in the wrong! There are those (bosses and worse yet, clients) who amazingly won't admit mistakes or pay for rework, and somehow twist the situation and put the blame squarely on the person (developer) who HAD to do it their wrong way, you know, because "professionals" should know better and advise them in advance... on those occasional times that is. And then somehow as that idea backfires, the dev/design/seo rework is unpaid or underpaid with lots of unnecessary commentary... believe me its a dog world out here.

Oh wow! You are awesome Miriam!

I think I will go ahead and conduct a study on this anyway, this presents a perfect opportunity as i have two clean and fresh slates to work with, one, for a client which I will do varied to be perfectly safe, and one for our own redesigned website to be launched soon, which I can take all the risk for and just do one single copy and see and compare the effects. Although it will be apples vs oranges due to totally different industries, but I doubt one ever gets to compare the two routes for the same type of business unless you are lucky enough (or shady enough) to have access to competing clients data...

I really do appreciate your post and time spent, deserves all the thumbs ups I can give it and may well get me to do this albeit somewhat flawed study.

Not sure if I will have the time to setup a fully controlled study... but it will be nice to get some idea of how this works. Hopefully i can report back soon in a youmoz post. Thanks again

based on everything i have seen, and if you have millions of pages. you cannot go wrong with Distilled.

Major respect for them! They know their stuff, and they are super good at preaching what they do as well. which means what they do must  be the cream of the crop.

just my 2 cents, really do not know very many of them, but I can tell you these guys are true pros.

any time!

wait, direct traffic has nothing to do (or actually very very little to do) with your "google" and other SE organic traffic.

Did you use to run any offline or other marketing campaigns or deals? Any groupons? Those campaigns ending can instantly get reflected in direct traffic drops per my experience.

also, do you know if this is historically a dead season for the type of site you are referring to?

I would like to see what is the consensus here about this stuff as virtually any automated service, be it yext or yahoo, will use one description text and use it for every available listing in their ecosystem.

In general what is your take on varying this business description text? of course, I would personally put a safer bet on avoiding any duplicate text between listings and the domain of the business in any case. but my questions is more between listing vs listing.

THIS IS BAD - WHY?

THIS HAS NO IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER - WHY NOT?

and in conclusion and hindsight, would one need to watch out for duplicate content across non-domain assets used by the business so long as none of the content is duplicated from the business domain? I tried my best googling this, but did not find a straight answer anywhere.

I would really appreciate some experienced and insightful comments on this one

I knew one of the TOTALLY clueless about SEO "devs" in Houston who was working alongside us with one of our clients... he was on retainer with few clients and he ran his own life and business like that for years... he WAS CLUELESS about anything SEO, we literally had to teach him... he is now working for a giant oil company for something to the tune of 150K as just one of the lead developers... said bye to all his clients and removed himself for good.

Just saying, like some other points made here, he was never actively looking for jobs, he always got referrals and pretty much job and project offers without seeking them aside from chit chats with his own league network of devs, and he refused most, until he hit the secure jackpot with benefits and everything. didn't even have to move and hasn't looked back!

btw im down for coffee [if I find the time man, I often miss my morning one as it is haha], and i do wish you success in finding who you are looking for sincerely, but generally that is one heck of an uphill battle, and I would suggest you do whatever you can with regards to attracting the talent, have you tried reaching out to other top tier companies for outsourcing certain projects to them? That's another way to go as opposed to hiring someone, case by case, contract type deals. IMHO this kind of talent should be found by the seeker, it often wont find u by chance as it wont be looking for jobs per their experience (they very often refuse more clients/jobs too, believe me we have had this very situation for ecommerce SEO clients... and if it sounds like a time consuming thing, they will probably refuse. that is just my experience, albeit very local and very limited in scope of time. Also, quite a few of such talents will be extremely control freaks... just what I have dealt with, they are more like lone wolves than team players as well. hence, even lower chances of success. Don't want to sound pessimistic, but this is what I have encountered with the few that I know.

also one last tip: If I were you, I would definitely hit up all local colleges and universities (even UT out there in Austin and Dallas) for your job offer and particular position/needs, sometimes you will be surprised at the brilliant talent and extremely fast learners you can find via those venues (contact their Career Development centers) at an amazingly low cost... with a little training and insight from your experience, this combo can do very very well. I can attest to this when it comes to designers, but def haven't tried it for developers. maybe worth a try. within a couple to few months, you could have created a major dev monster for your company

Good luck!

My pleasure Rich_995

be advised that there are a lot of "shady" SEO imposters around the world, for all I can suggest, you should block most countries ips if you do not serve them whatsoever, that is one way to cut em out in general... and it can also reduce chances of getting hacked or having malware and bad code inserted. most such events originate overseas, rule of thumb, block any country ending with ....stan especially! lol old soviet republics are a hotbed for hackers and scamsters.

they can be doing this, only to give you a call in a bit and tell you hey we see lots of bad links and we charge only this much to remove them... believe me, we are a marketing company and some of them are dumb enough to call us and offers us their get to the top of google guaranteed services....

my own rule goes like this: I don't know the link, it looks spammy as hell when i visit it, and it has terribly low PA/DA in general, i will add it to my monthly disavow list, if by the time i go machete playing, it is showing no improvements (sometimes it could be a legitimate link and page, just too new to have any good stats), or if i see more flags of spam, then i whack em right away!

Good luck to you and be careful on whacking links as not any link with low DA/PA is necessarily a bad link, spammy links will have normally one obvious sign: Bad or incomprehensible English (robot written text will always give itself away in 3 lines) , cookie cutter or bad design, and often, not so great of a domain and def no physical address or phone number. blogs excluded ofcourse, gotta make sure what is good what is not. and if you have multiple links from the same domain, and u have assured this is a spammy non-desired place, then disavow the domain entirely.

So do you think this had any impact as of sep 2013? Im curious to know if this method works at all or removal or modification of other links will still beat it. thanks

it really depends on your content. this site has a so so DA of just under 50 with over 400,00 links from just 200 something domains.

http://www.9slides.com/Talks/Growth-Hacking-is-not-sexy

this page PA of 0.

http://www.9slides.com/Talks/Fast-Mobile-Development-with-Apache-Cordova-PhoneGap-and-Backbone-js

PA of 22 since april

in comparison, slideshare has a domain authority of nearly 100 with 64 million back links from over 300,000 domains, but you would still find PA 0 slideshows on their platform as well.

http://www.slideshare.net/FrostSimula/10-tips-your-development-partner-wants-you-to-know

so you see, one is definitely more popular or much more established than the other, and in the end that plays some role, but YOUR CONTENT is what determines its PA and popularity, not the domain it is on really. too many of slideshows on both of these sites have horrible PA which means no1 cares about them or creators did not do a good job of promoting it. You have to face facts, the more niche, and the less mainstream type of content (the more professional and highly focused crap) the harder the challenges.

in comparison you can check this one on another provider

http://prezi.com/id1nlqcvqhrw/why-you-want-to-hire-me/ this content was cool and a bit aged, so you can see how it got that nice PA

http://prezi.com/a_4dfvuzpeg1/the-decade-of-data/ this content is too new.

both are on mentions of home page

http://prezi.com/isuuq2i9awi3/prezi-3d-template-by-sydofr/

here is another one with a higher PA. SO TIME IS OF ESSENCE when you are trying to analyze these choices, time and quality of content are about your higher determining factors, although your platform of choice can play a big role into how popular your content becomes and how fast, how sharable it is. not to mention the mere factor of traffics for each of these sites.

here is some hint as which platform gets more visitors overall

Prezi Alexa Traffic Rank: 1,648

9slides Alexa Traffic Rank: 239,923

Alexa Traffic Rank: 44,706

NOTE: Alexa numbers are only a hint, not really too accurate, but you can possibly arrive at an educated guess here about the correlation between PA of your slideshow page (lets say you have the same identically popular and quality content posted on each one of these platforms, at the same time) and how popular the provider itself is.

Given all of what I saw in this very loose and quick analysis, I'd pick prezi (you need a tad bit more skills on this platform) and i would spend a great amount of time and effort in ensuring what i do resonates well with target audience and would further make sure my target audience gets notice of this even if they do not naturally find this stuff on any of these platforms, meaning i would leverage as much controlled exposure to that link as i could via every available medium up to and including offline mediums such as TV or Radio or magazines, not to mention the plethora of apps and various other online mediums.

over time, try to use them in blog posts titles without getting junky and spammy. If you have ever tried to go through Yext local SEO providers and google for the local listing brand + add business search, you will notice that Yext has done a nice job of having a landing page for these and I would suspect these are not very high volume keywords at all.

Do use ubersuggest and keyword planner a lot and also never underestimate the instant search choices when typed into google search bar or chrome. This is about the best and cheapest way to go on these research affairs. Also, checkout yahoo answers and twitter for those phrases, you can get a good idea of what people ask, even if you have a bunch of 0s and 10s coming from google numbers. this will be a nice real world confirmation especially if you see your competitors using it.

one last way, do exact match searches for those keyphrases and see what is the competition like, who is ranking for them and how well those pages are built, or if they have lots of comments, shares, or other social signals.

tedious i know, but hey, this is the core SEO, tedious research and analysis for a solid base, and then move on this base to create the content and code that should fare well over time and various devices.

Here's another thing to consider:

One of my clients who is amazingly a control freak even when it comes to matters like SEO of which he knows next to zilch, has this old directory and multi-website-brands system setup that he swears gets him calls and customers consistently. Well, turned out on of the updates they did to the directory THEY own... they put up a banner ad on every single page of this directory to his own website without a no_follow. you can imagine the rest of story.

We insisted he contact his webmaster to do something about these and make then no follow, which did not happen as the webmaster had not been paid by the guy properly at the time for the retarded banner links...

We immediately disavowed that domain, took 1 ranking drop from pos 1 to 2 for literally a couple of weeks and were back to normal top position in no time. he got to keep his ads and not pay his webmaster (he is a total douche i know) and i got to save his butt from getting burned in long run.

so look at the long game, and your numbers, if that directory is the bread and butter, you may not want to remove these links or anything, but rather disavow the whole thing. you can bet 9000 links from a single domain, do follow, will only get you in trouble, so save the SEO and let them have the rest. catching up to 9000 links from 2000 existing profile to dilute back the link profile is a horrible idea imho as if you do it fast it will further signal spamminess and anyway how on earth will you be able to come up with so many different quality and valuable backlink opportunities before you lose out all your ranking edge over competitors. so just dont ignore it and dont try to play catch up with it (at least not fast) and play it safe for their SEO. they may like the calls now and the cash flow, but they can turn around and fire you in 6 months when they realize they are on page 13 or something

I would avoid a subdomain and go with a subfolder ie /product-uk. furthermore, i would try to find some major keyphrases related and do a couple or a few blog posts or other descriptive and valued content pages for that specific country and market.

however if it was up to me, i would put the best bet on local ccTLDs and go for a new website, have your current website create a /subfolder and redirect that 301 or better yet button/link to the entirely new domain. This way you can rank both ways. boost up a bit on description side of announcement and having a descriptive page about each market on the main domain you already own, and then getting.

case study: newegg.com and newegg.ca (also neweggbusiness.com) they COULD have technically speaking done it all on a .com, but they go all the way out for good reasons. Same with almost every other major international business.

NONTHELESS, if direct selling is not the main point, you can see how these guys are doing it

http://www.halliburton.com/en-US/halliburton-global-locations/default.page?node-id=hgbr8q6p&SRC=Footer

it will really be up to your brand popularity in your industry worldwide, and your budget and time, as well as your sales/lead generation methods. Also, you did mention that none of your competitors are on ccTLDs so that is another thing to consider. Do they do business in more than one country? How are they doing it, often studying and analyzing the few top competitors will give up their secrets with minimal hardship.

just something to note for others and for future, you get the notice IN JUNE 2013, and you are posting here asking about in almost in September... this can generally cause mayhem and result in what has happened, a lost message. Gotta be on toppa the game man, notice, next day or same night better get into it!

use absolute internal links, safer in general. do not stress more than naturally needed. GET THEIR LOCAL SEO GOING.

think of users, if I am copying that relative link, guess what, as a user, i have to actually DO the part that crawlers take care of in a nanosecond via code... and that is just not so cool in today's ADHD user world. make it easier to get links with every available ounce of opportunity, and this is just a tiny one.

what do you mean getting no links at all, that sounds like you are in a deep black hole!

GET ALL OF YOUR OLD URL ADDRESS with mentioned methods, via backlinks, and via existing flawed google sitelinks, get as many of them as you can. then 301 them to appropriate new equivalent pages on the new site.

and do not forget to submit a sitemap after you are set and done with all of above.

another method that can hint at this stuff is using the visual view (IN PAGE ANALYTICS) of google analytics (granted link percentages will be calculated from all links to that destination from the page you are trying to analyze, but if you have only 1 link per destination, this will be rather accurate.)

dont forget to submit  a new sitemap to google within GWT AFTER you finish your removals and other changes as suggested. that should also force google to act a bit faster than it would otherwise do in recognizing the changes.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/submit-urls-to-google-with-fetch-as.html

Press releases CAN rarely be useful if you have actual newsworthy affairs... say an event sponsorship that is for a good or community cause that can make it to your local paper or news sites actually.

stay AWAY from CHEAP providers such as lightening press releases (pure spam artists) or others as they all will involve a high degree of utter rubbish spam networks of scrapers and syndication sites that will constantly generate links for you for months on end, that COULD POTENTIALLY BITE you at some point even if Google currently does not care about them.

PRweb does nicely and is about the only one I would personally trust to be least spammy in the network of their 30000 bloggers. but there will be spam unless you are taking the highway and having a professional PR firm or person take care of affairs with more personal relations in the media crowd than one of these web services. costly, but can get you HOURS OF LIVE COVERAGE on tv (say if you are a restaurant and your fox666 local channel has nothing better to do for 8-11 am slot) which in turn not only can bring more traffic and actual market exposure, but will more than likely have some people check u out and give you links/reviews/etc.

Be forewarned, you stop paying Yext, and all of those changes and accuracies made sure of, are kaput.

Do this math: Do what yext does, manually yourself or outsourced, ONCE, AND CORRECTLY. and you are pretty much set for life. else, you pay $300 a year to Yext and in return, they give you a whole lot of free listings and a few unique and paid ones, the value of which is really not that much more than the free listings you can manually create on a good 95% of yext partners. Also, there are a lot more legit local directory sites to use on top of what yext has to offer which will be missed if one pressed the button, pays, and forgets. just my 2 cents on Yext.

Also, does your client happen to have a real actual physical location they operate out of, or are they out of some virtual office / ups store type address. Because Google has gotten somewhat smart with this stuff lately and also your competition can flag you and report you for violation of terms of Google service.

We have seen perfectly performing business on the graph, suddenly disappear due to very likely this very reason.

if you see "We currently do not support the location" in your dashboard, this is the case.

http://moz.com/community/q/google-places-we-currently-do-not-support-the-location-2

Sounds like someone is messing with you and your site. A shady competitor that is.

Google has said to use the disavow tool like a machete when you do use it. so read up a bit more on the below links and decide whether you should use it or not. I'd probably use it if this is the case of someone screwing around and I can ascertain about that, and I'd do so with extreme prejudice and no mercy on any domain/link I do not want nor had done anything to get anything back from. things that can now potentially throw off my other concerted efforts by diluting the anchor texts and making my link profile utterly spammy. Think C-blocks and IPs too...

Negative results and implications of these links may not YET be visible to you but by the time they are, it may be enough damage to affect your ranking and exposure on SERPs. Depends hugely on who is your nearest competition and what industry it is and how many competitors are out there to get you.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271695/Disavowing-Links-Google-Says-Use-a-Machete-Not-a-Scalpel

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-tool-harm-17327.html

"However, if you see a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links point to your site, and you're confident that the links are causing issues for your site, you can use the disavow tool to disavow those links. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

Good luck

Roger is plain smart. Not wise.

You want Gold, you must get your hands dirty.

Track one of these guys down http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/30/tech/web/first-website-cern/index.html

What they are involved with right now, imho is an utter waste of their precious and otherwise productive time and talent... That is like NASA getting its best people to do of all things, a rebuild of Shuttle in a decade or two...

EDIT:

Also, if you are asking all of these things from your "web developer", I would say, you are asking WAAAYYY too much from them. I personally know quite a few brilliant ones right here in Houston who are all the way booked in their professional time, and I would bet you a drink that not a single one of them would fit the criteria of your massive demands fully! It's almost impractical to ask for an experienced, well established developer who is also amazingly good at technical, local, and on-site SEO AND PPC, and be a good content writer too. not to mention the creative part of design which many "developers" do not really come up with themselves and collaborate with designers in their firms or networks to do. Most of them will meet a few criteria points but not all of those very diverse roles!

I am just saying, you could increase the chances of success here by dividing the roles a bit.

you may also want to mention the rewards and pay as well. there is all of this and no mention of what is in it for them. Maybe, just maybe, this alone can help attract more leads. You know, high almighty developers you are looking for do not often go job hunting... quite the opposite they are looking to offload workload to someone else DESPITE the pay, that is just my experience with almost every well-established developer I have dealt with locally.

Tried over Chrome on desktop and mobile. On desktop, I find the new size better and much more inviting to be read.

but on mobile, i find both of them highly not friendly. Overall you need to optimize this page better for mobile, i really must be desperately in need of what you have to say to try and zoom in on a wide text page like this on a tiny screen while on the go. But i guess that would depend if you rely on or get heavy mobile traffic. takes more than a font size change on this one.

my 2 cents, hope it helps

I just noticed this today that some websites and brands look like this on firefox only, and others while still being number one result for their brand name, do not appear like this at all.

also, this does not happen over chrome at all.

both images provided for comparison are using the same google apps account logged in.

It would be nice if someone could shed some light on as to why this happens sporadically and what does it take to be distinguished like this for your own brand if you own the identical domain.com or whatever.

Zz7ZkX5.png lpuwheo.png

Is your on-site SEO tags for Google news setup? Are you in Google news program?

I don't know why exactly Google's crawl rate changes, but that is something mostly out of your control or anyone else's. But I have seen this happen with site switches where before on a php site the blog post would be indexed within minutes to hours and now, a lot of changes take a lot longer to be reflected. mind you this is a #1 ranking site too for its niche.

have a look at these, make sure your on-site tags are all good and apply to google news.

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-news-keywords-tag

also, have you submitted a new sitemap to GWT since the update to site?

other things to consider:

blogger is a google service, they get priority clearance anyway

blogger ha a huge domain authority, your site doesn't

blogger gets millions of visits a day, your website will never

perhaps you can come up with a way to use the above 3 points to your advantage. run a canonical version of the site on a blog, get it indexed, get your links exposed and overtime, google will figure out that it needs to crawl your site rather fast.

I know this is an old thread, but have you made sure your results from analytics do not count any paid adwords stuff? Initially, I had this problem with my first project and realized the major discrepancies were caused by google analytics counting adwords hits and visitors as part of their "search" traffic. GWT does not count anything for adwords in its search numbers.

There is also this as explained by Google. Google basically says there will always be some minor data discrepancies anyway... between GA, GWT, or adwords back end. let alone that data coming in to moz back end.

can't wait until moz analytics is live

When I try to filter your links to internal it appears your have no internal links period. not sure why, but I do know that OSE spider works a little different than roger bot for moz campaigns per experience with some template and AJax/javascript sites.

I also do know this is the case between google and OSE. OSE does not equal google. not even close. trust your GWT data unless someone from moz can calrify why is this happening

also, i just randomly clicked an image on homepage and checked the source code, i see quite a number of no follow tags

use CTRL+F yourself to see what I mean, search for the word follow and highlight all to see them

also i see this which is a bit odd and may be part of the reason your internal links are not being read as well <a class="attribute-value">http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb</a> ???

it depends. that Option can often help a little bit with scrapers if you are going to run a blog (scraping WILL happen if you have worthy content). otherwise, there is not a real need to that.

see this thread for more info. this other link is mentioned in there for modifications to this theme's metadata and settings.

What is your google webmaster tools data showing you. which keywords among your list of researched kws are getting the best stats (clicks, bounce rate and CTR)

this can give you a good insight as to what is that users are searching for and clicking you for.

Furthermore, after doing this and seeing what kws are actually bringing any impressions/traffic to site, I would revisit my keyword research using all the tools and tactics suggested in this guide When dealing with adwords kw tool, i would ensure I get the google "search trends" of my list too in the export (enabled this from columns drop down - you do not need to have an adwords campaign). often times, targeting larger numbers of right keywords (longer tail, less popular, less competitive) is a sure way of gaining a good ranking faster while it can also bring the needed traffic as you wait for your major kws to rank in the longer run. you can also definitely utilize google trends tool for "forecasts" of future trends.

for example if you are aiming to rank high for 20 kws that are each getting 100-300 queries a month via adwords data, it is much better often than attempting to rank high for 2 very competitive and popular kws with thousands of searches per month. your competition is a huge factor in how fast and how well you rank. Especially if you are set against big dawgs (big corps, govts sites, authority sites, wikipedia, etc), it could even be impossible to rank higher than them if they know what they are doing SEO wise- not to mention big dawg DA is always naturally high.

btw have you checked your top competitors for your desired keywords, have you ran a on-page grading for their top ranking pages? have you seen those ranking pages "equity" backlink profile? social shares? all of these count and all it takes for you not to rank is others doing as much of it as possible through approved and organic methods and you may not even be aware of half of them!!!! this is very common for those new and experienced in SEO, that is how vast this thing is and even with a couple of years of experience under your belt you can still find yourself uneducated, outdated or out of the know in a lot of circumstances.

one last note: i would also exclusively use the rank checker tool to analyze rankings for keywords with entire subdomain selected. avoid doing regular searches or incognito ones via the browser as that will actually still take into account your locality regardless of being signed in our out of google.

competitors can easily benefit from that however... as well as few dumb search engines that still hover in the pits of 90s

I would generally stay away from pop ups as much as possible. Consider user experience. Do you like pop ups? even if its a totally legit chat or form window. How about the guy on mobile or with a slower mobile?

from a conversion rate and bounce rate stand point, pop ups typically work against you, regardless of their use.

HOWEVER, obviously the more popular and unique that particular resource on the net, the less this negative impact. ie Yahoo or Google using a pop up is one thing, vs. your small biz site. user reactions do differ based on who it is, and what is being pop up.

if you want to do a test, i suggest using optimizely for A/B testing and seeing how the two compare instead of risking ruining your live stats big time for a test that may end up not being worth all the damage it may cause.

I would like to report that it is now accessible via http://ranktracker.moz.com/, my bad for the panic mode, I am under gun here with a major contract and report I need to compile and this was just so unexpected as I have very little office time left to wrap it up but thanks so much for a rapid response and clarification, hope I can get the most of this remaining hour or so.

iT IS GONE

I GOOGLE IT, IN A FRESH CACHE, IT SHOWS UP AS moz.com/tools/rank-tracker

i GO TO IT, IT SHOWS the proper page, and then when i login it goes to http://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker

OR

http://moz.com/tools/rank-tracker‎

even if i copy the address and try typing in directly, it redirects over there.

this must have happened very recently, i was just conducting research there and had over 100 kw left to use for the day. it is now a 404 no matter what browser i use

PLEASE HELP MOZ!

Hi Christopher

I am not aware of any specific tests, but In my experience I would say that it will depend. Sometimes you may not want a too long of a url string, while your title could technically be long and yet visually fit nicely on page.

But for SEO purposes and for ranking, it definitely helps in my opinion to include the proper long tail kw string of focus in both url and page title tag. Those are among the most worth on-page cues one can utilize for best results.

also ensure they dont steal your content and create duplicate content issues for you.

not identical text. best is not to do that. however, you should and are encouraged to use the same targeted keywords in meta description and post excerpt and if fitting ,post url and title. try to avoid identical strings of words, no identical sentences, stay unique in each readable text section as much as possible, while holding on to your desire kw.

title and url being the same is perfectly ok.

Dont listen to chris, you can lose your 19 DA points along with your money with the next algorithm update by google. he just messing with you.

1. Do not get duped with cheap prices or "paid" links. if you want paid links, run a PR campaign, far far better value. do some press releases if you have news to share. "paid links" of most other kinds really will bite you at some point.

2. you are not doing "everything" in your power, not even close.

3. DIY SEO can be very time consuming and hard to do properly, that is why people like you, business owners whose time is worth more than sitting and learning all about SEO, hire people whose lives revolve around SEO.

4. per my basic and quick look up of your website:

• Your top referring "followed" baclink comes from a page with DA of 55. not so stellar.

• you have 10 total "root domains" giving you 312 backlinks. looks kind of very spammy! that is 31 links per each root domain and only 10 total referring root domains.

• per a little further digging

I notice that your anchor text profile does not seem something too healthy for SEO, very little relevance, and very irrelevant variance. You need to do some keyword research and better optimize your page titles and on-page SEO and then try to integrate those KWs in a non-spammy way into your controlled back-links (those you can edit). you further really need to invest in a way to have user or third party generated content about you and your company.

there you go, now you have a few things to get started on instead of just being upset and pondering what you have done wrong or what those other guys do. SEO is no quick fix nor easy thing to mess with and requires a lot of study time and dedication on a continuous basis.

Good luck!

per this amazing tool by moz, I can see that you do seem to have a bit of anchor text issue here, these numbers that you see are better to be far lower in count towards the top, otherwise google could potentially see them as spam especially if they are all created overnight or in a very short time span, in a shall we say, less than organic type of trend and activity with regards to your websites typical rate of backlink generation, etc.

Google is one heck of a spy agency when it comes to your digital identity and knows probably more than you do about your site. and it can easily spot "manipulation" (suddenly 70+ links change to 3 particular kw groups from diverse and different types before) you want to have a lot of 1-1 numbers and a few top used ones, but not to the extent that you have here that is all i can say. I would say you have made your baclink anchor text appear unnatural to google.

Your brand name is also important to be identified to google so that your name cannot be considered spammed in anchor text. export your results to CSV and SORT them in excel or google spreadsheets and see how often your brand is used in your anchor text, I think it is way too much vs. the rest of your anchor text profile. so are your top non-branded anchor text. I would say that you need to start hitting 1 - 1s by bottom of page one... I would try to build new links or change current ones and turn them more varied and organic

crunch your numbers, get your % of words in a nice visual format. see this and this for more reading and analysis.

There are no SET RULES.

You can use one particular keyphrase per page or you can be savvy and utilize your organic text and similar or alternative terms as well as google is on a daily basis improving on understanding meanings and definitions of words.

Although your keywords ratio counts (your targeted kw over your total number of words per page) to some extent, it is not what it used to be 10 years ago. your actual authority, originality, and uniqueness of content will count many times as much as your keywords of choice.

Of course, not all websites can really utilize this content strategy in a direct way on their pages. In cases like e-commerce where very little changes and updates can be made to a product page's content with a real added value for SEO, the one or two limited kw approach may work better. However, even these guys can exercise SEO blogging and relevant content creation (infographics, etc) on their domain to bring in more traffic and boost overall domain authority which can result in an indirect improvement effect on page authority and traffic as well.

but there are no etched in stone rules about this, you just don't want to spam, and don't want to lose focus of your targeted keywords. those are the only rules you need to know. the rest, how shall i say, "must come to you organically", if you read your text and titles aloud, and they sound fine, you see or hear your keywords a few times, its all good signs you are on the right track.

may i further remind you that when it comes to keywords, it is HIGHLY VITAL you know WHERE  to use them in key places of your site and pages (metadata-not meta keywords-titles, headings, top of the page content, etc) do some digging on this stuff and get a better understanding before spending time generating content, SEO revisions are even more time consuming and mentally exhausting...

Son, if the answer to your question was that simple or known so accurately, those who knew it would be wearing everything in gold!

it is a combination of both of those factors as well as your competition's use of your keywords and others.

Also, it will depend on the rate of new and worthy content creation with relevant and similar keywords included within your website/blog.

it also depends on how popular is your particular keyphrase with searchers themselves, you can use services like google trends, google correlate, and google adwords keyword tool to find out some useful numbers about your targeted kws and their popularity with searchers and competitors (at least with regards to paid ads, but if they know what they are doing they will more than likely use the same kws for SEO as well) alike.

there are no guarantees, but yes there are ways to maximize your chances (age of ads from competitors can count against you as one out of control factor)

you can use the tools google provides such as google traffic estimator and keyword tool to find out data about your keyphrases and their competitiveness. The more competitive a kw, the more you can expect to pay for it during your preferred peak hours of search (yes you can also vary your bids on ads by hours of day using automated rules, after you establish with some time what are the best hours of the day with regards to your traffic and adwords clicks)

In traffic estimator google gives you a pretty close idea of the costs you can expect and the a semi-close image of what you can expect with regards to results. use the **Daily estimates **bar on the bottom of that page for best results. you must have your adwords account already hooked up for best results.

Hope this helped & good luck!

what does your content say about US vs UK? your street address? your google plus page? your google maps listing? heck your other online listings? because you know that google considers all of these as factors for relevancy of information regardless of your geo settings in WT... yep, they have already said they aim to become a "knowledge engine" as opposed to a search engine, so they basically build up a semi-intelligent profile on you this way as far as I can tell, and that is how they can corroborate various types and sources of data about you and then decide how to rank you where and for what keywords.

a lot more involved here than your geo settings in WT imho

Also what are we talking about here, two domains or one domain? .com and .co.uk could very well be treated differently for rankings in UK vs US. I am a bit confused.

DEFINATELY subfolders.

If they are going to affect your SEO, you want to avoid subdomains as each subdomain will be treated as separate and irrelevant from others with regards to link juice and authority build up

you may have to work a little harder this way to achieve similar user experience to sub-domains, using things like geolocation services instead, or even making your site socially friendly and personalized with SSO and so on, and you may have to change your web design around this as well by incorporating navigation buttons or breadcrumbs in proper locations to enhance or organize user experience. In the end, for most situations, subfolders will pay off far far better in the long run, especially for new sites who need heavy SEO work. Down the line and when traffic and authority are established, you can always switch to subdomains and not care about SEO anymore, with proper 301s and other mitigations.

You can safely use the standard feed features provided by most major CMS and blogging platforms, they often have this option enabled by default or let you do it.

Yes!

You have to inform yourself and really watch out for this kind of stuff and SE bots.

Anyone ever had any experience with this tool?

Any feedback on how adobe muse does with SEO and markup is appreciated!

update 1: Really? nobody has any comment on this?