Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Just to make sure I am understanding:

You are trying to rank for the following 3 keywords:

Towels

Egyptian Cotton Towels

Personalized Towels

If that is the case, I recommend that you do not attempt to rank for the single word "Towels".  This is too broad of a term and doesn't reflect buyer intent.  You may want to look into keywords like "Bathroom Towels" or "Buy Cotton Towels" instead.

Since I recommend disregarding that keyword, you could take that single term out of your title tag to cut down on some of that keyword usage.

The 1 word in your URL category is fine

Meta description - don't worry about, that doesn't affect on page optimization at all.  It is good to use for CTR though, so you may want to find ways to make it sound less repetitive and add a call to action.

There are a lot of references to the word "towels" in content though.  You can definitely remove those or substitute other words, or just leave some areas as something like "Egyptian Cotton" because the user is likely to know you are referring to towels in that context.

For example, your top graphic with "Towels" could possibly be rewritten to say

We offer a variety of towels to meet your needs:

• Egyptian Cotton
• Personalized and Embroidered
• For the Nursery
• For the Beach

You can probably find other areas on the page to do this as well.

I think cutting back on these references would make your internal menu links fine.  If you do change those as well, consider doing some user testing to make sure people can still find what they are looking for.

I think with that you would risk the chance of Google viewing those as paid links, so I would be careful.  I think you should request that some of them be no-followed.  Then work on attaining other types of backlinks with that strategy, through stuff like guest posting and writing quality articles on your own blog, doing some type of interesting study in your niche that may be posted to news outlets, etc.

I usually use two different ones:

Yootheme, because their themes are really nice.  Over the years they have gotten a lot easier to figure out how to set up as well, which is great.  However I really dislike their support, really unhelpful for the most part and often seem bothered and rude.

Rockettheme, I really like rockettheme because it has a BUNCH of features, but the one annoying thing with them is that their logos can be hard to add to the theme.  I havent used their support.

I also recommend these because a lot of add-ons or extensions will often be coded to work properly with those two (as they are the most popular) while some themes may cause extensions or plugins to look really wonky.

Looking at OSE for that domain, both sites have links pointing to them.  So a preferred version should be chosen, and as Dana suggested, a 301 put in place.  Since G+ 1s were also considered a ranking factor in Moz's latest update, I would take that into account as well, but interestingly enough it looks like +1s are appropriately applied regardless of the www version.

You don't have a large amount of links or authority built up yet, so ultimately it will not make a huge difference which one you choose, but it is important to stick with one and ensure the other is 301'd appropriately. The non-www has more links, but the www has more links from different domains - so if you did make a choice I would choose the www to get the authority from more linking domains.

The www has slightly higher page authority as well.

www version:

Page Authortity: 35

Linking domains: 12

Total Links 22

G+ 1s: 36

Non WWW Version

Page Authority: 27

Domain Authority: 25

Linking Domains 4

Total Links 164

Google +1s: 36

In response to your WMT question, preferred domain settings are now in the top right hand corner as an option under the gear icon under "site settings"

Tags on blogs can lead to duplicate content, so can date archives if you have them.  I generally suggest indexing categories but blocking tags and date archives from being followed, and setting options to show a limited amount of posts per category.  Block these in robots.txt as well as putting "noindex" and "nofollow" on the pages.

I don't know what CMS you are using for your blog, but if it is Wordpress, Joost's plugin is an excellent plugin to use to help prevent dup content issues and help overall SEO efforts.

They are aware of the issue.  Their twitter stream https://twitter.com/SEOmoz has a tweet from 8/31 about the issue:

"Uh oh. It looks like our Keyword Difficulty Tool is having some.... difficulty. We're working on it now. Stay tuned, friends."

So they are working on it!  It is labor day weekend so it may take em a little extra time to get it up and going.

In the meantime, if you are in dire need of KW difficulty, you can get some basic insight the following ways:

Use Google Keyword Tool and look at the "Competition" level.  While this area refers to competition within Adwords - this can also give you a basic idea of how competitive the keyword is overall.  If it's a highly competitive Adwords term, chances are likely that SEOs are after it organically as well.

Do a quick check of the organic SERPs and check out the domains in the top placements or even on the entire first page.  Are these really high authority domains, how well optimized are they, etc.

No, traffic itself has nothing to do with rankings.  I am sure there is probably a correlation between traffic and rankings because more traffic = more exposure which can lead to more links - or to more user generated content on the site, if it has any.

Hi

When you first install Joomla, one of the things you should do in order to get more search engine friendly URLs is rename your HTaccess.txt to a .Htaccess file.  If you have done this you should be able to locate it in the folder for Joomla's root domain (make sure you are displaying hidden files if using a cpanel like interface).

To redirect just add:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yourdomain.com/newpage.html

Yes, keep this there permanently.  A 301 is a permanent redirect.

With Joomla there are also a lot of plugins.  SH404SEF is the highest rated one, but is not free.  It will allow you to add redirects directly from the Joomla Admin panel, and also comes with a lot of SEO options.

I have a more detailed article about Joomla and SEO over at

http://searchnewscentral.com/20110118115/General-SEO/a-geeks-guide-to-seo-for-joomla-cms.html

It depends on what your branding strategy is, are you trying to develop more of a brand and reputation as Joe Smith, owner of Acme Widgets, or do you want Acme Widgets to be a well known resource for all things widget related?

I personally think doing both is a great idea - it takes more time but you get the benefits of both.

You will have a little bit of a harder time as a business rather than an individual though, people want to see  human faces in their stream, not logos - you should still use a logo or mascot that represents the business though, otherwise this will be confusing.

People are generally leary about following businesses and dont want to be marketed to.  Due to this uphill battle you will have to really focus on a great content strategy to connect with users, provide useful information and go out of your way to find and answer questions.

It also doesn't hurt to humanize your brand a bit.  Use words like "We" a lot and not "our company" or "Acme Widgets" - make jokes and be transparent.  You can also add a picture of the individual behind "@AcmeWidgets" to the twitter background to help give it that human element.

Also regardless of which account you are on, concentrate on connecting to users and sharing great content - don't spend the majority of your time talking about yourself, your company or your widgets.  People will get turned off by the over-promotion.

Hi

I would say yes, I am of the belief that a sitemap is never a bad idea and submitting one (even later on) won't hurt anything.  It also sounds like you have a rather large site, so this will help get those new pages added each month crawled.   Even if all of your URLs are indexed, you can still use sitemaps to provide Google with information about other content such as videos and mobile versions of your site (if any).  It should actually help the crawler rather than hinder it.

As far as generator sites, I don't have a particular one to recommend but doing a google search for "sitemap generator" pulls up a lot of results.  You may want to test some of those and see what works best for your needs as many of them limit the number of pages crawled.

If you are using a CMS like Wordpress or Joomla there are sitemap plugins to help with this process.

Some ideas...

Create a resource list of important information for people suffering from depression/anxiety. Include suicide hotline numbers, a checklist like  "warning signs your friend or family member may be suffering from depression", links about the different types of depression, create a quick quiz people can take "Do you suffer from depression?" , how to talk to your doctor about depression, - etc.

Create an area where people can submit first hand experiences about dealing with depression/anxiety.

Create a "friends and family" area so people can learn how to help those they care about,

Contact authority sites that deal with these issues and share your resource list.

Find a lot of statistics about those disorders and write up a report/detailed post about your findings.

Find bloggers who write about their struggles with depression/anxiety and interview them.

Create badges people can put on their website - like breast cancer awareness, but make new ones for depression/anxiety awareness.

That's all from the top of my head.

Google determines what links to place here based on the pages it feels are most relevant.   You cannot suggest new pages to add to the sitelinks at this time, but if there is a page showing that you do not want as a sitelink, you can tell Google to not display that page in Google Webmaster Tools.

I would read this post for more information: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schema-examples

The post discusses how Google used to support 3 different styles of Markup but with the creation of Schema.org, decided to only use that going forward.  Any websites with existing markup would be okay though.

Google also mentioned (noted in the article above) that you should avoid mixing different types of markup formats on the same page as it can confuse their parsers.

Will the content be in a different language? If so I would recommend the sub-directory.  If not, the TLD.  Personal preference, Google has said you could use either - but I can see a lot of duplicate content issues if the sub-directory is in the same language.

The answer is - it is risky ground.  Some say it is good marketing, but there are examples of this backfiring - so the best advice is to be aware of the risks and tread lightly.  Technically when you really look at it - it is good marketing, but it is also an alternative to paying cash, and Google doesn't like this type of link building

Giveaways and even offering a discount in exchange for a link can land you in hot water.  Take the whole Overstock penalty for example, they were getting links on EDU sites by offering discounts to students and faculty.  Good marketing or shady link building? Debatable. Would they have gotten caught if they weren't such a big name? Who knows...

To be on the safe side, my recommendation is to host a giveaway, but make no mention of "linking back" to your site.  You can probably say "please share this contest with your friends and family" but "sharing" isn't necessarily asking for a link.  Any links obtained out of interest in the contest are earned through good marketing/content.

Edited to add:

You also have to consider FTC disclosures when giving away any product for a review.

Also, I can't find it right now, I will continue looking, but I think remember reading something from Matt stating that if you are giving away a product you have to ask them to no-follow any links.

Okay, I took a look at the plugin Ben recommended, and took another look at the SH404SEF one.  The free one Ben recommended (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef/1063) looks like it can help out with some duplicate content - but what I recommend doing is getting the SH404SEF here http://anything-digital.com/sh404sef/features.html because it allows for setting up canonical tags and also gives you the option to add the rel=next feature to your paginated pages, which is one of your problem areas.

One thing I noticed though is that it specifically states it "automatically adds canonical tags to non-html pages" - so that means it will apply it automatically to Joomla's defaul pdf view, etc.  While this is helpful, it may not solve the full issue of your duplicate pages with the undefined and "/%5C%22/" issue.

It does however state that it "removes duplicate URLs" - how it identifies and removes these, I am not sure.  You may want to try it out because it is useful for other optimization tasks - or contact the owner for more information.

If the tool doesn't recognize and remove the duplicate pages caused by /undefined/ and "/%5C%22/" then you should disallow crawling of these in your robots.txt file.  While you are in your robots.txt file you should remove the /images/ because you want those to be crawled - Joomla adds that in by default.

Because a lot of these pages have already been crawled, you should do a 301 on the duplicate pages to their matching page.  This sounds like it will be a long process - this may be aided by the sh404sef plugin - not sure.

I just want to also add that I am in no way affiliated with any of these plugins.

A common practice is to provide a page for affiliates to access that has unique content, images, banners, etc for affiliates to use.  This can be anything from descriptions, to blog posts.  Affiliates are pretty busy and appreciate short-cuts, so providing that information to them makes their job easier, and prevents you from the possibility of any duplicate content penalties.

I see you have noodp in the title tags, and as you said it has been there awhile, so I would assume that would have been updated by now.  It could just be taking a particularly long time to update.

Another guess is that it may be due to the main site's title at rickcase.com.  The title is 145 characters long:

Rick Case Automotive Group | Leading auto dealers for Acura, Audi, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda and Mitsubishi models at Ohio, Georgia and South Florida

It also includes the word Honda.  Occasionally Google will rewrite titles based on what they feel is more relevant.

Here is a post on SEOMoz about Google changing long title tags:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/long-title-tags

Here is also a short post on Webmaster world:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023139.html

I think you are mistaking "SEO" websites with "overly optimized" websites.  Just because you have a link from an SEO based website - like SEOMoz, doesn't mean you are overly optimizing your site.  SEOMoz is a high authority site and the link would be beneficial - of course relevance between the linking site and your site plays a part.

So to clarify - they are going to check your backlink profile to look for signals such as a large amount of competitive keyword anchor text from a variety of sites, a lot of backlinks from sites in  spaces that have nothing to do with yours, paid links, etc.

For paginated pages, I recommend using the rel=next and rel=prev tags.  Here is more info:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Tricky situation, and individual opinions may differ...but here is mine.

Ultimately, yes it would be more beneficial to have the subdomain part of the main domain. Right now your subdomain is generating a good amount of links, and the authority from those links aren't transferred to the main domain at all because a subdomain is considered a completely separate website.

I am also assuming that the subdomain and the main domain are on the same C-Class, and in that case any links you have coming from the subdomain to your main domain are probably not getting all the authority it can from those links.

301 redirecting the pages on the subdomain to their respective pages on the main domain would be the best option, but remember that there is some degradation of page rank so this won't be as strong of a signal as it was previously.  After transferring content and adding in 301s, I would continue concentrating on providing valuable content that would earn links to make up for the loss of PR when transferring it over.

So you own both domains I assume, since you can edit the Sepperro one?  I would just make this one link on the homepage, footer links won't help much, especially being sitewide - or no-following the footer, as you said, would accomplish that as well.

Are both sites on the same IP?

Well, everyone might define "quality" different - so I would hate to say "yea that's TOTALLY fiine" but then find out that quality backlinks meant 300 press releases to you

What are you going to be doing to earn the backlinks?

I looked at your backlink profile in OSE.  You have the anchor text "belize" linked from a large amount of domains and with a very high amount of links.  The domains linking with just the anchor text "Belize" take up nearly 23% of your link profile from linking domains.  The amount of links coming to your site with the single keyword "belize" take up about 35% of your total incoming links.   This is just for "Belize" and not the other various you have such as "Belize online" etc.

This is my person post-panda opinion, but I think this is likely to raise red flags with Google.  It may look "over-optimized".  I don't think submitting a site reconsideration requests would help - in fact, I fear it will only hurt as now Google will be reviewing all this information manually.

Second:

Your primary keyword is "belize" which is highly competitive.  You may want to focus on something like "Belize Vacations" or "Belize Travel"

I just want to verify:

Have you ever ranked for the single term "belize" in the US?

Are you experiencing a decline in visits from other keywords which have historically performed well?

There are some theories that pages with affiliate links suffer in rankings, but I haven't seen anything conclusive. It happens that many of those sites are also poor quality.

Depending on the press releases and directories you chose, those could be your issue.  Sometime in July Google stated they are going to crack down on links earned from press releases:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

"Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites."

Many directories are seen as spam by search engines because it isn't naturally obtained. In that same page linked above, it states "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links".

An article about links from press releases from searchengineland:

http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339

It is hard to say for certain without seeing the site, the press releases, or the directory links but that might provide some insight.  It also could depend on how recent your launch was, rankings can be volatile for new sites.

I am not positive I understand the question - so let me repeat what I think you are asking:

You want to remove links from your homepage that link to inner pages of your site, and move these to another page on your site - I am assuming the intent is to create a kind of "resource" list of links? Because you are just moving the links themselves and not moving them around in the site hierarchy - the URL is staying the same.  Right?

If I am understanding correctly, then the answer is...it depends

Do the pages that you are moving have a lot of authority because there are a good amount of backlinks to those specific pages, or do they have a lot of authority because of their proximity to the homepage (1 click away).

I suggest running each page you are considering moving through Open Site Explorer and checking the incoming links and # of linking domains.

If it is the latter, then these should continue to rank well, but over time may begin to degrade in authority as they are now more clicks away from the homepage, and the PR of those will now spread to deeper pages of the site.

If it is the first, then there shouldn't be much of an issue, though you still may see a slight degradation over time because they are not as close to the homepage.

Overall, you shouldn't see too much of a loss.  You can try to mitigate any losses by building quality links to these pages directly.

Sitewide links aren't great for SEO, but it probably won't really hurt you - and really only 1 link per domain is the highest valued - the rest are weighed differently.   How strong is your current link-profile?  Having sitewide links in the menu of another site may make the links appear as paid links - especially if you haven't built up a really strong backlink profile yet.

I would still err on the side of caution and suggest requesting your partner to link to you on their homepage somewhere instead of their menu.

The 100 links thing is more of a general recommendation than a "rule" .  The answer could be different from site to site.  Back in the day,  this was a limit of 100 links crawled per page because Google put a cap on how much they would crawl in order to save some bandwidth.

In current times, this is more about how much domain authority your site has.  If you have a lot of links, those are all going to be leeching your PR and they will all get less "juice" as the amount that flows over will keep getting divided.

Sites like Amazon and Zappos have a lot of authority and PR, therefore this is not as big of an issue to them.

I am not a web developer, but in my experience  with using these, I only noticed a speed decrease when I had a large number of fonts referenced.  You probably will notice a slight difference with 4 or more.  I would install the fonts you want, and then use a tool like tools.pingdom.com to test the speed of your site and see which one looks best.  Be sure to use the tool without any fonts so you can compare loading times.

I haven't used any of these services or tools, but I took a look at what you listed.

Removeem is more of a link management tool that lets you note who you've contacted and what the status is.  That seems really useful if you don't want to keep track of all this another way, such as Excel.

I am personally a bit hesitant to use "link removal services" but that's just me.

I also haven't had a chance to watch this yet - bookmarked it for when I have time.  It is a webinar from SEOGadget about link removal.  SEOGadget really knows their stuff so I am sure you will find some valuable advice in here.

https://seogadget.co.uk/adventures-in-link-removal-slides-and-webinar-recording/

Sites that are new are not as trusted, and have a more difficult time ranking for exact terms.  As your site gains authority you should start seeing some additional traffic for more specific terms - depending on your site's level of optimization, industry and keywords you are targeting.   Traffic will always be a mix of brand, long tail, and more exact KWs though.

I personally think it would be best to use /template.  Or in the case of specific templates, shorten the full phrase to /intake-template/ and then take advantage of the Title tag, H1s and other on-page content to target the keywords you are looking for.  With the second scenario you are relying too much on the URL for your keywords and this may send a spammy signal - especially if combined with other optimization efforts.

I am not a lawyer, so this should not be construed as legal advice

I am fairly positive that would violate copyright laws, intellectual property laws, and possibly and right of publicity.  You would need to get permission from the creators of the TV shows/commercials to use the clips.  You should consult with a lawyer/attorney to be safe. Many will offer free consultations.  Some things may be protected by the Parody law.

If you do go ahead with this, I would also suggest purchasing liability insurance first to ensure you are protected should anyone sue you.

I suggest checking out some of these videos from Reel SEO about legal issues when creating videos

http://www.youtube.com/legalvideoguys

Hi, here is a recently updated (as of May 2012) image sizing "cheat sheet" that may help you

http://www.dreamgrow.com/facebook-cheat-sheet-sizes-and-dimensions/

I think this section is what you are looking for:

Pinned post picture size

This is the size of the picture of your pinned post. Will not be scaled down so that smaller dimension matches 403 pixels. Facebook will take the centre of the image and cut it out accordingly. You can later adjust the horizontal (landscape images) or vertical (portrait images) position of the picture.
Width: 403px
Height: 403px

By broad do you mean more long-tail search terms?  This is pretty normal, especially if the exact keywords are in a competitive space.