Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Are you a business that people are going to want to interact with?  Oddly enough, people aren't too keen on liking a Car Dealership (my business), but I have seen other companies get followers.

My favorite example of engagement is a company that does it's troubleshooting through Facebook.  If someone has a problem they post it on Facebook, and get it answered right away.  Every other company I see has to run some sort of competition, but this company (Schedulicity - I think that's how it's spelled), just had to be a great resource.

Forum links can be kind of tricky.  Several have a 3 month waiting time for you to be able to have links in your signature, while some require you to just be a member for a while so that they know you can be trusted.  The best place to start would probably be any forums that you actually participate in.  From there I would start searching for industry relevant forums (keyword intitle:"Forums").

First off, I agree with Shannon.  There are some long tail phrases that would work better for you.  As for a quantifying reason for why you are slipping: the #1 website in that search has 2414 linking domains, compared to your 300.  Regardless of the overall quality, that is still a massive gap.

I would suggest two things:

1. Go after less competitive long-tails (which will convert better)
2. Either start, or get  more aggressive on link building

Although having visitors looks nice, and makes you feel good, your ultimate goal should be to convert visitors to customers.

Great response Danaglenn!  Can you send me some of your program info?  I might have a couple people that could use your assistance.  Yes, I'm being totally serious.

From what I can find on the internet, it depends.  Matt Cutt's has stated that these types of links are for profit, so would typically be devalued.  However, a few people have found value in these types of links.

Soooooo, it depends on the situation, but the main purpose of your affiliate network is still in place; to get more leads.

Because of the nature of their product, I would assume they are producing no-follow links, right?  If so, there is no perceivable value for SEO.  I guess a more important thing, though, is that purchasing links does have a risk involved with it.  There are supposedly some good companies out there for it (I haven't tried any), but there is always a risk when doing these practices.

It might be more worth your money to hire a writer to create totally amazing SEO optimized content.

I don't know if this is the case, but occasionally there are ranking spasms.  For example:

I ranked #2 for the search "City Car Dealerships" even though I am located over 150 miles away.  To make things even more complicated, I had used that phrase one time in all of my pages of content, and did so as a comparison.  For all intensive purposes I shouldn't have ranked that well for it.  Anyway, I stayed at that position for about 2 weeks, and have since dropped down to page two - where I should probably rank.

My advice would be to keep checking things out, but don't stress too much unless it lasts more than a few days.

I think it could generate quite a few leads for you.  Even though there is quite the controversy over their ranking factors (I've read money is the main one a few times), I've talked to quite a few companies who said that they receive quite a few leads from it.

Here's how I would look at it:

• People outside of the SEO business are going to go there to find talent (because there isn't really any other place that offers rankings).
• People in the business aren't going to hire you unless they know you.  You are going to generate these leads by attending conferences, meetings and other social activities.

I would just let it ride, and see what comes.  You probably couldn't get your money back anyways, so just enjoy the marketing

schema-creator.org

That's what I use.

Digg is a great medium.  I would also suggest writing a great piece of content, and using that as an ice breaker for requesting guest posts.

Like:

Look what I can do!  Let me do it for your site!

I use SEO Majestic as well as Open Site Explorer.  Go try out the free program, and see what you think.

The search volumes look about the same for either one (currently 110-74), and the difficulty level is about the same for either phrase.  So, I would choose the top one since it would be easier for a customer to just type in if they recommend it to a friend.

I would stick in the 5-10% range.  5% being safe

Just like external links are little votes from outside sources of what is an important article on your website, internal links are your little voting system.  It's your way of telling Google/Bing what your page is about, and how important it is.  So, you are going to want more internal links pointing at your important (money making) pages than something like a disclaimer.

However, you have to put these internal links in perspective of your other pages.  If one of your pages has 2000 links, and then next highest is 20, you should look at balancing it out a little.

1. Run an "Open Site Explorer" check to see what links are pointing at you.  Start with the lower quality ones, and do a site:domain search.  If they aren't indexed, get rid of that link.
2. Check where your links are located on these sites.  Footer?  Request a new location, or request to delete the link.
3. Check your keyword density.  If it's obviously high, decrease it
4. Find straggler pages.  Judge it to see if its valuable.  If not, 301 it.
5. Check out all of your pages (starting with most important).  Do they have light content?  Write more good content

• Car Rental Catastrophes
  • Keep a log of stupid stuff people do to your cars, and how you fixed it.
• Funny Video
  • Show someone that is revving up the engine (with some insanely powerful sounding engine revs), winking to the ladies on the street corner and then show him peeling away in a Toyota Yaris/Chevy Aveo/Honda Fit.   (like this, but with an actual good idea!)
• Do a daily FML picture
  • Someone blocks you into your parking spot... FML
  • Suggest readers to submit their photos
• Give a link to my website... Oh woops, how did that get on here???

I'm at the 18,000 mark with mine (Actually much lower because of Title and Body being counted separately)

We have 10+ matches of each Make/Model of new vehicles, a finance page for each of those vehicles (going away soon), a test drive page for each of those vehicles (going away soon), request more info page for each of those vehicles (going away soon), as well as some other random duplicates.  It's been a process to convince the developer to do any of it...

One of the tools I use is seoquake.  However, I turn off every feature except the "strike-through no follow and no-index."  That way I can just quick glance at a page to see what kind of links are on there.

Also, hopefully you aren't just exchanging links to improve your link total.

meta-keywords and description don't count towards the content on your website, based on whatever I've read, but the description is extremely valuable in getting people to click.  Alt tags do have some influence, but make sure the alt tag is for the user, and not just for the search engines.  Here's what SeoMoz says about description tags: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

Outbound Links can be beneficial to pages if they are linking out to authoritative sites.  You have to analyze the number of outbound links, as well as the nature and quality of the links.  If they have 1 link going out, but it's to something completely unrelated, it was probably bought or an affiliate.  If they have 15 links going out, but they are citing additional high quality resources, then go after that link!

You are going to want fresh content on your website, so having a small snippet of your blog posts could assist in that.  However, having too much of the post could potentially dilute your overall content on that page.

Is it pointing at the exact same page you are on?  If so, you are fine.

Most listing I see now are the hybrid ones.  Meaning they attached your Places page to your website, but the click thru still goes to your website. If that is the case, then that is where you now rank.

I've personally had good results with it for local search, but it's main purpose right now is for rich snippets.  I like to use schema-creator.org to generate the code for me.

There are many variables involved with a redesign.  The biggest concerns being:

1. Are you using the same url's from your previous pages?  If not, did you 301 redirect them into the new corresponding pages?
2. More importantly, did you make sure to check which pages had links pointing at them, and make sure those were reused or redirected?
3. Is the new redesign more efficient?  urls like domain.com/blue-widget instead of domain.com/reallylongstretchofcharacters
4. Have you submitted a new sitemap?  Did the sitemap change?
5. Is the website faster/slower?  Do a google speed check to see how its doing <80, you may need to make a couple minor changes.
6. Has Google went through and indexed your website?  How many pages have been indexed?
7. Do you have well developed content that is created with keywords in mind - without being spam?

Anyway, if you made sure to 301 redirect all of the old pages, or reused the urls, you should see a recovery.  I'd advise that you do a big link building push right away, though, in order to speed up the process, as well as be beneficial all around.

It's when someone searches for that exact phrase.  You can change your Google Adwords to exact on the left side of the page.

Exact = Blue Widgets

Broad = My Blue Widgets are Crazy Awesome

It's not so much that you have to have a blog, but you do have to have content on your website.

Awesome content that is link-able = Good for SEO

Also, don't make your blog a stand alone thing.  If a post is relevant to a page on your website, make sure to link over to it!

Make sure they are part of the actual structure of your website, not just part of search.  Meaning, you have to have links pointing at them.  Also, you will also want to make sure that those pages have value.

I can't remember where I saw the data, but the benefits of a link drop dramatically after the first few.  So, spending all that time building links to a secondary blog that will only give you good juice on probably two links seems a waste of time.  You would be better off buying a well established blog, drop a couple links to yourself, and continue to utilize it for its intended purpose.

If it were me, I would put that quality content with the products themselves, and work on getting them ranked.  With a well designed page you should be able to convert these people for the phrases they searched.  If additional help is needed, link out to it from this page, and not as a separate blog.  It will benefit from the very relevant link on your own site, and you can continue to build links to it if its a popular search phrase.

How else are those pages being linked to?  Have you ran a Screaming Frog scan to see how many internal links they are getting compared to similar pages that are ranking well?