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Not sure if I agree that the budget is way over the top for what you are trying to achieve if the keywords really are 'hyper' competitive. It depends how it has been structured - is it $25k when they achieve the rankings or $25k for the time period (3m, 6m, 1y) regardless of results?

In terms of their plan I agree with the others that sounds of the link building does sound a little low quality but even today those links can still get people ranked highly if done correctly (high quality directories, relevant one way links etc) and the on page stuff is good.

I don't like the way they state how many of each link you will get, that does sounds spammy and automated but there is know way of knowing if the 'one way links' are going to be high quality or not because there is no detail.

To me it all comes down to results - how long have you been with the company and how far have you progressed?

That sounds very weird, never heard of anything like it.

Uploading a script you know nothing about and opening up your FTP don't sound like things I would be doing in a hurry, they could run phishing scams or anything through your site without you knowing about it.

If you are keen on doing this and trust the company I would ask what they script is and why they need FTP access. In theory they should be able to write articles and do a lot of the on page SEO all from your CMS...

Thanks for your help all. Decided not to buy the domain and keep going with things as they are!

Thanks THB. You re-confirm what I was thinking really but it's just when they are offered I think they make you think about it a bit more. Would be interested to hear any other views on this?

Hello, Someone approached a client of mine to sell a exact match domain name for a very competitive and high converting keyword. Would this be of any use and what are the best tactics to employ if it is purchased? I was of the opinion that the 'power' of exact match domain names are dying fast but would be interested to hear what people with experience in this think and what they have done with them (i.e. set-up a website on that domain or re-directed it)? Thanks, Rikki

Yeah, Magento has upload built in.

What might be a good idea is to download and install Magento to get the back end and features a try before you buy a website built on it. It's free and quite easy to setup.

I guess everyone will have their thoughts on this but for me I would want to see the websites they have built, in particular the ones in your industry. Having a look though the sites will give you an idea of their design capabilities but also how well they have coded it in terms of site speed.

It would also be wise to speak to one of these companies to get a little bit of feedback on the developers (I find people are quite open and honest in their assessments).

From recent experience in looking for a Magento development company you will find the quotes you receive range massively. We received quotes from £5,000 to £225,000.

It really is a tough decision to make and get right so make sure you cover all the bases and get proposals from a wide range of companies.

I think with most platforms if you get the right people to develop them it will do the job.

Magento seems to be the most popular at the moment and because of that has a of support / developments available. However as mentioned above if you don't pay for a quality developer you could end up with a very slow site.

I believe the full campaign report updates once per week.

There is a company is the UK that offer a tool that does this. Not sure if this is the right link but the tool is part of Experian.

http://www.experian.co.uk/integrated-marketing/web-analytics.html

They call me a month or so ago to demo it. It had amazing data but was extremely expensive (circa £10-50k per year if I remember correctly).

Just a personal thing but for me you have tried to target too many keywords on the page therefore your title has gone over the 'limit' which could effect your CTR.

I would target your main keyword on the home page 'independent mortgage advice' then target the local stuff on individual pages. One page to target Ipswich, one page to target Suffolk etc and make the content really bespoke to the area (local client testimonials etc).

Hi Jason,

It looks like you are doing your on page stuff fairly well.

The next stage, which relates to your question on domain and page authority is to do with link building. As you have said you only have 19 external links (followed) to your site, this would suggest why your authority ranks are low.

Try having a read of this to understand the importance of links and some link building strategies - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Just had a look at Power Mapper Sitesort and seems good. Would be interested to see what people think of this?

A one off cost of £239 look good value for unlimited usage...

What would be the disadvantage of Google knowing who your clients are? (Just wondering)

I  have a client with a similar problem with over 6k individual products on an e-commerce site using manufacturers descriptions.

I think we have decided to 'bit the bullet' and get a resource to start writing unique content on these pages, starting with the most popular and working that way. The initial work will be to add a 'Our View' or 'Our Description' to each product to go above the manufacturers spec.

We also implemented customer reviews for individual products which build up unique and related content.

Do you have a link to that vid?

The short answer is yes, it could have an SEO benefit but I would think carefully about the impact on the affiliate campaign.

The major advantage of being on a major affiliate network is the access to thousands of affiliates, some very large ones. If you took this is house you would need to put a lot of resources into recruiting new affiliates and even then you might not find the quality of affiliate you would get on a major network.

If you took it in house there is of course the tracking, admin and payment side of the affiliate setup to consider, implement and apply resource too as well.

If you (or your client) is serious about the affiliate campaign then I doubt you would improve it by taking it in house.

Personally I think the service fee as a percentage (in the UK the average is 10%) is the best way to go because it usually accounts for the extra work a larger account (in terms of budget) requires.

I have always used UK but have often wondered why the two options are on here too.

The difference between UK and GB 'in real life' is that the UK includes North Ireland while GB does not, I would assume this would be the same here?

As Susanna suggests hootsuit is great. Tweekdeck is also a good similar tool.

Thanks for pointing out the keywords, I checked the physical page rather than running the report (which I guess would have been more helpful in hindsight!) so I missed that.

Hi Alan,

Without doing any real research on your site or touching on any site-wide points a couple of issues I noticed when looking at the page are:

• The term isnt mentioned in the body text of the page (only in the breadcrumb, affiliate links and table title at the bottom)
• Key term not used in H1
• Key term not used in image alt text
• The URL structure isn't ideal and doesn't include key term
• The page has little Page Authority

Im sure other users will come up with some more suggestions but hopefully the above will help a little!

Any more detail on exact what it was?

Its a great idea. It would also essentially build up a knowledge base within the Q&A for people to get instant answers from too.

I have never used Spring Metrics but as it has a free 14 day trial would it not be best to trial it? Would be even better if you could let us know your thoughts on it too once trailed!

Domain Authority is based on the strength of the whole domain while Page Authority is based on the strength of the individual page.

Here are the full explanations:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority

Obviously link building is important but I am always of the belief that if you have the opportunity to fix the on site issues (from an SEO, design and conversion perspective) first your efforts would be better concentrated there to start with.

This is because without the technical and on page corrections needed the efforts of your link building will be diluted and if your site does not convert well then your new traffic will not bring you the results it should.

I think the most important thing is that the most relevant page for the keyword is shown. In most cases this is a deeper page than the home page and will usually have a better chance of converting.

I believe the easiest way would be to add or remove the trailing slash in your .htaccess file in the root directory.

Make sure you backup your .htaccess file before you edit it!

The below may work for you but I would guess someone more experience in this area could help more with the coding:

"

Use this code to your .htaccess file to remove trailing slashes:

#get rid of trailing slashes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?turbocelica.lv$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http:/www.example.org/$1 [R=301,L]

or use this code to ADD trailing slash to the end of each URL:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$
RewriteRule (.*)([^/])$ http://www.example.org/$1$2/ [R=301,L]

"

Sure is a way:

Go to Visitors - Visitor Trending - Visits - Click the clock icon on the right hand side

Hello Gal,

I was going to type out a response for you but realised this post answers your question in greater detail http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

Hope this helps

Yeah I tried that but the URL in the URL coloumn shows for example:

/errors/error_404?q=-i3

and the Referrer shows:

/-i3

Neither page exists and so I do not know where the page which contains this broken link is...

Checked out the tool I just linked to on here and it doesn't include broken link data

Is the the custom crawl tool on here you are referring too? http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Hi Dan,

Thanks for that tool. It works great and especially like that it works in Chrome.

Do you however know of a tool which would do this site wide rather than per page?

Question says it all I guess. What would your recommend as the best free tool to check internal broken links?

Have you checked in Google Webmaster Tools where this site is set to target?

Despite what a lot of people say I still feel that link building in this sense works as long as you are strict with it. If they are making sure the directories have a good authority, they have a mix of followed v no-followed and build in some sort of organic manner (consistent drip of links).

I think a lot of concern is that the search engines are working out which links are manufactured in this manner and will soon heavily devalue them, but in the here and now it works to some extent.

I guess the other thing to consider is the competition - if it is this type of link building v no link building I guess this would win...

Not sure if I am not understanding the question but SEO reports / audits are normally on a specific website rather than an industry? Or do you mean general web stats on the industry?

.com domains are just as strong in the UK as .co.uk with regards to customer trust and CTR in my opinion - i.e. I don't believe a .com domain is restrictive in the UK.

From an SEO point of view make sure you registrar with Google (and other search engines) webmaster tools and set the target geographic location as UK.

In my opinion the 'old seo practices' are still worth doing. The link building you mention will all still add strength to the domain, just be a bit more strict on the type of sites you build links from.

As for where to start first I normally start getting all the on page and technical stuff sorted first before I start link building.

In the crawl diagnostics screen of a campaign there are 3 charts (total errors found, total warnings found & total notices found) - I was wondering if it would be possible to get a long term view / data of how this has progressed?

I think I did suggest exactly that but without going into the specific detail to be fair.

Of course guest blog posts are only one part of link building and activitysuper would need to ensure link diversity on his websites profile as well.

Things to also consider are user metrics, how a user responds to your site, such as bounce rate and non measurable factors such as trust.

Each industry and website is different.

If it is a new website personally I would use some directories, blogs or forums (ones which don't look too spammy, are relevant to your industry and have a good domain authority) to get some links (people may disagree with this).

The key with link building tends to be keeping things consistent so when you come to building more 'quality links' ensure you always have a pipeline going because so links can take a long time to nurture.

Ah ok, sorry I got the wrong end of that.

They will be using rich snippets, a markup such as shema.org - http://schema.org/Review or http://schema.org/AggregateRating should achieve the result

I would recommend starting with the Competitive Link Finder tool - http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect

Go through this process gives you a little bit of an idea about the places to find links such as competitor link analysis and Google searches