I like the first one. That being said I would recommend that you use an AB/multivariate testing tool like Optimizely to measure and test which landing page is better for conversions.
![Ron_McCabe Ron_McCabe](/community/q/assets/uploads/profile/50472-profileavatar-1619582885532.png)
Posts made by Ron_McCabe
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RE: I want your opinion?
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RE: Outsourcing Adwords
I would define your goals and budgets. You need to ask them if they are members of the Google engage program. This is kind of a square zero level of competence(almost anybody can get in if they know enough to join)
I would discuss how they are going to measure success as well as what activities they are going to do to manage the key words.
You should pay around $100 per hour for a qualified person.
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RE: Www for main site and non www for integrated blog - is this a problem?
You really need to integrate the blog to get the full benefit of the inbound links and associated traffic. Non standard structures do tend to trip up the search engines so I try to stay within normal parameters.
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RE: Best Way to Market a White Paper
You might consider setting up a dedicated landing page for the white paper and requiring an e-mail and name to download. You could use pay per click to drive leads and collect their contact info when they download.
If you are set up in directories that offer coupons consider setting up a coupon that allows leads to download the white paper.
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RE: Images not getting indexed in google image search :( " site: hdwallpaperzones.com " )
Did you write alt text descriptions for each image?
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RE: Moz Analytics Campaign Dropdown , does not work
It does not help but I am experiencing the same thing. It seems like they are doing an update or something.
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RE: Why is my website not showing up in a specific, very uncompetitive niche?
I agree with the others. If you are a local rather than national company I might suggest some off page local SEO. This might help considerably.
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RE: SEO Service Needed
Joe,
In the SEO area you want to have clear goals and objectives. What you want is someone who can look at your situation and articulate a clear plan with specific goals. If they cannot do that you do not want to deal with them. You need to determine what the measurable increase is that you will get and agree on it. If the SEO tries to tell you that they have some "special method" that does not follow the normal rules run for the hills ;).
While the link building itself is not hard(mainly boing) it is very time consuming. After the base links like Google and Bing, Yelp, Citysearch, etc are done your SEO may need to do link research to determine appropriate links. This can be very time consuming and does require some skill. A realistic price for good quality links is between $20-$30 per link (this should be the average anyway).
I would also check reviews as well as the Better Business Bureau to see if the SEO has any complaints.
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RE: Difference in Forum and Blog for SEO
I personally like the inbound link aspect of blogs as well as google authorship. You can also use guest bloggers to expand your audience.
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RE: A site is using their competitors names in their Meta Keywords and Descriptions
Chris,
We ran into this with another firm in the Seattle area. They were using all the names their competitors in their meta descriptions and they did go so far as to include specific pages dedicated to each competitor. In the end several of the companies went after them for copyright infringement as they violated their copyrights to create these pages. This is a more aggressive path but it is one you could consider.
Ron
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What are the SEO issues we should consider on a plug in that creates a custom home page based on zip code or GPS location.
We are developing a plug in the changes the home page relative to a users location or zip code. We believe this will provide users with a more personalized experience. We are concerned about how this might affect SEO. We are also wondering if we should partner with one of the SEO ply in developers. We were thinking about Yoast. Is there another partner that might be better?
I would appreciate any feedback people can give.
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RE: Looking for a Way to Standardize Content for Thousands of Pages w/o Getting Duplicate Content Penalties
Takeshi,
I think you are OK. While it is always better to write completely unique content I would say in this scenario you are OK.
I would implement this and watch your ranking as well as other indicators to verify this to make sure.
Ron
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RE: Train Client to SEO?
Sam,
There is a common misconception among clients that SEO is not real work. If you explain everything you need to do most will figure out that it is not something they want to do. If they still will not be dissuaded you might consider a small support contract to answer questions up to a specific time limit. Again after working with someone on the things they need to do they often will figure out that they would rather pay you and do their real job that they like ;),
Ron
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RE: Do you use interns in your company/agency?
Robert,
I see our interns as our top people down the road. We use our internship as a way to support people as they save for or go to college. We want top notch people working with us who are engaged in building the business. It is hard to get most people real engaged unless you are compensating them in some way.
I think it is appropriate to pay them at or near minimum wage to start as the company needs to invest in them to get them up to speed. As they start to contribute more and learn more we structure their compensation so that they can make more. In my opinion one of the best lessons you can teach someone is that,"you eat what you hunt and kill" in the work place. I think a performance based compensation and a clear path of advancement encourages growth.
Anyway that's my two cents.
Ron
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RE: What are your best moves if you want to get your traffic and rankings back for a specific keyword?
Lily,
If your target market is localized you may want to consider doing some local off page SEO. Getting these directories set up has created some dramatic results for our clients. A simple first step is to use the get listed.org tool to get the basic local directories set up.
Ron
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RE: When a client clones there UK site copy for a US version....
Yes you are right. Panda specifically penalizes sites with duplicate content. You need to have at least 65% original content on each page to avoid this penalty. I would suggest that you localize the UK page with references to the area and integrate local terminology, spelling and slang to address part of this problem. Hopefully this will create enough of a rewrite to make the content essentially unique.
As far as the client goes I am assuming they are trying to save some money because they don't understand the value of doing things correctly. You may want to look at ways to monetize the traffic they are already getting and might lose or better yet show them the traffic they are losing to their competitors. A few ways you might consider putting this value into real terms is to equate the cost of clicks to the average cost of a paid click for the same terms. You might also want to look at the actual value of each new customer over their entire customer life. For example a chiropractor might only get $76 for an individual visit but might get $8,000 over their average customer cycle. If the customer never hits the site because of bad content or SEO it did not cost your client $76 it cost them $8,000 per customer lost. If the site get 1,000 visits with a .002 conversion that is really two customers and $16000 revenue lost. Usually when people look at their traffic in these terms spending the money to do it right makes more sense.
I hope this helps,
Ron
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RE: Exit Popups Impact On SEO
In general terms the effectiveness and the SEO effect related to the pop up is all about how you implement it. As referred to in this article http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/conversion-heroes-chris-goward/
A pop up is employed by the NYT newspaper that is on the side that draws you into something more interesting thereby increasing their chances of conversion without damaging the brand or upsetting the person experiencing the pop up. This is not likely to have an SEO impact as this will not cause traffic to exit the site as quickly as possible and the user is more likely to return.
The other end of the spectrum is what i'll call the "As seen on TV" popup. These tend to be minor brands that do not care or even think someone will come back again. They know they have one shot and they want to convert at any cost. This type of pop up is more akin to a thug standing in the doorway. It is very invasive and makes it very hard to leave the web site without buying anything. Some people may not mind this but most people will. This type of approach is going to return a negative user experience which will track to your site performance and may affect your SEO. If Google flags your site and does a manual check your site will probably be downgraded.
So in my opinion the trick is to figure out what the fine line is between being so unobtrusive that the popup is ineffective and being so invasive that you get what you want on conversion but lose a customer or referral.
Here are some things you may want to consider doing with the page and the pop up as you implement it.
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I would use a tool like Optimizely to optimize the page itself before implementing the pop up. You may be able to get an acceptable conversion rate without implementing the pop up.
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If you still need to implement the pop up I would set up several off line variations along with the optimized page without pop up. I would use a paid service like Ask My target Market ( http://aytm.com ) to get feedback from a target group that fits your visitor profile. If there is not a conclusive result or if there is a lot of feedback that initiates changes I would consider making modifications based on the first survey and running a second survey.
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I would then use Optimizely again to set up a series of scenarios based on what you have learned so far to test on paid traffic. I would set up a simple advertising campaign that will drive clicks to these off line pages. Again based on responses and conversion rates I would make a another set of modifications.
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Finally I would test the winning scenario on your live page and monitor your conversions. based on how the traffic converts you may want to consider doing anther set of A/B testing on the page itself.
There are extra steps in here to avoid a negative impact to your target market. Based on the value of your brand, market size, and product price point you will need to evaluate how aggressive you want to be in each of these steps.
The main pice of input I would give is that it is important to test multiple scenarios and follow the measurable numbers. What we think the result should be is not what people actually do. Remember if you can't measure it; it is not true ;).
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RE: Is there anything wrong with having duplicate description tags if they are relevant to their pages?
No this will work. It is important that you maintain your categories the right way. A lot of people confuse these with key words when your tags are your categories that signal the search engines about which category oyu think the content falls into. It is important to think this out on the front end. We are in the middle of cleaning up 1200 blog entries that were not categorized properly. It is a big job at that point. You don't want to get to this stage.
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RE: Content Syndication Service
I have not. I did take a look at the site and I would be suspicious as they are not really clear about how they get things done. It seems like you might run the risk of getting a bunch of spammy content out there.
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RE: Blogging/content strategy
I think Chris had some good suggestions. I would add the following comments. 1) I would encourage your CEO or a ghost writer to start doing blog entries. I would add this as a blog category. In this way it is not going to look bad or screw things up if he does not always get a blog out. Once your CEO has built up a few blog entries it might be good to add a list of prior blog entries next to his profile. This would be a good way for people to get a feel for how he thinks and what he believes in.
I do think it is a good idea to hire a ghost writer(I admit I am biased as that is one of the services my company provides). However I would strongly recommend that your CEO participate in the process and approve the final blog so that the blog has his voice.
Even though you did not ask about this I thought I would also mention that you might want to add a newsletter archive as a category as well. This is a good way to keep old newsletters as a reference for those that are interested and increase your content at the same time.
Ron
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RE: "We are collecting your traffic data now!" message displayed for many days
Chiaryn,
This clears up the question I had but it does not clear up the original question. Can your look at Sorina's original question? I cannot tell if she is having a problem or if it is just taking a little longer to run the report.
Ron
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RE: On-page Local SEO
Sarah,
I have been working on this exact same problem for another client. As a disclaimer I am always going for the maximum traffic and conversion for my clients and on the aggressiveness scale I am an 11.
That being said here is what I would recommend. 1) Create a separate navigation for each sub branch. This would include all the basic information you would on the main site except this should focus on the branch. 2) Manage a blog for each branch with Google authorship set up. 3) Create content about the branch that has the unique feel of the branch along with anything special about the branch or it's employees. 4) Do competitive key word research for each branch and make sure that you include any content that is needed to grab searches from the local competition. 5) I would reflect the unique navigation or location of the information on each branch specifically in your off page SEO.
This approach will get you more local traction while improving the experience and conversion for potential customers for each branch. This also alleviates the "mega" company feel and helps the branch feel more local.
Ron
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RE: Google+ advice
Sarah,
This is correct. Be sure to add local citation to each G+ page if you have not done so already. You may want to discuss google authorship with whomever is doing your content plan as this is a great way to get visibility in each area.
To set this up you will need to identify someone who is going to be the face of each branch, You need then to set up a personal g+ page and set their attribution to the G+ page associated with their branch.
These steps could create some nice visibility if the content is written and attributed for each branch.
Otherwise you are right on track.
Ron
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RE: "We are collecting your traffic data now!" message displayed for many days
They usually gather information for the reports on Wednesdays or Thursdays. My guess is that you will need to wait until then. You might want to e-mail tech support to see if anything else is going on.
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RE: A few questions on Google's Structured Data Markup Helper...
You can do either but the net effect is different. If you set things up for reviews on your page you will get these reviews indexed as content on your page and if marked up properly this will index on the major review sites(excluding Yelp I believe). You also have the advantage of control over what is or is not published. The down side to this is that you will need someone with skills to program this and do the mark up properly. You also need someone managing this prt of the web site.
The other way is to use an embedded link for the review sites. This will get the reviews done off of your site. These off site reviews can create inbound links. For Yelp this is pretty much the only way to do it.
I would factor in the review sites people use for Bars in Chicago, is it Redeye, Yelp, or Citysearch for example. I would set up my site that favors where people look for reviews when deciding whether or not to come to your business.
Hope this is clearer than mud.
Ron
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RE: A few questions on Google's Structured Data Markup Helper...
Ok let's go through these questions on by one below:
My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant?
I would mark the locations that have food as restaurants and the ones that do not as local business. I would set up and write a unique description for each location.
It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it?
You can either link to your off site reviews sites by getting an embed code or you can write some code with structured mark up to embed reviews into your web site that will be indexed by the search engines. There are references on line about how to do this.
How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page?
Look at answer above. As a sidenote you should make it a mission to get 10 reviews on Yelp, Google, and Bing for each location as this helps your local results.
If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out?
Yes
I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body?
Can't help you on this one.
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RE: Landing pages in rankings report?
Catherine,
I do not believe the MOZ tools allow you to do that (although this would be a handy feature). The recon file report from Spyfu does do this on your company as well as your competitors. This has been very helpful to me.
Ron
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RE: 3 months of backlinks building is enough ?
You did not specify how many links or what type of links. If you are a local company the fastest way to improve results is to focus on your major local directories. Once this is done you should look at Open site explorer to explore the directories and links your competition has to see if there are any that are applicable to you. You might also want to check out Whitespark's tool for finding appropriate directories or links. On this type of thing more is better especially as stated above you make sure your links are high quality.
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RE: Is there a way to show random blocks of text to users without it affecting SEO? Cloaking for good?
Marvin,
I would post this as a graphic with a description of the graphic that presents the message you want indexed. In this way your random copy will not be indexed but you will be able to get the terminology you want indexed.
Ron
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RE: Anyone familiar with these guys?
Personally I would not trade links unless I knew exactly who I was dealing with. In general I am not a huge fan of trading links unless there is a direct relationship.
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RE: Page Title restructuring
Dino,
I would check out this QA string as it covers exactly what you are concerned about:http://moz.com/community/q/page-title-structure
I would definitely check out the SEO cheat sheet they references in the string.
Ron
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RE: Back links from press release. How and Who?
Bigblaze,
I use PRWeb for these purposes. It gets your products exposed to over 30K bloggers as well as all the major traditional media outlets. They have various plans but the pan that allows you to post media as well as copy is the best value. You can essentially create a mini infomercial about the products pointing back to your main site. I try to use this with all my clients but I really like to use this to get to the top with difficult categories and key words.
You do need to know this is indexed as news and is a very powerful link for a while but over time the value and positioning decreases so you will either need to put out a new release with new information or get more links in the mean time.
Ron
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RE: Duplicate Content
Darren,
This is probably OK but it is on the edge. I would suggest some before and after photos for local jobs. You might want to talk about what part of town these are in along with what was interesting/challenging about the job. I would change the layout of your bullet points for each page. You might want to use these different locations to test different styles to test conversion rates while you are at it.
Ron
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RE: Duplicate Content
Darren,
I am not sure what industry you are in but I would suggest localizing the content. This will help you avoid duplicate content while providing a richer user experience and some local SEO juice. So I would incorporate references to local landmarks as well as anything in the area that affects how the category might be implemented. So for example a page about tomatoes in southern California might focus on fertilization to maximize production while a similar page in Anchorage Alaska might focus on how to grow tomatoes indoors hydroponically. This is an extreme example but I thought this might give you the idea. You want at least 65% on the content to be original even though it might talk about the same things.
Ron
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RE: Additional Details in Google Places - Should I bother?
Sarah,
I thought the graphic on this link would help you visualize what I am talking about:
https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-search-data-providers.html
Ron
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RE: Local SEO: Specific pointers on how to improve my campaign
Bob,
It looks like you are doing a good job on link building. Here are some other things you might consider:
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Use Spyfu recon files to find out what content is getting clicks for your competitors. Adjust your content plan to reflect this.
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Up to 40% of your ranking can be reviews. Get at least 10 reviews on Yelp, Google and Bing
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Do a case study on successes and give some sort of incentive if the blog gets 25 or more comments. For example a wedding photographer I know gives a $100 discount if the featured wedding party blog gets 25 comments.
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Have owners and staff set up Yelp, G+ accounts with their workplace set up and get them to review other local businesses (the search engines are using these reviews as minor citations; strange I know ).
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Set up google authorship.
Hope this helps,
Ron
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RE: Using the same landing page for seo and ppc
Nathan,
I would always recommend this. This techniques gives you a higher quality score on pay per click while indexing on search. As you build out your content and links your performance will get better and better. This is also a good format for running software like Optimizely for conversion optimization.
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RE: How can we view traffic from specific Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit accounts in Google Analytics?
Justin,
I was able to put together a screen grab for you. The arrow points to exactly where you need to go.
Ron
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RE: How can we view traffic from specific Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit accounts in Google Analytics?
Yes it is. drill down to the traffic sources section. They track this as referred traffic.
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RE: Additional Details in Google Places - Should I bother?
Sarah,
It is absolutely worth filling everything out. Google is coming out with several different ways to display the information outside of your G+ account. Google is a source that other data aggregators get their information from. This information propagates to these other directories. This creates additional inbound links and local visibility. So yes it is very worth filling this information out.
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RE: Impact of simplifying website and removing 80% of site's content
I think this pruning process makes sense. Although this will potentially decrease key words it will streamline the navigation for the content that is actually getting traffic. This will provide a better flow and potentially a lower bounce rate. Staging these cuts and monitoring the changes seems like a good way to manage your risk.
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RE: Should bio information be consistent?
Lesley,
I cannot speak from an SEO perspective but from a personal branding perspective it is good to maintain the same themes throughout your BIOs. You may want to focus on different sub points but the overall positioning and high points should be consistent.
Ron
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RE: Is there a content ratio that google looks for?
Mark,
One of the mistakes I believe people make on e-commerce sites is a lack of content. I would not look at a percentage I would look at how many potential searches you can pick up with each page you add. If you have social media set up look at the benefits of marketing this content through these platforms. An area people often forget is Video and picture content. This may be a good way to show up on searches your competitors are not showing up on.
If you have competitors you want to get click share from you might want to look at Spyfu. Their recon files program will allow you to see the key words and content that is actually getting clicks. They also have another tool that lets you look at your competitors paid advertising over time to see how their advertising has evolved. This might give you some good clues on your on line messaging and/or ideas for your own advertising or other marketing campaigns.
Hope this helps,
Ron
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RE: Anyone tried MathSite
These seems like a low end mathematica. Not sure what this has to do with SEO.
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RE: How to get relevant inbound backlinks?
Well I would do a few things:
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go to get listed.org and sign up for all the local directories.
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I would use the Open Site Explorer tool to find inbound links on your competitors and sign up for any applicable directories and start following(and providing useful comments) on blogs that relate to what you are doing.
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Utilize your G+ account to engage your client base in a Google Air web seminar and publish a recording of this to Youtube.
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Use Presenter on the mac (or a similar program) to create a presentation with voice overs and export to video and upload to video.
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Create an engaging infographic that people will share on the web.
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Get 10 reviews on Yelp, google, and Bing. These reviews create in bound links as well as improve your overall local search rankings.
What I am saying is that links are created by doing a variety of things over time. You have to be creative, have fun with it ;)!
Ron
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RE: Do having keywords in the domain name still help?
If the domain supports the content I think it is ok and even slightly helpful. You are better served to employ a strong local content strategy combined with good off page local SEO. I think this would serve you in a better way.
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RE: Videos - Host on our Site or YouTube or Both
Karen,
I have some qualifiers on hosing your video on the site. As long as your web host if fast enough you will get a bump in Google's algorithm as they ding you for the slow performance off of Youtube. If you hst the videos you might also want to use a content delivery network to speed this up further. Finally you should submit a site map for your video to optimize how you are indexed.
I would also host on Youtube simply because this is yet another way to be found. I believe this also creates an inbound link as well(I am not 100% sure on this).
Ron
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RE: New Keyword Planning Tool
I really like the Spyfu Recon files tool. It give you the words and content that people actually click through on both on your site as well as your competitors.