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.

I personally like the inbound link aspect of blogs as well as google authorship.  You can also use guest bloggers to expand your audience.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Justin,

I was able to put together a screen grab for you.  The arrow points to exactly where you need to go.

Ron

hLA89jf

Yes it is.  drill down to the traffic sources section.  They track this as referred traffic.

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