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A big part of PR is the relationship--heck that's half of it.. ;^)--so reaching out to the reporter with an email like, "Thanks so much about your great story on Company B. I'm working with them in a PR capacity (ONLY IF TRUE) and am happy to help with any other inquires. Here's the company website (URL) and press kit page (page with photos, contact info, basic stats, approved quotes, etc.) which you can use at any time. If you see anything missing that you'd like on there just let me know. For example, if there's a certain company boilerplate that the LA Times likes to add to these articles, [Company Name, Employee Count, Website, Founded Date,] I can be sure to get you that.  Thanks again!"

You get the idea. You're not even asking for the link directly but instead building your relationship with them as a contact.  The more you make it as a way to make their job easier, the better.

Again though, only do this in your capacity of PR relationship with the company.  If it's beyond your scope and they have a PR person, forward along the article to them and say, "It'd be great if they linked to the company's website! (URL)" That person should already have the relationship in place.

Hi Ron. Yes, having a Name Address and Phone (NAP) that matches queries and listings on your landing page is part of what goes into ranking a specific page. See: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors and, "HTML NAP Matching My Business Page NAP" You should be able to set your service area within Google, see: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038163, which shouldn't conflict with your landing page. Be sure to avoid creating something like fake business addresses though, as that and other factors are negatives. Cheers!

There was an interesting blog post on this lining up well with what you're experiencing it seems (especially in the comments) here: http://moz.com/blog/1-dollar-per-day-on-facebook-ads.  The video they reference is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag which is pretty interesting as well. You might have to employ more cross-over in your social, i.e. using twitter to drive better Facebook engagement. Ultimately though it seems to be more alignment within Facebook's walled garden approach.

It could, but it's mostly a broken way to go about doing it. Per Google's guide on it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708, "Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found])."  So it's best to fix them to either return a custom 404 page, redirect via 301, or correctly land on a page of content without the 404.

I would choose #1, because the most important part of the title (that it's a pet store) should come before Boston, MA. Additionally, the most common word ordering for most people in terms of local is the address format: Thing, Area, City, State.

There's a nice write up on title tags here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag  Note that Moz also says:

Place Important Keywords Close to the Front of the Title Tag
According to Moz's testing and experience, the closer to the start of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking—and the more likely a user will be to click them in search results.

Cheers!

With your site being so new, you were probably getting a fresh content boost and now that it is gone your site is ranking where it most likely stacks up against the competition.  Here are few problems right off the bat though:

1: A large % of pages' title tags are duplicated - | Get Your FREE Trial NOW!!! | Shiva23
2: The title tag itself is kind of spammy with 3 exclamation points
3: Your content is all highly similar to "acne scar removal" so as you add more content, you're getting too dense around that phrase.
4: Your text is almost the same color as your background.  Old school, but still a spam penalty to have "hidden text".  It's best to stay away from styles that could cause this.

Many websites rank well that are using a CPA model.  Use the tools here and else where to see how you really measure up to your competition and you'll have a lot more insight into what you need to change.

You'll come across some sites that rank well despite themselves. Still, it's hard to believe that pages like those will do anything for the users visiting them, plus their bounce rate is going to be incredibly high. Chances are you're going to be getting some--if not all--of the visitors that try their page as a #1 result, don't find anything worthwhile, then go to your page.

Matt offers you some excellent long term advice on the best path to take. I'd only add that you can emphasize your competition's lack of content all the more by offering content/services/products/usability that blows them out of the water. Cheers!

I would recommend getting the link from their root domain(s) to the service hosted on your own domain as that wold most likely be more valuable.  This would do a few things.

1. Referral visits. You could see pretty quickly how many people are coming from the university site to your site using the link.
2. Endorsement strength. By having the link and university's explanation of your service on their site, they're providing additional trust based on people's past interactions with the university. This is partially an SEO thing, but also a conversion factor, i.e., "I trust my Uni's opinion so this is probably a worthwhile service."
3. Simpler. You'll be managing fewer domains (just you're own) and won't have to worry about technical changes on the uni's side regarding the redirection and subdomain.

There's all that, plust the newly created subdomain wouldn't carry nearly as much trust and authority as the root domain. It's why Wordpress.org doesn't get in trouble in Google if someone creates: reallyspammysite.wordpress.org.  Hope that clears it up. If someone else has compelling reasons for the other method, I'll let them expand on it.

Hi Dinesh. DA and PA tend to fluctuate after updates, but here's a blog post from a few months ago explaining why:

Every index, we get a lot of questions about why a site's/page's PA/DA goes up or down. The answer's not easy because the inputs vary quite a bit, but basically, four things can cause change in these metrics from index to index:

1. The site/page received more or fewer links or more/fewer more/less powerful links. Your site's link profile may even remain completely unchanged and still see fluctuation in DA/PA because the sites pointing to you have been recalculated to have better or worse metrics.
2. Google changed things in their ranking algorithm and thus our models for DA/PA, which measure and attempt to track to correlation with Google's rankings changed, too.
3. The web's link graph changed, and what was "0" (the lowest possible score) is now lower/higher than before and/or what was "100" (the highest possibly score) is now higher/lower than before. Essentially, think of this as the goalposts moving because the field's gotten bigger or smaller.
4. Our web index changed in size/structure as we toss our more spam/junk and crawl more/fewer webpages, potentially biasing against links we were counting or hadn't counted in prior indices.

Thus, it's very hard to know for sure whether an increase in DA/PA for a particular page is entirely tied to your efforts, Google's changes or changes to the web as a whole. This is why I strongly, strongly recommend tracking your metrics against your competition.

That last part that I bolded is key. Hopefully you're still competing well with sites similar to yours. Cheers!

If you're planning on doing this with a non-disposable, branded website it's a bad idea as there are can be lots of negative effects.

If you're planning on being black hat, having a network of disposable sites, and are going to be masking (or trying to mask) everything you do, it's just another tool in your toolbox.

Like people already mentioned here, it's better to make worthwhile comments that can be traced back to a reputable looking source as those could even have the added benefit of bringing you additional business, not just a boost in the rankings.

For this one particular search and context, 'cruise' and 'tour' are nearly interchangeable in English spoken in the US.  What could be happening is that Google is thinking the user intent is a branded search for Bosphorus Tours vs your brand of Zoe Yacht.

Hi Karen. Yes there was a recent update, please read about it here: http://moz.com/products/api/updates (that's the home of API update news btw).  And here's the Q&A post discussing the specifics as to why link numbers fluctuated: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here. Enjoy!

Hi Kathrine. You can find a searchable list of relevant categories for Google Local at: http://blumenthals.com/google-lbc-categories/search.php?q=&val=hl-gl%3Den-US(PfB)%26ottype%3D1 and here are a few possibilities:

• Crane Rental Agency - https://moz.com/local/categories/category/Crane Rental Agency
• Packaging Supply Store - https://moz.com/local/categories/category/Packaging Supply Store
• Shipping Company - https://moz.com/local/categories/category/Shipping Company

Within those Moz Local links you'll see how they relate to the categories on various other sites. Agreed that there's not a perfect fit at this time for what you're describing, but at least these should get you close. Also, there are people here that work directly with Google Local so this might get addressed in an upcoming update.  Cheers!

You could focus group the two and see which people prefer.  Or you could buy several and test their performance via Adwords split testing before taking the plunge of transferring or creating the new site.  Really this boils down to not what has possibly worked for others, but what works best for you.

You can use websites like oDesk, Rent-a-coder, Craigslist, or many similar other sites to bring on outsourced contractors.  With a careful plan you can probably attain a much higher rate of return.

The disavow tool is a the last step of a process Google outlines for dealing with spammy links. The first step being asking for the links to be removed... Since you control those sites and have deleted them you've accomplished the removal of the link, so no need to disavow. Mozscape will catch on as the index is recrawled.

For the second question, the spam score is calculated on site, so if the site where the content finds a new home has a low / non-spam score the content should lose its spammy associations.  It sounds like you're cleaning up things appropriately.

Mostly no.  I say 'mostly' because a lot of times when you look at a site using www and no-www if both of those work they're almost always pulling files from the same location (hence the warnings around duplicate content), so both www.domain.com/robots.txt and domain.com/robots.txt are going to work.  This is the dominant example of a subdomain sharing a robots.txt file. However, on domains that are set up as their own subdomains they have different robots.txt.  Take a look at the many differences between subdomain1-1000.wordpress.com/robots.txt vs wordpress.com/robots.txt.  If you set up a subdomain that isn't just a reflection of your root domain, then you'll need to create a robots.txt file as well. Cheers!

In addition to EGOL and Robert's insights, we also see Google behavior like this in a couple of other areas.

In search changes around News results when real-time feeds based appear in parallel with search query volume and page changes across the web we see news items gaining a boost.  If a new brand is gaining similar traction on both sides of search (both press and searcher interest) it's not a small leap to think that Google will respond with providing users more results around that brand.

Another good parallel comes from the Google patent for "Using concepts as contexts for query term substitutions" ( https://www.google.com/patents/US9104750 ). Being a patent around context and similar terminology, its Claim #1 is broken down as First Term + Second Term + Third Term = something different than any one of those terms used alone. Their example further on in the patent is especially telling...

During state (I), the substitution engine 206 analyzes the aggregated query term substitution data, and determines whether one or more substitution rules may be generated from the analysis. For one example, the substitution engine 206 may determine from the query term substitution data 231 that the term “Crossword” is frequently a substitute term for the term “Puzzle” in the context of the concept “New York Times,” as indicated by a positive indication 237. In some implementations, the indication 237 may be a quantitative score assigned to the query term substitution data 231 in the query log 209, and the quantitative score can be analyzed by one or more criteria in the substitution engine's evaluation of a potential substitute term. For another example, the substitution engine 206 may determine from the query term substitution data 233 that the term “Subscription” is not frequently a substitute term for the term “Puzzle” in the context of the concept “New York Times,” as indicated by a negative indication 238. Here, the substitution engine 206 determines that the term “Crossword” is frequently a substitute term for the term “Puzzle” in the context of “New York Times”, and sends an indication 239 to the collection 210 of substitution rules to add the substitution rule “Puzzle→Crossword (New York Times :)” to the collection 210. For subsequent user queries that contain original query terms “New York Times Puzzles”, the substitution engine 206 may then apply the substitution rule “Puzzle→Crossword (New York Times :)” and communicate with the query reviser engine 205 to include the substitute term “Crossword” in the revised query.

While the example above goes into the similarities between the terms "Puzzle" and "Crossword" the same machine learning can recognize and attribute values to the brand itself, "New York Times".

That's exactly right Isaac.  With the logarithmic weighting of Domain Authority and Page Authority, links from higher value sites and pages carry more weight than those with lower scores. It sounds like you've covered the basics as seen here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

The precise amount of link juice varies due to several factors, but in general you should see an increase in rankings and referral traffic when linked to by a high DA/PA site versus a low one.

I wouldn't NOINDEX a page that accounts for 60% of organic visits as that would be a major blow to your site overall. Are the other full-text pages not receiving any organic visits currently?

While the content is duplicate in the sense that it's pulling snippets from the full-text pages, the combinations on the listing pages are unique.

I would look into ways to enhance the full-text pages if they're currently not receiving visits from search before deciding to NOINDEX the listing pages.  Cheers!

Thanks for the clarification Lauren. Have you been able to determine if the organic results are news based? Based on the landing pages are you aware of any rankings that might have jumped up recently?  If you can get any insights from Google's Search Console you might get tipped off to some new rankings that are accounting for the spike.

Hi Melissa. You'll want to go into the Admin >> Property >> .js Tracking Info >> Referral Exclusion List and add in the domain(s) you want to exclude, such as zootsports.com, www.zootsports.com, k2snowboarding.com... and so on.  If you take a look at your current referral traffic in GA Reports section you should find a fairly complete list. For example, you might have mobile domains as well, things like, m.k2.... etc.

Hi Angelos. Dofollowing internal links, is fine, especially in the context of relevant articles as those links are tying together information both in relation to search and for users that want to quickly dig deeper while reading your work.

Why yes the is! In 2013 Kaila Strong wrote an in-depth article here: http://moz.com/ugc/guide-to-using-unlinked-brand-mentions-for-link-acquisition-20981 as one example.

One suggestion I'd add is the creation of a Media Kit page that provides pre-approved pull quotes, company related imagery (in various sizes), timeline and more can work well in either gaining hotlinks to the images or providing citation samples that make it quick and easy for someone writing an article to cite your company.

Yup! That sounds like a good interaction and a lively page that will keep presenting fresh, meaningful content each time it's updated. The only comments I'd worry about are spam (which you've screened) and really off-topic comments, but neither of those seem to be a problem. Since people are commenting under the same topic(s) as the article, it just adds to the page as a whole.

Per Google, "Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar."  (from: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359)  Substantive meaning most or nearly all of the content on two pages being the same. The examples they provide bear this out.

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

In each case they're talking about URLs that would be nearly identical, not the blocks of navigation or sidebar content that are common through out a site. Your website should be ok.

Why not change the file name to 'red-for-truck.jpg'? That would probably have a more positive effect. Much of what dictates image optimization is the same as on page factors, as described here: http://moz.com/blog/is-optimizing-photos-more-important-than-you-think. (On page factors: http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors) Plus Google has its own guide for image sitemaps here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636.  Cheers!

Hi Margaret. As discussed on the blog post here: http://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk the tool is just one facet of identifying what sites Google may consider spammy. A score of 5 is currently just outside of the green / ok part of the tool so it's likely very low risk.

In addition to the tool though, consider the site itself.

• Do they moderate their comments (deleting comment spam)?
• Is the link relevant?
• Is it on a page that is semantically aligned to what you do?
• Is the link text to your site accurate?
• Does there site get a lot of links from red / danger spam sites?

Those are just some of the things to consider. But it should become fairly clear with a little investigation.  Like Khem says, it's better to use the tool to identify trends, versus dissecting more granular details. Cheers!

Whatever you do regarding going from the new domain back to the old domain is going to require 301 redirection whether or not the pages have .html at the end.

There really is no way to see what your old rankings were without having kept historical data on it--spreadsheets, Moz Analytics, Rank Tracking software, etc.  One thing you can do though, is run the old domain through as many link finding tools--like OSE--as possible in order to establish which pages were the most popular via the most links. Next, you can go to archive.org and use the Way Back Machine there to see if they have copies of the old site.  From there, you should be able to get an idea of title tags, etc.

It's important to know that this change will further confuse the search engines for a time and could add further delays on getting back towards the old rankings. The path with the least resistance would be matching the old domains that had the most links exactly as they used to be.  Cheers!

Hi Kelly. Temporary redirects for things like adding items to a cart, changing languages, and the like are acceptable and shouldn't be viewed as an error per se. You could possibly put your cart in its own directory and then have that directory be ignored by Moz to clean them up, but in your use case it's not an issue.  Cheers!

Ah, this is definitely a more nuanced answer than just X links = Y DA/PA... The TL;DR is take a look at sites similar to yours in the Comparison Tool to get an idea around goal numbers. https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/comparisons

Rand has presented on this in the past, and here's one of his answers from the blog that should give you a good idea of what's taken into account...

Q: Can you speak in more detail about the specific metrics that are being used to calculate the domain/page authority?

You talked briefly about this in video 2, and it makes sense that you're using already existing metrics like mozRank, mozTrust, number of links and number of linking domains. But what are the other metrics you use (those "dozens or hundreds" of link metrics)?

Rand: Just a start, but things like:

• mozRank
• mozTrust
• Domain mozRank
• Domain mozTrust
• # of links
• # of linking root domains
• % of followed links
• % of image links
• % of links from same IP c-block
• % oflinks from noscript links
• distribution of % of links from pages with certain # of links on the page
• distribution of TLDs in links
• distribution of TLDs in linking root domains
• mozRank passed through links from certain TLDs
• distribution of mozRank passed through links with certain mozTrust metrics
• mozRank passed by sites with certain DmR/DmT scores
• mozRank passed through image links
• mozTrust passed (on all of the above sets)
• relationship between each metric with each other metric
• derivatives calculated between multiple metrics (3-way, 4-way, 5-way, etc. comparisons)

I suspect there's a lot more in our formulas at this point, but you can basically think of it as us using every metric we can calculate and every metric that can be calculated off the relationship between 2, 3, 4+ metrics.As we noted in the video, the algorithms themselves are pretty hard to look at and find value from, but the concept behind it - that by mashing up metrics in ways that correlate with search rankings using machine learning you can get high value data - is what's important. Hope that helps!

From: http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics

The moz video on DA: http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

It's partly due to the sources where they're pulling information, so for the Garrison Wyn profile, since he has an IMDB listing, it gets added in. Brian on the other hand seems to be getting his data scraped from Wikipedia.

Dr. Pete recently wrote a great article on the process he took in working with one of these and detailed it all in a blog post here: http://moz.com/blog/how-we-fixed-the-internet . Since he had access to the source material it became a little easier for him to alter, but it still took a while for the changes to take place. Further on he provides other examples.

In short, it's not an easy or rapid process at times, but if you address the source material to get the facts straight it should eventually get picked up. Cheers!

Hi Joe.  There's certainly many aspects to how you want to go about generating and gathering back links, but by in large you are seeing the basics. Raven Tools plugs into Basecamp which can be handy and tries to include a broader cross section of online marketing data to further help plan your campaigns and website marketing.  Still, Open Site Explorer gives you all the raw data you need in managing your backlinks and really it's up to you how you want to approach it.  You'll likely come across some sites that appear spammy but a competitor has a link there.  You'll have to decide whether or not you want to try and acquire one there as well.  Other times, you'll get widget, content, and vertical creation ideas from viewing where others--or your own site--have successfully gotten backlinks.

If you're putting a conscious effort towards acquiring genuine links you will have very little worry about appearing unnatural in Google, and emphasizing a broad source of backlinks will expose you to different market segments and your target audience (see Laura Lippay's: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-8step-seo-strategy-step-1-define-your-target-audience-and-their-needs).

Hello Laruen!  You'll want to look at your direct pages and see if they're getting legitimate traffic in your referrals report: Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Referrals

From there you should be able to get an idea about what recent news or articles that have gone live that have been influencing your traffic. You can also use the Fresh Web Explorer here to see what pages might be mentioning you and sending larger amounts of traffic as well as various tools in Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).

I'm not seeing spikes across clientele so your situation is likely unique to you in that some of your pages have been recently referenced on high traffic sites or has popped into the news cycle. Cheers!

Are you trying to get in the local listings? If that's the case just get the address on the page and start submitting through Google Local.  If it's a chain submit the bulk listings and/or service areas.  Pages like this: http://www.mrswitch.com.au/location are going to hurt you as the engines will see it as a keyword stuffing attempt to manipulate results around any Sydney suburb + "Electrician". I'd recommend getting rid of the location page in its current format and replace it with a few of your actual locations.  Use your keywords sparingly, and use the tools Google provides, especially mapping and reviews.

Rand recently did a whiteboard (beard?) Friday on this ~loosely~ under the broader scope of "Engagement" and I think you have to stick with keeping page views lumped into the overall scope of engagement, i.e., saying X page views per session = Y ranking boost is likely something no one can define precisely.

However, creating an on-site engagement score is something that is loosely feasible. For example you could look at time on site and a divide it by your GWT average time spent downloading a page to give yourself a rating engagement rating that. Lower the download time and you raise your score if the time on site stays the same. Increase time on site and the score goes up as well.

Does the number of page view equate into engagement? Maybe, although a site setup for getting lots of page views (pop culture sites with click lists, news articles, etc.) is going to have more than sites that do the bulk of their business via the home page. Perhaps a page view engagement metric you could create would be derived from your organic bounce rate: http://moz.com/blog/solving-the-pogo-stick-problem-whiteboard-friday

Hopefully this gives you a little direction in what to improve.

This should change after recrawls. A few things to check for sure:

• Syntax. Make sure the meta description tag is typed correctly.
• URL Parameters. Check to see that the missing description isn't attributable to variable or session based issue.
• Browser test. View the source of some pages as a spot check to make sure nothing is changing between the code and the public facing side of the site.

That should do it.

I think if guest posting becomes a tactic that is done on thin content websites or blogs that reproduce a lot of duplicate content then it should be avoided. However, guest posting in the sense of a book author writing something like a review of short story collections on a site outside their own is very common, or an article written in an industry-relevant news site by another company or leader in the field is also quite common.  Both of these examples and many others are guest posting in the positive sense. But they take having a site or work or product that generates interest in and of itself. You should be able to guest post on a site that isn't specifically designed for guest posting, i.e. your basic pitch should be, "Hello (editor, analyst, reporter, etc.) we (wrote the ABC book, run unique XYZ site, are researching 123) and have recently done some work into your site's specific focus. Please let me know if you'd be interested in sharing something written by us with your readers."  Ideally your guest post is accepted because you're advanced in your field, versus being an SEO tactic.

Hi Jason. Beyond the body text, the term physical therapy shows up heavily in many ways.

1. Alt text. 6 times
2. Tag Anchor text. 12 times
3. As 'physical-therapy' in links. 260 times.
4. As 'physical+therapy' in links. 21 times
5. Body text. 4 times.

If you look at the code, it's a pretty heavy usage of the term on the home page and throughout the site in on way or another. I'd work on reducing the presence in links and making alt text more descriptive of the image being described than as a box to tick for the keyword location.  Cheers!

Outside of redirection you might be able to accomplish this via redesign and branding. Still, I'd ask questions like these moving forward...

1. Are their email address going to change? (i.e. from doctor@privatepractice.org to doctor@medicalgroup.org?
2. Will their billing and call handling change? (again, from one to the other)
3. Will they have to present their business as "...part of the Medical Group?"
4. Will the web team be working for the Medical Group or individual doctors?
5. And so on...

Ultimately it looks like the answer is going to be The Medical Group. As such, redirecting the old individual sites to the corresponding section of the new medical group site is the likely conclusion, so individualdoctor.com >> 301 >> medicalgroup.org/individualdoctor.

To ease this transition it'd help you to have a thorough list of all the benefits the new site is going to bring, while also addressing how they can integrate their old work (social media profiles, localized listings, reviews, so on) into the new site.  Any other information that you can provide that shows how The Medical Group has helped promote doctors in the past (if it existed prior) would be good as well.

Hi Briana. Neat question! This could be pretty fascinating as it fills out. Instead of giving you a personal history though, I'll go over some of the things I read or used early on that have continued to serve me well into the present.  And I'll break these up into two areas: Technical and Classical.

Technical

• DNS and HTTP: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596100575.do You'll likely come across many other O'Reilly books as you study (whether on your own or in a course) as they are classics. The other applicable one to DNS being: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596005627.do Finally, combine that with HTTP (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596005627.do) and whenever you come across discussions on whether or not to structure a site with a third level, cname, a name, 301 redirect, 302... whatever, you'll have a solid foundational understanding of what's at play. I read my first one of these back in 2000 and the information has stuck with me ever since.
• Scripting. Another book reference: Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie, Wrox, April 2007. Their site is here: http://www.seoegghead.com/our-seo-book/search-engine-optimization-with-php.seo.  While their book is on PHP, having an understanding of any scripting language gives you a core understanding of how much of the content on the web goes from server to browser. Java script being another major one as you'll often interact with it on some level, at the least a code to incorporate tracking via Google Analytics or other services.
• CSS. Firebug is my favorite plug in for messing around with CSS. And really it's all about being able to quickly and easily mess around. Its in-browser highlighting features, css window, flexibility are all favorites for quickly tackling look and feel issues. Having an understanding of CSS also makes any discussions with designers all that much more smooth. In that vein...
• Images.  The big technical thing to understand here as far as the web goes is the various file types and how you can accomplish a smaller file that still looks great via formatting in JPG, GIF, or PNG (for the most part). I learned most of this while interacting with Photoshop and using the "Save for Web" feature. In relation to SEO though, the ability for people to share your images goes a long way. Here's how XKCD author Randall Munroe handles it: http://xkcd.com/license.html.
• Bots, Crawlers, and Spiders. Oh my. You can play around with Xenu's Link Sleuth to get a hands-on understanding of the automated web surfers out there as well as reading up on the documentation for Googlebot and others.  The big take away is understanding the difference between the previous two bullets and what bots see when they visit your site.
• SEO Tools. You're in a good place for those! With an understanding of all of the above it will really help you to break down what might be a breakdown in the sites you're analyzing. Moz's guides are excellent reading, along with what you've mentioned doing already. Same goes for things like Google Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics. GA deserves its own mention under UX, so...
• UX. When you can get a handle on UX you're at the finish line of optimization, but ready for another lap most likely!  If you're site is up (first two bullets), loading quickly and looking nice (second two bullets), indexed (fifth), and ranking well (sixth), knowing how your visitors are interacting with your site and moving towards goals or conversions is key. Being able to work with Analytics (Google or another) is key.  Thankfully there are whole schools dedicated to this: https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/explorer and http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/index.html.

Classical

• Marketing. In regards to the SEO space it's been neat to see how Moz has matured and how the space as a whole better and more conventionally intersects with classical fundamentals of marketing.  Having technical proficiency in the things listed above is one thing, but being able to combine them fluidly with core marketing principals is another. Avinash Kaushik is an excellent example of combining technical proficiency with marketing common sense. His "about" page and blog roll are filled with others who do both well.
• Sales. If you have the opportunity at some point, definitely work as closely as possible with a sales team. Especially the ones that crush it on a regular basis. Ask them what they want in terms of leads. What would their perfect lead be? How do they use the website currently? When you begin connecting the dots from search to visit to sale you're at the top of your class.  Conversion Rate Experts are a great example and their story is pretty instructive.
• MBA. If you're going to take the plunge in education and are going for a corporate setting, an MBA from well-regarded institution still goes a long way. By no means a requirement for success in the field (too many examples to list) it still has its place in many people's timeline.
• Conscientious. Look at any timeline and the ones that see the most growth and success--often despite blunders, mistakes, and tangents along the way--are the people that interact with others in a healthy, patient and kind way. If you come across some one who is the opposite of this let the go along their own way and keep on your own path. You might turn down work because of it from time to time, but you'll have the reserves to find more and continue onward if you do.

Those are some top of mind highlights. Best wishes for your success!

It's ok. It's a little tricky to get as this aspect has changed over the years as well. And Feed The Hungry is a good example of where their brand matches their domain like Monica mentioned earlier.  As a business "Feed The Hungry" is what goes on their business cards, letterhead, LinkedIn, etc. That the brand name is tied in to an applicable search is helpful partly for people who remember them and create a link back to them (branding) and partly as an EDM. Still the press they've gotten, DA they've built, and networking they've done online and off under the name "Feed The Hungry" has a stronger weight than the EDM. That the EDM ties into it though smoothly is icing on a cake built from all those other efforts.  So, EDM isn't worth zero, but you shouldn't sacrifice branding to get one.

Another search that's instructive: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google incorporated When you search for Google Incorporated you get different results than just searching for Google, same goes for LeSEA Global Feed The Hungry, Inc vs Feed The Hungry.  Search Engines have done well at figuring out search intent in addition to nuanced differences like lack of spacing in the domain vs the business name (earlier example).  An excellent litmus test would be to go with the name that you feel most comfortable promoting, pressing, and talking about as that's the work that's going to get you to rank.

Zoho Sites, Wordpress, Tumblr, or some hosting companies that offer a domain purchase + a year of hosting at an entry rate may be good. It's important to consider that much of SEO is in optimizing the presence of a individual website on the web.  If your website is part of a different site (i.e. yoursite.wordpress.org) you're going to have much less control than hosting the site and owning the domain name  (i.e. yoursite.com).  The $25 to $50 USD / year or so cost for that is usually worth it.

At the moment a few workflows can include addressing any errors in "Mobile Usability" in GWT under Search Traffic;  looking at landing page performance under Audience >> Mobile >> Landing Page as a secondary dimension and comparing that to results in desktop; and parsing out mobile visits with secondary dimension as source / medium (looking at google / organic)...

Not very exacting, but you should be able to get an idea pretty quickly of whether or not mobile is performing drastically different than desktop percentage-wise.

Questions

1. This type of behavior is considered a temporary redirect. Maybe it's better to think of the name as a conditional redirect. In which case, "Oh, your browser is in FR, with that condition let's send you here..."  The 301 is supposed to be used as an unconditional redirect, telling crawlers that you're trying to migrate from URL A to B permanently, so get rid of URL A.
2. Not necessarily. VS a 301, yes. but scrapability is mostly down to linking and sitemaps.
3. Yup.
4. Nope. You'd want to interlink directly to the other languages anyways though in case the 302 doesn't work for whatever reasons. Then the link is passing authority and the user has an option available to them if they'd like to get there on their own.
5. Right. It'd be best to interlink with hreflang on each as you never know for certain how someone arrives at those pages.  Best to give them and crawlers the guidance to where the other translations reside.

You're welcome! Hopefully that clears it all up for you.

Duplicate content doesn't tend to burn a website out unless there is aggressive scraping going on as well as other balck hat signals. It sounds like the bigger question you're asking is how can the site be made to have unique content when it, along with many others, are pulling the same MLS content. This was asked about a year ago here: http://moz.com/community/q/real-estate-mls-listings-does-google-consider-duplicate-content, and the general consensus remains the same: try to find a way to make your content unique.

Welcome! There are benefits to each. When people refer to your URL you'll have your keyword set there and when they talk about you as a business the name will be more readable. Very few business come to mind that keep the TLD as part of the business name: eBay, Google, Yahoo... maybe Pets.com--due to it's generic name without the '.com'.  So it's partly a branding decision in that regard.  I think if you do some analysis specific to what your 'blue widget' is you'll come up with a good answer as far as your branding goes. As far as SEO both will work if your presence grows.

Sorry Jonathan, I have not. You can compare them to several other tools out there to get a good opinion on it. Cyrus talks about several in his most recent webinar here: http://moz.com/webinars/seo-basics-the-fundamental-signals-used-to-rank-our-content-higher starting at 8:00 in for keyword research. Here are some tools he suggests:

• http://keywordtool.io
• http://ubersuggest.org
• The chrome extension for Uber Suggest: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ubersuggest-cpc-search-vo/hopggcicaffnjomhjjpogcelclkbnigp
• http://moz.com/tools/keyword-difficulty
• http://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar
• http://keywordeye.com
• http://keyword.io

These should help get you started and give you plenty to compare with. Cheers!

Per Sam Weber's answer a few months ago, "You should be able to do that. You'd just need to make sure it's formatted correctly. For the hours you listed, it would look something like this for Sunday:

1:09:00AM:11:00AM,1:02:00PM:06:30PM

If the hours overlap, then we wouldn't be able to process it for you."
http://moz.com/community/q/more-than-one-set-of-hours-per-day-in-moz-local

I notice your code is missing the leading zero: 09:00AM. Cheers!