Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Rand,

I'd like to add amateur video testimonials to the list. Dove started the trend offline by getting actual customers to review the product in their ads and the same concept seems to work quite well online. One of our clients mailed out disposable cameras to their clients and had them record testimonials which were then used in a variety of campaigns including landing pages, email marketing and on their site. Led to an increased engagement as the clients themselves shared the website link where their testimonial was hosted with their friends/acquaintances. Not sure if this qualifies in the "very few people know of" category however i thought I'd still share it.

Cheers,

Hi Nick,

This is a fantastic resource that we can share internally with our team members. My feedback below:

• More case studies will be awesome. Showcasing real time examples to drive home the concepts would be really helpful
• More discussion on the effectiveness and usage of analytics in marketing campaigns would be very helpful
• Topics like mobile and video marketing would also be very helpful

Cant wait to see more content in the academy. Great initiative. Just this resource in itself is worth the pro membership fee.

Cheers,

SEO5..

Your site appears to be spammy and not offering quality content to the visitors. The keyword "earn money online" has been used over 12 times , just in the meta data itself, This kind of over optimization is bound at attract a penalty. You have to write for the visitor and provide meaningful content, there are spelling errors on the site. This will not only impact your rankings but also the perception that visitors have of your site.

Google has stopped updating the page rank data in the toolbars so i would not worry too much about the PR info. Have your rankings suffered? Has your traffic dropped?

Wikipedia's resource on creating a page is quite detailed . Link Below

Starting an Article

Be sure to add lots of independent references/sources for the content that you post on the page.

i do see the site ranking # 1 in Google.de , not for google.com and google.ca. It's definitely ranking at the top because of the exact match in the URL as well as keyword stuffing on the actual page itself. Google may not have rolled out the updates as aggressively for the international sites as they did for .com. I agree with eyepaq its only a matter of time before another high quality site knocks it off the top position.

Hi Samuel,

Jason wrote an excellent article covering this topic on SEOMOZ. Even though your facebook likes might not directly influence your rankings, they can definitely impact it through a lower bounce rate and a higher average time on site metrics. There is also the advantage of getting backlinks for content that you share through your social profiles.The link to the full article is provided below:

Guide to Social Signals

Cheers,

SEO5

Since you already have one link from them, i would not bother getting the 2nd link.

This earlier post might also be helpful for you.

Hi Steven,

Welcome to this community. The ideal response to your question would be to take the content that the client is providing and come up with unique content based on that material. So essentially rewriting those content pieces and giving your own flavor to them. Now , of course, due to various reasons that might not be possible (time, budget, resources). In that case it's best to give credit to the original source where you got the content from, when you add it to the site. More info in the links below:

Duplicate Content

Hubspot Post on content

This post might be helpful for you.

Another Video explaining the tool Here

i agree with Edward as well. With Google cracking down on exact match domains , you would be better off focusing your efforts on building all the keyword related content on one portal related to that industry. You can have a resources section on the site and write good content on the different topics and over time establish your site as a credible repository of information.

Hi John,

I would say that keyword research is the main activity to focus on. It can really make or break your launch. If you choose keywords that are very competitive , they will take a while to rank and bring traffic to the site. The idea is to choose keywords (long tail or low competition phrases) that you can get ranked for relatively quickly and start seeing traction.I've added some resources below to assist you.

SEO Chat discussion

New Website Launch

Quicksprout Article

Search Engine Watch Article

All the best.

Cheers,

SEO5

With Google getting sophisticated with their algorithm and cracking down on spammy sites with every new update they roll out, it's only a matter of time those sites will get impacted by one of those updates. Stick with the recommended methods and you will be the winner in the long run. Tempted to quote EGOL here ; build great content for the visitors, optimize / distribute the content effectively and the rankings / traffic will follow. 

are you referring to this post?

Link Prospecting Tools

You might find the below link useful as well

Ontolo

Check out the White Spark citation finder tool. You will find lots of relevant citations for that website that you can list it in. That should help with the local rankings.

1. IMHO .edu and .gove links if acquired in the right manner without any spamming tactics or redirects are still very effective for link building.

2. The percentage of image links really depends on your vertical. If you own a photography site, it might so happen that a high percentage of your links would be from images shared on different sites across the net. The keyword here is "natural". If it appears natural for your site to have a high percentage of inbound links from images, then you should not  have anything to worry about.

Good article on this topic here.

To add to Oleg's response, i would suggest you to do a backlink analysis for your competitors (each keyword) and compile a list of common directories that you see you competition being a part of.

Hi Dana,

In our opinion that would technically be treated like a paid link and is in violation of Google guidelines. Link below:

Link Schemes (especially the part that says "Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites")

Better to be safe than sorry:). Our suggestion in this case would be to set up call with the blogger (a more personal discussion) as opposed to an email and then get your views across to him. I'm sure he will appreciate your proactive approach in doing this before you get into any issues with Google. Also the fact that you do have a reputation to protect with your clients and in the industry, so why put that in jeopardy.

Cheers,

SEO5..

In our experience, having a country specific domain name makes a lot of difference in your placement for that keyword . For example, if you're only looking for Canadian traffic and want to rank high in Google.ca , then having a .ca extension makes a difference. You should also host the website with a hosting provider in that country itself.

In this instance your best bet is link building. As Ryan mentions in his response put a lot of focus on beating your competitors with targeted and high quality links with the keywords in the anchor text. Do keyword research on synonyms that are very close to your core keywords. Build a keyword list with those related keywords and do both the on page and off page optimization with those keywords. If your industry is competitive, you're better off focusing on related keywords.

Hi Fabrizo,

Some possibilities are mentioned below:

• Do you post new content on the site every Monday

• Is your site the kind that attracts a specific demographic that is more active on Monday than the weekends

I would look at the analytics a bit deeper to review this trend specifically what keywords are driving the traffic, the landing pages that are getting the most visits on Mondays etc.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

SEO5

Hi Colin,

You can check out the recommended companies in the link below provided by SEOMOZ.

SEO Companies

Cheers,

SEO5

Hey All

My question is specfic to a particular website. The category of the website is Kitchen Appliances. The keyword is extremely competitive. The website I am currently optimizing has loads of products and many pages as well. I am constantly building links from industry specific websites for the website as well as composing articles and leading the users back to the website with keyword rich anchor text. I have been doing this for around 3 months and I do not see the website in the first 30 pages of the SERP (for the keyword kitchen appliances - the site is a page rank 2 BTW). No bugs reported as well in Webmaster tools.

My next step is to add these articles to the website (www.example.com/KitchenAppliances ) with keyword rich metatags as well as content with internal links to my product pages. I also plan on sending traffic to these pages to build the pages link popularity.

Do you think I can expect better results for the article pages than my original website product pages or do you think I should continue with the link building activity I was performing originally for the website.

regards

Ryan

We're testing this network Outbrain to promote quality content. Will do a case study on how it works out once we have tested the network.

This issue that you're facing is quite common with franchise related websites as they follow one master template and just some localized content changes on each of the franchisee sites.

Each of the individual franchisee sites should invest in original content that separates it from the corporate site. Just having a 5% difference in content will not suffice and will do harm sooner or later.

A really good discussion on this topic in this Link 

Is the data in the other infographics available publicly from other sources or was it researched independently by the companies that produced the infographic. IMHO If it is available, then you can use it as long as you quote the sources.

We've been testing some campaigns with Pulse360 . They have reputable sites like cnn in their network. Still early days but feel free to PM me for more info.

I would suggest optimizing one keyword per page . Google's been really aggressive with the over optimization penalty. Better to be safe than sorry.

Also want to clarify that having a keyword in the alt text or the URL is not technically "hiding" the keyword. The word "hiding" can have a strong connotation to black hat SEO (e.g old tactics like making the keyword font the same color as the background of your site)

Hi Sorina,

Archiving is more about classifying information/content that is either outdated or not being accessed that frequently by the visitors into a separate section on your site. I would not no index those pages because they might be ranking well in the search engines and still be getting traffic to the site. You can do this creating an "archives" section on your site so that if the visitors want to access the old content on your site they can still do so by accessing that section.

Here is a useful post on archiving content on your site

David, we've tried SEO campaigns with and without business.com links and it did not make much difference in the results. I will however tell you that their PPC offering works. We have run quite a few campaigns for our clients in the franchising vertical with very good results. The cost per acquisition is quite lower than adwords.

You have to be very careful because Google has gotten very aggressive with the over optimization penalty off late. I would recommend sticking with just one keyword and the brand name in the title tag ( Keyword | Brand Name) , use the keyword only once in the meta description and 1 for the alt tag.

You can probably get away with 2 keywords however it's better to be safe than sorry and use just one keyword.

Hi Ben,

What's your motivation to advertise the same branded keywords for both the sites at the same time? If you want to do some A/B testing and seeing which site converts better for the same keywords, you can run site A for one month and site B for the next and see which one converted better.

Cheers,

SEO5..

Hi Taysir,

In our opinion, the change in primary and secondary navigation (combining it) should not impact your overall SEO efforts as the content is still there, (you still have the secondary navigation terms merged under one nav)

If you have really good local ranks for the franchisee pages, then i would suggest rolling out this change in phases. Start by changing the territories that don't have as much activity in terms of search volume. Make the change and observe the rankings over the next 30-60 days. If there is no noticeable impact , then you can make the change across the board. Better to be safe than sorry

Cheers,

i would say that it's ok to have outbound links on your site as long as the links are to established trusted sites.

More on the topic on this link including a quote from Matt Cutts on this question . http://lincontex.com/the-missing-link/googles-matt-cutts-vindicates-controversial-theory-behind-lincontex-com/

Hi Andreas,

A very open ended question. It depends on a lot of factors, the competition, the industry, geo target. The fundamentals involve 3 aspects:

• Strong On Page SEO (www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/on-page-factors)

• Strong Off Page primarily link building (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links)

• Social Media (www.seomoz.org/blog/the-social-media-marketers-seo-checklist

As long as you have these 3 aspects covered, you are off to a very good start. Keep monitoring your progress regularly. Setup baseline metrics for rankings, traffic and conversions and keep marking progress each day,week, month, quarter, year.

All the best.

Don't worry about adding the "no follow" , Google's smart enough to figure out the duplicate "read more" links on your site and index accordingly. You don't want to cause issues by adding the "no follow" and potentially having any legitimate internal links jeopardized on that page.

How valuable is the site traffic to you. If you monetize the site traffic well then you should definitely invest in creating unique content for the site. You could have avoided these issues if you had used the rel canonical tag to identify the source of the content. It also matters on how much of the content is duplicated . If it's only a small percentage then it should make that much of a difference.

Based on the info provided and the fact that you have already been hit with google's updates, you should invest in creating unique content. Along with content also create unique meta tags for the pages as well as encourage user interaction on the game pages with reviews /comments.

Bryan, you might have created an infinite loop that might be causing the issue you are describing. More on the issue HERE

Use the open site explorer to check links (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/) . Before you start using it, i suggest you view the presentation in this link (http://www.seomoz.org/help/ose-overview)  and the FAQ (http://www.seomoz.org/help/open-site-explorer-faq)

I think that the "read more" link would result in better user experience especially on the main blog page that has a lot of blog titles displayed on it. So yep, don't worry about it, you can keep using it.

it also depends on what domain you have already done link building for. Choose the one that has more backlinks pointing to it.

I'd do any of the below :

• Submit a new site map for indexing
• Use Google's removal tool

Good post on this topic here 

Be smart about it, as long as it is relevant for the user and genuinely gives them related information to other subject matter on the site. Having said that , it is mentioned that Google can index upto a 100 links on a page. More info on this link: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/an-internal-link-juice-tool-14969

Take a look at this site that does quite a lot of internal linking and is ranking at the top for all "office space for rent" and "office space for lease" geo targeted keywords  (www.loopnet.com)

To answer point 2 , if you have a 400 word article having 1 to 2 internal links in that sounds like a good balance.

Hi Bob,

Personally love the style adopted by The New Yorker . Lots of "white" space on the pages , the font used is very readable, nice combination of images and text.

http://www.findthebest.com/

http://www.oodle.com/

http://www.mitula.us/

Google pulls sitelinks in an automated manner based on what they feel is important for your site and would help the user access your site better. According to Google:

"There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

Another good post below:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-sitelinks-2

In my opinion, i don't think you will derive a lot of SEO benefit from hosting the yahoo answers. You are better off building your own Q&A database . It is definitely more work and time consuming however there can be a lot of benefit in investing time and resources in this.

There is an old post referring to Q&A as a strategy that you can access here.