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Hi, this info I pulled out from Google Support,

Hope it helps:

Ranking of Google Places listings

Google Maps search results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence. These factors are combined to help us find the best match for your search. For example, our search technology might decide that a business that's farther away from your location is more likely to have what you're looking for than a business that's closer. Here's more detail on what relevance, distance, and prominence mean:

Relevance: Relevance is how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for. A complete and detailed listing in Places can help us better understand your business and match you to relevant search results.

Distance: Just like it sounds -- how far is each potential search result from the location term used in a search? If you don't specify a location in your search, we'll calculate distance based on what we know about your location.

Prominence: This describes how well-known or prominent a listing can be. This is based on information we have about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and we try to reflect this online as well. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels, or well-known store brands that are familiar to many people are also likely to be more prominent in search results.

Google Maps and Google Places are free services, so there's no way to request or pay for a better ranking. In addition, we do our best to keep the details of the algorithm confidential in order to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.

Thanks,

Russel

Hey Ben,

There many various factors need to be counted in on-page optimisation before you start linkbuilding.

• First of all make sure that your pages are accessible to Search Engines, check robots.txt
• Check if you keywords repeat several times (2-3 is enough) in your page's content
• It will be good if you will have the keyword in your page title, but don't keep only the keyword
  for instance if your keyword is "dhow cruise" then the title can be "Unforgettable dhow cruise in US"
• Avoid keyword stuffing in Document
• Avoid multiple titles on one page
• No more than one canonical URL tag
  (correlation research has shown that pages which employ the targeted keyword(s) at the front of the title tag benefit greatly in the rankings. There is a direct relationship between proximity to the front of the title element and prominence/rankings as seen by the engines, and the further back in the page title the keyword appears, the worse the correlation with high rankings)
• Keyword usage in image ALT attribute
• It should be less than 200 words on a page
• Appropriate usage of H1 tag (1 times is enough)
• Meta Keywords and Meta description should be filled it
• Keyword Usage in Bold/Strong/Emphasized/Italics also might help
• Avoid Excessive External Links
• Avoid long URLs
• Don's use a lot of ads on page

Also you can check this article about page layout http://www.vanseodesign.com/seo/page-layout-algorithm/

Cheers,

Russel

Hi Cyril,

What I would suggest to you is to make the 301 redirect from this page to home page. Then create another Privacy Page with slightly different URL. I believe this page has been ranked high because it has more text and better optimised than any other relevant page on your website. Second maybe someone has posted some external links to this page.

Another option can be cross linking. Try to make keyword  "Mardi Gras Parade Tickets" as a link pointing to your home page.

Hope it helps,

Cheers,

Russel

I think nobody will blame me if I tell you YES, because until now it is not proven fact that the appearance of your keywords in meta description will make an impact on your rankings. However I will recommend two things:

1. If you use any type of CMS (Joomla or Werdpress) to build your website then you can download the plugin which generates the meta description automaticaly.

2. Still it's better if you will include the targeted keywords from page to meta description, and even if you check SeoMoz on-page optimization, those guys are recommend to do this.

3. Remember that attractive and interesting Meta Description might highlight you among your competitors and bring you additional traffic even if you are not TOP1.

Hope that it was clear.

Actually this is not the first time when SeoMoz showing wrong ranking results for non US keywords. I have the same situation with my campaign in Google.ae.

Frankly speaking I never use SeoMoz ranking statistic to check my keyword rankings. From my experience this question has been raised several times in SEOmoz Q/A. I did it onces as well, here you can check what answers I got. 

Cheers,

Russel

Using rel=author helps to protect your content from being copy/paste. You should use this link on every page with content which belongs to you. It shows Google who is the author of the page's text.

According to the picture in SERP results, I can say that this privilege mainly for bloggers, however I successfully did it for one of my clients in dental field. Now if you will type "dentist dubai", you will find his picture in SERP. Unfortunately y ou can't use your brand logos or any other pictures (this is from my experience).

On the last point I will agree with you, however as I said you can't put your company logo.

Hope it helps,

Russel

Dear Joel,

This is definitely a good start for your SEO campaign however putting it in local sites which you've mentioned is not enough to rank higher than your competitors. Most probably you moved back to page 2 because your competitors are improving their links profile. You need to focus on getting some quality links, for ex:

• Links from Catalogs/Business Directories
  Pros: Free, Strong positive influence on ranking, which may have some reputable directories. 
  Cons: Take time to submit, Some directories have ban from Google)
• _Comments in blogs _
  Pros: Free to submit. 
  Cons: Take time to submit, Links can be nofollow or noindex
• Social networks
  Pros: Free to submit, Ability to get relevant traffic, Helps to increase page indexation time 
  Cons: Take time to submit
• Social Bookmarks Pros: Helps to increase page indexation time, free to submitCons: Low quality of links, big time spends
• News and PR **Pros: Make a big positive impact on rankings, ability to get several links from one pageCons: **Usually it cost money
• Bulletin board Pros: Free submit of external link**Cons: **Low quality of links, some of them baned by Google
• Sponsorship Pros: Ability to get high quality linksCons: Risk the link will not be permanent, cost money
• Forum links Pros: Free to submit, ability to get targeted traffic**Cons: **Post may not pass moderation, post may be closed from indexation
• FAQ services
  **Pros: Free to submit, ability to get targeted trafficCons: **Take time to submit, post may be closed from indexation

Of course this is not only the places where you can get some links and improve your rankings, if you will go through SEOmoz blog I am sure you will find some other ways for ex. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-things-you-can-give-away-to-earn-links-mentions-whiteboard-friday

Looking forwards to see you in Google's top,

Cheers,

Russel

Actually it is not yet confirm that Facebook likes have a direct impact on your keyword rankings in Google, but definitely it is one of the signals which Google use in their algorithm, especially after update in April, 24th.

According to number of likes or shares, I believe Google pull out this data from social plugins like AddThis.com or social code snippet which Social Networks provide for developers.

Cheers,

Russel

Hi Dino,

I can assume that Mozbot haven't index  your website yet, that's why it is not showing any backlinks in OpenSiteExplorer. I have the same problem with couple of my websites as well.

Try to check backlinks through MajesticSEO Backlinks tool.

Cheers,

Russel

Hi Patrick,

You might be interested in this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Winning-Results-Google-AdWords-Goodman/dp/0072257024

I've read it recently and found quite interesting and educated.

If you are new to Google Adwords you might be interested in this:

http://support.google.com/adwords/?hl=en

If you are not running SEO agency and want to learn how to create and configure Adwords campaign without lose of money, then the beginner guide will be more then enough.

Hope it will make some sense to you.

I will advise you to target your keyword on main page because main page has more weight and trust in front of Google. So it should be easier to bring it on Top Page of Google. Also if you have another page with relevant information to your keyword then if will be great if you put a link on this page targeting on main page. of course the anchor should be your keyword.

From my side I will recommend to add some more text on front page, otherwise it will not be so easy to achive high rankings by highly competetive keywords.

• Title tag is very simple and not informative. It can be something like this:  
  "Gudville - Discover, lead and support causes you care about"
• Add meta keywords and meta description

Cheers,

Russel

Frankly speaking there is no reason for you to keep the Security Function switch ON. I have around 20 websites done on Joomla CMS and all of them packed with sh404SEF since I found it the most accurate and bug free SEF component for Joomla.  And during all this time I have been using it, the Security Function has been Switched OFF. Same I will recommend for you, it is useless.

And remember the main purpose of sh404 is to make your website more SEO friendly but not to prevent from hacker attacks. So it's not an security component so far and still it might have a lot of bugs and mistakes.

BTW I read somewhere in INTERNET that many people had the same problem like you, but with different robots, not only SEOmoz. So you should be also careful because it might make a negative impact on other search engines.

I advise: Turn this sh*t OFF ;)))

Hi Sara,

I can't really agree with you that people in Russia don't use Google. I've been living there for the past 20 years and I can assure you that Google.ru is very popular there.

Currently for the keywords research I know only four best and quite accurate tools:

1. Google Keywords Research

2. Google Insights - Helps to find trendy keywords

3) SeoQuake

4. Wordtracker

Also if you speak Russian language you might find this post very interesting for you, it has 42 tools for keyword research.

Hope it helps,

Russel

Better for those 3 website to be on different hostings. Otherwise cross linking may not be effective and will not make an impact on your rankings. However I think it depend from the number of websites located on 1 hosting. Maybe if it is 3 still fine compare to 100's )

Russel

Okay, the answer is pretty simple. If you sitemap appears in Google SERP it means that Google found it the most relevant to your search query "kyocera black and white printers".

What I would recommend you to do is:

• First decide landing page is the most relevant to this query, have enough text and density of this keyword

• Then apply some easy steps of SEO on-page optimization. If you are a SEOmoz Pro member then it will be easy to do for you just going to the Research Tools and section of On-page analysis. Just follow the steps there.

• After that when you will be sure that on-page optimization done, go to Google webmasters and Fetch the URL for the particular optimized keyword and resubmit it to index.

• The latest step try to get some good quality links on your landing page with this keyword.

And after all, just wait for Google update and if everything done correct then for this search query you will get new landing page. However it doesn't mean that the page with your sitemap disappear, it will stay somewhere below the new landing page in SERP. Because if Google thinks that this page relevant to your keywords, he can't just throw it away out of SERP.

Hi have you tried to check if this page accessible for Google robots in Webmaster Panel. Because sometimes there are some sort of software which are blocking SEOmoz robot.

Also check your robots.txt file if there are no any restrictions. For ex. it might be setup to accept only Google robot but not others.

I've just checked your Google Cache for this page and it seems to be fine. I advise you don't worry that much about SEOmoz robot.

If you have access to your .htaccess file then there are plenty of methods how you can do this.

Write this in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /index.html/ http://www.yoursite.com

Actually you can made it bold or italic or underline, whatever you want. The most important is to put your text between

tag, which show Google that it is quote.

I personally do it in Italic and I never had any issue with Google. In bold you can make some of the important keywords, this will help you a little with on-page optimisation.

Thanks,

Russel

Hi there,

1. Loading tooltip through ajax will not prevent Google Bot from indexing your page. You can always check how google bot sees your content through Google Webmaster Panel. At the same time I believe it will not make any contribution for your ranking.

2. This wouldn't  be counted as duplicated content since you will be loading tool tip information from other websites. As I know from the latest news, Google are not counting citations as duplicated content. But of course it should be marked properly as citation, I mean HTML.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Russel