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Well isn't this a nice coincidence... Andrew Shotland just published this article on search engine land that talks about this exact issue...

http://searchengineland.com/the-smb-guide-to-changing-business-names-seo-128939

Hi Matthew,

As you've seen from the rich snippets testing tool, the author pic is showing up for your homepage - it's not just content-oriented blog pages.

It does take time though. Seeing the author pic show up in the testing tool, and having it not show up live is the norm. It can definitely take some time, so be patient. Personally, I believe it took me about 3-4 days from the time everything was properly implemented to the time I started seeing the author pic in search results.

There's been a lot of speculation about why some people implement the markup and see the author pic show up in SERPs in a day, whereas for others it takes a couple weeks. There was a lot of speculation that it had to do with your Google+ activity and the number of people who had circled you, but I've seen enough examples of people with zero G+ activity, and next to no circle activity that have their author pic showing up in SERPs.

A great resource (where all the really smart Authorship people hangout) is Google Authorship & Author Rank G+ community. AJ Kohn (Blind Five Year Old) Bill Slawski & Mark Traphagen are some of the go-to experts on the topic who are very active in that community.

In most, if not all industries, I would say: new site + less than 1 year + 250k+ links ≠ 'safe'.

I wouldn't sweat it too much.

I'd probably check out their link profile in OSE so you can see for yourself the types of links they're acquiring. If the client isn't that SEO-savvy, try to show them what they're doing and how they're doing it. Hopefully that can calm the client down a little bit if they're worried why they're not occupying the same spots as they were in teh SEPRs.

Don't be tempted to attempt to mirror the competitors' strategies!

Matt Cutts has gone on record as saying they don't use the meta keywords tag. Check out the video.

watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU

There's no hard & fast rule to how many links you want to have on a page, but if I had to toss out a number, you don't want it over 100 per page. There's likely a strong correlation with pages with hundreds or thousands of links on a given page and the spammy quality of the site.

Your issue in my opinion isn't as much an SEO issue as it is a usability issue. Your side navigation is just WAY too much. Once you click on one of those navigation items, you the user should be taken to another page. There's just way too much text there and it's difficult to read - it's difficult for the user to take in that information.

Try to follow 'The Rule of 7'. If you go beyond 7 items in a side navigation menu like that, it becomes increasingly difficult to take all of that information in. You should ideally try to divide up all of your products into about 7-10 categories. Those are the categories that you display in the side navigation menu. Then, when the user click on one of those items, they're taken to another page.

I provided a link to the help article...

Geo-related factors are one of the reasons that search results get personalized and the SEOMoz software doesn't (at least for now) have the ability to show personalized search results based on location, meaning, if your keyword is just 'pizza', it's going to show you how the search results will display for "most" people. So if you're in des moines, iowa, and your client, Des Moines Pizza, generally shows up #1 in the local search results for 'pizza' when the user is located in Des Moines, that's not going to show in the SEOMoz software. You'd have to input your keyword as 'pizza des moines' to get search results specific to that city.

Oftentimes what I'll do for small business clients of mine (service-based businesses) is have a few different types of contact forms through the site. You obviously want some type of form on the contact page itself. Depending on the type of business you may also have an actual page for a 'Request an Estimate'/'Request a Quote'/'Book an Appointment'. The latter type of form would typically be more detailed (i.e, more fields) than a basic contact form on a contact page, but what I've found effective on a homepage, or sometimes on every page of the site is some sort of 'Quick Contact Form', where you're asking for the bare minimum amount of information from the user in order that your client can proceed to the next step.

There's no silver bullet and what works for one site or one industry doesn't always work across the board. I'm a huge proponent of conversion tracking/goal setting and measuring the each form separately.

What I'd recommend is a 'tiered bidding' approach. Don't use different ad groups for different match types.

With tiered bidding you're setting different bid amounts for different match types - specifically, your exact match is the highest bid, followed by phrase and then broad. So it would be something like this:

[red shoes] - $1

"red shoes" - $0.75 (3/4 the price of the exact match)

red shoes - $0.50 (1/2 the price of the exact match)

This strategy  helps ensure that you're paying a fair value for all different types of search queries that are bringing traffic to your site.

Assuming that in this example, you're an e-commerce site selling red shoes, we'll argue the term 'red shoes' is the most qualified search query available. As such, you're paying top dollar for that keyword - $1. (I know your actual CPC isn't your bid price, I'm just saying - for illustrative purposes). If a user searches for, say, 'shiny red shoes', your phrase match keyword will be triggered, and you'll pay $0.75. You're paying a little bit less because, let's say, your shoes aren't exactly shiny, but there's still a chance that user will convert. Lastly, if the user types in 'what are red shoes', your classic informational type of search query, your ads won't be triggered by the exact or phrase match version of the keyword, but they will be triggered by the broad match, and you'll pay $0.50. You pay the least amount for this search query because this doesn't represent a very qualified visitor for your red shoe, e-commerce website.

Hope that helps.

It's definitely not the easiest thing to wrap your head around, and I'm sure anyone who has ever managed a PPC campaign has thought the same thing.

When I first saw Hal Varian's video on Quality Score  that gave me a better understanding.

He breaks down quality score as follows:

60% is related to CTR

30% is related to 'Relevance'

10% is landing page

The way that I've seen a lot of people talk about Quality Score & AdWords suggests that they think the landing page is a much more important part of the equation.

In my opinion, the best thing the focus on is CTR. If your clients' ads are getting clicked on more often, you're helping Google make more money. If the ads getting clicked on more often because it's more relevant to the user's search query, Google has a strong monetary incentive to serve that ad up higher. That's all very logical. Try not to get caught up in the minutiae of Quality Score. When you don't know exactly what their formula is, it can definitely get confusing/frustrating.

I'll chime in on the '**what is a good domain number authority'. **

I hope this is an obvious point... There's no magic number. I would suggest that it depends on your vertical, and the keywords for which you are trying to rank. Quick tip - use the SEOmoz SERP overlay tool . When you're doing searches for your target keywords, you can get a quick/rough idea of the type of domain authority/number of linking root domains that will be necessary to be in the conversation for page 1 rankings.

Good to see some quick changes implemented on your end. Definitely much better than before. Again, try grouping all of those product categories in your side nav into 7-10 'sub categories'. Wheelchairs for example. It looks like you've got 4 wheelchair categories. Group that into 'Wheelchairs & Wheelchair accessories', then when the user clicks on that link, they can further refine their search.

Do a search for 'real estate wordpress themes' and you're off to the races.

Quick points

The Remax logo is an incredibly recognized brand that will help build trust - _use it! Above the scroll! _

Phone number, top left corner. Make it easy for people to contact you.

Images... Pictures of houses... Pictures of happy, smiling families... Anything... You need images above the scroll. All you see is text. That's not very inviting.

Hi Anthony,

In what sense is it a poor-performing account? Just in terms of your ROI? You're talking about using new landing pages, that suggests to me you're not receiving a good ROI.

Your post seems to suggest that you're thinking that having better performing landing pages will result in Google giving your client some priority (i.e, increase in quality score). There's really only the smallest bit of truth to that notion.

According to Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, your landing page only accounts for about 10% of your quality score. The largest factor in quality score is your CTR, which represents about 60% of QS and the notion of 'relevance' is about 30%. You can check out video I've attached.

As far as your client's large budget, I've never seen or read of any evidence suggesting that the total amount of money that Google makes off an advertiser has an impact on Quality Score. Obviously the max CPC bid for individual keywords has an impact on your client's position (Ad Position = Max CPC x QS), so if your client is looking to bid very high amounts for individual keywords, that will certainly help with where their ads will show up.

watch?v=qwuUe5kq_O8

Any information on when Moz Local will be available in CanadaÉ

Check out Davis Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors .

The way that you're talking sounds like you're focusing on optimizing the site to show up in the regular organic listings, but when you're talking local you also want to look at factors that are unique to actual local search results. So I would start off by claiming (or creating) the Google+ Local page (aka, Google Places listing). Choose your 5 categories wisely based on some sound keyword research, but don't get spammy and and put 'massage clapham' as a category.

Two of the more important predominantly 'local' ranking factors are citations & reviews. A citation is basically a place on the internet that lists your business with its name address and phone number, so think of local directory & internet yellow pages sites for example. Other types would include BBB or local chambers of commerce. You need to ensure consistency of your name, address & phone number across the web so the search engines see that all of these different citations do indeed belong to the same business.

Reviews are also important. If the search engines see people talking about your business online, it's a signal to them that your business is an important, well-known business.

Just one more quick note on your keywords... Depending on what type of massage you're talking about here, you may want to look at keywords like 'massage therapist', 'registered massage therapist', or specific massage techniques like hot stone or swedish.

They are just a new/alternate way of displaying sitelinks.

Here's a relevant article from Search Engine Land earlier this year.

Here's an article from Google Webmaster Tools on what you can do with sitelinks as a webmaster.

In short, you can't tell Google which sitelinks to display, but you can 'demote' certain pages. So if you find Google is pulling up your 'About Us' page as a sitelink, but that's a page that you don't place a lot of priority on, you can log into your Webmaster Tools account and demote that page to give other pages a better chance of showing up.

Just building on Jasmine's comment, the Google Analytics URL builder is a handy tool to created tagged URLs easily. It particularly makes it easy if you want to name a campaign something like 'Campaign #1'. You can't write '?utm_campaign=Campaign #1 in the URL. If you just fill out the fields in the URL builder, it automatically builds the proper URL for you, i.e., utm_campaign=Campaign%20%231

%20 = 'space'

%23 = #

In short, don't stress about why that particular URL is constructed the way that it is. It doesn't follow best practices. There's better ways of building/tagging URLs.

I agree in this particular case the SEO value of their Twitter activity may not be all that significant, but there's no doubt that search engines are increasingly using social signals in their rankings algorithms.

I like to say that social media has 'democratized' the web in a way. In the past, acquiring an in-bound link was like acquiring a 'vote' of sorts for your site. Today, you don't need to have a website in order to 'vote'. When someone follows/likes/+1s you, it's a vote of sorts. I'm not suggesting that individual follows or likes are the equivalent of a good inbound link.

Search engines want to rank websites that they feel are both relevant to the user's search query, and websites that they feel are authoritative. There has been much discussion about search engines looking at things like your 'retweet ratio' or your 'follower to following' ratio. If those types of ratios are 'favourable' that sends a signal to a search engine that you are 'authoritative'.

Most studies/reports that you'll see point to a slightly negative _correlation. _But correlation does not equal _causation. _One that I recently remember reading pointed to a negative correlation when Google authorship markup was present. It's obviously very hard to argue that adding Google authorship markup to your site _decreases _your organic search rankings.

Similar question was asked earlier today...

Within Google Webmaster Tools you can 'demote' certain pages. You can't tell Google to promote specific ones.

Having said that, using Google AdWords, you can specify sitelinks. Especially if the concern relates to the sitelinks that are showing up on branded keywords, just buy AdWords on those branded terms (especially if competitors) are advertising on your branded keywords). Buying keywords on branded terms is much less expensive than buying non-branded, competitive keywords because if someone is looking for example.com, and you are example.com, your AdWords ads will typically get quite a high CTR, which leads to a high Quality Score, which ultimately leads to a lower avg. CPC.

I'm doing some competitive link analysis for a new client in the food industry right now and I've come across one of their competitors using this tactic quite extensively, and it seems to be working very well. They crush their competitors as far as domain authority. Most of the anchor text is branded (company name) but you can quickly tell that there are one or two keyword phrases that they have targeted. I can only assume that they were getting some of the bloggers to include the custom anchor text. It's definitely not overdone, so the overall link profile still looks natural.

The bloggers that they're targeted all seem to have relatively authoritative sites which I can only assume means their brand is getting a lot of quality exposure on these sites as well as referral traffic. I'd hazard a guess that the direct referral traffic and overall exposure is worth as much or more than the increase in organic rankings that they would see because of these links. None of these links were nofollow or affiliate links.

The general rule of thumb I've always espoused (with a few exceptions) is that anything that you are doing for SEO purposes should have an equal or greater benefit to you for _non-SEO _reasons. I guess that's sort of my test to see if something can be considered a legitimate white hat technique. But there's obviously still some grey area with this.

Thanks. That's not the one I had in mind, but I'll check it out.

I've often wondered the same thing.

I don't know what USPS standards are (maybe because I'm not American).

As far as the legal name. Search engines don't necessarily know what your legal business name is. In Canada at least, as an incorporated business, your legal name can be a number. Google obviously isn't expecting you to list yourself as a number. It's important that the name is consistent.

When manually submitting/correcting client's information on directory sites, I try to keep the address the same in terms of whether or not I'm writing the street name as 'Road' or 'Rd'. (Maybe that's what you're referring to). It seems silly that Google would penalize you if 75% of your citations have 'Road' and the other 25% have 'Rd.'

As far as the phone numbers go, from my experience, you don't necessarily have control over that. You can input the phone number one way, but then the way that it's actually displayed online may show up differently, i.e, dashes vs. no dashes, or including the '1' vs. excluding the '1'. You can't control that, so don't worry about it.

If you refer to David Mihm's Local Ranking Factors  both the quantity and quality of citations are more important factors than the consistency of those citations.

I'll elaborate on what Nakul has said (all great points)...

If you have something that is truly newsworthy, it will get picked up and generate quality in-bound links, and also generate some qualified traffic. (The idea of traffic is all-too-often lost when we talk about link building). Those links will build up your domain authority. Then, you let your on-page SEO do the work for you. You can have perfect, by-the-book on-page SEO, but if you don't have any links/domain authority, search engines aren't going to give you a sniff. In your case, you're dealing with a relatively competitive vertical, and I would think, the businesses in that vertical are all vying for some choice 'trophy' keywords, and thus, the on-page SEO from some of the top businesses who have invested some money in their site/internet marketing is going to be similar. What's going to separate one from the other in the eyes' of the search engines is the quantity and quality of in-bound links that you have. And press releases are definitely one way of earning (I stress that word) good links.

You're also going to want to make sure that the full address in your Google Places/Google+ Local listing is the same as the address used in your online citations. I.e, you don't want to have Floor/Unit number in the Google Places profile, and then just the plain old address in the rest of your online citations.