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As far as the member profile pages, can search engines crawl those pages?

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.

From the SEOMoz Help section...

Why do the rankings in SEOmoz not match what I see in Google?
Great question! Although there is never one “right” ranking for any keyword, SEOmoz tries to represent the ranking results that “most” users will see. If you see wildly different results from your search engine compared to your Ranking Report, it could be because of the following reasons:

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.

Here's a great article that appeared on Mashable recently that outlines 6 different types of posts specifically for Facebook to build user engagement.

In addition to these types of posts, publishing great content to your blog that would be appealing to your users, and then promoting those posts through Facebook and other social media sites is also a good idea.

It sounds like you've definitely waited enough time for Google to make a change, so that doesn't seem to be an issue. I can only imagine that Google is still displaying these unwanted sitelinks because it's relevant to the users' search queries and is receiving a solid CTR.

If we're talking about the traditional site links (those that include a small snippet of text, i.e, the meta description tag) you can try to tweak the meta description tag in a way to try to increase your CTR for the pages that you would ideally like to show up as a sitelink.

This seems counter-intuitive in many ways, but for the pages that you want to demote, maybe you tweak the meta description tag to make it less attractive for the user to click on.

Hard to comment further without knowing more specifics.

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.

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.

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.

This isn't an article written for human beings. It's written for search engines. 'Spray on tanning in oakville is a great option compared to other forms of tanning.' People don't actually write like that. People don't talk like that. The anchor text is very spammy. If you do too much of this, you end up with an un-natural link profile. The majority of your anchor text should be your website address, your business name (or some derivative of your business name), or something like 'Visit Website'. That's how most 'organic' or 'natural' links on the web are. If you've got a high percentage of your anchor text that are competitive, non-branded keywords, search engines know that. They know something isn't right with that. Then you get in trouble.

In general, your website is 'spammy' in that sense too. The copy, again, is written for search engines. SEO is not all about ranking #1 for competitive keywords. That's only half the battle. The other part is turning those visitors into paid customers.

I feel you'd be much better off investing resources into developing a website with a more modern/'chic'/professional look and feel. Although difficult to quantify at times for small businesses like yours, a website that has a higher production quality will result in a higher conversion rate - meaning, turning more of the the visitors that come to your website into paying customers.

Bottom line, don't try to fool search engines. If you're questioning if it's spammy, it probably is. Search engines are a hell of a lot smarter than most people think they are. You may get away with some low-quality/spammy techniques for a while, but eventually, you get burned.

Good point from Highland.

If you're not looking to build out largely different/unique sites for each ccTLD, just re-produce your main .com site on the other ccTLDs and start off by adding in a country flag and maybe a 'local' phone number just to send some signals to users that this is a more 'locally' relevant site.

This is one of those questions that doesn't have a definite answer. It's an example of where SEO is more of an 'art' than a science, but in a best case scenario, you're only targeting 1 keyword phrase per page.

The single most important place on a page to place your keywords are in your title tag. A title tag should only be 65-70 characters in length, so there are only so many keyword phrases that you can fit into that space. Your target keyword phrases may include city names automatically making those target phrases longer. You also want to place your target keywords as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. So say for example you had 'California Real Estate Agents | California Real Estate Brokers' as your title tag, that page, all other things being equal, would have a better chance of showing up for 'California Real Estate Agents'. So the 2nd keyword phrase that you're targeting in your title tag is going to be less effective than the first one, and if you're targeting a 3rd one, it's going to be even less effective.

In theory, you want want to take a look at all of the keywords you want to target, and map each of those keywords to a specific page on your site.

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.

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.

It would also be a good idea to use the canonical tag on the pages for the individual posts.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with footer links per se. It's just the fact that it's an inconspicuous part of the site, so SEOs have thought it was an easy place to sneak in some good links.

One example that I have (I won't dive into the details too much), is a competing SEO company in my local. He has the most SEO-friendly name you can could imagine, and he tosses his SEO-friendly/anchor text-rich name into the footer of all the sites that he works on. His link profile consists of almost all blog comments and these footer links. He ranks super high for 'SEO big name city', when there are clearly much, much more authoritative sites that should be showing up ahead of him.

So you definitely can't say that search engines are discarding the value of footer links.

You're talking about the idea of page rank sculpting which became all that rage after 2005 when the rel = nofollow attribute was introduced.

In 2009, Matt Cutts addressed the issue and clarified that if you do something link nofollow links to a 'less important' page like a Contact Us page that the the link juice that would have flowed to that page is lost rather than reallocated to the rest of the site.

You don't want to create duplicate title tags. It sends a bad signal to search engines, and you ultimately then create multiple pages that compete with each other for the same keywords.

When  you're targeting various cities, you also need to exercise some caution. Brad mentioned 'breaking up landing pages depending on locations'. I'm not going to say that's wrong because I'm not sure exactly what he's getting at, but you don't want to create multiple pages with the the same, or largely the same content, where the only difference is the name of the city because this presents a duplicate content issue. And this isn't a 'technical' (honest mistake) duplicate content issue. This is a 'I think I can outsmart the search engines' kind of duplicate content issue.

In the grand scheme of things, with all of the different things that as search marketers we have to worry about, this is WAY down on the priority scale. Specifically when looking at AdWords, the idea of landing page plays a small role in quality score.

Check out this from Google's Chief Economist, Hal Varian who breaks down quality score. I would say it's a slight over simplification, but he's saying quality score breaks down as the following:

60% is CTR

30% is 'Relevance'

10% is Landing Page

watch?v=qwuUe5kq_O8

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.

There's nothing wrong per se with a 'do follow' link. It's just sort of a redundancy. You can argue that 'Do Follow' links could pass little or no link juice if a blog for example has enabled 'do follow' on comments on the blog. In this case you're kind of inviting spam and as a result, little or no link juice may be passed.

In the very off chance that they are actually all quality links, or specifically, 'naturally-occurring' links, it's happening because of great content that they're putting out there. Then you want to be examining examining what type of content they're producing and then you're going to want to invest some resources into high quality content development. You should want to do that in any case.

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!

Hi Joel,

Just took a look at your website. I'll give you some quick points.

Bluntly, your website needs work. It needs to be completely re-built.

If you want to to build up authority for your site, you need to do so through link building. If you want to get natural links as opposed to paying for links or submitting to low quality directories, you need link-worthy content. That takes me back to my first point about a new website.

SEO Moz's Open Site Explorer is a great tool where you can take a look at the websites that are ranking well for your top keywords, and you can see where those sites are getting their links from.

I think this is one of those things that SEOs hear a little bit about, then stress out about. Although high rankings & an older domain may be highly correlated, that does not mean that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between ranking & age of domain. It's simply natural that the longer a domain is around (and the longer an actual website resides on that domain) that website/domain has more opportunity to build up its domain authority and their rankings.

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.

Have you had any offline media/advertising that could have resulted in short-term increases in direct traffic?

www.opensiteexplorer.org 

That's the URL to take you right to the OSE tool.

It's probably good to input your own site in that first field, then just click 'Compare Pages' and you can see how your site compares to 4 competitors.