Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As far as SEO advice... work on backlinks.  MajesticSEO shows a lot of spammy backlinks as well as Open Site Explorer.  That said you are ranked well in Google for relevant keywords.

Since your chosen keyword market is small (i.e. exact match keywords are less than 500 monthly Global searches), you're going to have to build more "need" in your market.  That and start working strongly on conversion optimization. If you're getting approximate 250 monthly visitors from Google keyword traffic for "london magician" but only end up with 5% converting into customers, then work on getting your on-site proposition and call to action better so that you can convert more of the traffic you are already getting.  Check out CrazyEgg and KISSMetrics to help with that.

Best of luck!

Will,

Thanks for the awesome feedback - especially about the page snapshots..

"I haven't used Conductrics in anger" - not sure that you meant anger or ages but either way I would be interested to know why you haven't used it?  I like the idea behind machine learning and real-time implementation, but I haven't found a lot of people that have much to say about it.  On the flipside, I'm always a little nervous that the machine learning process will leave out key information that could only be noticed by a human and therefore optimize incorrectly - thus, I lean more towards Optimizely/VWO.

Thanks again!

Steve

Matt Cutts addressed this back in 2007: 
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/sea...

Short answer: its best not to allow it as Google will drop it when they catch it.

Hope that helps!

Remember, going from PR2 to PR3 is about twice as hard as going from PR1 to PR2.  So there is no "X number of links will get you to the next pagerank level" because each is uniquely harder than the previous.

That said, I have a 8 month old domain name that has maybe 15 external backlinks from PR0-PR3 sites... that domain is currently PR3.  However, I have a 2 year old domain with maybe 200 backlinks from PR0-PR6 sites yet is only has a pagerank of PR2.

Honestly, social engagement does so much more as well as great content.  Plus, find some killer untapped keywords and rank well for them. My 8 month old PR3 site is generating revenue for me yet my 2 year old PR2 site isn't... and its all because of keyword research and rankings.

I've always done my own A/B testing and haven't used a software package.  I've heard a lot of good about Visual Website Optimizer.  However, I like that Conductrics uses statistical modeling where the others don't. So what do you see as being the really big pluses?

Note: I need to find a platform so that we can do testing faster and for more clients at a time... I just don't have the time to hand build and track each client's multivariation test. Thus the need for software.  Therefore, ease of use, quick integration, and good analytics are important in my decision making process.

Thanks in advance!

Try running a test on mysite.com as well as www.mysite.com

I'll bet that's the reason why it's only returning 2 pages.

The best one - bar none - is WPSocialite. It loads only a 5kb image of the social sharing icons but on hover will load the rest... Deferring the load until it's needed. I originally saw it being used on Tech crunch and then implemented it on several client sites... It has a sleek look to boot.

That alone has cut some sites load time by 6+ seconds by our tests.

Hope that helps!

One case I thought I would mention about one of our clients:

They were getting ~15% of their traffic from a shorttail keyword that they didn't rank for in all the Major SEs. However, as I dug in, I found that they ranked #2 in Google+ Local (but weren't showing in the mixed searches)... that in turn was driving 1000s of impressions and 100+ new visitors per month to their website.

I don't know if your client focuses on local search but if they do then that could be where the hang up is.  Google (and Bing Local and Yahoo Local) ranks things completely different in the local SERPs than they do in the General Search... you may find that they are owning keywords that you didn't know they were ranking for.

I've had it happen with almost every client... albeit, not always at such a high percentage

It's a little hard to help you analyze a problem without knowing the website and phase... I can appreciate that you don't want someone poaching your client... but from my experience Mozzers are respectful about that stuff.  Care to share so that we can dig a little deeper and help?

Header Line:

In your div, when it is collapsed, make sure that you don't just have blank space, that when someone clicks it it expands.  Instead, what you need is to have something that says "Click here for full video transcript"... and it would be a good idea to have that tagged as an H1 or H2.

Hope that helps!

rel=author does help with SEO... no doubt.  However, instead of focusing on it for ranking - look at it for what it was meant to provide: a face next to the result in the SERPs.

Short answer: you can definitely put your rel=author for each separate discipline... but remember the primary benefit - they are seeing your face next to the result (dramatically improving the likelihood of it getting clicked).

See Matt's article on SEJ about the hidden benefits of rel=author -- http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-hidden-benefit-of-authorship-134526 

Honestly, you are going to be in a VERY competitive market.  If I were you, I would do an analysis on your competitors.

Lets say a primary keyword for your homepage would be: [social media management]

When I run that keyword, I see that it is a HIGHLY competitive keyword with decent monthly searches.

But look who holds top positions in the SERPS:
1. mashable.com
2. maximizesocialmedia.com
3. sproutsocial.com
4. fanpilot.com
5. spredfast.com

Did you notice that HootSuite isn't even on the 1st page?  Yet that is HootSuite's #1 keyword that they are targeting.  HootSuite has a PR8 home page yet SproutSocial out ranks it with a PR6 and less links, etc. One thing I did notice was that SproutSocial has a responsive website and a significantly faster load time.

Honestly, my advice to you would be to look at what your competitors choose as keywords for their homepage and diversify.

If they choose [social media management] then find something like [professional social media management]... don't buy an aged domain or EMDs... you're going to have to win this battle on the uniqueness of your brand and services.

Setup your website for good SEO but don't expect to get a lot of traction... you really need to do a lot of outbound marketing via SMS, email, ads, cold calling, networking, and of course social media.

Yes it is fine.  However, you should following some basic rules:

1. Make sure your page is configured with all of your DIVS expanded when JavaScript is disabled.
2. Make sure all the divs and the text is on the page–and not called from an external file.
3. Make sure the header line is visible, otherwise you might be considered as hiding text.

See here for original content:
http://www.shimonsandler.com/collapsible-div-seo-friendly/

I've always done my own A/B testing and haven't used a software package.  I've heard a lot of good about Visual Website Optimizer.  However, I like that Conductrics uses statistical modeling where the others don't. So what do you see as being the really big pluses?

Note: I need to find a platform so that we can do testing faster and for more clients at a time... I just don't have the time to hand build and track each client's multivariation test. Thus the need for software.  Therefore, ease of use, quick integration, and good analytics are important in my decision making process.

Thanks in advance!

As far as SEO advice... work on backlinks.  MajesticSEO shows a lot of spammy backlinks as well as Open Site Explorer.  That said you are ranked well in Google for relevant keywords.

Since your chosen keyword market is small (i.e. exact match keywords are less than 500 monthly Global searches), you're going to have to build more "need" in your market.  That and start working strongly on conversion optimization. If you're getting approximate 250 monthly visitors from Google keyword traffic for "london magician" but only end up with 5% converting into customers, then work on getting your on-site proposition and call to action better so that you can convert more of the traffic you are already getting.  Check out CrazyEgg and KISSMetrics to help with that.

Best of luck!

Matt Cutts addressed this back in 2007: 
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/sea...

Short answer: its best not to allow it as Google will drop it when they catch it.

Hope that helps!

The best one - bar none - is WPSocialite. It loads only a 5kb image of the social sharing icons but on hover will load the rest... Deferring the load until it's needed. I originally saw it being used on Tech crunch and then implemented it on several client sites... It has a sleek look to boot.

That alone has cut some sites load time by 6+ seconds by our tests.

Hope that helps!

250,000 SKUs is no joke.  However, I was the GM for an online distributor that had over 80,000 SKUs and they had a lot of the same problems when I got there.  However, in a few months I fixed those problems and more which led to almost doubling their sales.

The correct answer is not just SEO related but also takes a content management approach.

1st - with that many SKUs you need to trim some fat.  Focus on the top 80% of your SKUs that you sell and cut the rest (or at least hide them).  I cut the company I worked for down to almost 55k SKUs and based my decision on product age and SKU turns.

2nd - make sure your website has KILLER navigation!  With that much content you will drown your clients.  Choose less than 7 main categories and break each one of them down respectively.  And then have multiple ways to slice those categories (i.e. price, mfg, size, etc).  see http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ for an example of good organization of categories.

3rd - and this addresses your main question - correctly mark your pages for canonicalization.  There are a lot of ways to do it but I'll just point you to what Google says on their WebMaster FAQ area: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066

I hope that helps!

Do you mean the SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Report? If so, it depends... but mostly it will only take 2-5 minutes.

Once the initial report is run you will have the option to run a full report.  However, that report will take up to 24 hours and you'll get an email when its done.

We've had the same problem with several of our clients.  However, if you use rel=author then your Google+ profile will actually increase the position of the main site in the SERPs.

Instructions for setting up rel=author are here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2539557