Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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 

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!

I agree with Will.  However, imagine that writing content is like building a really awesome skyscraper: you obviously are doing it for "the people" but you have to remember that the "building code inspector" (Google) will come along and make sure everything is in order.

Short story -- you should design for people and code for Google.

Just because the content is killer doesn't mean that it'll explode.  However, if you write killer content that is coded for SEs and then distribute it to all your network, once everyone starts spreading it... Google will "endorse" it because they like the markup and you'll see great rankings as a result.

When you mention that she put her business name in "one of the directories", mind if I ask which directory?  I have had several clients that will do directory listings themselves or will pay someone to get them listed but then come to me when its all messed up.

What you need to have her do is go to that specific directory and get her business delisted.  Some directories will list you on their site and then auto-setup a G+ account... the problem with that is that they then control the G+ Local account.

So the steps are:

1. Get the directory listing removed
2. Hand submit a G+ Local listing (Submit here: www.google.com/placesforbusiness )

Then wait up to 10 days for the verification postcard.

I know what you're dealing with and it can be quit the pain to correct.  Hope the directory is helpful.

I think your assumptions are on par.  However, make sure to review that the 301 has been removed.  Also, if you still want that auto redirect to happen on a crash, make it a 302 and not a 301 as a 301 will suck a lot of life out of your site (since SEs see it as permanent).

So I did a crawl test on you site via the SEOMoz tool... it pulled in 300+ pages.  You can download the excel spreadsheet here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5yo553nkkmzm6fq/babysitters-nyc.com.csv

So definitely submit to GWMT to speed up the process... other than that just wait

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.

After giving it a cursory review, I drew a few conclusions:

you've got a lot of links but need a higher majority of them to go to the home page.

You've also got a really slow site: 13.2 seconds on the load time... that'll hurt you.

But at the end of the day, with all the work you've already done and all the help that you've received, you really don't need more people on forums trying to shoot in the dark... as you said: you need an expert.  You need to hire a company to do a thorough and exhaustive site audit.  Expect it to run $1k+.  You need someone like Alan or any of the other excellent auditors that can help you get back on the right track and fast.

While I can appreciate that you are really trying to get some ranking in the SERPs for "fruit baskets", "organic fruit baskets", etc... basically all those titles are the same - just reordered.

Honestly, you'll get so much more bang for your buck if you go after alternative keywords for each page.  Go after good, relevant keywords that will attract other business.  Maybe something like "fruit arrangements", "chocolate strawberries", etc.

Honest, run your client's biggest competitors through Ranks.nl or any other paid service so as to see what keywords they are going after and then do an analysis on how much competition you'll be running up against.

As a general rule, I only target one keyword per page.

Danny Sullivan really covered this well and includes a quote from Matt Cutts:

http://searchengineland.com/do-links-from-expired-domains-count-with-google-17811

So in all likelihood it will do nothing for you

The general SEO's response of "it depends" doesn't apply here.  I've done a lot of PR article backlinking in the past and I've never had a case where it helped for anything but maybe the company's name and even then we couldn't track any additional sales to the PR efforts.

The ONLY exception that I've seen is concerning ORM (Online Reputation Management) of a personal nature.  The reason is because the objectives are different.  With traditional SEO/SEM you are trying to drive sales, therefore you can not rely on spammy outlets. Whereas when we are conducting ORM for the different varieties of a person's name - there is almost no competition yet you need to dominate the top 5 SERPs.  I always use an extremely diversified strategy but I do include PR articles about 50% of the time and it does help... especially on pages 3-5.

Hi Daniel,

While 11.3s is bad, I had a client who had 14.x seconds and when it was all said and done we were able to get him down to 0.86s on average.

You bet there is a quick way to speed up your website.  And you're in luck since you are running WordPress... go install the free plugin W3 Total Cache (W3tc).  There are others... don't use them.  W3tc is by far the best, albeit it can be a little complicated at first blush.

To overcome the complications, either hire a pro to set it up for you (around $250) or go to gtmetrix.com and do a test on your site.  Keep in mind that GTmetrix will always understate your load times so only use webpagetest.org or pingdom for getting an accurate result.

Once you have the results, scroll down to the tab labeled "Page Speed" and you will see where it says "recommendations." When I run a test on your website the #1 thing it shows to fix first is combining your images using CSS sprites.  That might be a little hard unless you've done it before so I would skip it and go to "leverage browser caching".  Click on it and it will drop down and tell you what you need to do and what are the problem pages.  In this case, you need to specify browser caching of at least one week.  So now go to your website and to the W3tc plugin you just installed and look for the browser caching setting... if I remember correctly it is in the general settings but I could be wrong. I believe you'll have to set it in seconds.

Then do that for the rest of the items on the GTMetrix report.

Once you are done with that, go install Yahoo's SmushIt plugin for Wordpress. Then navigate to it a do the bulk smushit... part of the problem is just the fact that your page size is almost 2MB... mainly because of photos.  Once you run the smushit plugin, your page size will be more around 500KB.  That's still about 5 times what it should be so you should really take advantage of CDNs (W3tc will help with that) and maybe hosting all your images on a subdomain so that you can take advantage of HTTP's ability to load from multiple resources at once.

Last thing, in the future, when you upload photos to your website, make sure that you are uploading in a size that is just the right fit.  WP will allow you to upload a photo with sizes up to 2MB and then will resize for content but you'll still be loading the full size in the background... thus killing your load times.  And if you have the option, choose JPG over PNG as it compresses better... unless you need the alpha channel.

Be on the lookout... I hope to be posting an article to SEOMoz's UGC blog that covers all this in more detail soon.

Best of luck!

Matt Cutts addressed this back in 2007: 
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/ 

Short answer: its best not to allow it as Google will drop it when they catch it so its just a waste of your time.

I hope that helps!

Just after a cursory glance at your site, I noticed that your load times are horrible. So I ran a test at webpagetest.org and your load time is 11.3 seconds.  You probably don't see that because your browser has a cached version of your website since you've visited it repeatedly.  However, Google is grading you based upon a load time of 11.3s.

See here for the results of your website:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121228_X3_AGM/ 

Then see here for why that is negatively affecting you:
http://www.socialdesignstudios.com/webpage-speed/ 

Some other points:

1. Add rel=author
2. Start driving a social media campaign (it will help you in the SERPs as well as your audience particularly loves it)
3. Offer a scholarship (see here - point D)
4. Create a Meetup, link it to your page and get a Bootcamp going... Meetup.com will provide great referral traffic as well as clients.
5. Run your site through an HTML/CSS validator to make sure you're not getting held up by simple corrections. 
6. Create some "big content" and then push it to your distribution channels to get some good backlinks.

At the end of the day you have to remember that you've only had the domain for 4 months and only have a PR1 rating.   But whatever you do... don't focus on directory submissions. It'll end up biting you in the end.

Best of luck!