Using social media competitions to increase search demand for certain queries is very effective.

That blackhat is a really poor long term strategy

In my experience, there are two ways to pull off the B2B badges tactic:

1. For B2B badges to work with big brands, you probably need to be some sort of industry leader being able to give out awards that actually mean something.

2. If you are not an industry leader, you can give awards/badges to those companies not receiving a whole lot of attention usually. They tend to be used a lot.

The best example I can think of is Google's AdWords / Analytics certifications used by quite a lot of SEM agencies.

I agree with Robert. The ranking difference between .com / .net and no-hyphen / one-hyphen is going to be minimal. So go for the domain that is easier to read. That will probably benefit you in the long run.

I don't attribute too much value to page-rank sculpting. It's based on such a flawed understanding of SEO - that SEO is about sending PageRank to a few but important pages that will then rank. Good SEO is about making the website easy accessible for users and crawlers. And internal linking is great for this.

Internal linking is a great way of doing SEO, whenever it's done with a user perspective in mind. I'd be thrilled to work with internal linking on news websites, as it is possible to do so much relevant inter linking.

So I guess my advice would be, that all links should be based on relevancy, not PageRank sculpting. That does NOT mean, however, that you cannot optimize the anchor text on the links, or place them strategically (e.g. links to most important pages in the top of the page; lower priority in the bottom).

I do that too! Only little problem with that is it often creates some significant bumps in link acquisition rates.

One more thing: building a community and optimizing their contributions. That is the very future of SEO in my opinion.

Hi there

I don't really see any usability nor seo reasons for using English keywords in your folders. Why not just translate it all into German? That is, in my opinion, the best long term strategy.

You are probably considering keeping the folders in English because it is easier. But it is a thing you'd probably want to change eventually. So although it is a hassle, you can aswell get it done

Hi there,

I am afraid there is no way of not working with a script, when using rel=canonical. Either you have to develop a script that generates the canonical URL by itself, or you have to insert the meta tag with the right URL manually.

I would strongly discourage NOT spending any time on rel canonical, as it can mess you up site's rankings completely. Read this post by Dr. Pete if you need to convince yourself to spend some our doing the proper development: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

Best,

Thomas

Needless to say - gaining Twitter through sincere outreach and good content is the right way to do it.

This being said, it can be a bit hard to get started on twitter. One tool that lets you buy "real followers" is Twiends.

It's a points based platform. You can either earn points by following other people or buy the points if you don't want to.

Hope it works for you!

Best,

Thomas

Yes, the name of the sitelinks are most often (or maybe always!?) based on anchor text, so go hunt for Anchor Text to find the error.

You can generate a list of links to the url (internal and external) from GWT or Open Site Explorer.

I wouldn't worry about adding the links and logos. I'd be happy to link to all my customers (do follow links) to show my appreciation.

Happy to help. I think the problem might be, that it looks too much as a lead gen site, and too little as a site with great content / serious services.

Hi Bill,

I am sorry if this sounds a bit harsh - but I would not like to give any information to your website. Although the design is simple, it looks kinda spammy to me. It looks like a site that wants my email address and then sell it to other.

Good CRO starts with data collection. What I'd do if I was you is to ask a bunch of Amazon mTurkers some questions about your site. A good list of questions is the one Google uses - you can find it here.

Also, a small thing is the moving fav.ico - would definitely find a new, static one.

So the short answer to your question: invest in better design. But do it on the background of data.

Best,

Thomas

Hi Greg,

Google usually discover pages via links. So if a page does not have any links, it is hard for Google to discover. This being said, you can try submitting XML sitemaps with the pages to Google, and they might crawl and index them.

However, if a page does not receive any links from your own site, it does signal that you do not consider the page to be particularly good/important, making it quite unlikely that it will rank well.

Hope this helps.