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I work for a company that manages websites for several hundred small businesses. We do a good job with on-site optimization but don't do any link building for our clients.

Occasionally, clients are in desperate need of links and ask us for recommendations. I've had a tough time finding a balance between quality consultants and affordable prices. I understand that link building campaigns, in general, carry a hefty price tag, but of our clients can't afford any of the big name agencies.

We've also had a few of our clients get burned recently by bad link building and I don't want to point them in the wrong direction.

Does anyone have any recommendations for companies or freelance consultants that do good work without breaking the bank?

Thanks!

Tim

Hi Joel,

There have a been a couple great articles on the SEOmoz blog this year that should be able to give you some ideas. You should definitely check them out.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-links-with-video-content

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hey DRCS,

It's likely just because SEOmoz had some issues with their most recent update to their index. The update was delayed for a few weeks so the current infomation in OSE is a little outdated. If you website is new, most of your new links probably weren't included in the last index. Don't worry, however, the index is scheduled to be updated again next week.

Even after the next update, you'll notice differences between all the link tracking tools. They all use different methods for crawling the web, scrubbing out junky or old links and processing their data. This results in wildly different numbers. Although it can be good to use a few tools to get a larger picture of your link graph, I find it most helpful to track my success by sticking with one tool and comparing my metrics on a monthly basis.

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hi Arthur,

I believe you're just talking about management of your Places pages, right? If that's the case, it's totally fine manage both under one Google Account. In fact, this would be preferable since you'll be able to view stats about your pages and make edits in one location.

Tim

Happy to help!

Rather than submitting your articles to a syndication service, I would recommend using them as guest posts on individual blogs. My Blog Guest for finding blogs that may post your articles.

Article spinning/syndication might result in a bunch of links, but most of those links will be of very little value. On the other hand, getting links from a handful of high quality blogs can go much further towards improving your site's authority.

Hi Jean,

I highly recommend Epipheo Studios. They're a bit expensive but they do amazing work. We recently had them create a video for our website and we love it.

If anything, adding a video to your site would likely help your site through improved engagement stats. I wouldn't worry about load time too much. The best option is to embed the video on your site through YouTube, Vimeo, Wisita or any other 3rd party hosting service. The embed code will have very little affect on load time.

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hey Dave,

Google has an article about this over on their Webmaster Tools blog - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

In short, yes, it does have a small impact on how Google determines where your website would be considered relevant, but they also look at country specific TLDs and your geo-targeting settings in Webmaster Tools.

In my experience, it's not something to be overly concerned about. If you can easily get your site hosted in Australia, go for it, if not, you'll probably do just fine.

Tim

Miriam, you always give the most awesomest Local SEO responses!

One thing we've also had some success with is signing up with the major listing aggregators like Localeze. This is especially helpful if you have multiple locations as it gives you a way to easily manage your NAP information.

Here's some more good info from David Mihm about listing distribution - http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/local-search-ecosystem-2012/

Here are the two plugins we've been testing:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-awd/http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-facebook-connect/AWD has more goodies and options. SFC is made by http://ottopress.com/, probably a more experienced WordPress developer and better supported. Both should work for Facebook comments.

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hi Arthur,

I think doing both is okay. For our clients with multiple offices, we usually list contact information for all locations on the /contact page. Then we create unique content that is specifically optimized for each location on separate pages.

If local SEO is really important for the company, make sure you claim Google Places pages (and listings on any other important directories) for each location as well.

Tim

Hi Michael,

It really depends on how Google decides to display the local results which can vary based on the keyword being used. The most common way of displaying results is called the 7-Pack (see example) in which no description is used for the map listings.

Occasionally, you will see a local search result that does include a description, but this usually only happens when the search phrase is specific to a single business (see example).

So it really depends on Google and there isn't a way you can force them to show a description. It all comes down to the keyword you're ranking for. On the upside, Google Places pages tend to a get a lot of attention when they appear in organic search results. Here an interesting article by Dr. Pete about it. Please note that although some of the examples Dr. Pete uses do show descriptions, Google has since changed the way they typically display local search results.

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hi Adam,

I would suggest you read through David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors. It's almost a year old now, but there is still a lot of insight that can be gained from it.

As with organic search results, local rankings are influenced by a huge number of factors. There are some basic steps like selecting the right categories and claiming your listing that play a very important role, but things like the authority of your homepage, the number of matching listings on other directories (like Yelp, CitySearch, etc.) and the number and quality of reviews on your Places page can all have an impact on results as well.

Tim

To add to that, what tool did you use to grab link metrics for a one week old website? Most tools have at least a little lag in determine inbound links. Your new website likely hasn't had a chance to establish the long-term, quality links that the sites for your retail stores have built during their lifetime.

Unless I'm mistaken, the SEOmoz Tools only pull in search traffic data from Google Analytics. I would suggest going directly to Google Analytics and exporting data from there to get a larger picture of your overall traffic - http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57161

Hope this helps!

Tim

You might just need to reset your Google Analytics authentication. This can be done by going to Campaign Settings in the Pro Dashboard.

I think you should always share your guest blogs over social media as a best practice. The blog owner is doing you a favor by post your content (and hopefully giving you a link). The least you can do is help drive traffic to their blog through social media.

As Erik said, "Most of the time i'm proud to have an new blog post, so i post it also to facebook." I couldn't agree more. If you're not proud enough of your work to share it on your social media accounts, you need to rethink your guest blogging strategy.

You could also take an extra step and submit the URL to social bookmarking sites like Digg or StumbleUpon.

I doubt you have to worry too much about articles getting indexed. As long as you're dealing with a fairly reputable site that has their basic SEO in order, your article should get indexed pretty quickly.

Hi Aviva!

Glad I could help! I have one Thai client and use the same trick to get a general idea of how much traffic they are getting from Thai keywords.

Happy traffic analyzing!

Tim

Hi Debi,

I can't think of a perfect way to solve this, but you might be able to set up some sort of advanced search once you're on the keyword report.

Russian gives you a bit of an advantage because there are characters unique to the language that you can search for. For example, you could create this advanced search: Include, Keyword, Matching RegExp, г|и|ф|ч.

See the attached image for a better explanation. In RegEx, the | character means "or". So you're basically saying "г or и or ф or ч" and the results will show any keyword that uses one of those characters.

Like I said, this isn't perfect. For all I know, there are many Russian words that don't use these characters, and this doesn't help you out with singling out English or French keywords. But maybe you can play around with this idea and find something works.

Tim

KH80d

I also like the Google Analytics IQ Lessons. They won't teach about the principles of SEO, but understanding your analytics is a huge part of quantifying the performance of your SEO work.

Excel FTW! A pivot table could handle this for you as Basil said. Or if you wanted to do a one-off formula, it would look something like this:

=(B1-A1)/B1

Where B1 is your number from the more recent time period and A1 is the number from the previous time period.

Hope this helps!

Tim

Mcarle, the blog post you reference only mentions issues with the rank tracker and the Pro reporting system.

There were issues with OSE that delayed the release of updated metrics - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-index-delay-explained - but the most recent Mozscape data was released on May 1 - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mozscape-update-our-largest-index-yet-159-billion-urls

IKHO, with the delays in the release of the new Mozscape data, it's very likely that the data is a little old and SEOmoz just hasn't had a chance to index the links you created for you new site. The next index update is schedule for the end of this month - http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape%20Schedule

Hi Notsy,

The truth is that there is not a 100% accurate backlink tool out there. SEOmoz maintains their own index which is used for OSE data. Market Samurai is likely just pulling data from another backlink data provider - maybe Majestic SEO.,

No two data providers will give you the exact same numbers. They refresh their data a different rates and have different methods for scrubbing junky links from the results, and none of them have the same level of resources as Google to throw at building an index.

Here's nice article that gives a comprehensive look at the major link research tools - http://www.rankabove.com/news/seo-research/backlink-data-provider-all/

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hi Vinku,

You can find a nice discussion on Raven and Ontolo here - http://www.seomoz.org/q/ontolo-vs-raven-seo-tools

Gianluca makes some good points that they are kind of hard to compare because Ontolo focuses only on link building while Raven is an overall campaign tool. Also, all three of your options offer a free trial. Why don't you give them each a shot and see what you think?

Tim

I love Raven, but like MisterG, I don't use it as a link building tool - mostly because we don't currently offer link building services. However, as MisterG said, it's an awesome hub for managing clients. Your research, analysis and reporting can all be done from one location. It also integrates with social media networks and email campaign tools. I've also their support staff is super nice and always willing to help.

We're hoping to start offering link building later this year, and when we start, I absolute plan on using Raven for link building management.

I've never used Ontolo, so I can't offer much insight there. Hope this helps!

Hi Bob,

Marcin has you on the right track here. You first need to decide what the objective of the website is. The Thank You page used after a PayPal transaction should definitely be used as a destination URL goal, but you might also want to track smaller goals like contact form submissions and email newsletter subscriptions. Both of these could easily be tracked through Thank You pages as well.

Tim

One problem is that the www and non-www versions of your domain resolve separately. As a best practice, you should pick one to be your primary domain and redirect the other to it. Otherwise, you can end up with duplicate content issues.

Hmmm, that's a bit more complicated. I'm sure there's a Macro out there that can do it, but I don't know one off the top of my head.

I think this can be done without a Macro but it will take a little bit of manual work. Here's what I would do:

Place your two sets of keywords in Columns A and B. Select all of Column B and cut (ctrl+x) it. Then in Cell B1, right click, select Paste Special > Transpose. Then, move Column A down one so the list starts in Cell A2.

This will create a matrix with one set of keywords in Column A and the modifiers in Row 1.

Next, in Cell B2, enter this formula:

=$A2&" "&B$1

Copy this across all cells in the matrix and you'll have 10,000 unique keywords. You will then have to remove the formulas by copying the entire sheet, right clicking in Cell A1 and selecting Past Special > Values.

Finally, you'll have to do some manual work of cutting and pasting all the separate columns into one long column of 10k keywords.

I know this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it's the best I can think of for know. I've updated that spreadsheet example to give you a better idea of what I mean - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsNfzI57aVSXdGFKME1pamRnZkJNandZWVpoVkFXZkE

Or, if you want to send your initial set of keywords to me, I wouldn't mind giving it a shot myself. Feel free to send it to tim@prontomarketing.com.

Best,

Tim

If I'm correctly understanding your goal here, I think this can be accomplished by just using an Excel formula. You shouldn't need a Macro to combine two columns.

Place your keywords in Column A and the modifiers in Column B. Then, in Column C, enter the following formula:

=A1&" "&B1

Copy this formula down the list and it will combine the contents of the two cells separated by a space. Here's an example I put together in Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsNfzI57aVSXdGFKME1pamRnZkJNandZWVpoVkFXZkE

Hope this helps!

Tim

Hi Adam,

It's based on the preference of the webmaster of those domains. They have simply chosen whether or not to include www in their domain. It doesn't have an effect on SEO because the addition or exclusion of www doesn't give search engines any clue as to the quality of the site.

The important thing to remember here is that http://www.example.com and http://example.com are technically different domains, so if you're not careful, it's easy to run into duplicate content issues. If you're working on this for your own website, you should pick one version and make sure the other redirects to it.

Hope this helps!

Tim

I'm not a pro when it comes to technical server set ups, so maybe Keri can jump in with some better knowledge.

It seems to me like you have everything set up on your server correctly. And it looks like Google currently has only one version indexed of the original page in question.

You site navigation menu points to the capitalized version of the URL, but somewhere on your site there must be a link that points to the lowercase version which would explain how SEOmoz found the duplication when crawling your site, and if SEOmoz can find, so can Google.

I still think you should use the rel=canonical attribute just to be safe. Again, I'm not that great at technical stuff. Sorry I couldn't be of more help here.

Tim

Excellent points, Keri. I hadn't thought about either of those issues. Using a redirect is definitely the best way to go.

The problem is that search engines view these URLs as two separate pages, so both pages get indexed and you run into duplication issues.

Yes, using rel=canonical is a good way to handle this. I would suggest using the lowercase version as your canonical page, so you would place this bit of HTML on both pages:

The other option is to create a 301 redirect from the caps version to the lowercase version. This would ensure that anyone arriving at the page (including search engine bots) would end up being directed to the lowercase version.

Cool! Thanks Doug!

Has there been any research done on CTR for written descriptions vs. snippets grabbed by Google? Personally, I hardly ever look at meta descriptions when searching for something. My judgement is mostly based on the title tag.

Logically, it makes sense that a well-crafted description would be better, but I'd like to see some hard evidence to back that up.

I'm not sure if there is a good, free tool out there, but Rand covered this in a Whiteboard Friday a few months ago. Check out the attached video. At item #4, he discusses using some search operators to get a basic idea of your competitors' citations. This can be done by searching for the competitor's name, address and excluding the results for their own site. Like this:

competitor "1234 competitor ave" -site:competitor.com

The results are sometimes a little messy but its a great place to start. Hope this helps!

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