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Ryan, I have to say that you do bring a great point here and kudos to you on that. I think I may have jumped the gun a little bit in my initial response without considering the exact situation.

If you look at site like Compendium, along with Smashing Magazine and Noupe, they use this same method. Although, they a lot of high quality content, get tons of traffic and their category and tag structure are highly organized. This does work well, but from my experience, if you don't have all of those keys in place then you won't rank well for those categories in search results. On the other hand, here at SEOmoz, they do not have their tags and categories indexed, but they have the organization, traffic and content. Although, the only difference is that SEOmoz isn't using URL friendly slugs for these categories...

Maybe the better suggestion to Jared should be, try it both ways. Use noindex, follow at first for a month or so, then switch to indexing them. Test each method and see what results you get for your blog. It won't hurt your site in any way. I would just suggest that if you are going to index categories that you make sure you have thought through your level of organization.

Tags and categories in Wordpress should always be set to noindex, follow. Why? Usually by allowing the search engines to index WordPress tags and categories you create duplicate content. If you have a lot of tags and categories you also create a numerous amount of non-signifcant search results for your domain.

EDIT: You are not hindering search results for potential visitors by not indexing your tags and categories. You are simply keeping them from being cached and indexed in search results. For SEO purposes it is much better to noindex, follow these pages.

How do you gauge setting your initial max cost-per-click for specific keywords?

For example, you have a keyword that has an estimated "first page bid" at $6.25. If you are wanted your ad to show competitively with your competition, how much should you start at? Two times the "first page bid?" Three times?

I'm working on revamping some ad campaigns to help with our paid marketing expenses. I do have quite a budget to work at, but we are hoping to cut down some of this cost. We just spent the past few months trying to spend our way out of some poor quality scores and CTR's. Our metrics have improved drastically, now I want try and cut down our CPC, which is over $19! Our ROI is hard to calculate due to the fact that it can take a few years to obtain profit from the market we are in. Our conversion rates are over 9% from paid advertisement to leads (which is pretty decent for our market).

I am all eyes and ears on this subject... I am ready to start playing around with prices tomorrow to see how we fare, in hopes I get some solid responses before then.

Thanks in advance!

I've never considered this as a good practice, but is there any benefit to submitting a press release to one PR source, then going to other PR sources and submitting the same content? My main goal, currently on one project, is the soul purpose of link building and backlinking.

I see this as duplicate content, although I am seeing competitors submitting the same press release multiple times trying to reap some sort of benefit from it. In my honest opinion, I would rather submit 1 different press release each week throughout the course of a month to a quality site like PRLog or PRweb.

Comments? Opinions? I would really like to hear them.

I was about to post a similar question, but found that this was already posted, recent and has some good discussion. Hope I am not "highjacking" thread. Figured it would be repetitive to ask the same question...

If I may, how often would anyone suggest utilizing a press release service? My experience and other sources have given me the impression of once per month, maybe twice. This would be solely for the purpose of gaining backlinks.

Thoughts?

The title of the question asks it all.

One site I currently work on has a handful of blog posts that rank really well in the SERPS for certain "long-tail" searches. Would it be worth the time to, when I have it, to go back and edit the blogs little by little to help with SEO and building some links throughout the site to get people where we need them to go?

Basically "sprucing" up the blog posts to make them more readable, more engaging and help some link building efforts within the domain.

Thoughts?