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This is another great suggestion and YES I do this on a weekly basis. IMO, your answer fits right in with the discussion.

I usually like to pull my full reports from AWStats from within the server. I then "weed" out certain words that should be within my negative campaigns and find others that may be worth running.

Lol. No worries! Always reply with great responses. Never know who may be looking for that answer as well.

Right now, we are not running location specific campaigns. Only nationwide 24/7. Haven't had the time to really "fine tune" this account due to the massive amount of keywords, landing pages and ads running already.

Job security maybe?

Excellent information and well put together answer!

I don't want to take away from it, but I have already done all of my homework (as you have already suggested above). I was merely searching for a modest starting point at cutting down our CPC to a certain extent.

I would have to imagine I have answered my own question while asking it. I need to simply adjust my pricing (decrease max CPC) till I feel satisfied with our positioning and our conversion rates.

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!

Love this idea!

Thank you for sharing Geoff.

"So put the hashtag once or twice in a tweet. Many Twitter-user do searches."

Agree. Using them a few times to help make them more visible for certain subject matter is really important. I have been known to use 3 or 4 "hashtags" in a single 'tweet,' but I wouldn't recommend doing it on a regular basis. It seems to take away from the professionalism of your 'tweet.'

"time and progression are always excellent reasons for new posts and new content"

Great point. I don't feel that the current blog posts are outdated as of yet and in need of a re-written post, they just aren't up to "snuff" for potential readers and visitors.

The main goal I have for editing these older posts is strictly for current user-experience. That is why I am battling the idea of going back to them, re-reading and making the minor edits needed to help or just leave it and write a new article, as you have mentioned.

Thanks for the reply.

Our blog is only about 6 months old. The first 3 months or so of posts were really poorly written and I did not have the time to really "fine-tune" like I normally would. That job was left to someone doing the initial editing... Needless to say, looking back at them, they are really, really bad.

I'm not really interested in stuffing these older blogs with additional keywords or adding keyword rich anchor text in the posts.

The content was poorly written. We are getting a lot of traffic to our blog through some of these posts, but the bounce rate remains extremely high. The entry keyphrases seem to be "dead-on" for the content itself, at least for the most part. I won't lie, I would like to put a few links within some edited posts that would take someone to another page on the site that would be helpful or another blog.

Still not really sure what to...

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?

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?

Appreciate the response. I couldn't agree more with focusing time and resources on the site itself and other quality backlinks. I really just needed some reassurance so I can focus our attention on what is more important.

As mentioned, this question arises from a co-worker (who doesn't understand SEO) doing some research and reading a forum response from last fall about using these "content farm" sites... Initially, I told him that it was a waste of time, but everyone seems to panic when they find a new median source to use without consulting me or doing the research.

Out of morbid curiosity, are "Content Farms" still a good source to use for backlinking within articles that you share? I have yet to see some results to base an answer off of for myself.

Some co-workers are wanting to utilize sites like Suite101, ArticlesBase, etc for sharing articles and gaining the benefit of getting some backlinks from these sites. Is this still a good tactic to utilize? My research is telling me no since the Panda Update...

Anyone have any insight on this?

Thanks!

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.

Thanks for the reply. I agree at this being worth a test. As I have stated in a response to "Highland" below, this is definitely NOT a primary SEO strategy by any means. Just another supplement to what we have been doing.

I've also been weary doing this due to Google's "content farm" update... I just need to make sure we are utilizing sites that have not been penalized as of late, which in my studies I have found them to be the article sharing sites more so than sites like PRWeb or PRLog, etc.

Thanks for the reply! I figured as much for going little to no benefit... Just needed to reassure my stance before I present my thoughts back to upper management and co-workers.

This is definitely never my "primary" source for SEO. It is mainly just an addition to the currentl link building strategies already in place.

My main concern was the fact some individuals in the office don't understand SEO very well and wanted me to send our our PR's multiple times. I think they misunderstood my explaination at sending them out at the most once per week and using different sites to do this. I really just wanted to get another solid answer of "No" to reassure myself.

I do like your idea of just putting the PR on the site and letting people link out to it. I am planning on converting the PR's into PDF files and then putting them on our site as well. Problem is, I don't want to submit the same release 5 different times, then put it on the site. I'm more for the submit once, post on the site for visitors to view.

To be truthfully honest, the competition we have is doing a lot of this for SEO purposes. They are trying to rise up organically as our industry prepares for a possible change in the market. I see a consistant number of companies pushing out PR's, with lack of purpose other than to help them with backlinks. Once again, not primary, but definitely part of their strategy. I think this is the main reason my co-workers feel that they should do the same, which I am telling them, "No, lets put one out per week at the most... Maybe just 2 per month."

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.

Thanks for the reply!

I agree with both points. I think I am just more or less worried that what I am doing would cause search engines to penalize me due to the amount of outbound links from the domain. Maybe I am just thinking to much into it.

I doubt that any of these sites would ever backlink to this specific site, but we can always dream!

Thanks for the reply.

Should I actually put the rel="follow" attribute into my <a>tags or leave it off, since default settings should follow that link?</a>

As I am going through and redeveloping a website, I am trying to add some external links to resourceful information regarding this page. Should I put a nofollow or follow attribute on these?

I am only putting 1-5 links per page to associations and other organizations that would be beneficial to the visitor. I am worried about the number of outbound links causing me to get penalized.

Ideas?