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They're still good for links! Plus, as a company you need to be producing Press Releases weekly anyway to give to other various sources. For the extra 10 minutes it takes to upload it to the site you may as well just for the high PR links!

Hi Edward, Welcome to SEOMoz!

There may be many reasons why the website in question is ranking higher than yours.

You'll need to factor in a couple of factors, regarding both your site and the competitiors.

How old is your domain? Theirs is almost 12 months old, which if I believe correctly, is long enough to avoid any 'youth website' penalisation. If yours is new then Google may not have crawled it properly yet.

Aside from this, OSE and Google do not share databases, therefore some pages that Google is aware of, OSE may not be aware of. Mozbot would need to follow links to the competitiors site for it to be added to the index (what I believe).

As a result of this, you will see 0 on the mozbar when infact there are some links pointing to it. In fact there are some (rather dodgy) links pointing to ambienmed:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=link%3Aambienmed.com&sugexp=chrome,mod=2&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

On page content can also play a part in ranking factors. Ambienmed has a wealth of content on the home page which is very keyword heavy.

Also, as mentioned previously, your competitiors are fortunate enough to have an exact match domain name.

I hope some/all of this helps!

A quick Google showed me this result: Video Optimisation

Essentially these appear to be important

• HTML surrounding video
• Filename, title, description
• Video Files Metadata Optimization
• Keyword “video”
• Links and Backlinks
• Video sitemaps / MRSS / RSS
• Optimize your URLs

Tom

There is an amazing list here: http://www.seoresearcher.com/articles-directories-list-alexa-rating-ordered.htm

Also check out: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

That said, these article sites will only go so far towards helping your link building efforts. I wouldn't submit more than a couple of articles to each (all unique, too), as it will pass some Authority and increase your unique number of linking root domains.

Once you've exhausted that list to a good degree, try guest posting on other blogs if you have spare content!

Mihai,

Panda is looking for thin sites, so as long as you have a genuine website then there should be no reason your site can't do well in time.

The on page reports are still very useful in highlighting factors for consideration. Whether you take them literally or not is up to you.

Using keywords in H1/Title tags etc is still fairly common practice if you're chasing that key term.

Is Google indexing all of the news pages individually. If they are all indexed, then what we can do is make it so that the individual page is more relevant than the news archive page. I'd suggest removing the h2 tag from around the news title, and replacing it with another inline element such a span. This would make the index page less relevant for your title term. Then make sure your individual news article headline is a h1 to make that the most relevant. Other than that, I'd just go through all of the on page optimisation check lists on SEOMoz and make sure everything is in order. Ultimately you can't choose what Google will show for you, but you can influence it. I'll have a look at your site when I'm on my computer to see whether I can suggest some more changes for you

Technically, yes, removing the Google Page will remove the results, but I'd think twice before doing it personally.

Have you checked all of your on page content to make sure your page is fully optimised for your location? I've found that our Google Places listing compliments ours, but yes the places listings get a lower click through rate.

It's not necessarily a best practice in SEO to do this, but there are tools out there like http://www.submityourarticle.com which I've seen positive results from. The service basically pushes out either the same article, or a close spun alternative to many article networks, so there is a huge risk that in the future the links from the duplicate pages will be discounted/have negative impacts on your efforts.

Hope this helps!

John,

41 links for a footer area, whilst it is a large number, isn't too many really. You should be careful on the total number of links on the page however. I believe you should try to cap it at 100, but I think I've read somewhere 200+ is classed excessive

Hope this helps!

This is as much a business decision as it is an SEO one.

I would personally continue only with one generic domain, such as propertyanywhere or worldwideproperty, then direct any of the other domains to the country landing pages as you suggested.

From then onwards, focus all of your time on the one domain, as you'll have better chances of ranking with a single authoritative domain rather than 4 or 5 weak ones.

Hi James,

There are two ways to do this;

1. In Webmaster tools, there is a link under the Optimization menu to remove a URL,

2. Or if you'rve got access to your robots.txt file, just add the following to the bottom:

Disallow: /airport-cab/?show=gallery

This will remove it from the Google index next time the file is crawled.

If you are on Wordpress, and do not currently have an SEO plugin, try Yoast's, and use the Edit Files sub-menu to edit your robots file there.

This is a bad idea, the practice has been around for a while and Google is wise to it. OSE and Google don't use the same indexes, and OSE can be up to 1 month out of date at any time.

The links or 301's will not count in Google's eyes, so I wouldn't recommend it at all.

We use a call center to handle our leads, and ideally wanted that to be the number on the Google places rather then a direct line. Essentially we just called up the call center ourselves and told them that the call will be coming soon, then asked them to write the code down, then they just emailed it over.

So long as your customers aren't too computer-illiterate I'm sure you could just pre warn them about the call to make sure they're prepared for it.

Guy, there are two aspects of SEO to consider. One could save you a little more than the other, however neither should cost the earth.

In terms of on site optimisation, many factors can be edited by the webmaster (in small businesses, typically the owner). A lot of suggestions can be found through the PRO campaign management tool, however there are plenty of suggestions on the Beginners guide to SEO http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

The main factors you should focus on, for on-site optimisation are;

• title tags
• h1 tags
• keyword usage on site
• keyword match in url
• image alt text
• internal linking keywords

In terms of off site optimisation, there should be a small budget set aside. This should not necessarily be spent on paid links, as these will over time be picked up by Google, and your websites performance will drop. However, focusing on generating good, interactive and/or graphical content (for example, see ours: http://www.evoenergy.co.uk/uk-energy-guide/) is the way forward, as it attracts a lot of links from design-related blogs and galleries.

Perhaps you could let us know what niche you are in, and we could all suggest a few ideas for you?

Tom,

It would make sense to target the home page at the National market, as it will generally require higher Domain Authority to perform well long term! You could have some local pages, with office addressess and relevant local terms and images embedded within it for the wine tasting rooms.

This way, the site would not necessarily be split, but it would be more of a journey for the user through the site. Most visitors would land on the home page, and those interested in local niche's can be funneled through to the sub pages via carefully places links/navigation.

Obviously the on page SEO would have to be considered, perhaps using vcard formats on all addresses, and optimising title and H1 tags, as well as monitoring keyword density, bold, emphasis, etc. (The 'Analyse' tool on the SEOmoz toolbar is good for this!)

Finally, the off page SEO will then have to be considered, such as local directory submissions, DMOZ, BOTW, JoeAnt, Yahoo Directory etc. Then following the top level obvious choices, get links form Blogs, Forums, and articles.

Try running online competitions and offering small online discounts to get lasting links to your site also

Tom

It's a toss up between the PRO toolset and the blogs, both main and the UGC blog (however I'm still waiting for my blog entry to be read, grrrr!)

Thanks Guy.

Great, there are a couple of ideas that already spring to mind. Obviously these suggestions come from much larger corporations, but hopefully they will inspire you!

• http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/migration.html
• http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/infographic-plastic-surgery-is-giving-the-u-s-an-economic-lift-042012/?display=wide

Putting together smaller pieces like this can still work for you. Spend time on building a network of 'seed websites' i.e. websites that already distribute your type of content, so that you have a rush of publicity and visibility as soon as your content is launched.

I hope this helps!

If you are not leaving the company behind, I would suggest flipping the current brandedsite.com to the new city. If you didn't start with CityAWebsiteDesign.com, then you shouldn't need CityBWebsiteDesign.com.

If you need to change the URL in some way to reflect this change... perhaps you're keeping the old office open etc, then the best option would be a subfolder, just brandedcompanyname.com/City-B-website-Design

That way you keep the domain authority of your website, and you get the benefit of the keyword rich url.

Hope this helps!

Tom

Moz.com mods - do we have a new URL since the domain change? I can't seem to find the URL anywhere

Google shouldn't penalise you if that is legitimately your brand name, however the example that you have given looks very suspect. I've be very careful with focusing your link profile anchor text to just a small number of phrases, as it looks un natural.

It's better to come up with an awesome brand name/identity that consumers will love, then invest in the right areas online to succeed - that's the best way to go about it in the long run!

Don't worry about meta tags, they're not used and add clutter to the page code.

Must be an on page SEO issue.... Check on page elements out as your next port of call.

Soobum, If I were you I'd go after the search term with the highest traffic volume. Check google Adwords keyword tool to see which is higher. From your description of autocomplete, I would suggest you go after the plural. You won't lose too many positions in the serps for the non plural version, but you should see more traffic coming from the plural keyword. Try changing your title tag and h1 to reflect this, if it's something you want to go ahead with!

Claudio, What is your annual link building budget? From your concerns I would assume that Yahoo shouldn't be a priority of yours right now. Guest ousting on blogs should be your main focus, and then, once $300 is a smaller portion of your link budget, it may be worth adding it for completeness in the long run.

Depending on the rewrite rules of your new CMS, and the redirects put in place, there may be issues with the techniques used.

You can 301 redirect the non trailing slash versions too, just to be sure!

There's no harm in getting the yahoo link if it's within your budget. It's certainly not a bad link to have! If its within budget, then it's something you should do! Edit: I should also add that yes, it will increase your number of unique c blocks, unique number of linking root domains, and it will add something to your overall link profile and DA, whether or not it becomes immediately noticeable though I cannot say.

If I were you I'd keep the same URL structure. You're correct in thinking this won't be a quick fix.

First, use the robots.txt to disallow robots access to the search pages.

Don't remove all results just yet from GWT, this will be a long task and might damage your sites performance.

Could you provide some links to your site? I'll have a closer look.