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Start off with landing pages focused on long tail keywords. You can use those landing pages to build site reputation and traffic. Use that as a platform for competing with the big guys. Going head to head with them right out of the gate is a recipe for frustration.
The analogy I use is that it is like always being at 3rd and 1 in American football. You don't have to throw into the end zone, you just need to move the ball a few feet.
I would create landing pages for product categories and use rel=canonical on the actual product pages.
This worked for organic. I've never had much luck ranking on the local search results outside of my immediate physical locations. However, I get plenty of traffic through the organic results; and frankly, I think that my clients prefer seeing my content to just seeing the local results.
However, the major caveat is that this is specific to your niche and may not work as well for certain businesses. Since I'm running a law practice, my clients like organic results because they like the information that is available in my targeted pages.
The answer isn't keyword stuffing the alt tags. That will do nothing for you. Here are two suggestions based on results in a photo site that I run:
I can illustrate with a very specific example that will hopefully clear it up a little bit. I am a bankruptcy lawyer with offices in Seattle and Kent. Seattle was my major target because it is a major city and the largest in my target region. However, there are dozens of towns around Seattle. I wanted to get as much reach as possible.
When I did my keyword research, I found that searching for "SeaTac Bankruptcy Lawyer" mostly brought up results in Kent. The reason was that there are no bankruptcy lawyers in SeaTac with a web presence. The bankruptcy lawyers were concentrated in Kent. Since this was the case, a good ranking for Kent spilled over to a good ranking for SeaTac. This meant that instead of trying to focus on both Kent and SeaTac, I was better off focusing just on Kent. The result is that by ranking well for Kent, I get a geographic spillover to smaller towns around Kent like SeaTac and Auburn.
When you are doing local optimization, try to think of the metro area as a flow chart with the biggest city at the top (level 1) and the smaller ones coming below (levels 2 - whatever). You will find that the further you go down the flow chart, the fewer strong competitors there are. This means that ranking will for a city at level 3 of the flow chart gives you spill over to a city at level 4 or level 5 provided that there isn't strong competition at level 4 or 5.
So focus on unique landing pages for the cities at the lowest level where there is active competition. This will give you spillover to all the levels below that level. Then, once you have established those landing pages, work on landing pages at another level down. They key is that the landing pages need to be unique to avoid the duplicate content penalty.
I'm not sure what you mean by "index page." Do you mean a static front page like the index.html page in a regular website? If so, that is set using the Settings==> Reading Panel. However, you can only use one static front page. You may be able to customize the content of the index page by using PHP to call different content in response to a given condition.
Also, I am a Lynda user. The best thing to do is contact Lynda directly. They are good about responding. It sounds like the issue is that the tutorial is outdated, which is usually something that they want to know about.
Nice site! I like the idea.
1. I am not sure what kind of backend you are running, but you can use either PHP or Ruby to identify related posts and display previews at the bottom of answer pages or in a sidebar.
2. You should be either using rel=canonical or robots.txt blocking any index pages that duplicate content on a site page.
We need more info. A major question is site age. If the /blog directory is fairly new, your results are not atypical. Also if the /blog directory is fairly new and changing the URL wouldn't damage existing SERPs too much, you might try a more descriptive directory name like /location-business type-blog.
I have the same issue with marketing my business. This is what has worked for me.
You don't have to rank for every town in the metro area. You just have to rank for the towns that people associate with your business. For example, I am a Seattle bankruptcy attorney. There are about 6 other areas that people associate with bankruptcy attorneys. This is because not every area has a lot of professionals.
What I did was look at my competition first. See where they are located throughout the metro area. Then do some keyword research with "Business name + location" and "location + business name." Then compare the results to the map and see if you can focus on locations that are spread throughout the metro area. Then write unique landing pages for each.
I have had a lot of success using internal landing pages that are targeted to a single topic. For your client, their homepage might be rentaluxurycar.com that is more general in its content; but then have individual pages that are focused on each make and model, i.e. rentaluxurycar.com/astmonmartindb7, with keywords focused on renting a DB7.
I would also push the client on letting the six subsites run alongside the main site. If they have different domains and unique content, then they can crowd the search results.
I can illustrate with a very specific example that will hopefully clear it up a little bit. I am a bankruptcy lawyer with offices in Seattle and Kent. Seattle was my major target because it is a major city and the largest in my target region. However, there are dozens of towns around Seattle. I wanted to get as much reach as possible.
When I did my keyword research, I found that searching for "SeaTac Bankruptcy Lawyer" mostly brought up results in Kent. The reason was that there are no bankruptcy lawyers in SeaTac with a web presence. The bankruptcy lawyers were concentrated in Kent. Since this was the case, a good ranking for Kent spilled over to a good ranking for SeaTac. This meant that instead of trying to focus on both Kent and SeaTac, I was better off focusing just on Kent. The result is that by ranking well for Kent, I get a geographic spillover to smaller towns around Kent like SeaTac and Auburn.
When you are doing local optimization, try to think of the metro area as a flow chart with the biggest city at the top (level 1) and the smaller ones coming below (levels 2 - whatever). You will find that the further you go down the flow chart, the fewer strong competitors there are. This means that ranking will for a city at level 3 of the flow chart gives you spill over to a city at level 4 or level 5 provided that there isn't strong competition at level 4 or 5.
So focus on unique landing pages for the cities at the lowest level where there is active competition. This will give you spillover to all the levels below that level. Then, once you have established those landing pages, work on landing pages at another level down. They key is that the landing pages need to be unique to avoid the duplicate content penalty.
Nice site! I like the idea.
1. I am not sure what kind of backend you are running, but you can use either PHP or Ruby to identify related posts and display previews at the bottom of answer pages or in a sidebar.
2. You should be either using rel=canonical or robots.txt blocking any index pages that duplicate content on a site page.
I have had a lot of success using internal landing pages that are targeted to a single topic. For your client, their homepage might be rentaluxurycar.com that is more general in its content; but then have individual pages that are focused on each make and model, i.e. rentaluxurycar.com/astmonmartindb7, with keywords focused on renting a DB7.
I would also push the client on letting the six subsites run alongside the main site. If they have different domains and unique content, then they can crowd the search results.
I'm not sure what you mean by "removed them from your blog," since most blogs have categories and tags to help with internal navigation and organization.
It may be that they are still in your sitemap; so check your sitemap. The other issue is time. It takes awhile for spiders to catch-up with your site.
This worked for organic. I've never had much luck ranking on the local search results outside of my immediate physical locations. However, I get plenty of traffic through the organic results; and frankly, I think that my clients prefer seeing my content to just seeing the local results.
However, the major caveat is that this is specific to your niche and may not work as well for certain businesses. Since I'm running a law practice, my clients like organic results because they like the information that is available in my targeted pages.
Go to Google Webmaster Tools => Optimization => Remove URLS
In order for Google to remove the URL, you will need to do 1 of the following:
1. Block it with robots.txt, but it sounds like it's too late for that.
2. If you removed the old development content, make sure that the old content's URL produces a 404 or 410 status code.
3. Block the content with a Meta noncontent tag.
In my opinion, option 2 is the easiest since you should have a 404 page anyway.
Start off with landing pages focused on long tail keywords. You can use those landing pages to build site reputation and traffic. Use that as a platform for competing with the big guys. Going head to head with them right out of the gate is a recipe for frustration.
The analogy I use is that it is like always being at 3rd and 1 in American football. You don't have to throw into the end zone, you just need to move the ball a few feet.
I have the same issue with marketing my business. This is what has worked for me.
You don't have to rank for every town in the metro area. You just have to rank for the towns that people associate with your business. For example, I am a Seattle bankruptcy attorney. There are about 6 other areas that people associate with bankruptcy attorneys. This is because not every area has a lot of professionals.
What I did was look at my competition first. See where they are located throughout the metro area. Then do some keyword research with "Business name + location" and "location + business name." Then compare the results to the map and see if you can focus on locations that are spread throughout the metro area. Then write unique landing pages for each.
Links in comments may not be passing you any SEO juice. Since comment spam is such a big problem for blog owners, most comment links are rel=nofollow.
Since your blog is very focused, I suggest finding other blogs and organization websites about Dyslexia or cognitive issues for adults. Then reach out to them.
Explain who you are and what you offer, and that you want to create a relationship with them. Offer to write a unique article on your topic or to profile them on your blog in exchange for a link. This is the best way to do natural link building. Given that your topic is scientific, you may be able to get backlinks from some really trusted .org or .edu sites.
So far my best method for same day indexing is having a history of posting daily and doing it consistently. In my case, I was getting indexed like you were. After awhile, my indexing rate picked up. I think this is one of those SEO issues where the answer is keep at it and hope they notice.