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I would drop the "keyword in bold, italic and underlined" as well as worrying at all about density.  I would only do that if it enhances the page for the reader rather than bolding etc... a word simply because it is your targeted term for the page.  Also - alt tags are very important, yes, but remember to describe the image, don't just throw keywords in.  I think will all of the recent talk about 'Over Optimization'  those are things that the algo's could potentially be looking for etc...

Just a quick look at the home page a some quick navigation of the site showed me that on the home page alone there are at least five links that go to howtotradecommoditiesDOTcom/go/etoro which just redirects to the etoro website.  It almost looks like there are ads that are disguised as internal links in order to keep from getting the 'above the fold' penalty.  Who knows how Google sees this but I would think that they wouldn't see it in a very good light whether this was the intention or not.  I would certainly look at reworking your internal linking structure as well.

Good luck

I like the idea of 301's the best in this case - in any event all of your suggestions are right on.  Thumb up!

Thanks, brother.  All of your opinions are much appreciated!

Go to your Dashboard and click add new plugins and type in Word Press SEO Plug in and download the one from Yoast.com

That is what you need

In the market I work (strictly hospitality) I would have to say that our mobile success, of which we have a good amount, is actually based on the desktop websites ranking very well and the sniffer delivering the mobile website to mobile devices.  Whether or not this will go on forever, I just do not know.

We expected strictly mobile search to take off in 2012 and optimized our mobile sites accordingly but alas, it is still the ranking of the desktop sites that is delivering the vast majority of mobile visits.... maybe 2013 ?

You want to add the content to help your users, right?  You aren't trying to get it indexed, correct?  Just noindex those pages...

VP went for it.  We are on the hunt for a part timer whom I will personally train.  I am more of an on page guy but I did train with Eric Ward for 10 months (boss flipped the bill for that one!) and I do feel I have a very safe and organic approach.  So if I can instill these methods in to a part timer there is a great chance they will quickly become full time.

Any one know anyone in Jacksonville, Florida looking for a part time job, LOL?!?!

I totally agree.  Going a bit deeper, each page should have its own clear focus and the Titles should reflect each page's focus.  For the home page, however, location and service is the way to go.  Good answer, Matt.

Mr. Weiss,

I suppose, for me, it would depend on the campaign.  If it was going to be a long running client or if it was going to be my company's website I would pick one phrase and run with it for a few months and then change it up and run the other for a few months and compare the data to determine which one was the most successful.

If, however, it was a short running client like a 'one time' optimization (which I hate but they do happen) I would first rule out that I could in no way run them both together and if I couldn't and if I determined that they both carried equal relevancy to the page's subject I would take the one or two words that make the short tail phrases different (in this case 'background' and 'credentials') and I would find out which of those carried the most search volume and make an educated guess from there - I know you touched on that and I agree that it doesn't 'mean' much - but it does help with getting an idea, in my opinion.

You pose an interesting question and as I have taken your advice many times - and you certainly give excellent advice - I am quite curious as to how YOU or others here would approach this.  I will be watching this thread closely.

Cheers, my friend

I wouldn't do that.  It would work, but in case your site was ever manually looked at for any reason and that was noticed, that could look like an attempt to manipulate search results and you could get hit.  I would just put it on as text and either noindex the page in your robots.txt file or do as Raymond and Nakul suggest and set up a canonical tag.  In my very humble opinion I think the safest thing would just be to block bots from the page but the canonical isn't a bad suggestion at all.

A criminal Justice Attorney can represent the State OR the accused.  They are simply an attorney trained in criminal law.  Yes - that category is correct although a bit broad.

Cesar,

That is what it means, yes.  However, I have seen my Titles change (meaning they have crawled) but the snapshot not change so even though they say that they cache it with every crawl I think they miss sometimes.

"this is a one time change that would affect about 800,000 pages so we want to get it right the first time around and stick with that url."

Oh yeah - I dig that.

Maybe instead of just the one word checks simply make it more broad?  Like 'Dr credentials' and 'doctor background check"?  Those would probably register and would be a bit more relevant to your campaign... maybe?

shanrenee.com has relevant links from photography and wedding sites.

http://jmayphoto.com/index2.php#!/home does not.  Also, the URL string is funky, I don't put stock in keywords tags but this one is stuffed pretty bad - and the pages that do have content... it appears that the content is Framed...  They may have been developed by the same agency but they did not develop them in the same way at all.

I stand corrected  Thank you, sir.

See, interalta?  Told ya if I was wrong someone would politely point it out  I love this community.

Absolutely.  It just seems that at the end of the day it's going to be a guess so the most data you can put towards it the better your chance are of choosing correctly, of course.  I just hope that when you do make your decision it ends up being correct for at least the majority of the pages.  Good luck - I have faith in ya!

That is what I have seen as well.  I just assumed that is just how it is.  If I did something wrong and there should have been a confirmation than I certainly have a busy weekend a head of me....

I get what you are saying about separating the new content from the sales content but I think I would still go with the sub-directory.

You have well established domain names that Google associates with the well known brand - stick with it.  Your new pages will rank for the terms for which they are relevant and when they do, the relevant traffic will go straight to those pages, never having to even see the sales copy unless they choose to click in to it.

That is how I believe I would approach this.  New domains require building authority from the ground up - absolutely achievable, we all do it... but when you have an already established, totally relevant domain.... use it.

Geo Meta tags are simply what they sound like - they are meta tags that allow you to declare your geo-location (longitude/latitude) - they may have some impact on local searches or searches using location identifiers.

Microformats are schemas used to help crawlers understand your content better.  I would recommend looking in to using schema.org formatting - or, at the very least, use V-Card formatting on your physical address in the content of your site.

As far as Dublin Core meta data - read this.  http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/

Of course you can always ask anything here in the forums but Google is a good tool too

Cheers!

OK - I would get a list of all of your old pages and start 301 redirecting them to your new pages asap.  This could be part of your issue.

I totally agree with Andy here.  PageRank is not the only metric - not by a long shot.  Any association can be negative or positive whether PageRank is passing or not.  I would disavow just to get out of the bad neighborhood.

Indeed - everything I said goes equally for sub-domains.

instead of having different pages that are almost the same can you just make it one page that both navigation subs link to? So if you have Page A and Page B in the Navigation and Page A has a Sub nav link to Page C - rather than Page B having a sub nav link to a different page altogether why not just have it also have a sub nav link to Page C?  If they are so similar anyway can you not just combine the two similar topics in to one page?

I don't know, man.  When Barry Schwartz finally caved and no followed the paid ads on seoroundtable I figured that was about it.  The end.  He refused to do it out of principle for a very long time and then one day said 'screw it' and threw the tags on.  I have no doubt he will still get fans that wish to pay for a clearly paid spot on his site (and it has always been clearly marked as paid) but for the most part.... people buy them for the link juice.... I think it can still work for a while but Ole' Goog is getting a lot better a properly determining when a link is a TLA and seems to be coming down hard on them.  Personally I haven't used them in a very long time.

Definitely don't cut yourself short.  If it takes 15k words to properly describe something then that is what it takes.  It sounds to me that you have a good handle on what you are doing.  Keep it natural and all will be well.  Good luck!

I agree with you completely.  When you get more information please post it.  I am curious.

If your client shops local universities for interns and/or employees, those universities will link to your client's jobs page from their careers page(s) as a resource for their students.  It is quite a relevant link and there are quite a few universities or colleges in OH... I'd hit them up as well as taking the on page advice that has been listed by Kade and Jesse (and anyone else that chimes in)

There is an old webmaster world thread that explains how to hide the robots.txt file from browsers.... not sure why one would do this however....

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum93/74.htm

Perhaps they are doing something like this?

You never 'have' to use the keyword at all, actually.  Simply make sure you are writing about it and chances are you will use it exactly how many times you should.  It isn't the keywords, or more specifically it isn't mainly the keywords.  It is the surrounding text.  Are you describing your keyword?  Are you staying relevant and on topic?  And as far as your content volume I would suggest never write content for the sake of having content.  If the page requires 4k words then write 4k words.  If it requires 1k then write 1k.  Quality over Quantity.  I promise.

Cheers.

We have tested sub-folders vs. sub-domains with international clients in the same region of the same country - each received very similar SEO (on-page, links etc...) and found that neither appeared to work better than the other as far as ranking went.  However I am not clear on what they mean by 'mapped to the TLD'.  Are they saying that each language variant  has its own TLD and that the sub-folder from the main TLD will redirect to it?

You mean 301, right?

I would say a category page as redirecting to a different product, no matter how similar, could make for a poor user experience.

Is there any correlation with ranking drop for the exact match keyword (or any other keywords for that matter)?  I know that exact match domains may not get the boost they used to but I certainly don't recall seeing any penalties.

Yeah, trust me, I have strongly advised against it.  They don't use us for design, just marketing, and the company they use for design (while, admittedly, very, very good) was almost done with this before we were brought in to the loop about the redesign.  Down the road I hope to convince them to add more pages etc... but for now this is what I have to work with.  I am hoping the rel=canonical will take care of the duplicate content issues while perhaps giving a bit more authority to the content sections of the one page design.  This is something I have not done before, however, and I wanted to bounce it off my peers.  Thank you for the response!  I'll come back and post how it goes in a few months.

when was your site moved over to the new site?  You say that didn't go well and I have to wonder if you left out a lot of redirecting there.  If it hasnt been to long and Google still has the old site indexed (or even if not if you had good links) I would make sure you redirect every page of your old website to the relevant page of your new website.

I would check Google Trends for a possible drop in search volume for your targeted terms.  I am not sure how long you have had this site up and running but you may just have hit a seasonality drop (we see this with hotels) and you may simply need to wait it out.  You may consider deepening your 'bucket' of phrases if there are relevant terms for which you are not targeting that may still be receiving some decent search volume.

Because you have not dropped in ranking for the specific term I am confident in saying this has nothing to do with your exact match domain - any penalty would have been to your rankings which would have effected traffic but Google can not cut out the middle man - they can't keep you where you are in the rankings but still control your traffic amount.

Hmmmm - that makes me wonder - have you narrowed the traffic loss down to search engines?  Were you perhaps running some other type of marketing that may have been driving direct or referral traffic that you have stopped?

I am not huge on directories but here are some you should go for - I am sure there are more:

http://www.thebluebook.com/
http://www.homeadvisor.com/
http://www.nahb.org/
http://www.epa.gov/radon/rrnc/directory.html
http://www.builderdirectory.com/

As always EGOL's response consists of words to live by - his white hat, good content approach wont only get you where you want to be, it will keep you there no matter what updates Google launches (unless they just go insane).

The only thing I would add is to really look at your website's usability compared to theirs.  How is your page load speed compared to theirs?  Is their website far easier to navigate?  Do you meet ada compliance?  If not, do they?

These things seem to be more and more important.

You are totally correct, Adam  I simply use DA as a guide line for whether or not the website, as a whole, is 'OK' - not as a definitive rule.  You certainly can get a spammy link from a high DA website but I haven't found that to happen very often at all.  I suppose I use it in the way that I used to use toolbar PR - not as a rule, but a guide line.  Thank you for your insight.  Again, you are totally correct, I should not have been so vague.

Cheers, and thumbs up

I checked Rugs USA.  They are using Canonical Tags to point to a general page for like products.  They are also using the Schema Product tags that Irving suggested.  I do not believe they are taking a hit - they took the time to set it all up.

I would say--and many may disagree with me--that if you are building a directory to honestly help users than that is great.  However, to do so on a subdomain of your company's website is very likely going to seem fishy.  I wouldn't do that, personally.

Google crawls and indexes secure pages - for instance, your https website has 128 pages indexed in Google.  I agree with Mr. Weiss that your site needs to be fixed however - especially the temporary redirect from http to https.  Was your entire website only recently moved to https and then you lost ranking or has it always been https?  I feel you probably have some other issues going on besides the secure socket layer.  For instance, almost every link in your footer nav has 'dog tags' in it.  Kind of spammy to me....

That would scare me.  I would stop using that program and see if you can get the listings deleted.  If not I would disavow them through Google.  I wouldn't take any chances with something like this.

Both of those pages have canonical tags that point to https://lurento.com/city/ which 404s out.... I would start there.

Missed that post as well!  I must be getting slow, LOL

I am not disagreeing with EGOL - I know when someone has more experience than me

However... I can't help but remember when links from Press Releases, according to Matt Cutts, were useless... then it was proven that they certainly did count.  Or when exact match domains weren't supposed to help... but they still did...

Sometimes I think that Mr. Cutts will say these things knowing that many webmasters will believe him and stop doing what Google wants them to stop doing.  Then later they may make some algorithmic changes...

This is clearly speculation on my part.  It just seems this way sometimes.

The vast majority of my clients are hotels.  Because of this I deal with rebranding all of the time (a property switching brands, a branded property dropping the brand to become independent etc...)  If you feel comfortable leaving your old and new domains I would be happy to take a look for you.  As Ikkie said, it could be any number of things.

Ha!