No problem, if you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me through private messages.

I really recommend you watching the video I posted below, it is a SEOmoz webinar on Rich Snippets.

The markup should be on the product pages themselves, the offurl tag could complicate things. The other questions that you have I'm not too sure of.

I hope this helps.

Zach

microformats-real-life-use-cases microformats-real-life-use-cases

I always liked this article http://www.iblogzone.com/2011/08/how-to-google-authorship-markup-rel-author.html

If the website is relatively new, you may have to wait until then next LinkScape Index Update. My website, ProTech Internet Group, took 6 months to show up on the open site explorer.

Yes, but a lot of the topics discussed are still key concepts. The fundamentals of SEO haven't really changed, just the means of achieving optimization has. On Page SEO is still extremely important along with the creation of quality content, and quality links. Even though the book is dated, you can still learn a lot from it.

The industry is also constantly changing, which is why, in my second response, I recommended to subscribe to some of the prominent SEO Blogs' RSS Feeds.

Google+ is great, especially now for the local optimization. The key for any local or niche site is community, if you can get quality reviews and comments on your Google+ page, you can really start to build trust from an online reputation stance.

Google+ offers tremendous results for Local sites, especially now that it replaces google places. It also has great benefits from a personal branding perspective. I was at one of the SEOmoz meetups (Search Church in Philadelphia, thank you SEOmoz and Wil Renolds), one of the topics discussed there was how to get an authorship search result. If you can properly implement the rel=author tag, along with linking it to your personal Google+ account you can really establish yourself as an online authority for both your website and you personally.

I see that you are in a very niche real estate, try to create great geolocated articles related to buying and selling homes in the Bronx, along with linking BronxPad to your google+ authorship page. This will help boost both you as an online author and BronxPad.

On a second thought, there are other venues you may want to look into as well. I love SEOmoz, it is one of my favorite websites of all time (user friendliness) and has one of the most active online communities i've ever seen. There are however, other websites that provide great information on SEO, I personally subscribe to 20-30 feeds on web design and SEO that gives me constant fresh content to look through and learn more SEO. The YouMoz Blog, and the SEOmoz blog are two of my favorite subscriptions, but there are at least another half dozen solid blogs you could use.

I have two favorites

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Secrets- Danny Dover, he was the lead SEO when SeoMoz still did consulting

The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization (Theory in Practice) - This is an older book, but a classic. Rand Fishkin, actually contributed to this one.

I actually just looked at the same problem yesterday. I personally used feedburner. It is a google product first off, which just makes things simpler. Personally, I am a big fan of Google Reader, so it has really easy integration of these things. As far as a plugin, I used FeedBurner FeedSmith to plugin to my website.

Hakim,

Definitely a unique issue your having. When you are using any of the WordPress SEO Plugins (I use WordPress SEO by Yoast). Within Yoast go to permalinks=>Redirect attachment URL's to parent post URL.
 and check that box.

What this will do is redirect any SEO value that is passed to the image (or other attachment) and redirect it to the original post/page that it was on. It should also work the same way with your logo.

Zach Russell

That is really interesting, what is the url of your website?

You could use a 301 redirect in theory, BUT the purpose of using a 301 redirect is when a page has moved. When you are talking about mysite.com and mysite.com/ there is no two different pages, they are just different versions of the same link, just like mysite.com/index.html is the same page, when put the rel=canonical tag, you specify that these are all the same page, and the preferred version of that link.

Good Evening Stuart,

I agree with what was being said before, Citations and Reviews are a big part of affecting your rankings. Instead of generic text, try to create two different pages each location based. For Example; yoursite.com/batteresa-massage-therapist and yoursite.com/calpham-massage-therapist, you can include keywords along with location in your URLs, this can really help. I love that paper by David Mihm, you really should take a look at it.

As far as content, try to use completely standalone content for each page. You do not want to use generic content and just replace location names, because you will have issues with duplocate content, and this is a big problem. You may want to consider adding things like landmarks or relevant places of interest into the pages to assist with a guide to your location desitred for optimizing.

Hope this helps

Zach

Hey sorry for the late reply, I just got the email an hour ago saying that you got the website. Overall the theme doesn't look bad, It looks well documented and has good support. My experience with these more advanced looking themeforest themes, however, is that they sometimes require a certain learning curve to set up. I do not know how hard it is to set up, of course, because I haven't used it, but just be aware.

This theme also uses and alternate version of the DSIDXpress plugin, now it uses the plugin that I recommend, but be aware that this "custom" plugin won't have any support from Zillow if anything doesn't work right.

This is just some food for thought, I've set up a lot of WordPress sites, some from theme forest, a lot from the StudioPress genesis framework, and themes from another dozen different sites.

Let me know if you need help with anyhting else

Zach Russell

I haven't worked with that theme in specific. I specialize in Wordpress design and SEO, and id be more than happy to take a look at the theme for you, send over the link. One thing you want to ignore is any theme that claims build in SEO. In many cases the theme will restrict you. Ironically studio press has built in SEO, but it will be disabled with any SEO plugin, I tend to use the WordPress SEO by Yoast. If you have any more questions, let me know Zach

I think they are similar. I prefer the complete control over everything that Dsidxpress provides. Try out the free test plugin and see what you think.

Brett,

I have did quite a bit of real estate websites, and SEO for those sites. I really recommend two themes that run off the genesis framework (they are relatively identical) http://www.studiopress.com/themes/agentpress and http://www.studiopress.com/themes/realpro you can click the demo button to see what they look like in action. The DSIDXpress plugin that is featured in this website is something I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. They charge something like a $99 set up fee and $30/month, but what it gives you is all of your local listings from the MLS naively on your website, meaning they can all be indexed by Google even if it isn't your listing. I have developed on this a lot, and I can give you more information if you would like.

Hope it helps,

Zach

Try some websites that revolve around your community. If you have an authoritive community blog, or something like that, I highly recommend it.

I agree,

Your best bet is to find unique quality links from websites, preferably related to your industry, that can give you quality links to yourself. As a rule of thumb, you want to stay away from paid links, however, because you don't want to get penalized for paid links.

You should put the rel=canonical tag on the index page of your site. It could either be the index.html (or any extension), or if it is a cms, whatever home page you specify from within it. The rel=canonical tag will specify any of the pages to register as the mysite.com (or mysite.com/) if you specify it. This should solve your duplicate content issue.

I think this change has been coming for a long time. When you think about this, when you want to market something locally, focusing on a social aspect could be really helpful to gain more customers. When you look at a new local page, you can see the local "buzz" of what the page's circle is saying; for example, a restaurant:

"There is a friendly atmostphere"

"excellent Servers"

"Clean, fast food"

I think the whole social aspect can really make local advertizing much more effective.

Hello,

By creating blog posts on the content your trying to rank for is a very smart move, actually, if it is done right. When your writing a blog post on Vanilla Ice Cream, every time you write about a page that relates on other content on your website, for example, if you mentioned ice cream, place a link there to your ice cream page. Also, with blogs, a very powerful tool is to have a  "related posts" section, not only does this help build an internal linking structure, it also can interest readers to read other articles or content on your website.

Remember not to go overboard with focusing on keywords, you need to make sure that your website is friendly to the readers. If you are forcing yourself to change the structure of the content to change the keywords your optimizing for, it may lose it's readability. Google, along with many other search engines have put a lot of time into semantic cues, so they may infer that even though your not using the same keyword (something like Popsicle instead of ice pop), they can infer that your referring to the same thing.

My recommendation is to place a link on the blog post to the page you want to rank, and you should be okay,

Hope this helps

Zach

Hello,

I may be able to help you with this. If you think this down as simple advertizing, what do you think of as a brand? Wal-Mart?, Coca-Cola? GE?, those are all branded keywords. Now this doesn't always work for just the company name, think of the iPhone, the iPhone is a branded keyword that apple has. xBox with Microsoft, and PlayStation with Sony are another two branded keywords outside of the company name.

When you think of it in that perspective, Blue Widget and Blue Widget Company are both branded keywords, but if BlueWidget.com sold a patented widget (royal blue sprocket?)

As far as anchor text goes, don't go overboard with keywords within them, make them natural. For example, if you listed your patented widget, don't make the anchor text "Royal Blue Sprocket by bluewidget.com" this could be flagged as keyword stuffed anchor tag, and you could be penalized for it. If your pushing the brand, just put the name of the widget "royal blue sprocket"

I hope this helps

Thanks for that. It really provides some new insights that I really didn't think about before. My true basis on responsive themes is the WordPress 2011 (twenty-eleven) theme. When it gets scaled down to smartphone, or even tablet sizes, it disables the sidebar altogether. I think this is a bad idea, for the obvious SEO Reasons (displaying different content to different users on the same site, even though this is a good use of it). As i'm expanding my plethora of web design skill, I think responsive is going to be the way to go. The new Dreamweaver CS6 has a really cool implementation of the grid system (and cross device compatablitly) features, which will help me greatly once I actually learn to use these.

Thanks for taking the time to respond

Zach

I know this is some cutting edge technology, but I think that this will be a very important topic in the coming months, as html5/css3 becomses more and more the standard, or at least standardized, I think the topic of this in relation to SEO will also arise much more.

My question is simple, is it better to code a responsive site, or a completely mobile site for a small company with no special needs (mobile ordering, ecommerce, etc...) I obviously know the visuall differences, and, personally, I think respomsive websites look better. From an seo perspective, my big thing is for the resizing, for example, with WordPress, when you reach the tablet size you can set the sidebar to basically display:none, can that impact your website?

I would really appreciate any feedback

I agree with you, I love how WordPress does that automatically. You should definitely concider dong that within your .htaccess file

Michelle,

I agree with Alan, if your confused with the Rel=cannonical tag, I recommend your read the SEOmoz beginners guide to seo. More specifically this page: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/search-engine-tools-and-services, the whole book/guide goes through a lot of best practices, and even advanced SEOs can kind of use this guide as a "bible"

Hope this helps

There is no difference for any file extension you use (htm, html, php, asp, aspx). When your coding/programming a website, you need to remember that even though the file is written in ASPX, the file is processed through the server, and outputs HTML. The key to this is that the HTML is valid, or the HTML 5 is using the generally accepted practices. Besides this, the file extension has no bearing on SEO.

I hope this helps!

Hello Everyone,

I'm new to SEOmoz, I'm looking to use this as a tool to really help me, and evenually I can help others. I am an Web Developer with some online marketing experience. I did Local SEO a Few Years ago, and things have really changed since then. I know this Panda and Penguin update really is putting a hurting on the directory submission. Google no longer has 'Citations" on their places page, and many other changes.

With that being said, what are some best practices for Local SEO? I am a propeller head by nature, but am also very creative when I need to be. I have potental sites to market, anywhere from Holistic Medical Doctors, Plastic Surgeons Community Blogs, and Auto Repair Shops, Law firms (to give you some perspectic)

I also read Danny Dover's Book, to learn some more about SEO, the one thing that is unclear is how to acquire quality links

I would really appreciate any perspective on this, every little thing helps

Zach Russell