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Glad to hear it...Any chance you could give me a "Good Answer" on this?  It seems like my perspective was helpful, and I'm trying to reach Journeyman status ASAP.

Thanks guys.  I have that in my toolbox, but for some reason couldn't think of it today...If you ever need help with Spanish work, don't hesitate to ask!

I'm about to do a site audit, and as part of it I need to download all the metadata so that I can see what is ok, and what needs to change.

I've seen tools that allow you to do this a million times, and even used a few.   But today for some reason I'm drawing a blank.  Can someone help me please? Best case scenario, the tool is free, but I'm not opposed to paying if it's going to save me a lot of time.

I agree with Neil but I also want to add a couple of points.

Think of it from a UX standpoint.  If you are looking at the SERPs when searching, and you see a headline that trails off with three dots like so...does that make you more or less likely to click on that result?  In my experience pages that have longer titles and descriptions generally have a lower click through rate.  This means that their high ranking is generally less effective (all other things being equal of course).

Also, you need to remember that the algo has many factors and each one may have its own level of emphasis.  So maybe these pages that rank better now have a better backlink profile.  Maybe they are creating fresh content periodically.  This type of activity can offset the fact that their page titles are too long.  Unless you are certain that the longer page title is the only reason that they are ranking above you, there is no need to copy that particular strategy...In fact, you should look at other factors like Page Authority and MozRank before you go writing long titles.  As my grandmother would say, "if your competitors jump off a bridge, would you do it too?"

Hopefully this helps, and let me know if there is anything else I can do.

www.knowem.com is a username checker.  Their list is very extensive, but as Ben points out, I wouldn't suggest making submissions en masse.  I hope that helps!

Hi Mark,

Great explanation.  I was recently told that Google does ignore stop words and prepositions, but my internal research for clients shows that this is not the case.  While I really don't want to give any examples, I can confirm that this is the case.

However, if the question is specific to having a question makr between keywords, the effect is relatively minimal.  What I am trying to say is while you may want to reconsider the way you write for the future, this particular post should be fine IMO.

I'd go with the second option.  First off, from a user experience standpoint, nobody wants to read EVERYTHING. Having lot's of pages means they can choose for themselves.  Also, using multiple pages allows you to create unique metadata addressing multiple keywords.  This gives you a better chance at ranking for long-tail phrases, which can sometimes be more valuable than the so called "money" keywords.

Good call on the Google Alerts!  Everytime I add keywords to my campaigns, I set up Alerts.  Actually, I use that for link building prospecting as well.

It's doubtful that you are the victim of negative SEO, as you would have seen a spike in links (that is what negative SEO is, they attach spammy links to your site).

Seeing some variation in the rankings is not uncommon...Especially with the recent updates there is going to be an adjustment period.  The rank dropped this week.  They could very well get back on track next week.

Another question.  Did anything big happen in your niche recently?  Maybe there was a big announcement, and that changed the SERP's.  News stories can change the rankings significantly because of Google's interest in providing fresh content.

Also, if you notice in the rankings graph, you did have a previous drop in rankings, only to have it come back again.  So don't panic.  As long as you are doing the right things, you should be fine.

Hello Exquiel,

The truth is that each way of doing this has different advantages and disadvantages.  I tend to agree that for you Option 2 is the best, but this blog post by Sebastian Aroca lays out the differences very well:

http://www.hispanicmarketadvisors.com/blog/spanish-seo-domain-per-language-subdomains-or-language-folders

Hopefully this will help you make the best decision for your company.

Facepalm.  Such a good call.  Can't believe I didn't think of that.

If the words are different it is highly unlikely that this is the issue.  It might be possible if the titles were (for example) Sugar-company name Sugars-company name, sugary-company name.

But even then it would be a stretch.  Are you sure that your website platfor hasn't dynamically created mirror pages?  This happened to us in Magento recently.  The developer didn't know any better and we had to set him straight.

At this point we have discontinued all content marketing programs, at least the kind you are talking about.  We still create squidoo lenses, do social bookmarking, etc. but even those practices are becoming more obsolete. The best link building blogs in my opinion belong to Ross Hudgens and Jon Cooper (PointBlankSEO).

Read their posts, use what you can, and I wish you the best of luck!

I've heard great things about Basecamp as well.  It's only 20 bucks a month, so that's not bad.  Hey, Tod, you might have talked me into it!

We've tried quite a few of these out, and frankly didn't really like any of the free options (I'm assumming you don't want to pay.  Grindstone2 was the best of a bad lot.

We ended up just creating a custom excel sheet that auto-updates when you enter data.  It has easily been the best option.  If you want a copy message me in private, I'll be glad to provide one.

Well, sometimes we have to deal with people we don't like.  One of my first clients was a huge pain in my rear.

I complained until my throat was sore, but the fact of the matter is that him being on me made me better at documenting progress, reporting and explaining processes.

Take those lemons, and make lemonade

Welcome to SEO

Explaining what we do and why it has value comes with the territory.

If the site is a nightmare then you shouldn't be building links to it yet!  First get the site architecture figured out, and then get back to this.

That might even be the reason why the client is so upset...he might be thinking that you should be focused on getting the site built instead of buidling links to an unoptimized site (and he would be right).

There are a variety of metrics that you can provide.

1. Increased referral traffic.  If your links are good and are coming from pages and sites that people read, then your referral traffic should always rise.

2. Increased traffic to specific landing page.  If you are targeting the links towards specific landing pages, then their traffic should go up, right?

3) Increase in rank for targeted keywords.  This is easier if the client is long term.  We always tell clients its going to take at least 2 weeks for rankings to increase.  This is my least favorite metric, but it does help clients understand.

Another thing that I have found is that clients need to know as much about where you failed as where you succeeded.  We always provide a list of pending or failed link attempts.  This shows them that the work we do is difficult, helps them understand our efforts.

It sounds to me like what could have been improved was the initial planning period.  If you had helped set expectations from the start, writing down your plans and KPI's you might not have this issue.

That being said, sometimes no explanation is good enough.  If you feel like you've done everything you can and the client is still not happy with your answers, it may be best for you both to go in a different direction.  Nobody wants to give up revenue, but sometimes it is for the best.

Hi Guys,

If you are looking for big time enterprise, or SEO targeting Spain, I highly suggest you check out http://www.iloveseo.net/ as well as http://www.aleydasolis.com/ (I think she is in house, but her blog is always full of great tips).  Ani Lopez has quite a bit of multilingual info on his blog as well (http://dynamical.biz/blog/).

They are all top shelf.  But if all you can afford are well drinks, and perhaps a premium beer (to keep the bar analogy going) at Not Just SEO we help smaller companies target spanish language customers in the US and Latin America.  We're based in Mexico, so we've got that going for us too!  I hope this helps.