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Hi Wayne! I've always been considered syndication a no-no. But if your competitor accidentin is ranking well, it could be a number of factors. If they a syndicating and are always updated frequently, this could be a factor. Google loves freshness and freshness usually ranks better than actual content. Lets say NYTimes reports something, it will take a 30+minutes for other publishing companies to report the same thing because they don't syndicate it, they rewrite it with same details or more details(investigative journalism). So if they are reporting it and accidentin is reporting it right away, this could be why it ranks well. Because they beat the others to it, and others might start using them as a source, which then would provide them a link to that page. One other thing that could be a factor, it that the domain is partial match. The partial match definitely can help in ranking better with people searching for "accident in new york" "accident in california" etc. Also things like social media can help boost a SERP of a site if they get enough shares or likes etc. Many factors can help them. Sorry for the spam on text, I am on lunch and can't type too coherently. But IMO, the top suspects are the domain name and freshness of content.

ribandhull First, the answer is no on the whole if the only way you are going about ranking is with keywords in tags. But, you are going to have some text, images, and other parts of the page that need SEO. So, make sure your images have appropriate alt text (kw=wedding photography, alt txt = Jones Wedding photos - bride and groom). Make sure each page has good title tags and H1's. Make sure your 1% text is relevant to your keywords and you should be able to do fine considering this is what a lot of photographers do. Another helpful hint is each photographer needs to take advantage of Google Places (+1 ) listing.

Thanks so much.  That's perfect.

DaringFireball.net must have very low time on site numbers though. There's nothing to read on that blog, and links take the user away from the site.  It's just a weird example that he chose.

Matt Cutts recently addressed this: http://www.stonetemple.com/matt-cutts-and-eric-talk-about-what-makes-a-quality-site/ Eric Enge: Let’s switch gears a bit. Let’s talk about a pizza business with stores in 60 cities. When they build their site, they create pages for each city. Matt Cutts: Where people get into trouble here is that they fill these pages with the exact same content on each page. “Our handcrafted pizza is lovingly made with the same methods we have been using for more than 50 years …”, and they’ll repeat the same information for 6 or 7 paragraphs, and it’s not necessary. That information would be great on a top-level page somewhere on the site, but repeating it on all those pages does not look good. If users see this on multiple pages on the site they aren’t likely to like it either. Eric Enge: I think what site owners may argue is that if someone comes in from a search engine and lands on the Chicago page, and that is the only page they see on the site, they want to make their best pitch on that page. That user is also unlikely to also go visit the site’s Austin pizza page. Matt Cutts: It is still not a good idea to repeat a ton of content over and over again. Eric Enge: What should they put on those pages then? Matt Cutts: In addition to address and contact information, 2 or 3 sentences about what is unique to that location and they should be fine. Eric Enge: That won’t be seen as thin content? Matt Cutts: No, something like that should be fine. In a related situation, I had a writer approach me recently and ask me a question. He has this series of articles he provides to gyms that own websites. He wanted to know if there was a limit to how many times he could provide the same content to different gyms, yet still have it be useful from a search perspective for his customers. Would it be helpful, for example, if he kept on rewriting it in various ways. It gets back to your frog site example. The value add disappears. Imagine 4 gyms in the same small city all offering exactly the same advice. Even before you get to what search engines think, users aren’t going to understand what the difference is between these 4 places. As a user, after reading your content, why would I pick one over the other? For search engines, it’s the same challenge. Find a way to differentiate and stand out, so that people want to try your product or service and see what they think. When they try it, give them something outstanding and earn yourself a customer.

Just a title on the page - what is the value of that page to a user - this is ultimate spam and should be blocked Hope this helps you out! and if it does please mark answered

I think it is pretty dependent on the content. It sounds like an overly simplistic answer, but I'd consider using the date when it is time-relevant content and not when it isn't.  That way you are only showing relevant, useful content to the users - which has to be good for all. If it helps with CTR from the SERPs then all the better! Google knows (at least roughly) when the content went up whether you date it or not, so it really is about what you are showing the user both on page and in the snippet. So why bother them with it if it isn't relevant?

I'm in agreement with the others. Don't even entertain the thought of using a spinning software to create content for your websites. Google and other search engines have become very good at detecting crap content and penalizing them. Content resulting from spinners are the worst quality, lowest junk crap and would never be good for the SEO of your site. Your goal should be to do something real and useful. Using spinners to manipulate the search engines worked a decade ago but will only cause your rankings to drop in the present environment. It will also damage to your brand.

For checking spelling, there are sites out there like http://checkdog.com/ that will do a spell check of the site. On a forum I run, I've exported Google Analytis of page titles and dumped those into Word to scan for spelling errors in thread titles and fixed those (though I've left the copy of the page intact, but that's just because it's a forum).

Thanks for the help.

I use Textbroker for a number of reasons. 1. You can specify the quality level per article and pay accordingly. I wouldn't recommend going any lower than 4 stars though. I have mostly good experiences with 4 star writers, 4 star is actually quite affordable too. 2. If you don't like the article you can request it be re-written, by the same or a new writer. 3. They have US English as well as UK English writers, there's actually a .co.uk version of the site too. 4. You can create teams of writers, so if you have a large volume of requests, you can send the requests to writers you've worked with before and know what to expect from. You can also create teams for specific niches etc.

It helps a bit to have a custom map with your location pinned on it.  Though there are a lot of other factors considered more important right now.  Have a look at the 2012 local ranking factors report: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

I didn't say Flippa was good for buying, just the best known  I'd definitely be more inclined to use it to offload an unwanted site than the acquire one.

Agreed. I always install mine on the primary domain. Usually mydomain.com/news or mydomain.com/blog.

From a SEO perspective, content is content. Whether you present that content in a blog, a web page, a forum post, a Q&A response does not matter. What does matter is: the quality of the website platform.  Is it crawlable? Does the site appear correctly on various devices (ipad, smartphone, etc)? Does the site appear correctly in various browsers? Is the site user friendly? etc. the quality of the content the authority of the site and the relevancy of the content to the site how well the article is promoted The above are the major factors involved although there are others.

It will all depend on how you setup your blog, a subdomain or a subfolder. subdomain: http://blog.example.com subfolder: http://www.example.com/blog/ If you are setting the blog up as a subfolder, then yes, the blog will help the site, and vise versa.  (It will also hurt the site as well).  For optimal SEO, I would do it this way. http://www.example.com/blog/ Rand wrote a great post about this topic here: Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

I read in the article that Google takes into consideration, the popularity of your page.  This meaning that your website has a very low bounce rate. I run a photo booth rental business for weddings and other social events.  One of the features that comes standard with every package is that all of the photos from the event are hosted on an online photo gallery.  We currently give the guests a business card at the event with our website address and on the website they can click a link that takes them to their online gallery, which is hosted on www.smugmug.com. I wanted to see if there is a way that we could keep the traffic/visitors on our website longer vs. sending them to www.smugmug.com.  I also would like to see if there is a way that they can incorporate social media sharing, such as Google+ to share our website with their friend and family. It seems that with the online gallery it's a great way to drive traffic to our website and also take advantage of social media platforms.  However, I just can't put finger on how to best go about this.

I have always had mixed feelings about FAQ pages. On one hand I do sometimes try to find them to use when I'm searching although I feel that if I need a FAQ page I haven't adequately provided what my user is looking for on the other pages. I like the idea of using landing pages and just distributing out the content in logical areas of the site verses putting all this somewhat valuable content on one page. As far as helping other pages, if you are getting links to the page it will help but otherwise not so much.