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Hi Mike, wow, what a comprehensive reply, thanks a lot! I think it's time for a new SEO cheat sheet Best wishes, Georg.

Ok thnx !

You can also message me if you have pains with certain parts of your project. I have tons of resources I can help you connect to. Good luck

Yoast's is an SEO plugin, Jetpack is quite broad and varied (and not really SEO focused at all) in what it offers, so I don't believe it's an either/or decision. See: http://jetpack.me

Thanks so much for the reply. I agree about the headline posts, I will more than likely delete them as there would be no links to them, only like 50 links to the whole site according to ose. Wrt the links, the site is a mess and requires restructuring which I think I am going to have to do. Thanks for the help. Paul

Thanks, Oleg! I was thinking along the same lines, but it's a bit difficult to reproduce a person's biography, as it is such specific information, e.g., Schools they graduated from, where they worked, experience, etc. And since that's the only information on that page, it makes it a bit tough, indeed!

You may have over optimized for the word certificates on the home page. You should look at the top competitors on the first page of the SERPS and use keyword density tools to see if you are over optimized. You currently have at least 56 instances of the word certificates on the home page. You need to compare to that to the overall word ratio.

Hi Emmanuel, Sorry to hear about your lost rankings and traffic. First question: Have you received any notice in Google Webmaster Tools? Are you registered with Google Webmaster? April 24th was the date of Penguin, which primarily targeted over-optimized anchor text. Sitewide, exact-match anchors were particularly targeted. If we take a look at your backlink profile in Open Site Explorer, we can find a number of these types of links. For example, the link on this website: http://sterlingrealtybelair.com/ The link "Custom Wooden Signs" appears on every page in the sidebar. Unfortunately, these are exactly the types of over-optimized links targeted by Penguin. Then there are links like this, which seem soley to exist to link back to your main site: signswooden.com/ If I had to guess, I would say this is where the problem lies. If this is the case, my advice would be to check Google Webmaster Tools for warnings. If you see no warnings, you can file a pre-emptive reconsideration request to verify a penalty. Then, you're probably going to be faced with a long period of link evaluation, clean-up, disavowing, and reconsideration requests. I know it's not the best news in the world, but almost any site can recover if you put in the work.

If there are links to it, I would 301 it to a broader category. e.g. for Houses in San Francisco I would 301 to Houses in California. If there are no links, I would consider building a useful 404 page, with links to help people find what they're looking for, and then remove the page.

Sorry about that.  You can do this through CSS by doing this (This is generic so you'll have to implement your information into it, obviously) This is some text that is placed in the transparent box. This is some text that is placed in the transparent box. This is some text that is placed in the transparent box. This is some text that is placed in the transparent box. This is some text that is placed in the transparent box.

A simple 301 to the new site should suffice All the best.

To avoid a template change, you could also try using the "Force Rewrite Titles" option in Yoast.

Hi Parvesh, there could be lots of reasons why I can list a few for you and tell you about my personal experience. Reasons why a new domain could be outranking a well established domain 1. There site is just plain better, users like it more, it has a higher CTR (click through rating), and could be running a multichannel marketing campaign that is driving users to their site more then others in the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page). 2. The site is using a black hat aggressive link building which provides short term gains at the expensive of long term gains. 3. The new site is actually just a new domain for an old established competitor who is 301 redirecting their old site to the new site (passing all their link juice). 4. The new site has a higher domain authority / page authority. I know this may seem somewhat unlikely but imagine I launch a website  tomorrow and my brother at CNN writes an article about it, which gets picked up by MSNBC, FOX, ALJAZEERA, MASHABLE, YAHOO and several other popular sites, my domain authority just went up big time. Last year we had a competitor obliterate us for some keyword terms during a 4 week stretch of time. Their website was new, their design was poor, and they were clearly paying somebody to do link building for them. Because we had them marked as a competitor here at SEOmoz we were able to view historical data about them, it turns out them went from about 30 in-links to 70,000 in-links around the same time we noticed them killing us in the SERP's. The following month they were off the first page for nearly every single one of those keywords, and we were easily out ranking them once again. The moral of this is there still are black hat tricks that can get a new site ranked very high very quickly, but it will not last. Maintain focus on the long term goal of being the industry leader, and let the black hats fill up with rabbit droppings.

I guess for the home-page go for the highest searched first; but due to the fact that you would want to rank for "Ski Rental" and "Snowboard Rental" I would also consider doing two separate pages in the website which tackle each separately; this way you would have a page optimized for Ski and another for Snowboard with more details on each. This way you could still capitalize on both. For the homepage I would probably go for  "Ski & Snowboard Rental Lake Tahoe"

Sorry for the misunderstanding - I'm just talking about both title tags

Considering that I used to work for both RunningShoes.com and New Balance, I think I can handle your example Let's say you run Shoes.com and I run Sneakers.com. Someone searches for Nike Running Shoes and the SE has the option of bringing up pages like yours that are relevant to Nike Running Shoes, Adidas Tennis Shoes, etc or pages like mine that are relevant only to Nike Running Shoes. All else (links, authority, etc) being equal, which will they rank first? Mine. Why? Because the searcher isn't looking for Nike Running Shoes and Adidas Tennis Shoes. They're only looking for Nike Running Shoes. Now, if someone searches for Nike and Adidas Shoes, the SE has to make a choice. There's a good chance though that there's a page out there with that as its title, so we'd miss out more than likely. We'd be better off creating a unique page that speaks specifically to the interest of that type of visitor. Also, take into account that SEs likely stop counting keywords after a certain character length in URLs and titles. If I recall correctly, SEOmoz has found a correlation between long URLs and titles and lower rankings for keywords at the end. This is one post I found. I know there are more though.