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Thanks Mat!

Right okay. Well then I'd suggest you move each of the blocks from the home page to a new page. Then look at the calls to action on the new pages to encourage click-throughs to products. Or look at adding links/photos to products that relate to the topic being discussed. Anything you write on the site should be a standalone piece of content, but would presumably, in one form or other, relate to what's being sold on the site. That being the case, the traffic coming to the articles will be people interested in the type of things being sold, so you should be able to encourage the click-through to products. Yes, you will get some non-converting traffic, but by putting each one on a separate page and working on the SEO of each, you can broaden your scope for MORE traffic, which you can then encourage to buy. The home page is not the place for everything and will be restricting what you can achieve in traffic terms.

I never used Yoast before, so I am not sure as to how their Canonical strategy works. One thing I know for sure is that Yoast is not working properly on your site.... Link one: http://www.prntscr.com (not working while it should be directing to link # 2) Link two: http://prntscr.com The following post could be helpful: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-canonical-and-301-redirect-explained?replies=9 It is one year old, but still i'd appreciate it if you let me know if it answered your question

It can be tricky.  Xenu Link Sleuth can do it fairly accurately.

Hi Samuel, The H1 element on a page plays a large roll in ranking, but it isn't the only factor. I had a client once whose web designer placed the websites logo in an H1 tag, by removing the H1 tag, and correctly playing the targeted keywords in the H1 tag per page, we managed to jump up the ranks fairly well. My opinion on this matter is that this could well be the problem, but if things don't change within the next 7 days, then I would look at a full audit on one of the pages in question. It is also important to note that you should only use one H1 tag per page, and rather use H2 or H3 for subsequent "titles". I hope that helps!

Inside the wordpress loop on the homepage/category/archive theme pages. right now it probably has the_content() --> replace this with the_excerpt()

Thank you both! So wordpress is generating one and platinum seo is too. I'm going to try this entry into the themes' function.php: # Remove WordPress' canonical links remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical'); Fingers crossed...!

Hi Samuel, Google will consider you most relevant to whatever your physical address is - this is the locale for which you can work towards your main local/blended rankings. Beyond this, yes, you can work for organic visibility for other towns you serve in. Having a unique landing page for each of your major service cities is a smart way to go. You can then linkbuild to these pages to go after organic visibility. I agree that you should not simply go the route of listing towns in a list. Have you considered blogging? Instead of putting too many geo terms per page, have you considered using a blog to showcase weddings you've done in Camden, etc.? A few photos of your band, folks dancing, pics of the venue and 400-600 words of text describing the event, songs the couple requested, testimonials from the bride and groom or family members would make a strong blog post on the subject and could get that long tail traffic you seek. The nice thing about this would be that it would naturally generate very unique content. Though I'm sure there are similarities in all your gigs, each one must be a little bit different, right? And, it would enable you to optimize part of your site for things like regional and neighborhood/district names. I hope this is a helpful suggestion.

Why not take advantage of it? If you own copyright of the image, you could offer the image in return for a link to your site. Use Search by image to find out if people are using it without linking back already. If appropriate put some other great content on the page that contains the image that is likely to attract links, or see if you can monetise the page somehow. You're fortunate to rank on page 1 of Google Images, not unfortunate! Find a way to use it to your advantage.

Thanks guys - the example I was going to send is now working. I'm not logged in and there's no spaces between the colon. If I can dig out an example I'll ping it over but thanks for your help GB

Good call

Instead of rehashing you might want to have a read of these posts in regards to your site-wide footer links: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond

Without examining your site I am left to guess. If you use WordPress or any other form of CMS or software, you may have pages you are not aware of. A crawl would need to be performed to discover those pages and/or relevant links. It is possible the canonical tag does not appear on those pages. Also, keep in mind the canonical tag is a recommendation to Google. They do not always follow it. I would not recommend using the canonical tag to cover up site issues.

Someone asked this here in the past: http://www.seomoz.org/q/avoiding-duplicate-page-title-and-duplicate-page-content-best-practices this should help...

Hi Sara Now a days google doesn't make any sense if  thousands are links comes from single domain, it might be possible that google consider it as an unnatural links and you are doing over optmization of your keyword. so it is batter to use variant relevant pages of your domain. Target relevant inner pages with keyword variation it is best method  for the keyword optimization.

Hi there, I'd have to know the keywords you were using to see for sure. But I just tested a keyword from your campaign and saw similar results. It's most likely because When you run the report without the http you aren't getting the credit for the canonical tag you have. When you run it for https, you are getting the credit for appropriate use of the rel canonical tag. That's why you're seeing two different scores. If you want to get more in depth, you're welcome to provide keywords here or email help@seomoz.org I hope that helps. Cheers, Joel.