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These domains can be very difficult to beat. I currently have an entire website of information that includes articles, videos, products, printable resources and more, yet some thin content on a guide page of About.com and a product page on Amazon are above me.  My site is way better than what they have in every possible way. Domain authority is hard to beat.

Thank you! That was very helpful.

I'm creating the page for optimization. My top four contenders are usiing the word 'classifieds' in their key word phraes.  If you do a Google search you will see what I am talking about. I'm confused now, could you please help. What about the appropriate way to create the keyword phrase. Thanks, b

Competition for that phrase is really really low.  If you have any kind of power in your site you should be able to rank for it.  Plus, if you are located in Virginia and your searcher is there too, that will make it even easier to rank for these terms. So, it's not worth sounding like a hillbilly to every person who visits your site, just to contrive sentences that put these words in the order of a query that might be used once in a blue moon.

I totally agree with you Matt. Nowadays even Google's Keyword suggestion tool is crap. Just check on what Rand talked about in a blog entry here on SEOmoz: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/be-careful-using-adwords-for-keyword-research If it was me, I would go for Matt's solution: allocate time for keywords research, try to figure out how you potential visitor is thinking. Gr., Istvan

From what I've read, there's no hard answer on a percentage. I've heard recommendations to keep it around 5% to optimize but under 10% for stuffing purposes. Aside from using tools to analyze the content, you can usually tell a lot just from reading. If a page is stuffed with keywords, it's not too hard for a human to tell.

There's a few things I'd do. First of all, recognise that many of these keywords are going to be seen as synonyms as far as google is concerned  and even if not exactly synonyms, they'll be regarded as heaviy related. Optimising pages for a number of these keywords/phrases really will help the way your entire site is perceived. While exact match numbers seem to be pretty low, I wouldn't mid putting a bed down on some good long-tail traffic out there. I would: Take a look at what my competition are doing. I'd do a search for each of my target keywords and grab the top 10 ranking sites and take a look at them in Open Site Explorer. Take a note of the number of links to the domain and then have a look at the anchor text. (Select links to all pages on this domain). This will show you how strongly these site are optimising their link building and what target phrases they are using. Get a list of all these terms and check out the traffic and the difficulty. You can see that the stronger ranking sites will have lots of keywords in their anchor text. Can you also do this when building links? Also take a look at the top pages report. This will show you how they are building optimised pages and the titles can reveal the kind of keywords they're targeting. Think also about your audience and what their needs might be. How can you make you offerings more specific to them. "Copywriting for students" or "copywriting for medical students" etc for example. Or how about "lastminute copywriting" or "fast copywriting".. Having an offering that talks directly to each audience and highlights the particular problems/needs in that niche can help with your conversions. Think also about how you can stand out from the crowd. What is it about your service in particular that makes you different, makes you unique. Why should people come to you and not the next guy. There's no benefit sticking with the herd here.

Your welcome, any time.

If you mean do we have reporters contacting players/coaches/etc, no. However, when you search 'chicago bears news' only the first 4 are legitimate sources of information (newspapers and official Bears website). Everything that follows is just sites which aggregate all the newest articles by the top 4 sites. Since we report the newest developments as well via our forums, twitter account, and tumblr page, I don't see anything dishonest about saying that we are a source of information for Bears fans.

Hi Storwell, Unfortunately, there is no tool that I know of that does this. I was actually discussing this recently with some other good Local SEOs and the consensus was no, this doesn't exist. It would be nice if it did! One fellow suggested making a rough estimate from the number of Adwords impressions that actually trigger local results in the SERPs, but we agreed, that was kind of a tough approach. Sorry not to have a can-do answer for you on this one. There are many local research tools that have yet to be developed. The market - though giant - is still new-feeling to many, and rather under-served. Kind Regards, Miriam

Yes it could impact display and also the text ad traffic. Display because your publishers might go up or down in traffic and you might notice a difference if that movement is big enough. Text PPC traffic could be affected because they made some changes to Local results as well, however it completely depends on your niche, your geo target market and if your organic competition includes local listings at all.

Thanks. That explains it.

We do have original content on each of the products. Just thinking this is more of external linking than anything else.... Thanks for the feedback.

Hello Jon, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. You've asked one of those questions for which there still isn't a 100% percent satisfactory answer, but I'll do my best to provide you with some excellent resources here. The trouble is, that unless you are doing KW research for a pretty major area, tools are often likely not to actually show you appropriate geo modifiers. However, I was recently speaking with Darren Shaw of Whitespark (awesome company) about this and will quote his advice to you, which is about as good as it gets on this topic. Use Google Adwords tool without the location modifier, supplement with data from Google Insights, Suggest, and Related. Build a huge list. Then, remove all location-oriented KWs from your list and set them aside temporarily. Then, go through the list again and remove any KWs that don't trigger local search results in the search engines, or don't bring up your competitors in the search engines. Set those aside, too. Next, go through the list again and identify all main keyword terms. These are keepers. So, if you're in the vacation rental business, then 'vacation rental' would be in this list. Then, go through the list again and identify plurals, more descriptive terms, combined terms, etc. So, here, in the same business, terms might be 'pet friendly vacation rentals'. At this point, you should have a really big list of main terms, plurals, longer terms, combined terms. Now you can add back in any geo terms that came up. So, you can have Vacation Rentals Boise, Idaho, as well as Pet Friendly Vacation Rentals Boise, Idaho and so on. At this point, your list will be quite huge because for every possible geo term, there are all of the non-geo keywords you have identified that you can add the geo terms to. Finally, if your research hasn't turned up any geo terms, it's likely that they aren't being tracked. Add them. Also, look at your analytics for any geo terms that didn't appear during your research. Add those to the list, too. From this step by step process, you should end up with a really good list. Also recommend you read these: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/local-keyword-research/1787/ http://www.expand2web.com/blog/tips-for-using-google’s-keyword-research-tool-in-a-local-context/ Hope this helps! Miriam

See what I would do like I said was put social buttons on it, to try and and gather some social signals to those articles but then anchor text link out of the content to a page with a term that does generate traffic. Maybe you can use those articles to help the SEO of other pages.