Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jac - take a look at this http://wistia.com/learning/advanced-seo-with-distilled and this http://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets These will tell you everything you need to know about video SEO and help you develop a strategy that works - they are by Phil Nottingham who is an expert when it comes to Video SEO Hope this helps

Hi, The video being too far down the page might be an issue. I've seen this cause problems before, and in your case I think it could be a problem. More broadly though, I don't think you should have those videos on the category pages, because the video itself is just image slideshow and actually does more to hamper the using experience rather than help it. As rich snippets aren't common any more, I don't think you're going to get much value from having these videos on those pages. Having the sitemap hosted at Wistia isn't a problem. You can point to a sitemap hosted on any site. Other likely problems are duplicate content. You seem to have significant duplicate content issues as I'm seeing about 3 variations of that page indexed. Hope that's useful, Phil.

I'm still not 100% sure I understand the situation, but yes you should be able to add a noindex tag to this page I imagine. If you ant Google to find the videos linked out to from this page, use the noindex,follow tag rather than noindex,nofollow

Ryan, I would like your participation in the discussion. However, I fear you are hearing what you want to hear and not what I am saying. I didn't say I wanted to charge based on the number of links I build. I want to charge based on results. I don't believe I will achieve consistent, sustainable results marketing content and praying someone links to the content. For some industries that strategy works great. SEO, Web Design, etc... Where the average user has a website and understands how to use it. For real estate, there is not a lot of people going to link to a real estate website. Certainly no real estate agent will link to another one. They could lose their clients. Furthermore, the industry is dominated by brands. None of those brands will link to agents. Even the agent profile pages don't have links. The ones that do you must pay for and they are no-follow. I'm asking you to participate in the discussion but understand there is not one strategy to seo in all niches. People will not link to real estate websites. It is why if you pull up your local agent websites you will see they have DA around 10. Just google [city] real estate and [city] homes for sale. You will see the brand sites dominate the serps. Second page you will start seeing local realtor websites. All of which have nearly no authority. Help me out! As a community we can think of something.

Hi Nathan, I second Richard's statement. It's a very good idea to build out individual landing pages with contact information. It's even better to include Schema markup, at least for the NAP. And lucky you! There's markup that relates directly to a furniture store as a local business. To get started with the markup, you'll want to look at the code examples at the bottom of the local business page. That should give you a solid idea how you should structure the markup. Then you can see if your markup checks prior to pushing live via the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. Here's another reference via Moz in regard to on-site local considerations.

Thank you everyone for the excellent feedback!

So glad if that will help! Good luck - you have a really important chance to help this business

There are pros and cons to it. I would just make sure you have some good caching rules in place and let it load once and be done with it. Realistically Google is not going to refuse to serve your page because you ran 20 http requests for some icons. That would be silly. I try to remember that at the core of all things search related every search engines holy grail is the perfect result for your search query. In one of Matt C's videos they hit the subject of on-page factors versus content and he said they would overlook a lot of things in order to deliver the better result to the query. So for SEO purposes cache it and get to that content rocking.

Hey Stephen... Ray and Rob make some great points here! Here is my personal explanation on the importance of proper image alt attributes... my mother lost her eyesight back when she was young. As she uses her computer each day, knowing my profession, she constantly tells me how bad most of the sites are that she visits. The reason she feels they are so bad is due to improper structure and poor usage of image alt tags. When her computer reads the contents of a web page to her, it reads similar to the way a web crawler would. Images are a very important factor and the alt attributes should be a clear explanation of the image itself. Thus explaining what the image is to both a web crawler and most important, your visitors. I would recommend catering your website, its design, content and the optimization (including images) to your users first. End of the day, without them, does being on top of Google even matter that much? Good luck with your project!! Cheers

Hi, One actually can't "force" Google to rank a site or a video, what would advise is one to EARN the right to be Ranked and Indexed by Google, this will be a more fruitful way of to approach this. The "forcing" attitude is more of a decade ago mentality unlike for one in 2015, of which may put you in contravention of Google's Webmaster guidelines. Leading to your site being DE-indexed from Google. What would advise is to highly optimize your YouTube page, have links pointing to it, get thousands of people viewing the YouTube Video, create Original Content, even promote the YouTube Video and without a doubt, it will be indexed and ranked by Google.

As Egol has said....it's all true...and as he never takes any consulting....he's unavailable But DO look up Alan on google - and you'll find he's one of the best known, most revered, most reputable audit guys out there...in fact I couldn't even name a peer of his....he's def the one to contact.

Hi Michael, Definitely check out the link Jim Rudnick has shared to the Local Search Ranking Factors 2014 survey. As you'll see from that, local search rankings are made up of a tremendous number of factors, with some having more weight than others. So, first, you want to be sure your client has all of his ducks in a row with the basics. Then, you should analyze his competitor to see if you can spot any weaknesses. We just published an interesting tutorial here on Moz for using our Check Listing tool for some cool competitive analysis. Check this out: http://moz.com/help/guides/local/check-listing The above how-to also gives some other research suggestions. Essentially, what your client needs to do is: Do all of the basics right Make a superior effort in some areas, such as content development, review acquisition and, possibly, social engagement Remember that rankings are not static. Over the past few years, it has been clear that one of the most important local search ranking factors relates to the physical location of a customer at the time he is making his search. You may hear this referred to as the customer/using being the 'centroid'. Particularly on mobile devices, where a customer is in town will influence whether your client or his competitor comes up first, based on the distance between the searcher and the business. It's really, really important educate all local business clients about this! Hope this helps!

Hi Pegasus! Here are Google's instructions for handling this scenario: https://support.google.com/business/answer/160464?hl=en Hope it helps!

Create graphics on the longest travels you can do by airplane on straight flights and how many kilometers/ miles that is. If the service has a lot of use you could create the most 'popular routes' and see if you can provide some trends on them. Related to the last one you could also add more information on what the longest distance is you could travel from that place.

If you can cut and past the text then as a rule Google can index it. Check out this link for more information right from the horses mouth. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pdfs-in-google-search-results.html

I use YouTube. It is great, as PixelbyPixel said, it is another engine giving you exposure. Not to mention it has a DA of 100 which is a very credible linking source. And it is owned by Google, so my guess is, the engine prefers it as well.

Good Morning! First off, I would need to know a bit more information before throwing out an exact answer, but from my experience, anytime I'm optimizing a new word/image/video I usually notice it fall in and out of rank on an almost weekly basis. The general trend appears to be upward, but it takes a little bit before the rankings become solid. As far as other aspects, is the original site that hosts the photo still up? How long ago were the photos put up? Are all the tags correct/optimized to the persons name? Being in Canada may or may not have an impact, although I highly doubt it, unless this person is a local legend. Google is putting a heavy push on local searches so if you are in mexico looking up a Canadian local municipal legend then I might think yes. Anyway, hope that helps a little!

Hi, Arthur image-slider pro ( WP) you can add image alt & titles. For Joomla modules i'm not sure, but you can go to; http://extensions.joomla.org/ and check the different slider modules and look if they have the possibility for image alt & title tags. Goodluck! Leonie

I'll throw my recommendations in for videos:  One  of the most successful video series ever was the "Will It Blend" series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_It_Blend%3F (You know a video campaign has gone viral when it has it's own Wikipedia page that documents it.) Hope this helps... Jeff

This is a known problem with YouTube's safety mode filter but there is not much information about it. There is no official appeals process but you can report it on the support forum thread where one of the community volunteers, Epontius, has been helping to escalate some users false positive reports to YouTube's staff. You could report the false positive there and ask for Epontius help. Hope this helps.