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Sounds like a hard to do list but will give it a go as google are putting me out of business at present. Thanks.

It really is bizarre, the number of unique keywords or queries is as follows: Google Webmaster Queries (in webmaster) - 77 Google Webmaster Queries resulting in clicks (in analytics) - 18 (406 in total) Keyword clicks to the site (in analytics) - 125 There must be something I'm missing!

I think I remember reading something about Google toning down the impact of their EMD update.

Hey Ben, This post immediately popped in my mind: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mission-imposserpble-establishing-clickthrough-rates Although it is over a year old, it is an  interesting study.  The download available from slingshot is good too...Maybe not what you're looking for, but I just looked at it so I thought I'd pass it on.

You can also link your webmaster and analytics accounts together. Hopefully they'll make all the data visible in analytics in an easy to use manner.

Cesar/Stephan, personally I have not seen much difference or I should clearly say any difference between a Dallas Restaurant site hosted in Dallas vs a Dallas Restaurant site hosted in New York. I just don't see any evidence today, but from a country perspective, it definitely plays a role. So if you were targeting Toronto Restaurants, the site hosted in Toronto/Canada would be better then hosted in Dallas/NY/USA. It would then also mean looking at a .ca domain vs a .com However, this could change tomorrow and it would not be a big surprise if local hosting influences local rankings. So if you have the choice to host it locally, where your target customer is, do it. Expect no gains because of it today, but there's nothing to loose, right ? As for Auto Suggest, yes, location plays a role. Just search for weather. You'd see your city's weather information. If you fly to another city and then refresh that weather results page, the results will change to reflect that city. I hope this helps.

all good advice given above. Have external links like social media sites and external blog urls open in a new window instead of kicking the user off of your site.

Hey thanks Irving, The distinction for me here is that over-optimised links / on-page is being penalised as you say 'on the fly' rather than seeing penalties corresponding to Penguin Updates like in the past. My question to people is ...do you think it's likely that separate Penguin Updates are a thing of the past (hasn't been one sine start of October) and 'Penguin like' ability has now been merged into the main ongoing algorithm?

Not just search volume mind you. Do you think mentions on sites around the web have an impact as well?

what does do not link site-wide means?? You mean i can only link to  competitors on my home page?

Hello! Google+ Local is Google's new interface for their local index and is their attempt to increase the social aspects of Local. However, Google Places still exists in that it is the dashboard via which the listings are still being controlled by many business owners. So both things still exist. If you'd like to read more from the period of time when Google+ Local was first rolled out, here's a good post that also links to a ton of other announcement-style posts from that time: http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-plus-local-google-places.html You should not create a second listing for your second website. If you have 1 business, you are entitled to just one listing. See: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 I recommend that you study those guidelines and be sure you are complying with them to the letter. This rule specifically applies to your situation: Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the hospital or clinic at large. Regarding your EMD sites, I just want to check in to be sure that you are aware of the recent, large penalties affecting those types of websites. If not, here's some good reading on this topic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-emd-algo-update-early-data http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-exact-match-domain-playbook-a-guide-and-best-practices-for-emds Hope these resources will be just what you need!

As far as the traffic, it's going to the home page and then the majority of the top 10 are blog posts on various subjects. We already do use Yoast. For the footer, is there a correct number of terms to use there or is the answer to that, don't do it at all? And if so, is there any evidence that it shouldn't be done at all? I see a lot of people using this tactic.

Wish we could claim it as a client, then we would definitely report it and ask for a raise!  LOL It's most definitely a regional thing, as we changed the Search Tools location to other areas and it varied the results slightly, but I wonder if this really is a glitch or if that site is doing something we should be, or if it's just a temporary result. It was just shocking to see almost an entire page of one domain.  Almost like their "site links" were converted into actual results. Thanks for the responses! hmLKE

I understand. having no alt tags is better than having the same alt tag with your main keyword on all images. I would probably reach out to them individually and request different alt tags for each site so that you vary the keyword phrases. This should not be a problem since you need to speak to each owner one at a time anyway. On images linked on a huge site that might be on hundreds or thousands of pages i would leave those blank. no need to ask them for your domain name added because you should be ranking for that anyway.

As long as you have a good content plan in place, you will be good. Already you don't have duplicate content. So no need to worry about the negative impact. If you want to increase SEO benefits then you need to show differences in several areas like tone, anchor texts, link sources, etc. Such practice will help to increase rankings of each site for a specific set of keywords.

The changing title is because you have duplication in your title.  You have this: <title></span><span>Savannah Ghost Tours | Savannah Georgia | Walking Ghost Tours</span><span></title> By duplicating Savannah twice, Ghost twice and Tours twice, you've forced Google to remove your title and use a "related" one. Also check this: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624  "Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. The goal of the snippet and title is to best represent and describe each result and explain how it relates to the user's query." You can try to limit this with: Your second part of the query about local results - you will only show up on page 1 once on a general query like this.  So if you're in the A spot, you won't also be in the other portions of the page.  Local results vs. the other organic results is a balancing act. We've found if you over-submit local, you will rank A local but won't necessarily rank for organic on non-7 block searches.  Try to balance the GetListed with some "regular" link building and that stuff should even out.

Hi Micheal, Sorry to hear about your Domain Authority dropping. But this isn't always as bad as it appears. First thing is to take a deep breath. Often times these things happen for perfectly innocent reasons, and often have no relation to your website in the real world. The important questions are: Has your traffic dropped? How about a drop in rankings? This could indicated you've truly lost a good amount of your backlink profile, and might warrant further action. Linkscape, and Open Site Explorer, are based on link metrics, so on-page factors like duplicate content generally don't make much of an impact. If your Domain Authority dropped it could mean a few things: 1. Domain Authority is a relative metric calculated fresh with each new index, meaning you shouldn't compare the score from one index to another. Instead, you should compare your score to your competitors and look for relative movement. That said, a drop from 41 to 29 is usually a sign of something bigger. 2. Mozscape and Open Site Explorer are updated about every 4 weeks. The metrics are entirely link-based, so downtime of your server won't effect the numbers. Because we use a new index every few weeks, there's a natural fluctuation in the number of links we find. There are literally billions and billions of links on the web we have to crawl every month, calculate metrics for each one, and then package them into an index that makes sense. Sometimes links will disappear or re-appear in the index. This is natural and usually minor, although a large jump or decrease in your Domain Authority can be scary - it doesn't mean your traffic or rankings will change. Mozscape may have trouble finding links on pages without a lot of links pointing to them, or links hidden under layers of navigation. For more, see this document: http://www.seomoz.org/help/open-s... 3. Finally, it's possible you actually lost a portion of you backlink profile. Are you missing any important links that you are aware of? It's estimated that 80% of the web vanishes every year. If this is the case, you might want to use Google Analytics to find who was sending you traffic over the past couple of years, and verify those links are still around today. If you find links missing, perhaps you can take action, or be proactive in gaining new links. Hope this information helps. Best of luck with your SEO!