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I actually have a website with a blog. Currently I'm on page 1 for my main keywords. I was thinking of another way to generate new leads.  So the Social network was an idea for another project. What do you think? Is it worth it or dead end?

Search for your Brand at Knowem.com They should be able to show you all kinds of social sites where your brand/username is still available. I recommend it.

Look up the 90 9 1 principle (ignore the debates about the actual numbers, its the philosophy that counts) Try this as starters: The 90-9-1 Principle Applied to Forums

In addition to Malcolm's suggestions, just be sure you follow the guidelines to the letter to avoid penalties. That's very important.

I would think that buying AdWords for your brand name would be a good/affordable solution until you outrank that video. Benefits are: Those ads could potentially move the negative video down the page visually. Clickthroughs to your site will be affordable.

OK, thanks for the info. So going with the "mydomain/blog" setup, would there be any SEO benefit to using mod_rewrite to redirect the "/blog" to a different server? The thinking being that any links back to the site would be coming from a different IP address.

They have local chapters. I believe you can order over the phone, but here's their online form: http://www.la.bbb.org/Apply.aspx Make sure to make yourself sound SMALL, okay? Because the larger your company is, the more they charge.

Ah... I see! Thank you Shane. That makes sense, I thought I might have missed something. Thanks Jojo

Have you seen the Facebook developers page about this? http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/ I don't think you can pre-approve these comments but you can set up alerts that let you know when someone has posted and also blacklist certain words if you want to. I'm assuming your worried about spammers.

We rank #2 and sometimes #3.

To be honest we aren't even going for top spot. The clicks just work out super expensive.He is competing with major hotels, whereas he has a styling 8 bedroom boutique hotel in a major tourist destination. But I'm going to change up the adwords ads a bit as you said. Thanks for the input.

Hello Taso, While there isn't really anything you can 'do' to get Google to pick up notes on third party reviews, you mention Yelp in your question and that is a special case. Google stopped showing notation of Yelp reviews in mid-2010, so if this is the source of your 3rd party reviews, you will not see them show up in G. Places. Here is a good article from Lisa Barone at that time: http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/08/yelp-reviews-out-of-google-places.html So, you will need to be sure you're getting reviews in sources Google does use. Look at your competitors' websites for a quick picture of what those include. It can take Google some time to pick up new reviews, so be prepared for that, but do go ahead and start planning to acquire them. And, definitely, work on getting Google-based reviews. Those are very important since Google stopped displaying 3rd party reviews from any source but their own. Hope this helps! Miriam

yes

Mark- Your awesome man! Thank you for the advice and the through response. That helps me out a lot!

why would you have so many blogs?  it's creating a false link network.  None of the ranking that any one of them could possibly get would even come close to the ranking strength the main site would get if you keep it all self contained.  Then there's the problem with partial duplicate content conflicts, the need to maintain them all, and the potential complete failure down the road if you ever need to change domain names or technology platform on any of them. It's about the least effective solution I've seen (and I do see a lot of people do it) done by people who think they know SEO yet where I consistently run circles around them by using a much cleaner self-contained approach. Now if you wanted to have separate subdomains or entirely separate root domains for each of several topics, where each one has completely unique content dedicated to the topical focus of that subdomain or root domain, you MIGHT get some benefit out of that, but in reality, that path is for very rare and extremely complex needs only and not to be attempted if you don't know your stuff at the highest levels... Better to keep it all self contained - every inbound link to any page, article or section not only benefits that page/article/section, but the entire site gets a boost.  And users don't become confused.

Hi Jbstr13, Oh, boy, I haven't seen one of these come up in awhile, but they do happen. Ryan has linked to the right starting point for you. Be advised - these things can really take some time to change. I'm actually dealing with a similar, though not identical, issue myself with a client. The roads were significantly changed in his part of Virginia 5+ years ago and the maps reflect the old roads...plus, the client is pinned in the wrong locale. For the sake of interest, here's my recent blog post on this in case you'd care to read it: http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1228 Also, Mike Blumenthal did a good series of posts back in 2010 about the 'lost' town of Rogers, MN that you might find interesting: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2010/03/17/google-maps-what-happens-when-you-loose-a-town/ Start at the link Ryan placed here and good luck! Miriam

Hi Bob, I'm getting a 'server not found' page when I tried to access your demo site. I guess I don't know what theme you're using, but I would imagine you can create whatever kind of pages or  you'd need to. If you're using something like the All-in-One SEO-Pack and permalinks, you could even make the 2 city landing pages as blog posts and just link to them from the main menu. But, I don't know what challenges you are facing with your theme, obviously. Hope you can figure it out. I know it's sometimes tough when clients are on a tight budget. You've just got to let them know what you can do for their investment. The nice thing about websites is that they can always grow as budget becomes available. Good luck!

Hi Clancy, Best practices is to host your blog on the same domain, and same subdomain, as your main website. This offers so many long term benefits, you're almost throwing everything away if you consider anything else. Depending on the technology you are using to construct your website, there are different ways to prevent your users from accessing your site, but there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. If you're using WordPress, you can simply install a maintenance or "coming-soon" type plugin to keep visitors out, and then install your blog on a subdirectory.  example.com/blog If this isn't possible and you want to host your blog elsewhere, keeping on a subdomain as Jim suggested would be the next best alternative. Apart from linking to your site, there's not much else you can do to pass link juice between the two sites. You can, after your site launches, move your blog and migrate your traffic via 301 redirects.