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We have been happy with ekomi

Big showoff! Just kidding, well done! Robert

Thank you, Rob! I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks guys. That makes sense. I guess a good test is to also check and see if you dominate not only for the branded keyword but also all the common misspellings, etc. That might be harder for some brands such as bitskin and bitskins or intenso and intenseo. But i guess if you have a unique enough name and you rank for those too, then you know search engines really do understand.

Hi Becky, There have been some good replies so far but to address your question here, I think it's definitely worth doing the outreach and trying to build relationships. Unless you're a massive brand, it's hard to get noticed online without some form of outreach, at least to begin with. In terms of time, it really does depend on your other priorities. If I had to put a time on it and given that you haven't really started yet, I'd block out maybe half a day to do some research and contact a few sites and then gauge feedback. Then build up from there. Bear in mind that some companies will hire SEO and PR agencies to just focus on promotion of their website, so it can take up a lot of time. But if you start on it yourself with a few hours, then you get a good understanding quickly of what's involved. A quick heads up - it's not easy! But it's important so it's worth pursuing. I hope that helps! Paddy

Thank very much!  Great advice! I will do it that way.

I love Tim's answer, and I want to add that the amount of time needed to become competitive can vary a lot—in fact, there are industries in which a site with those stats would already be competitive. Along with everything Tim suggests, I also recommend benchmarking all of those stats against other sites with which you expect to compete. That'll give you a much better sense of how much will need to be done.

Hi Bob, I don't believe the price of what you are selling has a significant impact on the cost of ad clicks. The audience definition you use along with the relevance score of your ads is what will have the most significant impact in determining how much you will pay for ad clicks. Whether or not your ad campaign will be successful in selling a $50 product, I cannot say. There are a lot more factors that go into this. Generally, I like to use social ad campaigns to promote content or even just as a remarketing campaign so I know I am only reaching users who are familiar with the brand/website I am promoting. Let me know if that helps, I may have misunderstood your question!

Thanks Joh, Will look to reduce the length of the video, it's not really there to boost conversion rates but rather appeal to the target market (I.E. Align our brand with the viewer). Great idea on autoplaying videos below the fold only when needed. Sam

Google should be able to understand that all these are variations on your brand name, so you shouldn't need to worry much about that from a link building/organic search perspective. On the paid search side, you'll want to bid on as many variations of your brand as you currently see driving traffic or mentions to your site.

Hi Lauren, This technique can be very effective but it is getting harder to do because as you say, people need a reason to link and often don't like linking out. My question would be - does your colleague have a page on your website? Something such as a profile page? If they do, then this may be a good way of providing a reason for the link because it's crediting the right person with the quote. Another possibility - have they used a photo of your colleague? Again if they have, then that may be another route. I know this may be a little too late, but I wanted to mention it for the future - the quicker you can contact someone after an article has been published, the better chance you have of getting the link. You mentioned that the article in Reuters was from a few months ago which makes it tougher for you. So I'd advise trying to react as quickly as possible to things like this using a tool such as Buzzsumo of Fresh Web Explorer to find fresh mentions of people's names. I hope that helps! Paddy

We yanked a whole bunch more content than that over the last few months.. blog posts that no longer got much traffic and had never really gotten any traction, articles covering topics we'd covered better multiple times, etc. If they were still drawing some traffic, we set up a 301. If there wasn't much of anything happening, we just let it 404. We haven't seen any negative impact from this so far. I like EGOL's idea of having someone rewrite the content on those pages. If you can't get that done quickly enough to satisfy Mr. Disgruntled, set up some 302s until the new content is ready. I'd also say that it's probably not worth rewriting unless you're planning to do it better than it was the first time around. If you can't blow it out and make it more valuable, then 301 or 404, whatever, either is probably just fine to wash your hands of it and walk away. Stressing out over one half of one percent when it's not delivering results in the first place isn't going to be worth my time, not when I could be spending that time and effort on something more profitable. Opportunity costs apply.

Hi There! Thanks for your response!! I emailed our IT group about the sitemap observation. The site went down on January 4th. It was only for 30 minutes. We noticed the odd SERP results on Wednesday- January 6th. According to Moz our Keyword rankings for 'duluth trading co" & "duluth trading company" have been all over the place. See here: http://screencast.com/t/Tgc3qZgYrd & http://screencast.com/t/uvgHeRGNy I also noticed that "https" is showing up and not "http". I'm not sure why that is happening as well...

That's great advice, and I will definitely be referencing the Beginner's Guide. I have lots of thoughts on this topic, so I appreciate the help prioritizing what I write.

HI Juan, It's a bad thing. Will's and Bryan's responses are great. My personal experience provides another side to this. Years ago I ran an ecommerce site in a smaller market. Business was good, and then I started getting these random emails about orders that I could not find any record of. I spent literally hours going through documents and the database trying to figure out what was going on and came to the conclusion I was getting trolled. But these people were insistent they just wouldn't let up, I was stealing from them and they were threatening me with lawsuits and what not. About a month after this started I found the problem, 2 copy cat websites had popped up and copied some of my content word for word, markup for markup, resulting in pages on their site with links to "my contact page". Turns out the people did have an order they were just complaining to the wrong company. Though I did convert a couple of these people into customers, the time I spent looking up erroneous orders and responding to emails made it a bad experience. My thoughts, Don

If you are concerned with the 301 redirects no passing all the juice you do have the option to contact the site and ask them to update the link. This can be time consuming if you have a high number of links. Your best option is to review all your links in Webmaster tools and remove any poor links through contacting the site, or disavow, then redirect the site. Ideally, you would want all content on one site, mostly because you don't want to be competing against yourself for rankings.

Thanks a lot!

I just wanted to say that EGOL's and Fuel Travel's post are the most excellent responses I've ever received for our site. Fuel Travel, we don't have many (maybe any?) competitors that are like us. We have competitors that compete with different aspects of our site (competitors for orgone products, competitors for shamanism, competitors for supplements) but no-one ties them together like us. How can we use this to our advantage, and what in the heck do we use for home page keyword - not that you can tell us but give us some clues on how to come up with them since we are so unique and almost too cutting edge in our field. There's not really a path set in Google and searchers for our site as a whole, just as pieces. Please any more advice from anyone is also appreciated.

It is hard to predict, but I always say go with a .com if you can get it. The thing to remember is: will the .org rank better due to having more of the keywords placed in it? I thought for sure that Google would have discredited EMDs years ago, but yet you still see them ranking, very much so with local businesses. Here is what I would ask myself if I was in your shoes. 1. What is working for businesses already ranking high for that area/service? If the EMD seems to be working, is the .net version available? I think people would prefer a .net over a .org unless the site was strictly educational or informational. If it is service-based or product based I would use the .net 2. If the EMD .org is available, was it owned before and does it have any history that could be harmful in the short-term? 3. What is the EMD .org site being used for? An add-on domain or site, or as the main company website? 4. If the .com covers the most important two of the three KWs, are they the most important two? Think of webdevelopmentsoftware.org vs developmentsoftware.com. If the 2 keywords are the most important two that cannot be misconstrued or misinterpreted by Search Engines then I would say use the .com In the example above the .org domain specifies WEB, meaning you would be targeting a certain type of software, whereas the .com leaves the interpretation more open-ended and open to misinterpretation. Moz did a study about EMDs and what was used the most often. I think it's worth a read in your case: https://moz.com/blog/bing-vs-google-prominence-of-ranking-elements Hope this helps! https://moz.com/blog/bing-vs-google-prominence-of-ranking-elements

Thank you Highland That was very helpful!