Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Bryan, I would suggest hiring in agency to start out with somebody extremely reputable friends since this the http://moz.com/community/recommended http://www.distilled.net/ , http://www.portent.com/, http://evolvingSEO.com, Internetmarketingninjas.com , SEERinteractive.com , Then get a recommendation from them it seems to me that to me If you hire somebody and they are on Odesk and nothing against Odesk however there are some people that honestly have no business calling themselves SEO's Or whatever they're calling themselves my opinion would be to create a relationship with one of the recommended companies and get them to then that your new employee that way you'll start off strong and finish strong. You're looking to spend a decent amount of money, and I'm not trying to prevent you from hiring people I think that's a fantastic thing you're doing however you need somebody that knows what the other people are doing to tell you hire this guy or don't. Some one you can test with http://www.distilled.net/u/home/ I hope this is going to help to you sincerely, Thomas

I believe in order to find the keywords provide you traffic can be found through following ways! -          Follow the trend This means follow giant blogs on email, experts on twitter and track all of them to see what topics are trendy and then write on the same! -          Google Keyword Tool Grab the list of keywords that you think are good... put them in the Google keyword tool to see what contains the considerable search volume and then plan your writing! There can be other ways as well but I believe these are the quick and the easiest one!

Distilled U is great, and SEO specific: http://www.distilled.net/u/ If you'd like to have a broader range of training topics, I'll second a recommendations for Lynda.com.

This would be a good starting point  http://moz.com/community/users/63

Nice link, Chris.  Thanks! I have found from personal experience that long articles pull in a LOT more long-tail traffic. I have lots of pages on my site that had 50 words several years ago and I have slowly be rewriting them into 1000 to 3000 word articles with lots of photos.  As I do this the traffic skyrockets, not only from increase longtail but also by higher rankings.

Here's my feeling on that:  When you say you are targeting "all major categories of product" I (rightly or wrongly) think of an Amazon affiliate-type site.  When I think of someone launching an Amazon affiliate-type site and trying to market it, I think the many tens of thousands of other, similar site owners who have underestimated the budget and/or the time they need to do market it correctly.   In those cases, 99% of their products remain forever invisible to searchers. I have to tell you, the fact that your site is about finished and you're just now thinking about marketing isn't giving me the warm fuzzies. The marketing of each product-- individually chosen to be on your site because it fits a need of your target audience and within your marketing--would best have been dealt with prior to the development of your site. If the sell-everything amazon affiliate had thought that way, they may have gotten a handle on how much total time they would be investing in their marketing, as well as how and to whom they'd be marketing them to. But since you're just getting around to it, for each product, I'd be asking myself, "why this product", "who needs" this product" "when do they need this product", "what is the buyer doing that requires this product" "how difficult will it be to get this product to show up in the search results?", "How long will it take to get this product to show up in the search results?" ,"How profitable is this product", "What's my marketing budget? "When do I need to see an ROI?" and then I'd start tossing products from my site for which I couldn't those questions right off the bat, so that I was at least starting with a core bunch of products I know something about. If you're not that kind of site, please excuse my rant.

Yes the presence of BingSiteAuth.xml or the lack-thereof doesn't really give you a definitive answer, but it does give you a little insight into the situation. There is really no way to know for sure if they have activated or are using Webmaster Tools accounts unfortunately, unless you have access to their email accounts.

Wow that's very exciting to hear, many thanks for the update Peter. I can't imagine how much data he has been sifting through since his 2011 report. His next report will likely have a profound effect on how SEO's steer their departments.

Ah Tom... I try!

I second that.  Google is creating it's own snippets for the search results rather than using your description because your category descriptions are all the same.  Easy fix.

Many Thanks for your valuable comments and suggestions which have led to significant improvement on the traffics and our website quality. Thanks Mak

Roger had some tired fingers last night as he was updating everything. It is for 1:30pm PDT. The website is now updated, too. So sorry for the confusion!

After you've done the "on-page" optimization, you can build links of course and yes you will probably follow the same methods you use for normal SEO, but I would probably focus on making sure the product (App) itself is great and then work on getting good reviews. Since we're talking about App Store Optimization here and not Search Engine Optimization, you want to work on those things that can help boost your App in the store itself. Lots of good reviews are similar to lots of links in that they are all "votes" for that App in the App Store search results.

I was the one who said to add a custom report, not Karl. Personally I ONLY use custom reporting instead of the initial "Audience Overview" because I know those reports are inaccurate (it attributes some of our PPC traffic to Organic, etc). It's up to you, but I'm a bit of a data fan and love customizing my reporting (I have 20 reports for one of our sites that I can quickly page through each day). I find them particularly useful for segmenting specific pages on your site.

Your Google+ profile (about section) does give you the option of adding links to your bio. As far as i can see them, they are dofollow. example: https://plus.google.com/114163207395031733621/about

Ranking signals are extremely complex, and On-page SEO is only a fraction of the pie (although sometimes it's a very large piece!) For a broader perspective, run your keyword through Moz's Keyword Analysis Tool - then run a "full" report. This will show you dozens of on-page and external ranking factors for the top ten websites returned for that search query. .... and this still isn't the full story. Questions like this help us learn how Google's search algorithm work, and why some sites rank higher than others, even when we don't expect it. Keep questioning everything!

I worked on Mesothelioma campaigns for a while.  CPC averaged $100-150/click.  It's literally AdWords most expensive CPC....but a Mesothelioma Lead is worth $10,000 and a settled case is worth $500,000.  That's why Mesothelioma clicks are so expensive. Keep an eye on AdCenter clicks...AdCenter causes many more headaches that AdWords. Look at your search query reports..if you see anything outside of the norm, ask for a refund..and then add that term as a negative keyword.  Its usually only broad match that will cause issues...if you don't use broad match, you shouldn't have many problems.  Once again AdCenter will match up 'related' keywords that are not really related....AdWords is much more accurate for broad match keywords. look at geo ... do you capture ip address on leads or server logs?  look for IPs outside your targeted geo.  If you find them, ask for a refund If you find any issues, request that AdCenter or AdWords audit your account...I automatically did this every month with AdCenter ..and usually received 10-15% refund every month...and I didn't have to spend lot of time investigating things ...AdCenter did the work.  Do you have a dedicated rep?  this is what they are for.

Have you looked into SurveyMonkey? I've been using it for the last 7 years - though not for anything extensive.