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Could have been, I tried searching other SEO blogs but came up with a blank on those as well.  I could have sworn it was on the Seomoz blog.  Oh well; thanks for looking!

Thanks

My IT Director and I just had an interesting back and forth discussion about this. I'll spare you the witty repartee and take you straight to a post in the Google Webmaster's Central Blog: To Slash or Not to Slash? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html Quote: "If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can: Consider changing this behavior (more info below) to reduce duplicate content and improve crawl efficiency. Leave it as-is. Many sites have duplicate content. Our indexing process often handles this case for webmasters and users. While it’s not totally optimal behavior, it’s perfectly legitimate and a-okay. Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris." We particularly enjoyed Maile Ohye's reference to Chuck Norris. It's handy as a search term if you ever want to find her post again   Hope this helps!

Thank you Paul Much Appreciated!

Hi James, SEOMoz is a great tool to help you demonstrate subject matter expertise and give clients or perspective clients good advise. You can set up Campaigns for your target companies, and then use the Crawl diagnostics to tell companies about potential problems with their sites.   You could also use the OnPage Report card for this. You can compare their backlink profiles vs. their competitors, and identify opportunities for your clients to improve their SEO profiles.  The labs competitive link tool would be good for this as well. You can track their keyword rankings and notify them about significant changes in their rankings via campaigns or the rank tracker. You can use the new Fresh Web Mentions to find very recent news about your clients properties or keywords, and share those timely articles with clients. Lastly, you could use FollowerWonk to evaluate their twitter accounts.  You could recommend the best times for them to tweet.  Influential people they should be engaging in, etc... It's a great toolset for your application! Good luck, -Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg

Couldn't agree more Mark.  SEO plugins just help with the mass production of handling certain tasks, but it doesn't matter if you are lacking development support.

Thank you!

SEOcertification.org certification is pretty much meaningless. I wouldn't trust it, and I don't know anyone else who would. First, ask yourself if this certification provider is even up to snuff in their SEO skills. This particular site is not. Kris cracked me up on his post about seocertification.org : "Before I’m even 10 seconds into the site I note that they didn’t even apply one of the most basic SEO fundamentals: Canonicalization Observe: http://seocertification.org http://www.seocertification.org http://www.seocertification.org/index.php http://seocertification.org/index.php" The lack of fundamental canonicalization on their site is just one of many telltale signs of weak SEO-fu. It's 3/13/2013 now, at almost 3:13p.m. and their site looks dated circa 2006. Goodness, they even have text written on to images..! And what's more, their images lack keyword-rich filenames and have no alt tags at all! images/featuredImage.jpg" alt="" /> just ain't good SEO. I wouldn't trust them to teach me. If they are true masters, such as, perhaps Yoast or SEOmoz, they'd practice what they preach. A better way to learn and master SEO is to learn by doing. Build your own site, and then optimize it for people and search engines. Follow the checklists and tremendous detail here at SEOmoz, and participate in the forums here if you can't find an answer for your question first by searching the SEOmoz blogs. If you want to learn SEO but don't want to develop your own site, you can always help build links to my site about rap similes and metaphors, Glennraps.com. Perhaps test your skills by trying to improve the ranking of the glennraps search result for https://www.google.com/search?q=haters+in+las+vegas&pws=0  Good luck and godspeed!

Hi Egol, Many thanks for your reply. I have a fair few pages on the online store with over 640 products to choose from.  I'm assuming that lets say one of these products was my best seller I'd spend an increase amount of time in nurturing these pages etc. I like the idea of a blog about phone accessories and I may have come up with an idea that could be useful... - experiments to follow. Again thanks for your reply... Regards Rob

I have graduated from PPC Master Certification course. Brad Geddes is the instructor. He is an excellent teacher and I found office hours very valuable. 3 months long course is a lot of work, but you learn a lot through practice. You also have access to all other courses as well. I highly recommend the PPC Master Course.

He is referring to the rel next and prev canonical tags. That tagging is critical for proper indexing of paginating pages.

Thanks for your prompt response EGOL I agree that asking those questions to the people directly involved in the business would yield interesting and valuable results. However, this project requires that we survey the organization's clients. The clients are directly impacted by the performance of the organization's website, and as such, they will be interested in helping out. As such, I'm curious as to what questions would be most valuable to ask. The results of the survey need to direct the SEO plan to some degree, so the questions should relate to how the organization can improve their website, mainly from an SEO perspective. Does this make sense? Further feedback would be much appreciated!

Btw quick questions i have tried to contact Search news before. Who do i talk to in regards to writing a guest post or an article about Restaurant Marketing

what process is the syndicating  if i write a really good bit of content how many places can i place that before it becomes duplicate syndication?

Joseph, send me your email, I will send you the list of 30 local business categories that I started off with. Also I would encourage you to look at -->  The Best Citations Sources by Category All the best, Clark

From a programmer's perspective I would assume a basic algorithm exists where your search is partially matched, then shown in reverse order (most recent first). If they're clever they might match other factors from your profile against the job requirements - e.g. if you have a required qualification, or previous experience. As it's been a while since I applied for a job and the last job site we built was over a year ago, I can't speak for 'most job boards'. If I were you I'd give a few a spin and see if you can work out what's going on when you search. Try some non-logged in searches, then set up a profile and try again, see if the results are different. Martin

Thanks for the replies. I will look at both resources and let you know how it goes. I'm guessing that most optimization and knowledge comes from trial and error?. As far as analytics goes, dotmailer tracks everything from who opens, forwards, reports as spam, doesn't open, how many times opened, links clicked, popular links, email clients used and % / numbers, bounces, unsub requests, social network views and a massive variety of other analytics. It also allows you to view a copy of the email with hotspots showing click through areas and % statistics etc. In regards to actually learning how to lay the emails out and improve click rates I will read the guides provided. Thanks all.

Google autocomplete and the 'searches related to' field can be manipulated, however it is against Google's TOS to do so. Rishi Lakhani wrote a very interesting article on the subject over a year ago now. In it he shows how he managed to manipulate these results. Hope that helps.