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Thank you for all the responses! I feel confident going forward with the move & am happy to not be linked to our former SEO company, with expensive hosting. My web builder and I have been doing our own SEO, for over a year, with MOZ reports & I couldn't be happier. Being able to have this forum is invaluable!

The way Google look in to links and anchor texts is different than how they see and measure your social media score. If the tweet is good with nothing optimized in it, it will get lots and lots of shares and retweets, where as a completely optimized tweet failed to create a buzz in the arena. I believe when using twitter or any other social network just think about people instead of Google, algorithms or machine and this way thing will get natural automatically and you will see the buzz you was ideally looking from your social efforts.

Hi, The sites I work on are both on SSL certificates (entire sites). This was not something I wanted but the powers that be above me in my organisation made it clear that there wasn't a choice. The two sites are in financial services (we are a mortgage broker) which is why we had to have it, even though it isn't a necessity as far as our regulators are concerned. Just a company policy. Thank you for posting this information it gives me hope that my sites may start performing even better throughout 2014. I don't have bad listings (in fact we're position 1 for a few things on both sites) and since completing redesigns on both sites one in March one in April this year (one is on a new domain as we created a new company for commercial mortgages as opposed to residential ones) we've seen a real improvement in rankings and conversions. All I'm saying is SSL shouldn't be a barrier to rankings and it isn't one for our rankings. Though I was extremely worried by it when they decided we had to have it! Best wishes, Amelia

Thanks, Jane! This is a very valid option, though in the current website architecture coupled with client expectations that could be difficult. I will keep this in mind but am open to other thoughts if anyone has any.

Thanks Rand.. have just re-read this response and I totally agree with the SEO tactics you have mentioned.. but in my opinion you are assuming that the client has an endless budget for SEO. Unfortunately this isn’t the case for a lot of ‘smaller’ clients, they have limited budgets in comparison to their nationwide ‘bigger’ competitors.. Creating videos isn’t cheap, hosting events isn’t cheap etc.. Google favours big brands who have the resources to make them happy.. it’s a lose lose situation for smaller companies.. how can they compete?

Thanks Rand I really appreciate your response - I feel a site overhaul is imminent! Ash

HI Chris thanks for your thoughts. Just watched the Vid, which is great & we will review our content. Of course its chicken & egg, without volume visitors, as we arent on Page1, its difficult to fully understand customer behaviour with regards sharing etc. Whilst i have also seen short & long pages work, I havent any experience or checked the results of when on the same site they have keywords that overlap & are inter-related, such as the example i gave. For example, funeral planning will also show search results for funeral plans & yet have different volumes of searches when checking in Adwords Keyword Planner, so i want to target both, and currently i have them on differing pages - so is this the right strategy? I know that off page factors will also effect my overall ranking but im keen to get the optimum on page structure. What do you think? Ash

What is the best way to handle the sitemap for this situation? Do we need separate sitemaps for http and https?

Just noticed that this video spam is still killing the SERPs all over Florida.... starting with Sarasota...

Hi, this was very helpful! Is there anything else besides bad links that one should be concerned with that could potentially hurt the ranks? I'm using the OSE to keep track of newly discovered backlinks. Although our old-SEO company hasn't threaten to do such a thing, they've shown signs of being a bit shady in the past... so I rather monitor for the next year or so (to be on the safe side). Thank you

Thanks Chris. This makes sense, I do have a combination of both, content relevancy to attract search traffic, and highly informative traffic that should be shared for homeowners knowledge. I now know which to unload now at once and which to release over time.

1) why would so many companies like Hubspot, others require email for content exchange if putting on site would do as well? Here are two answers: A) they want to spam you with email and sell your email to everyone on the planet; B) the value of a sale is enormous, so they would rather have a sale than the ad clicks Does the type of industry: B-B, vs B-C make a difference in how you would approach or is your answer blanket for all types B-B,B-C? Publishing for everyone makes more sense for the B-C business because the number of potential visitors is enormous compared to the B-B. If we go the route of publishing to site (not pdf)  does it make a difference whether a 12 page ebook is one long scrolling page or should the content be 'click to read more' which advances to another possibly optimized page?  If multiple pages then each page would likely be optimizing for pretty much the same content? I put a few thousand words on a page but if you have more then I would break it into separate pages.  I would break the ebook into chapters or lessons each targeting a different keyword. Has there been any correlation between top step (main menu) and 2, 3, 4 steps below the main navigation on relevance (with same content) in rankings? Yes.  The deeper you bury the content in your navigation the deeper it will rank in the SERPs.   If you want to promote this for traffic, income, links, tweets, signups,  I would think that you would be showing it to every person who visits your website.  That's what I do when I have something hot, valuable and important.  If you fail to do that you lose the opportunity.

This is the link you're looking for http://youtubecreator.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/using-google-page-identity-on-youtube.html It's a bit convoluted, but it does work. First step is getting the YouTube account added as a "Manager" of the Company G+ account

I can tell you I don't use SEO hosting. I like to stay off Google's radar completely and SEO hosting companies are sitting ducks IMO.

CleverPhd, Robert Cialdini is fantastic! Thank you so much for introducing me to him.

They have the option to purchase songs separately or in "music collections" (http://www.premiumbeat.com/collections). Pricing for individual songs is about $40/ea for permanent use. The music collections are substantially cheaper ($15/ea) so if you want a lot of choices I would go with that route.

No problem, you can click answered so if people search the topic they can see it is answered.

Your first point: creating fresh, relevant content on a regular basis, is the key one.  This then hooks into catching long tail searches relevant to your business.  The more you talk around the subject and business, providing use-cases, how-to guides, 37 things you never realised about x, the more long tail searches you're likely to catch.  It's also far easier to place on the site as a blog post than trying to constantly produce evergreen content for the site and find some suitable place to put it. It's also the logical place to inject a little opinion or humour - which perhaps will lead to some discussion or following.  For the most part that's going to look out of place on the main site in amongst the sales pages. For many small businesses, in many sectors, building a significant following is unlikely, unless the posts are very far removed from the business:  perhaps drain clearing, dentistry or invoice factoring.  In such a case you're never, ever going to build the same following as if you were in some entertainment or tech sector discussing the the latest iThing.  I'm sure there's one or two exceptional folks out there who've managed to gain following for some dry, dull industry, but that's infinitely more about them, than the topic. Many of the businesses that blog, highly successfully, are blogging about topics incidental to the business - for many web businesses the topics that catch notice and generate responses are the discussions about programming or some problem they encountered with scaling or the tech they're using, rather than the payment service, or the service they're actually offering.  The posts on the actual service they provide getting much less traction and sharing by comparison. But it's also about getting awareness, so that post on some uncooperative aspect of Wordpress or Apache might introduce new people to your actual service.  Of course this perhaps easier in tech, but in any sector there are connected and related sectors where the same can apply, so the wider the topics the better even if not directly related to the business.  That's not the same as saying constantly blog about iThings on your dentistry site of course! Establishing self as authority.  Again for many sectors, this is a bit of a stretch.  With the best will in the world, the most surprising, enlightening posts on drain clearing are unlikely to get much traction on Google+ and Facebook, yet the engines are taking social success as a clear sign of authority.  I've seen several valiant attempts to make "unsexy" businesses succeed on social, and to an extent, they have.  As an example a ladder and scaffold rental business spent much effort sharing photos of ladders in silly places, and achieved some success.  Up against shares of an iThing, cats and zombies, not so much. So, yes, it's very necessary, particularly for the very noticeable effect of long tail traffic.  For the other factors, treat them as nice-to-haves and blog accordingly. The other key thing about blogging is nearly everyone gives up far, far too early, so keep at it.

I'm happy to be of help. Sincerely, Thomas