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our short tail search has a lot less competition that our long tail Yes, that makes this sound extra good! Good luck!  Let us know how it works!

Yep, I got my confirmation as a pro tested via email from them today. The premier launch will be announced soon, and then I'll be able to login and test it out - as I wanted too

Hmmm, just looked it over. Not to be too negative, but I couldn't help but notice that a significant number of their speakers are from companies that are not performing well and/or are on a downward spiral: Barnes & Noble, AOL, and Amtrak.

Hi John, This is amazing. It's pretty much what I was looking for. Not only it shows the average ranking position, but is also shows  ... everything else Thanks for your help. You saved me much time Tolik

Hi Ron, I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A. The response Robert has given you is correct. Google's guidelines would not allow the procedure you are describing. The requirements in order to qualify for a Google Place Page are that you have: 1. A legal business name 2. A local area code phone number 3. A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you or from which your employees depart in order to serve customers at their locations (think chimney sweep, landscaper, etc.) I think your situation is rather interesting, in that I do detect some grey area. What follows is not my suggested advice, but it does point out some of the lack of clarity and potential loopholes in the guidelines. I present this only for educational and hypothetical purposes. Let's say your band is actually a company with a registered, legal business name. Let's say your main headquarters are your home in San Francisco. Let us further say that you appoint 3 band members as franchise owners. These franchise owners have their headquarters in Berkeley, Oakland and San Jose. Let's say that each franchise owner has a distinct local area code phone number and street address (all under the company's legal business name) and each franchise owner is empowered to take bookings over the phone, hold practices at their facility and that the band heads out from these franchise headquarters to do a gig in each of the respective 3 cities, as well as from your main office in San Francisco. In a situation like this, one could almost reason that it would be logical for each of the franchises to have their own Place Page. But in reality, I would call this an extreme long shot, and I believe Google could well consider an abuse of their intended use of the system, hence my warning that this is not my advice. It's interesting to consider, though. Situations like yours are why I would like to see more minutely detailed guidelines published by Google. In all honesty, I believe your most above board move is to get a very clean, violation-free Place Page in place for your business in the city in which it is located, and then do what other go-to-client business models do: depend on your organic efforts for additional visibility in the cities in which you serve. When I work with a client like, for instance, a mobile notary public, my process is to get her site well-optimized for her city of location, get her local business profiles created and claimed and then put a plan in place for creating very strong content on her website for the additional cities in which she serves. Of course, both she and I would love for her to be able to have a Place Page for all of the cities in her service area, but this simply isn't how Places works. I would recommend that you read the Google Places Quality Guidelines yourself in case anything I've written isn't clear: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528 Good luck with the band! Sounds fun!

Hey Keri, I do not have hard data to prove this claim, it's purely my opinion and I should have marked it as such. I had a few presentations to customers recently and most of the time when I asked them to go to a specific page the person would use a hyphenated (spelling?) version or search brand1 keyword1 instead of brand1keyword1. I personally first try a hyphenated version (e.g. -online.com). So I updated my response to the question to reflect this. Sebastian

So did you meet any other mozzers?

I completely  agree with you when you say.. "In my opinion the SEO consultant who will bring the most value to a company will be the one who learns the most about that  company's current business, current products, current goals and current capacity... and then identifies ways to match them to opportunities that exist on the web." And this is exactly the type of business I want us to be, so how would you recommend learning about these above mentioned factors and more.  Apart from researching there site and industry ( which comes later) assuming they are not a client yet. It seems to me that a well designed in depth questionaire would scale very well and would mean that before you start looking deeply into someones site ( which takes alot of time ) you can use questions carefully constructed to serve lots of purposes. Then of course come your research more talks with the client and eventually a proposal/ business plan. but it seems to me that the first step is to make them think  through a set of questions it shows that they are commited and it should be very usefull for everyone involved

Ya, this is what I figured.  Was just confused when I saw it and wanted to make sure I was on top of it.    Thanks for your help!

You can get in touch with Sebastian from http://french-seo.woptimo.com.  I know Sebastian personally and he is really good. He has a strong background with his years in search quality at google and that should count for something. Hope it helps.

Recently I had to ponder this issue for a shopping site that was competing with the major brands they carried. The site is still rising in ranks. This took a while to assess and ponder before implementing any work. SEOMoz peeps already explained some of the issues related to working on a main brand kw term but I want to mention a few other problems you may face. As mentioned, beating a brand that has domain longevity is going to be tough based on the PR, authority, established presence, links, and budgeting for advertising to drive traffic. using trademark and brand name targeting for a domain name or URL might have legal ramifications. What you might consider is doing a long-tail analysis to find out what variations people are searching and then assess the competition to target those keyword phrases you have identified. As another SEOMoz peep suggested to me, "go broad." Another answer in this thread mentioned that you might target competitors as well to help people select the right choice--and I think this is applicable to your case. Don't forget to optimize your social media as well and use some of those options available to help your site. Most of my work is for smaller businesses but the site I did in October was a national one and so you might consider geo-targeting options (as most small businesses do) as well to give your site an edge.

Greetings Ian, Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I want to be certain that I understand your client's situation. You mention the queries First Aid Training in Cornwall First Aid Courses in Cornwall Health and Safety Training in Cornwall These are not, per se, local queries. Google Places (and most of local search) is a city based application. If the client is in Victoria, Cornwall, then 'Victoria' is actually his true local term. I am in the U.S., so things may be slightly different here, but at any rate, I would expect the client to rank well in Places for Victoria-related queries and that efforts to go after the county of Cornwall would need to be chiefly organic in nature. Is this correct or am I misunderstanding what you are describing? In general, in North America, the website is an extremely important part of any local campaign. One applies all traditional SEO techniques + the strong usage of geographic data. So, good onpage SEO, lots of local-focused content and linkbuilding are all going to be party of your work with local-focused clients to achieve high Places rankings for their city of location. At the same time, they need to have a clean, complete Places record (no violations!) and work to accrue citations and reviews within Google. Simultaneously, they need good records in the major 3rd party local business indexes in your country. All of this comes together to create a winning Internet presence. In closing, there was a shakeup here in N. America some weeks ago. My friend and colleague, Linda Buquet, has dubbed this change the 'proximity algo lockout'. I don't know if this happened overseas as well, but I recommend you read about Google's apparent new narrower circle from city center in their results: http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-algorithm-ranking-drop.html Did this happen in the U.K. as well, and could it have affected your client's rankings? Just a thought.

I don't get it.  Is there or is there not a discount code for pro members?

Just thought I'd give an update, and in case anyone else is patiently waiting for reviews or marked up content to appear, hang in there, as ours is now finally showing, 12 months after we first marked it up!! Finally!

Maybe you should move away from packages and work on a client by client basis as different clients will have different needs and you might be shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to a client with a bigger budget.

Just FYI - our data scientist, Matt Peters, has written a great blog post about PA/DA that's launching in the next couple days, and that might help with this question.

I am a VB man, my algorithm if url.location.equals(url.relCanonical)  then leakJuice = 0.15 end if I say this because of what Duane Forrester said that it assigns its value to itself, all hops leak juice or link juice or it would flow in internal loops, there has to be some decay, From what he is saying i get the idea it is a link to itself, and would leak. If you use the Bing SEO Toolkit, it shows you the inlinks, i noticed that there was a link with no link text, i found that this was the canonical tag. it could be that it assignes value to itself again? I have removed them from one of my sites and i will see if a get some movement, once i get these ideas in my head i have to find out

Why do you want keyword from a HTML source?, instead of that why can't you do a keyword analysis online , with can help you in understanding your competitor profile online. I can help you with Keyword research. Please reply me back in case if you are looking for any  assistance. I also recommend SEOMoz tool for competitor analysis. Great tool for learning and understanding the SEO results. :Naveen Srikantaiah

I have just seen those videos available to purchase . Going to give them a punt they should be well worth the investment.

Which one is better for google? Using ş , ğ and ü OR s instead of ş, g instead of ğ, and u instead of ü in my URLs? yurtdışı-üniversite OR yurtdisi-universite ? Thanks in advance...