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"Would I get more of a boost in rankings to pages of my site by placing links in the text of my articles on my site to other pages on my site?" As Spencer says, you're talking about internal linking with generally comes with a slightly different set of rules to inbound / outbound links to and from third-party websites. Feel free to link to relevant parts of your site from articles, but do so where and when it appears natural, and don't overdo it. That is, don't link to a product every time you use the product's name or mention something to do with the product's function. Imagine if Moz linked to its blog home page from every page on the website that mentioned a blog in text. It would look manipulative and spammy.

Hi guys, Just went through the same process as Alligator. Found this old webmaster video in which Matt Cutts states it's ok, but still recommends to use newer tactics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4LYWxXESY Hope this helps other people!

Keri is quite correct about Google not showing web design companies for main local queries, and David is also correct that adding 'in' to these queries will typically bring up these local results. Why Google makes this big distinction between 'in' and not 'in', nobody knows. Presumably, the use of 'in' makes Google more convinced that the user is, indeed, searching for a local solution. Kind of an arbitrary distinction on G's part.

Hi NetMasons, Google forms a cluster of data about each local business, drawing information from around the web. If Google is publishing incorrect business data for your company, chances are, they have pulled it from some source that features this incorrect data. For a better understanding of how local business data is shared around the web, check this out: http://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-providers Your task will be to search for whatever pieces of the data are incorrect, find the source of them and then correct them at the source so that, eventually, Google will update what they have about you to reflect correct information. Citation inconsistency is widely considered to be the third most negative ranking factor. You can read more about this here: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors Without actually being able to audit your unique situation, I can't guarantee that this is what is causing your issues, but from your description, I'd bet that you have some citation cleanup work ahead of you. Please, let me know if you have any other questions.

All great points. The individual sites are going to be re-designed as they are old designs and the content is a little thin. I will take all your points into consideration and make a decision. Thanks for the great answer!

ahrefs.com is another one, I think that finds backlinks a little faster. I generally check ahrefs, majestic seo, and OSE.

Hi there, The points others raise here are very good. Look also at the total number of links coming into the website. Links are still very important for rankings - Google may be trying to steer away from having inbound links influence rankings as much as they have in the past, but they are still a big part of the ranking algorithm and it's difficult to rank well without them. Open Site Explorer only shows the site receiving links from 13 separate domains. Cross-check this with your competitors - how many do they have? And as David mentions, do these links point to the pages you want to have rank?

John Mueller from Google has mentioned that there is no penalty or demotion for using a hyphen.  However, be careful you're not keyword stuffing.

Hi Marty! We checked the post and there are some things that we are definitely going to implement. Thanks for your help!

No, not as long as it doesn't get overused. What Google doesn't want you doing is "Cane Beds | Cane Beds for sale | Buy Cane Beds" If you are refering to character count, Keep it as compact as possible, while still being readable. Looks like you have already done the research on what is popular and ranking, now you just need to implement in a SEF and user friendly format. Think of it this way; what would you click on if you were looking for a cane bed? If you arent sure, draft a few examples, and show them to someone else for a few opinions.

Woot!  Congrats!  And thanks for letting us know.  

This is to target a language specifically. A better explanation of how to utilize this feature is at the link at the bottom of this post. But first, a few snippets: "your ads can appear for customers who use Google products and third-party websites in the languages that your campaign targets. This helps ensure that your ads will appear on sites that are written in the language of the customers you'd like to reach." "Let's say you sell coffee beans online, and you want to target Spanish-speaking customers. You set up an AdWords campaign targeted to the Spanish language, with Spanish ads and keywords. As long as your customers' Google interface language settings are set to Spanish, your coffee ads can show when your Spanish language customers search for your keywords." https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722078?hl=en

Jonathan First off, I would ignore the competitors to some degree. It's going to lead you in circles. It's not so simple that links relate directly to rankings. There are a ton of factors as to why competitors can be ranking better. I'd focus purely on cleaning up your site as best as possible. You also do seem to have an issue with anchor text in your link profile - a lot the top anchors are commercial keywords ""hoisery online uk" "tights" etc. These need to be changed or cleaned up. This is going to give you a flag as being over-optimized. I don't think number of internal linking pages would create a penalty. How's your non-google traffic as a percentage? If it's anything less than 30% of overall traffic (and organic Google is 70% or more) I'd work on getting traffic from other sources - this will all feed back into your SEO.

I concur. Wordpress is an excellent option for blogging and it would definitely better to put it on a subdirectory of your main site. Something like http://www.awaragroup.com/blog would be ideal.

Thanks Martijn much appreciated

The way our site is structured, it might pull the business data from one specific source. If we wrap our business NAP data in Schema, it might display that way on the category pages. As I linked above, Home Advisor uses Schema on category pages and I'm not sure why, so I thought I'd ask. It seems nobody is sure why. 1. Okay. 2. They're all using different things and getting different results. TripAdvisor uses RDFa, I believe, which doesn't exactly help me. I guess I'll just have to play around with them and see which works best.

We just went through this exact process with a website.  We agonized over whether to do the move since the .html pages were ranking and converting well. In the end the client wanted it so we decided to make the switch, this is what we did: 1.) Took all well ranking .html pages and 301 to their new version in apache .htaccess file, example code Redirect 301 domain-name/old-page.html domain-name/new-page/ 2.) Installed the SEO plugin by Yoast and made sure to tune all title/meta info for each page 3.) Made the change and stayed patient. We saw a traffic drop for 9 days following the move.  Then on the 10th day we got close to pre-move levels, and 2 full weeks later we were back at pre-move levels with improved average site time, bounce rate and conversions. *we are almost 2 months into the move now and traffic is higher than ever.

What's the #1 goal of the client? You need to show how organic search has improved that goal. For example, if it's an e-commerce site, then you want to track revenue coming from organic search (and perhaps social media, if you're doing that). If it's a B2B company, then you want to track the number and quality of leads coming from organic search (and perhaps social media, if you're doing that). All of the other types of reports -- keyword rankings, growth in links, amount of traffic, and so on -- can also be included. But the examples above are what your client will (or should) care about the most. That's the #1 thing by which you will be judged. It's about the bottom line.