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Hi Rusty, That's great that you're considering amassing the skills you need to begin offering Local SEO to clients. It's a huge, ever-changing form or marketing that requires on-going study. If Local SEO is new to you, I recommend you access the following free resources to kick of your learning process on steady feet: First and foremost, study the Google Places Quality Guidelines, here: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en Here is a recent Moz post I wrote which takes the Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors and illustrates each: Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors - An Illustrated Guide The above post features ranking factors that are deemed to be most important by the annual Local Search Ranking Factors Survey which is the premiere annual survey in the Local Search industry and must-read stuff for every aspiring Local SEO. Here is my post on the psychological mindset behind a strong, good Local SEO campaign: The Zen of Local SEO And another on the more technical tenets of a Local SEO/SEM campaign: The Rudiments of Local SEO As you are also working on the design end of things, I recommend your read Matthew Hunt's article on local on-page optimization: How To Do Onpage Optimization for Local SEO – The “Perfectly Optimized Local Page” ExampleAnd here's a great one from Darren Shaw on the art of citation building:How To Identify Quality Citations SourcesThere are many other great, free learning resources out there, but I've highlighted here some that will get at the heart of basic good practices for you.Moving along to the specifics of your question: directory submissions - called 'citations' in Local SEO - are one of the key components of any local search marketing campaign. Citations must feature completely consistent data about the business and follow all guidelines for each given platform. Where phone verification is necessary, the best thing to do is to alert your client that he must be ready to answer his phone within a given time window. Do not attempt to redirect the phone number as redirecting numbers are against Google's guidelines (linked to above) and could cause major NAP consistency issues for your client.You can choose to build citations manually. This is often the best way to go. On an agency level, however, you may be so busy that your clients' needs will best be served by you using a third party resource. Yext is such a service. I personally recommend WhiteSpark's service, which is conducted manually and is very highly thought of in the industry. Here's a link:https://www.whitespark.ca/citation-building-submission-serviceIf you do choose to hire a citation building service, be absolutely sure that you are carefully researching your options. Some work better than others and some have known problems. Thankfully, there are various option to choose from!One last tip: success as a Local SEO often depends heavily on knowing what NOT to do, as well as what to do. Studying guidelines and making daily reading of top Local SEO blogs part of your job is going to be a smart way to get started. In this industry, one never stops studying and learning, and changes happen overnight on a regular basis. Exciting stuff!Good luck and happy reading!

I think you can find the answer to your question in this other thread: http://moz.com/community/q/what-are-benefits-to-develop-large-html-sitemap

Hi there, thanks for your question! You've received some excellent responses. Did any of them help you resolve your issue? We'd love a status update, thanks! Christy

I think the problem with this strategy is that you are at a big disadvantage compared to building links direct to the page, if we take for example you blog - how many links are on the page, now divide 100 / number of links on the page and this is how much power (%) you will gain compared to building the link direct. The big gain with building links to a blog is that it looks more natural and with the right content can be much easier than a product page to build links, but it should be part of an overall strategy like most things in SEO.

Saif - Yes, Google will add in site links if they determine that your sub-pages are also important for the search results.  It's all done auto-magically, so it's not something you can set. You can tell Google if you don't want certain pages to show up as sitelinks.  But beyond that, the best advice I have is to create compelling content that engages with the end user... and strong rankings will likely result Hope this helps! Jeff

Hi Doug, In my experience, the client has to be convinced on his own that there will be value in the investment. Part of this comes from his realization that he must get this work done in order to compete and see returns from being visible on the Internet. If he is under-educated about the power of the web, he may not realize this and you have the chance to teach him. Sometimes this works out well! Sometimes, however, a potential client just doesn't grasp the value of being visible and is unwilling to commit resources to it. Often, he ends up going with some quickie/cheapie deal instead and winds up blowing what money he has on services that either won't help the business or will actually harm it. I've had small business owners come to me in a state of a disaster after going down that path. Business owners who are ready to learn and willing to rely on the expertise of the marketer are my favorites. Those who come to you with bad information they've learned elsewhere and who are not willing to learn better ways of doing things are seldom good clients. It's quite common for Local Search Marketing contracts to cover at least a few months, sometimes even a year or more. The difference between a big budge project and a small budget one will be the amount of work you are able to do for them per month. But even the smaller amount of work will have cumulative value over time. Bottom line: the client must believe in the value of what is happening. If he doesn't, the project will likely either not happen or will be a stressful one. You can help shore up their belief, but it's my feeling that there has to be some measure of faith on their side in the marketer they've hired that will keep them going until results start to become apparent.

thank you, time to clean house in a meticulous manner

Nadir- I'd always recommend putting in an Alt tag on images, to describe what the image shows. The Alt tag was developed originally for text-only browsers or visually impaired visitors to a website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_attribute According to the W3C's accessibility site: http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web According to the w3Schools.com site, the Alt tag (attribute) is one of two required attributes for the tag: The tag has two required attributes: src and alt. http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp The Mozilla Develper forum says that setting the Alt tag "attribute to the empty string indicates that this image is not a key part of the content" https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Img The latest version of Dreamweaver won't allow you to add an image onto a static HTML page, without using an Alt tag either. So, yes, you should try to always use the Alt tag, in my opinion. That said, Alt tags shouldn't be stuffed with keywords. If you do that, it will hurt you in the long run. Best practice is to describe the image. Hope this helps, -- Jeff

Hey There I know this question is a little old but just want to add some things. If we're talking about volume only - and getting accurate numbers from the Keyword Planner there are a few important things to know. First of all - the changes are just calculating the numbers in slightly different ways. They are still accurate, so long as you know what's different. For one, volume for desktop and mobile is now combined together - there is no separate report at the moment for desktop vs mobile so you're seeing these volumes combined Next is they are now averaging volumes across the last 12 months (which before I imagine they may have pulled from the most recent month) Now you can also not only get volume by country but also by city, state, region etc. Lastly - they are showing you all exact match volume by default - which is what you want. Broad and even phrase match are not very ideal for SEO. So when you go into keyword planner, it's actually easier in my opinion to get the right data. You don't need to set a match type. You don't need to add up desktop and mobile and they have average the last 12 months for you. The only thing you need to do really is decide on your location. If you want to know how many people type "french chocolate" in France vs. the whole world or vs. Italy - that's the biggest choice you have to make really. Full documentation from Google on the changes here. Hope that helps

Sending you a PM

Logging out, clearing my cache, and logging back in seems to have fixed it.

Catherine, If you have a blog you should be using structured data. But in any case that couldn't be the reason of the drop. I am guessing competitors using some shady techniques to outrank you and others or perhaps lack of content. I do see only 18 pages were indexed. Having a blog and posting regularly can help you. For example posting experiences from your customers? or any extra info you can provide on the locations you offer skiing (I don't know). Do a little research and see what's missing in other pages and get your hands on it. In any case, if the site outranking you are spammy, you can always report them to Google, they don't pay too much attention, however, you could then throw a thread in the Google Webmaster Help forums (if you didn't do any backhat link building, which apparently you didn't. Once you start creating good content, over time you will earn links which ultimately and combined will give you an edge over your competitors. That just needs time, time and more time. Hope that helps!

Hey Alberto, If those 44 posts are set to "private" how is Moz finding them? Somewhere in your blog you are linking to them. Find those links and take them down. Then you should consider 2 things: Do those pages get any organic traffic? If yes, try to create a page that isn't a copy, with unique and useful content and set it as public. If there's no organic traffic, then just leave the 404 and just make sure your 404 is a nicely designed 404 that offers some value to the user. Not only for these 44 pages, but to cover any 404 issue in the future too. You could, for example, check the URL requested and search our site for related content and while saying that the page they were looking for is missing/removed, you suggest looking those other pages. Hope that helps!

No problem! You are welcome! FYI, the page you gave me has almost no content unless a few lines and 3 pictures, plus the header with a little animation and the footer. However, it has over 10 scripts and over 5 CSS files. Heck, the first 135 lines are just the header, while the actual content of the page is from line 258 to 274 (16 lines). I would review all those wordpress files and remove as many as possible from the site while trying to merge all the others. You are making over 30 requests for a page that has only 16 lines of actual content.

That's an interesting thought Luke. Yes, I agree something like that would work much better. I think a group like that would need some strong affiliations with already recognised online groups of like-minded SEO people (like on Moz) to give it gravity and value, but it could work. I don't know if such a group exists. Peter

Hi Luke To include the suggestion on searchenginewatch.com in this conversation, it said: Submit an updated sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and use the change of address function if moving to a new domain. Remember to initially keep the old URLs in your XML sitemap to facilitate Google crawling those links and processing the changes in their index. Well it would be interesting to hear others feedback on that. Personally, I think having old URLs in a sitemap (that without a redirect would result in a page not found 404 error) doesn't seem correct to me. Presumably, you have had the URL in the sitemap previously when the page at the URL was active. But then, by setting up a 301 redirect, you are telling Google that the page at the URL that Google has in its index has now permanently moved to a new URL. When you submit a sitemap to Google then you are submitting a list of all the URLs on your site that you are asking Google to crawl. But to include the old URL in your sitemap along with the new URL is essentially asking Google to crawl two URLs pointing to the same page. I'm not sure Google would necessarily consider that to be a canonical issue (because the old URL is now not current) but for me it's a misuse of the sitemap. But as I say, it would be interesting to hear others feedback on this. Peter

RSS feeds as duplicate content? That's the first time I hear something like that. Feeds are intended for feed readers, which basically is a file that tells the title of the page/story, a small portion of the content/summary and the location of the actual document, an URL where you can read all the article/page. It also helps crawlers find new content in your site by scraping the feed instead of the whole site, but it does not SEO benefit, other that "perhaps" having your new pages indexed faster.

For the most part, links from askives and mrwhatis are ones that I classify as "not seo made".  They're autogenerated pages that link to almost every site on the web.  If you were affected by Penguin it's definitely because of links that you made.  Look for self made links from low quality sources like article sites, low quality directories, bookmarks, etc.

So Lets say I embed analytics code into the iframe. Visitor filled up the details in the widget and click submit button then it will record that as a visit. But how much time spent or pages/visit will GA recognize.