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Well first thing is to ask yourself these questions Who is my target audience? (Marketing 101 but it's amazing how many people skip this) What am I relevant to? (How relevant is your site content within industry or niche?) What problems am I trying to solve? (Every search query generated is someone looking for a solution to a problem) Does my site require localization? (if the site has any relevance to location that will play a big part in your Optimization strategy) What are my goals and KPI's? (Knowing what the "R" is in "ROI" for you site and or campaign is essential to planning for it's success.) Who are my Organic competitors? What are they targeting? (Knowing the competitive landscape in and out will give you a clear indication of routes currently explored my others in your space and will help you determine you KW path) Who are my Paid competitors? What are they targeting? (Don't forget to research the paid media targets & spend of your competitors. PPC will give you great insights into high converting terms and will provide you with a great snapshot of you competitors mindsets when placed side by side their organic plans.) And last but not least, Who do I want to rank for and where? (Here is the question that every optimization guru needs to ask themselves when trying to "rank". Searches are tailored now to an individual and results can and will be scewed by a searchers location,social interactions,search history and more. So understanding the who, what, why and where is essential to your long term sustainability and ultimate success) Finally let say that while keywords are still a relevant piece of planning your campaign and should get some focused attention, they are losing relevance by the minute as Google has gone almost completely to not provided now anyway. Also you don't want to get into the habit of having your reporting be Keyword focused. Start researching new and exciting metrics that can show real return. SEO's trying to hold onto reporting heavily on Keywords will be out a job soon. So focus should be put into planning a relevant, valuable, content rich website that takes it's intended audience on a specific journey resulting in whatever your "R" is. Focus on your audience and being hyper relevant with solid best practices and you will be fine.

Thanks very much Paul.. Very helpful!

Thanks for that David, it def helped. Awesome!

Hi  Bongani, Here are some extra resources that could help you understand better what happens when you do layout / website changes. This is a video by Matt Cutts posted a wile ago, it also includes some other things but it also mentions things related to the layout: Will changing the code and layout of my pages while moving to new URLs affect their rankings? Also, besides what EGOL said I would also add another thing: Be very careful about the Wordpress theme you are going to use. It's a good thing you already mentioned that you want it high quality. Just to be sure - I would check for any embeded / hidden links. I had some unpleasent experiences even with "high quality ones".

No it was fixed next day. Thanks.

Thank you for responding Richard. That would have been easy if there were any purchased or bad links, but there were none. There were some links from blogs in sidebars and I did have two blogger blogs that referred to a number of our stories, but all of those were removed, and the two blogger blogs were deleted. Most of the linking domains are real businesses. I believe this is all about content, but I could be wrong. This is why I need help.

I have a website showing very well with Google right now and this site has a SLEW of back links going to industry.com. I guess it's just a matter of time before Google figures this out and slaps the site with a manual spam application. I have had several of my sites slapped and 2 have had the application removed, one is now showing in the #1 and #2 position for the most important terms, the other has not recovered and I am thinking about taking it down and starting fresh with a new domain. A third has been slapped and I can not for the life of me to get the manual spam application removed.

Hi Sheldon I love getting a little creative, but let me make sure I understand. You're talking about basically the name of the product being an "unknown unknown" to customers. They don't know the name even exists, so they don't know to look for it? But there's something else similar which they do know to look for - and your client needs to show up there instead? So essentially we have to find a way to call streaming movies "DVDs"? Thanks for clarifying first -Dan

Hi Coletron! Thanks for your question. Would you mind making it more specific? As Christopher noted, more details about what you are asking will allow us to provide you with better answers. In the meantime, I will leave you with this: HTML is a language for marking up text and images on a web page. It defines the basic structure of the web page and certain aspects of its appearance. You can learn more here: http://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Training/What_is_HTML. You can view the HTML of any web page by selecting "view source" or "view source code" in one of the browser's menus. In Chrome for instance,  you can do this by navigating from the browser's top menu  to View > Developer > View Source. Looking forward to hearing from you, Christy

I don't have an example off the top of my head but what I will say is that the way software sites do comparisons of packages is great like avg or something like that. 3 columns, Gold, Silver, Bronze Then down the left a list of all services you offer and then under each column a tick if it is included in that package. Does that make sense? It gives people a very clear understanding in one page what the differences are, rather than having to scroll up and down or flick between pages and scanning sentences. It will likely help people choose a higher package and spend more money with you. A bit like McDonalds asking if you would like fries with that for the small additional cost of X

I try! Thanks, Jonathan.

Since this discussion discussed problems with backlinks I want to refer to a great article and tutorial on locating unnatural links that could be damaging your site ranking and how to correct that. Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal

No problem at all, glad I could help! Good luck with the site!

Hi Gina! Sorry about the radio silence. We pushed a fix on October 15th that should have addressed this. Are things still looking weird on your end?

OK here are the issues, stop using hyphens (-) and stop using pipes (|) these is seen as an attempt to stuff words in just for search engines. Google thinks that this will not be a good read for its users and will rename them. Also please keep in mid that Google does change title tags based on the search query sometimes to give you a better click through rate. They are testing things all the time. Also make sure your meta tags are the correct lengths for best results, some you have are very short and just one word not great for SEO and others are too long.

Agreed - the hyphen will make little difference.

Thank you very much for your time and looking into this. I am very sorry but I am not sure if I understand you correctly:-(  Perhaps you are using some translator? I have noticed you are from Czech republic, you can talk to me in Czech language, I speak this language very well. As regarding of the duplicate page titles, how this can be duplicate??? http://villasdiani.com/rentals/beach-villas/ http://villasdiani.com/rentals/beach-villas/page/2/ http://villasdiani.com/rentals/beach-villas/page/3/ It is a category with properties and it has 3 pages?? how can I avoid to this? Also as regarding of the weird link-the db page i just pasted a wrong link, crawl shows me that this one our most important pages:http://villasdiani.com/?db What do you mean  that url site map is failing for a dns lookup??? Oh my god what I have screwd up? How can I fix it? I am using yoast seo plugin. /sitemap_index.xml Thank you very much Frutiko (Hodne dekuji)