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I'm going to take the opposite perspective, because I don't think this is a one-size-fits-all situation. Building out unique, ccTLDs does have ranking advantages within those countries, but it also has a couple of disadvantages: (1) Your marketing efforts and link-building are now all split 3 ways, and your authority is split 3 ways. The again you get from international targeting may not offset what you lose by splitting your SEO efforts. If all 3 markets are mission critical, and you have a large budget, 3 domains has advantages. If one market is much bigger than the other two, though, and you don't have a lot of time and money, I think subfolders are a better choice. (2) You may have more complex duplicate content issues with similar English content across 3 domains. Google isn't always as good as they should be about isolating international content. Granted, though, this is a problem with subfolders, too. We can say "write unique copy", but you can only say the same thing in the same language so many ways. A few colloquial spellings and phrases aren't going to make for unique content.

Thanks for the quick response Anthony.

It's not the prettiest blog, but I've always found Matthew Umbro's PPC advice to be solid. Other PPC-related blogs that I like: http://www.gordonchoi.com/ http://www.semgeek.com/ Also, don't forget about the PPC categories at SEOmoz and YOUmoz.

I agree with Ryan and EGOL. Spend your time and energy on making content that users want to read, not in trying to outguess the search engines.

I doubt this will dilute the effectiveness of the keyword - what I would be more concerned about is a potential ranking penalty. I have seen this technique used in the past but hardly ever see it being effective these days. I would stick to crafting well crafted titles designed for the user in mind - keeping your keywords first in the title.

No problem! I'm so sorry for the inconvenience! I just pushed the remaining pending reports through, so I think you should be set, but if you continue to run into any problems, just let me know!

I'm not above re-visiting an old blog post, but like PeterM22 said, make your comment useful and relevant.  Sure, you're kind of using the blog for a backlink, but in exchange you're giving them some content that will pull in a long-tail visitor one day.  Or at least that's how I justify it in my head.

its a SEOmoz secret...

Sam, I strongly recommend you follow EGOL's advice in this case. The other suggestions are OK, but they run a distant second to EGOL's suggestion. Your site needs SEO attention before you add additional content or link building. Everyone has their own experiences and proceeds differently. I am a firm believer in taking care of your site SEO first, then adding content and link building. If you were to follow the other suggestions and add content / link build now, you are adding to a poor foundation as your site requires SEO attention. Your site is duplicated. You have a www version and a non-www version. http://habitmix.com/ and http://www.habitmix.com/ both are working URLs for your site. This is a major SEO issue as you have links built for both versions of your site. Fortunately, it is very easy to fix. There are other issues as well but this highlights my point which is you either need to be prepared to invest a lot of time learning SEO and applying it to your site, or acquire the professional services of an SEO then act upon the advice you are given. If you choose otherwise, I predict your $1000 will disappear and you wont be happy with the results. You have a great concept. Back it up with some solid SEO.

Yep, I agree with you there - never have trusted using &pws=0 logged in or out

Thanks everyone for your info.  Most of you seemed concerned about my onsite SEO and i had a professional SEO guy build my entire site from scratch using only html and no flash, etc.  The page is hand built and optimized for the key phrases far better than the competitor's page that is outranking me.  Here is my theory:  Google always gives you a boost about a month or so later after you build about 10 or 15 links to your site and then after a few months of no links you start falling again until you get new links. I think this flurry of new links has temporarily boosted my competitor and they will start falling again unless they start building new links.  I think Joe Ant and the other directories are well respected enough that Google will count these links but the pages in the directories are low enough page rank that they won't keep my competitor high in the rankings for very long.  Do any of you agree with me or have any opinnions based on your experience with this? I'd love to hear your experiences.  Thanks again for your input! Ron

Hi Dan, Create a Goggle Alert http://www.google.com/alerts Say the keyword you want to find is "motor" , you'd use: "site:http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ motor" at the term to search for.  google Alerts occasionally have some odd behavior (sending you old hits as new), but it's a widely used tool for your purpose. Ga4U7rbxvuJQ