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Thanks! I've checked their website and I saw that they only work with long-term projects, rather than this kind of short-term things. Should I try to contact them anyways?

Traffic Travis has a nice  and easy to use free windows app that does what you want (for low volumes). http://www.traffictravis.com/  you'd be better off using a proxy service with it though.

Google made over 500 changes to their algorithm last year. Each change affects different sites in different ways. I would be more concerned if your sites rankings were not fluctuating to be honest. There is nothing weird, unusual or wrong with bouncing around the serps. Just keeping doing tried and tested seo techniques and you will be fine.

Great answers thanks. In terms of where to link to, is it necessary to divide equally between different pages on the website, or does it help for SEO purposes to have lots of links to one particular page?

You do often see that if the engine knows about the URL but isn't able to crawl the page. It should eventually drop out. If you have control of the site you can also go into GWT and request removal of that URL from the index, since it's already returning a 404.

Hi Gemellak, Yes i have scrape box and am tryng my best to find the top 100 but using: custom footprint: site:google.co.uk and the keyword yields a mish mash of results which dont tally to the Goolge top 100. Any ideas on a search operator that may work I know that the Google advanced URI is  &=num100 but i cant seem to get this working inside scrapebox any help is much appreciated. If i cant get scrapebox working Im going to have to write my own script Regards Christian

Great thread! I just submitted one with Marketwire, it was much cheaper and I know they have strong contacts. i will likely use PR web next time and I'll let you know which I found better. I think it also depends on your industry and what you are looking to get out of the press release. Marketwire is great for Canadian offline media distribution if that's what you're looking for.

To get into google news you have to convince them that you are in the news business, that you are an "organization", that you are publishing original, news-worthy content and that you are not a guy or two trying to toss pages into their news SERPs. If you have a simple press release getting it into google news will involve going straight to a website that already appears in google news and getting them to feature your story.   A very small number of press release sites can get their releases into google news.  Check with them before you submit to be sure that they can make it happen.

If you want to go with more of a shopping cart sort of feel you could emphasize products carried within the brand and not really break away from general site navigation like: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Shop-by-Brand-Roxio/ci/4/N/4294255798/phd/4291243286 Tiger direct uses a brand splash image, common product categories, and then products as seen here: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/campaigns/campaigntemplate.asp?CampaignID=517 Walmart's brand shopping page is very splash heavy: http://see.walmart.com/lego/ Dunno if I'm moving far afield of what you want to do with your site in general, but that should give you a few ideas to throw around.  I came up with the BH Photo example from memory and the other two via a "Shop by brand" search in Google.

thanks

Hi, I wouldn't worry too much about them, but you can mark them as nofollow and exclude them via the robots.txt ... as they are on so many pages throughout the web, I'd assume Google & Co do kind of ignore them when putting weight on different links ...

Poor conversion can be cause by many things... - unprofessional copy - high prices - high shipping - bad checkout procedure - out-of-date merchandise - difficult to navigate site - great offers by your competitors - low quality traffic Consider the above and compare your site, your offer, your prices and your conversion funnel to what your competitors are doing. There is a lot more to making a sale than getting good ranks.

I tend to agree that you can't take everything Google says at face value, at the end of the day they're still a company and have their own interests to defend. You indeed could develop several other KW-specific domains (assuming you had the domain names), but I think the big reason not to is that it would take a lot of time and money to get peripheral sites to the point where they compete with 12 year old domains with thousands of quality links. IMO this time is better spent on your own site on something other than SEO - like marketing, which has its own SEO benefits.

I think that if you have an important, impressive, well-known brand that you can boost your SERP click through rate and conversion rate by including your brand in the title.  However, for a relatively unknown brand like mine there might be more valuable things to include in the limited title tag space. These might include: - free shipping - kick ass price - free ebook - fast delivery - biggest selection - free beer - a couple of extra keywords to pull traffic All  of these can elicit clicks and put the buyer in the mood to do what I want him to do when he gets on my site. I am not out to compete with Microsoft on branding.  I am out to get visitors onto my site and covert them - so I believe that in my situation the title tag space can be more wisely spent.

Cindy, I come up against this challenge frequently.  The solution I've come to rely on for a few years is to swap out the location for the next bigger location closest or enveloping your target location. For example, if I am looking for "Restaurants Sausalito", and if no results come back for that or any of the variations I think are most relevant, I expand it to "Restaurants Marin" (Marin County is where Sausalito is).  Or I'll step it up to "Restaurants San Francisco Bay area", the immediate region. Once I go through that exercise, I'll take the top X phrases that come back and just to be sure, go back and swap in my ultimate intended location. This process serves a couple purposes. 1.  It establishes a base that legitimately works even when there are language nuances across various regions.  For example, I've found that people do in fact search differently from one geo-location to another even here in the U.S. for some things.  And this method targets the words that are used in the immediate location surrounding my target, which is more accurate than non-location based guesses in some situations. 2.  it also helps me target the larger region if it turns out there's search volume for that larger area that I would have missed had I only optimized for the smaller location.  So I do quite often optimize with the larger area in my content. You'd be surprised sometimes at the number of people who search based on those larger areas.  And if nobody seems to be searching for "Restaurants Sausalito" (or very few are), then I get those bonus eyeballs from those searching for "Restaurants Marin" or "Restaurants San Francisco Bay Area" or "Restaurants Bay area". Another method I use includes doing actual searches to see what comes back in the Local Result set when I leave off local identifiers in Google.  I not only look to see what sites are optimized for Google Places, but what sites spend money on PPC specifically targeting that local area.  The more PPC competition in the local results, the higher the potential value for a phrase that doesn't even include the local designator.

Hey everyone, I wanted to let you know that I passed along these suggestions some time ago to the team. I can't say a timeline on getting anything implemented, but it is on our list. Even without these features, you guys are awesome with the way you're keeping up on things. Thanks so much!