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Eric, you are absolutely correct - "and" and "or" are stop words and are ignored by Google. While doing the keyword research you will come across key phrases consisting of stop words because they were searched for. What Spencer has written is absolutely correct but i feel that here we are merging two different things. You can definitely use "exercise and vitamins"

Hmm, so you could be held to ransom for your own site? I'm not saying for one minute that the company is bad or anything but the problem with this type of thing is never about how much they charge, it's about the level of service... if staff changes or they take on a bigger client, or any number of things that result in you getting low service, what are you ever going to do about it in that situation? What if the site and CMS used is no good for SEO purposes, what if they don't allow changes and don't allow others to access the source code. What if things go wrong with hosting or anything else to do with the site? I would just get the whole thing built in an open source CMS by someone and hosted somewhere you have full access to if I were you.

Eric, Rand's post really carries weight due to how search engines evaluate content relationships, and topical focus.  It's inevitable that your page, with enough unique content on it, will be found for variations of whatever core phrase you target, so you might as well integrate a couple or a few highly related relevant phrases.  Not only does it make sense in regard to ease of optimization, but the fact that you're integrating a few additional highly refined phrases just reinforces the emphasis on the primary phrase, while not coming across as trying to stuff that single phrase. Search engines are very good these days at looking for those signals - the relationships of two topics.  Not just cross-page, but definitely on-page as well.

Added X robots tag into our headers on our development sites. Just a note - if you use apache and have mod_pagespeed installed , it wall conflict and pagespeed will remove the X robots tag. Begin Bad Bot Blocking BrowserMatchNoCase Googlebot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase bingbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase OmniExplorer_Bot/6.11.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase omniexplorer_bot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Baiduspider bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Baiduspider/2.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase yandex bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase yandeximages bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Spinn3r bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase sogou bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Sogouwebspider/3.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Sogouwebspider/4.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase sosospider+ bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase jikespider bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ia_archiver bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase PaperLiBot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ahrefsbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ahrefsbot/1.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase SiteBot/0.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase DNS-Digger/1.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase DNS-Digger-Explorer/1.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase boardreader bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase radian6 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase R6_FeedFetcher bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase R6_CommentReader bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ScoutJet bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ezooms bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase CC-rget/5.818 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase libwww-perl/5.813 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase magpie-crawler 1.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase jakarta bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase discobot/1.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot/v1.2.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot/v1.2.5 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase SemrushBot/0.9 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MLBot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase butterfly bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase SeznamBot/3.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase HuaweiSymantecSpider bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Exabot/2.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase netseer/0.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase NetSeer crawler/2.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase NetSeer/Nutch-0.9 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase psbot/0.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Moreoverbot/x.00 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase moreoverbot/5.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase SocialSpider-Finder/0.2 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MaxPointCrawler/Nutch-1.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase willow bad_bot Order Deny,Allow Deny from env=bad_bot End Bad Bot Blocking Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow" Begin Bad Bot Blocking BrowserMatchNoCase Googlebot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase bingbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase OmniExplorer_Bot/6.11.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase omniexplorer_bot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Baiduspider bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Baiduspider/2.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase yandex bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase yandeximages bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Spinn3r bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase sogou bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Sogouwebspider/3.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Sogouwebspider/4.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase sosospider+ bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase jikespider bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ia_archiver bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase PaperLiBot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ahrefsbot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ahrefsbot/1.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase SiteBot/0.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase DNS-Digger/1.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase DNS-Digger-Explorer/1.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase boardreader bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase radian6 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase R6_FeedFetcher bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase R6_CommentReader bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ScoutJet bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase ezooms bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase CC-rget/5.818 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase libwww-perl/5.813 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase magpie-crawler 1.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase jakarta bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase discobot/1.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot/v1.2.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MJ12bot/v1.2.5 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase SemrushBot/0.9 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MLBot bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase butterfly bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase SeznamBot/3.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase HuaweiSymantecSpider bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Exabot/2.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase netseer/0.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase NetSeer crawler/2.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase NetSeer/Nutch-0.9 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase psbot/0.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Moreoverbot/x.00 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase moreoverbot/5.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.0 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase SocialSpider-Finder/0.2 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase MaxPointCrawler/Nutch-1.1 bad_bot BrowserMatchNoCase willow bad_bot Order Deny,Allow Deny from env=bad_bot End Bad Bot Blocking Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"

Yeah I knew they were doing it with books, just wasn't aware about PDFs in general til Keri pointed it out.

I don't know on exact ratios, but I think it is effective to vary your anchor text. I believe that search engines expect handwritten content to have variation.

EGOL is right. I think its only a matter of time before thinks built on/thru social media begin to have a greater effect on SEO, but for now it's a terrific way to share content and gain natural links. Google sees all.

Great content can get some good attention through social bookmarking. As you probably know, most of the popular bookmarking services are no-follow until a link attains a certain level of "popularity".

Hi Mark, You might want to ask this in a new question. Currently, Q&A admins are the only ones who can sort questions by most recent activity, so your comment isn't going to show for people just browsing the recent questions submitted to Q&A.

Thanks. I am tasked with updating and refining our current process for my boss. We do use most of the common best practices...but we certainly want to continually enhance our process.

Better looks to prepare a comparative checklist on factors yahoo, bing and google give importance. Repeat the same on competitors will lead you to the final decision.

Hi Lora, Can you share what domain that is please? Casey

Thats a good tip. Beware of rewording products titles though. Especially for titles where people are searching for a specific branded product or will be searching for exactly the same title.

If you don't have proper pure HTML links, search bots can not be guaranteed to be able to properly crawl the site & discover all the content, search algorithms are less likely to be able to properly assess content relationships.  Proper HTML is fully capable of providing accessibility - it's a core function of HTML based navigation. If someone needs to use alternate means of navigating beyond a mouse, it's those very pure HTML links that are most likely to provide functionality to special browsers designed to meet accessibility guidelines.