Welcome to the Q&A Forum

"Welcome to SEO, the industry where everything's made up and the points don't matter!" Realistically there's no 'international standard' as everybody does their keyword research slightly differently. If you're looking for a step by step I recommend starting with the SEOmoz guide - http://guides.seomoz.org/chapter-5-keyword-research - there are a list of tools in there that most of us use. 10 steps to advanced keyword research - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research And an alternative approach (though still similar) from Lisa Barone - http://www.searchengineguide.com/lisa-barone/five-steps-to-effective-keywor.php Read these, combine and compare and you should be able to come up with something that is workable for you.

I have heard that Google does indeed use characters after the 65 character display limit in its ranking algorithms. Is this true and does it therefore make sense to have title tags longer than 65 characters, so long as the first 65 characters (or 60 in many cases) are a complete thought on their own? Here is a page describing this strategy: http://www.seologic.com/faq/title-tags.php#limits

Depends how competitive, but around 3 days if you're lucky and the search matches Usually I only see our stories in there for 1 or 2 days tops, but then again smaller and smaller sites run with the story and our results get replaced with the same story but more recent updates. If you become the authority on that story (ie, lots of links and references) I would imagine you could stay in there for longer, but alas, never seen it.

Thanks for the link Gary. I watched the video on misspellings; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seomoz-pro-video-tips I think this would be a good way to capture variants of the part number search

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered? Thanks!

Geotargeting is not uncommon and the search engines are pretty good at negotiating sites using it, depends on your implimentation though. We use geotargeting of users on our site to send users to /country/ based on their IP, with a few conditions. Users are only redirected when coming to the homepage, either as direct or from search. If a user from France is coming to the main dot com we'll send them to the /fr/ site automatically. If the user tries to get to the homepage via a search engine we redirect them to the appropriate language site. This is because the main dot com often shows up above or near the /country/ sites in search, especially for brand terms. If a user has been given a subpage for a search (e.g. site/cat/page/) then they won't be redirected as we assume the search engines have done a decent enough job at matching them to a page they want. Users/bots can override the routing. Users can internally navigate to other languages through the language menu. If we send somebody in France to the French site, but they only speak English, instantly forcing them back to the /fr/ site will just frustrate them. Link to the other language sites on your pages and check referral headers, if internal do not redirect. All language folders are specified in WMT and it definitely works. So Google comes in to the dot com, in the header there is a link to the /us/, so they'll crawl down that link getting both versions of the sites in their index. You biggest challenge here is getting the /us/ ranking above the dot com in the USA, which will require some creative link building Make sense?

Hi Jennifer, Rand just made a comment today on another question in Q&A that addresses some of the differences between the figures from OpenSiteExplorer and Magestic. http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-there-is-no-even-close-correlation-between-majesticseo-data-and-open-site-explorer Hope this helps!

Hi Barry, As I said in my response, I used tools to check for the headers returned by the URL, the same information that is returned to search engine spiders. There no way to know how the PHP script is made, for me, or for a search engine spider, as the PHP is executed server side and all you get back are the HTTP headers and content. The url doesn't contain any id, it's simply the redirection url that is passed to it so the script probably look like this : header('Location: '.$_GET['url'], true, 301); ?> If the redirect.php file was receiving an ID instead of a direct URL, it would probably look more like this : // stuff to connect to the database here include('connect.php'); //a long line not well constructed that does a lot of stuff $url = current(mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query("SELECT url FROM urls WHERE id=".(int)$_GET['id']))); //redirect to the URL from the database  header('Location: '.$url, true, 301); ?> It could be a way to trick user into thinking that the link is passing juice by doing a 301 redirect but blocking the file using robots.txt wich is not the case, there's also no Set-Cookie. It is more likely to be a way to get statistics about what are the most popular links. For example, redirect.php probably add an entry to a database each time the url is reached to track the number of visitors sent to a particular website. I hope my answer will help you understand the use of the redirect.php and the way it works. If you still have questions, do not hesitate to reply to my response. Best regards, Guillaume Voyer.

Don't forget that the description has no effect on the SEO. Tis is just for those reading the search results. I would suspect that with a site the size of amazon, descriptions will be made up from algorithms, or a description pulled from a database. Might even be something stock that the manufacturer supplies them with. Regards, Andy

Shailendra, Its a common thing when a bad link causes a devaluation. But, Google doesnt penalize for just 1 bad link, its a bad neighbourhood that it mostly targets. There is very little that you can do at this point of time. It maybe a good idea to keep a lookout for your GWT messages.

I have over 250,000 links into my site that I did not ask for, did not buy, and frankly, do not want. Some are from pages covered with links, some are from what look like "normal" websites. I'm afraid these crazy links are going to destroy my credibility with google. My site has been up since 1997, and I've never had anything like this happen before. If I follow your argument correctly, you are saying that I should be blacklisted? But I did nothing NOTHING to get these links in. There are links from about sixty sites into my site - links I asked for and from high quality sites. The rest are all just there, I had nothing to do with it. Any expertise you could offer would be deeply appreciated. I wake up having nightmares about these links.

No, I don't know any sites you can use to get your infographic 'noticed'. However, in situations such as this, you shouldn't feel confined to this single tactic. Justin Briggs made it a point to call out at least four other options in his post on How to Build Links with Infographics. I highly recommend you read the post and pay close attention to the 'Getting Links' section toward the end of the post. Best of luck!

There were several sessions at SMX West 2011 on Facebook, and also some at SES NY (happening this week) regarding facebook advertising that might offer some insights as to how to advertise effectively.Outspoken Media and Bruce Clay, among others, are covering the conference and their blog posts can give an overview of some of those sessions. Also, check out aimClear for some of their posts on how to use Facebook demographic targeting. http://outspokenmedia.com/blog/ http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/ http://www.aimclearblog.com/category/facebook-demographic-research/

Hi Pashmina, How does Website A is a redirect to Website B and can it has one page indexed? If Website A has a 301 PERMANENT redirection to Website B, then I think it should stay permanent. If Website A has a page indexed, then I presume it is not a 301 redirection.  In that case, moving the content and making a 301 redirect from Website B to Website A would be a good idea in term of SEO. But, you shouldn't only think in term of SEO, you should also think in term of branding and usability. What is the domain name that reflects your brand? relates to your products? is easier to remember? Best regards, Guillaume Voyer.