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I would:

• Keep the photo on Houzz
• Make sure you're linking from Houzz to your site (dofollow if possible)
• Keep working on your site, so you can rank about Houzz, then you'll have 3 first page rankings

That's a bad thing. Use an alt tag instead. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBLvn_WkDJ4

Yeh, at least 12 SEO years, if not 20, the way stuff changes.

I would imagine it hasn't changed a lot though, because SEOmoz still says that alt tags appear to carry a surprising amount of weight.

A few rules of thumb I use to target multiple variations of the same word:

• If possible, optimize your page for each variation
• That would include having each variation in the page title
• At the very least, include each variation in the page content
• Prioritize which variation is most important, and place it closer to the start of your page title
• Use each variation, and variations of the variations, as anchor text when link building

By the way, I would be interested in hearing about the differences you are noticing based on case sensitivity.

Subfolder is more ideal. Seems link juice may get passed better between subfolder and domain than subdomain and domain.

A few suggestions:

• Anything you can do to get the new domains indexed and a few links built to them well in advance of the redirect might be a good idea. I've never had it happen myself, but I've heard of a few cases of lost rankings when redirecting to a fresh domain.
• Once you do the redirects, try to get your most important links changed to the new domain. (Redirects to lose some link juice and/or decay over time.)
• Make sure you are redirecting each page on the old site to the most relevant page on the new site.
• I've never redirected every single URL on one domain to pages on two other domains. You might want to ask around to see if Google might frown upon that (I can imagine this is a tactic spammers might try to use to pass link juice to a bunch of domains). I'm sure someone else has done this and could advise.
• Any chance of keeping your current domain for one of the two sites?

I can think of a few options for the homepage:

• Don't redirect it. Create a splash page with a "which do you want" option and links to both domains.
• Redirect it to the domain that is most important to you.
• Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the highest number of users.
• Redirect it to the domain that will be most relevant to the keywords the homepage currently ranks for.

Hope this helps!

My reply was in reference to web directories, not link exchange directories.

I do not recommend that you do link exchanges based just on PR. If you want to exchange links, find a few very high quality sites that you can exchange links with that will offer value to your users, not just search engines.

I suspect that at least one of these statements is true to some extent:

• Contextual/in-content links have a little more weight than byline links
• Contextual/in-content links have more contextual relevance than byline links
• Contextual/in-content links are slightly less likely to be penalized or filtered than byline links

I can't prove my suspicions, and I'm not suggesting that byline links are all bad (far from it), but we know for a fact that Google takes "location on the page" in consideration now when calculating PageRank. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE

Matt Cutts has indicated that they use whois info to try to know when sites have been sold and 301'd for link juice. Other than that, I would not expect your whois data to affect your ranking.

I'd say one site per market.

So if your content is about 5 different types of sport cars, make 1 big site.

If your content is about sports cars and printers and fishing, make 3 sites.

Article spinning is certainly not the best way to achieve top rankings. In general, I would consider it "probably  spammy" depending on how it is done. Google is actually starting to crack down on article marketing in general a bit with the recent Panda/Farmer update. There are definitely better strategies to focus on.

That would be bad for SEO, and search engines would not likely index the content. It's possible, but not likely. I am working with a site that has done this exact thing, and the content is not indexed.

I would not do social bookmarks or search engine submissions.

I would:

• search for a few good quality industry or local directories to submit to
• try to get links from vendors, local businesses, etc. the client has a relationship with

"How do I know when a site has too many links versus the number of unique cblocks?"
There is no set number or formula. You want your links to be as diverse as possible, and C-class IP blocks is one metric that matters.

"Is this the total number of unique cblocks on the web or am I using the tool wrong?"

There are many more than that. Not familiar with the tool, but it may be a limitation of the tool. It looks like it uses Yahoo backlink data, which is limited to 1,000 links.

SEOmoz has a ton of features. Here are two good places to start:

Beginner's Guide to SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Overview of SEOmoz tools: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/seomoz-pro-tool-overview

We have a client site (a dentist) that has 10 locations and 20+ services (braces, teeth whitening, cosmetic dentistry, etc, etc.). We're trying to figure out the ideal approach to optimally cover all their locations and services, but each option we consider has drawbacks:

1. Optimize service pages for service name + each location name (or at least the biggest location names), with service name and location names in the title tag. That results in a too long title tag, plus possible user confusion, since they are searching for "braces richmond" but the title tag lists other cities, some of which are in a different state.
2. Optimize service pages for service name + each location name, but don't include the locations in the page title. This is the current option being used, but it appears to be hurting the rankings at least a bit not having the location name in the page title.
3. Create a page for each service + location combo. That will be 200+ pages, which will mean the pages will be deeper in the site, with less link juice.
4. Create new domains for each location/state covered. But then we have to start over building link juice.

How have other sites dealt with this? What has worked best and what hasn't worked?

Google makes updates to its rankings and algorithms daily. That being said, SEO is a long term game played over weeks and months. If your site is new, expect it to gain rankings over a matter of months.

Sure. Here goes. Of course, keep in mind that for more enterprise/corporate situations, the options we use may not be as good of solutions. I think that for their target market, Vocus probably works very well, I just think it's not for us at that price point.

Based on the demo I saw, here are the main features included and how we fulfill them:

• Listening Platform - Google Alerts for super basic stuff. We use a platform one of our clients has, and there are other platforms available for low cost.
• PR Distribution - On the rare occasion we need mass coverage, we just pay the per release cost. Most of the time, it's individual outreach that gets us the best results anyway.
• Facebook Apps - Some of these might be of use, but not the custom page one. We custom design Facebook pages. I think Wildfire has some free ones.
• Press Requests - They are just offering a slightly premium version of HARO, which you can use for free.
• Recommendation Engine - I currently don't use any platform that automatically recommends people to connect with. You can use FollowerWonk, Twitter search, etc for this, though.
• Sharing Options - TweetDeck, browser toolbars, and a host of other applications are available to make sharing easy and even schedule posts.
• Reporting Dashboard - We use SEOmoz features, Google Analytics, etc to do the reporting we need.

Just wanted to second basically everything Cyle said. Your design is great, but your sales copy and messaging are very generic and vague - you need copy that grabs visitors attention and tells them exactly how you're going to help them get what they want or need.

As Cyle said, conversion/bounce rate optimization is not a quick fix - it's working with a lot of different factors and testing changes to improve results.

That's just a fraction of a percent difference.

Google's count of results is not that accurate. You can demonstrate this on smaller sites. Google might say "200" results but once you start digging down its only 154 for example.

The count of results is only an approximation of the actual number.