Welcome to the Q&A Forum

To increase your Domain Authority, you need to build/earn/attract quality backlinks from other websites.

These resources will help you get started:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z

Eric,

If you are optimizing category pages, I recommend modifying your theme to display your category description as visible text on the page. This will allow you to have some optimized text on each category page. I believe there is a title tags plugin that will allow you to change the title tags of your category pages individually, also.

Adding rel=nofollow to a link won't affect your page load time.

I would not expect you to gain or lose any SEO benefit by nofollowing a link to your SSL certificate page.

Google seems to indicate that Pilotenausbildung is the correct version and the others are misspellings. I would optimize for Pilotenausbildung, but also make sure you sprinkle the other two versions in a few times onto your page.

It is partially duplicate content, yes. As long as you're creating a unique title and unique on page text for the new category, you should be fine, though.

When adding or editing categories in WordPress, there is a field called "description" (not meta description) with the label "The description is not prominent by default; however, some themes may show it." Your developer can modify your theme so the description text is displayed on the category page.

I think you should only use the subdomain tactic if you need to divide your lower quality content from your higher quality content. This may allow your higher quality content to rank while your lower quality content stays penalized.

See http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2011/07/wsj-wtf-google-panda-subdomains.htm for more details.

The most accurate numbers you'll get from Google Adwords are using the Keyword Tool set to exact match keywords.

Trevor,

One possible explanation is that their PageRank doesn't reflect recent changes (since the public number I only updated about once a quarter).

For a difference that large, though, I would strongly suspect that Google is discounting some of their inbound links that SEOmoz isn't.

If it is coded correctly then search engines can and will read the links in the dropdown menu.

If you are ranking for 101055p but not for 10-10-55-P, I would suggest that you ensure that both variations are:

• Present in the page title.
• Used at least 1-2 times in the page content.

Jack, Google ignores the keyword meta tag completely, and doesn't pay much attention to the meta description tag for ranking or relevancy purposes.

This blog has a lot of good info on how to optimize a page for your keywords: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

It is only really required on the non-canonical urls, but it's often placed on the canonical page also. It doesn't have to be, though.

Here are my thoughts:

1. I would not use http://www.redfin.com/cities/1/seattle?src=homepage as a template for a good page to emulate - it's just a page with a bunch of links. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future Google decides that page is not providing value to the user.
2. You probably want to optimize a single page for "Meeting Rooms Seattle" and "Seattle Meeting Spaces"
3. You should probably send users who search for "Meeting Rooms Seattle" and "Seattle Meeting Spaces" to the same page, too. I see no reason to have them see two different pages for those queries.
4. Be wary of creating separate pages for SEO purposes. If you have an existing page for Seattle that most users see, there is no reason to create a second page for SEO. In fact, it could hurt you - having two pages for the same basic purpose (for users to see seattle meeting rooms) will divide your social likes/shares and organic backlinks among two pages. (On the flip side, you could work on getting both pages ranked, but I don't think that is what you were asking about...)
5. If you don't want your text content pushing the listings down the page, put your textual content on the right side of the page or even at the bottom, like Zappos does.

Hope these are helpful.

The short answer is that you write the description when you advertise via Google Adwords. You will enter the description into Google Adwords when you setup your ad(s).

I agree with AWCthreads - you should either spend a lot of time learning about Google Adwords, or you should hire a firm with experience (PM if you're interested in how we can help you in this regard).

The SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool is great, but the 5 keyword limit is too small. I need a tool that will allow checking the organic competition level of 100's of keywords (to help in selecting blog topics). Anyone know of such a tool?

Aye.

Oh, and hey! I just noticed I know you from NOLA.

If users have to click from the landing page to the search results page to see the listings, that's an extra click = fewer people seeing the search results.

You could have two very similar pages - one with the extra text and images, and one without. Add a canonical tag to the one without so all the link juice goes to the one with the extra text and images.

Maybe submit a support ticket to SEOmoz to see if the 404's might have been false positives.

I would say it is likely that there isn't much local search volume, but there are other options. It's difficult to say with 100% certainty. You could run a quick Adwords campaign to see how many impressions you get, which can be a very good way to measure search volume (just make sure your QS and bid are high enough that your ads shows all the time).