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Ah, good to know.  I found this because my old fraternity (yeah, yeah, shutup) at Rutgers has all of their pledges using it, which I thought was super creative and a great idea to brand themselves on campus.  These kids are getting smart!

Exactly.  And don't forget to check your analytics to see how those keywords are converting, too!  These are the little details that separate good keyword research from great keyword research.

Nope, and you won't find that kind of tool anywhere, the reason being that each page on your website probably ranks for hundreds of extremely long-tail keywords and keyphrases.

The best way to see the information you're looking for is to take all keywords that sent you an organic search visit for a given time period in your analytics and run them through a rank checker.  You can then cross-check this data with the Google Keyword Tool to figure out which keywords are getting significant traffic.

This can be a great way to spot "low-hanging fruit" - keywords that you are ranking for naturally and are sending some traffic, but might just need a little push to get your page to the #1 spot.

I stumbled across Twibbon today - it's a service that basically creates an easy way for you to brand your Twitter/Facebook pictures, and to allow others to promote your cause as well.

I'm not sure if I'm late to get on board here or if this is a relatively new thing, but it seems pretty cool.  I can definitely see this really working out for promoting philanthropic causes.  It would also work really well for events - imagine if every speaker at an SEO conference used Twibbon to brand their Twitter/Facebook?  I think it would really help with branding, for both individuals and businesses.

301 redirects are indeed the proper way to restructure URLs, and adding these shouldn't hurt you.  This is confirmed by a post by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable a few years back.  The one thing you do want to make sure to avoid is "chaining" 301 redirects, as noted by Matt Cutts.

Right that's what threw me off as well, and that's why I ruled out the possibility that it was pulling the site titles from the ODP.  Here is Google's explanation of how they choose Title/Description snippets.  I suppose they could just be pulling it from the content of the website and writing their own, but I've never really encountered that happening without it being related to an external link source.  Strange.  Hopefully another SEOmozzer can provide better insight.

I can't be sure without digging into your site a bit, but Google has been known to use the anchor text of strong links to your website in place of your title tag, on some occasions.  This is discussed in this YOUmoz post, Distilled Stole My Page Title.

Could this be the cause?

Phew, what a relief.  I was half-expecting an angry mob to bust my door down.

I completely get your point, and you're right, best-on-the-web content does rise to the top, even if you don't necessarily give it a big nudge in the right direction.

I agree too that if you've got some traffic to work off of already, your time should be spent focusing on your content.  The problem here is the have-nots.  If you've got some traffic, you can put up a post, blast it out to Twitter, and move on to writing.  From a small business perspective, it's just never that easy.

Interestingly enough, in the back of my head, all I kept thinking was that while my response is how I truly feel, I could definitely be creative enough to get Joe the Plumber's website to blow up on Reddit if I had to.

Thanks for being cool about it!  I'd love to see this quality of debate on these boards more frequently.

Note: I edited out the first two lines as they were sort of disrespectful.  I originally put them there to get a rise out of people, but on Dr. Pete's advice, I removed them.  I didn't want people to read my response and get a bad taste in their mouth from the first couple of lines and have that taint their opinion.

I'd buy that wristband.  Just sayin...

I have nothing but respect for you and your opinion, EGOL.  I've said that countless, countless, countless times.  And obviously I believe in the power of content, and that's always the first recommendation I make to anybody - as I did above, by recommending content-based link building strategies.

Don't get me wrong, your response is not bad advice - not by any means.  But I do have my qualms with it.

A.  It's kind of misleading.  We get it - your content is amazing and it attracts back links.  My qualm here is that I don't think that's something that everybody can replicate easily.  In order for that to work, you need either a strong community, significant influence on a social network like Twitter, the good fortune of working in an industry that really embraces social bookmarking and blogging, or a lot of elbow grease.

Even if Joe the Plumber writes an amazing resource guide to fixing any plumbing problem in the world, he's still going to have to market it to bloggers (that he doesn't have connections with), on his social media profiles (that nobody follows), and on social bookmarking sites (where nobody cares, because it's not a picture of an adorable kitten).  He's still going to have to work hard to get links to that content, by networking - which IS link building and IS hard work.  Just creating great content isn't quite enough, and to suggest so is misleading.

B. It's kind of lazy.  Take the above poster, for instance.  We both recommended that the right approach here is to write great content - you by saying so directly, and me via recommending content-based link building strategies and linking to the Professional's Guide to Link Building.  But as you can tell, speed of link acquisition and cost minimization are key concerns for the original poster.  Whose response do you think provided more value here?

I just kind of feel like if all you do is recommend that people write great content, and you don't qualify that by saying that you're still going to need to market that content, or by tailoring your response to fit the concerns of the original poster, at what point does this advice lose its value and just become more noise?

I don't mean to disrespect you in any way.  I've seen you give amazing, amazing advice more times than I can count.  And I know your time is valuable, and like the rest of us, you do this for free.  And I respect that.  I just felt as though I should share my opinion on this, because I know that for every thumbs down this post gets, there are going to be 20 people who completely agree with what I've said, even if they don't have the balls to say so publicly.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, OP - I just can't help but speak my mind.  And for those that don't know me, I'm not some random jerk off the street that's complaining about writing great content.  I try really hard to help out everybody I can on these forums, and I mean well.  All I'm trying to do is make the SEOmoz Q&A boards a more helpful place.

This is an extremely difficult question to answer without spending some time on your website and figuring out exactly what you are doing wrong, so the most I can do is point you in the right direction with some articles that have proved very useful:

• Understanding Panda: Why Panda Is More of a Ranking Factor Than an Algorithm Update (SearchEngineLand)
• **Recovering From Panda: **10 Tips For Beating Google Panda (Pocket-Lint)
• **Life After Panda: **Link Building in a Panda's World (Blueglass)

In general, the biggest issue causing problems for most websites is duplicate content.  Not external duplicate content (your content on someone else's website), but rather internal duplicate content (multiple versions of your content on your website).  The rel="canonical" tag is going to be your best friend if this is the case.

Generally speaking, there is no way to automate linkbuilding and get high quality links.  The links that you really want to be getting are from relevant, authoritative websites in your niche.  There are a number of ways to get these high quality links, particularly content-based link building strategies.  Any links that can be automatically built, such as directory submissions, forum profile backlinks, and blog commenting, are typically of minimal value.

That's not to say that you can't scale high quality link building, however.  Ross Hudgens wrote a great post a while back about scaling SEO by eliminating pain points.  Some of the advice in that article is greyhat, or borderline blackhat, but the general message is very valuable.  Obtaining high quality backlinks is always going to be a time intensive process that requires hard work and creativity, but you can certainly make the process smoother, easier, and more efficient.

There are a number of other great resources around the web that discuss scaling link building:

• Scaling Link Building - Whiteboard Friday (SEOmoz)
• Scalable Link Building (Distilled)
• How To Scale B2B Link Building Across An Organization (SearchEngineLand)

Ana -

Great question.  You certainly want to address this issue, especially in the post-Panda world we live in today.

If you have the ability to re-write your product descriptions and make the pages as unique as possible, this is the most attractive option.  Think of it as a way to re-target your product descriptions to sell to wholesalers.  The only downside to this is the potential for keyword cannabilization, although you could theoretically target different keywords for wholesalers than you do to individuals.

If you don't have the means to make that happen (read: thousands of products), you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag.  This will let Google know which page is the "right" page for them to be looking at.  If the majority of your web conversions from organic search are retail, then perhaps the retail pages should be the "canonical" version, or vice-versa.

Your competitor probably built this expressly for SEO purposes.  For that reason, they're probably not going to link out to you, no matter how smooth your link request approach is.

Competitive link research can be a great way to find links, but you don't want to go after all of them.  Go after their highest quality and strongest links - the ones earned not by any specific linkbuilding action, but by editorial accumulation.  Aside from those, go after the easy targets - directories, blog comments, resources or links pages, and blogs.  If they don't have any of those, and they're all manually built crap like the example you sent, then maybe your competitor's backlinks aren't the right place to start.

BONUS TIP:  To maximize your competitive link building success, use SEOmoz's Competitive Link Research Tool to find websites that link to multiple competitors.  The idea here is that this weeds out websites that are affiliated with any one specific competitor, including links like the above example that were built manually.  What you are left with is a list of websites that are known to link to websites in your niche and typically aren't commercialized so there's no real incentive not to link to your website.  These websites are a great place to start.

The best way I know of to truly research your market and figure out which keywords will convert well is to use Google AdWords.  Aaron Wall wrote a great post a while back about this topic: Market Research Using Google AdWords

Aside from that, you can also look at whatever traffic you are currently getting in your analytics.  Although this will obviously not be a complete picture of all of the opportunities available to you, you can certainly mine the data for some sort of actionable information.

Oftentimes, the short-tail keywords are not the ones that will work best for promoting your website.  There is frequently a tradeoff between traffic and conversion rate.  Short-tail keywords get tons of traffic, but they don't always convert well.  Conversely, long-tail keywords might not get much traffic, but if you choose specific targets, they can convert exceptionally well.  Obviously your strategy is going to involve targeting a mix of both.

Why give that link juice to YouTube?  Lord knows, they've got plenty of it.

Take advantage of the links you received and make them benefit your main website.  Create a landing page on your main site featuring some of the best submissions embedded on the page, and include a link to your channel if visitors want to see even more videos.  Then, 301 redirect the microsite to the landing page on your main website in order to get the link juice to pass through to your primary domain.

The only reason you'd want to redirect your microsite directly to the YouTube channel is if you don't have a main website and your YouTube channel is your main presence online.  Even then, though, I'd generally opt in the direction of leaving the microsite up and embedding some featured videos on it.  You can certainly make a page on YouTube rank decently well for a keyword, but given the lack of control you have over on-page elements, it's much more difficult than optimizing a website that you own.

Most SEOs have the opinion that exact match domains are a bit too powerful in Google's current algorithm, and I think most of us would bet our money on this tactic falling out of favor in the future.  Although admittedly, it has stuck around for longer than I think most of us would have expected.

Branded traffic, on the other hand, isn't going to be affected nearly as much by any sort of algorithm change in the future - and it converts insanely well.  This should be the primary goal of anybody with a business.

Of course generic traffic is important, but in my opinion, it's not important enough to put building my brand in the backseat, or to affect the way I choose a domain for my company.

Now if this was an affiliate website or some kind of blog that I was launching in order to gain traffic from advertising, my opinion might be different.  But because this is a company, and presumably one that you intend to be around for a long time to come, I think branding is the most important consideration.

If I had a sweet generic domain name in addition to my company domain, I might consider making a small microsite expressly for linkbuilding purposes, although I have to emphasize here that the vast, vast, vast majority of your effort should go into working on your primary domain.

T - Just like Gyi, I do my best to keep all of my clients in the loop about what our options are, exactly what we are doing, how it is being done, and the results we have achieved (yes, even when they're negative, although thankfully those situations have been few and far between).

A - Quite simply, I just be myself.  Yes, sometimes this means that when I'm explaining something to a client, my response might be a long, drawn out extended metaphor about fantasy football or hip hop, but either way, at least I'm being me.

G - This starts with my time here on this Q&A board, and on other outlets like Quora or SEOchat.  Likewise, everybody in the industry has that friend or family member that has a billion questions, and I do my best to be patient with those requests as well.  I can't tell you how many times an innocent happy hour has turned into a full blown SEO strategy session.

F - I try to get to know all of my clients personally.  I don't want to be the guy that drops in once a month with an invoice.  I'm the guy that's invited to the company holiday party and drinks the Vice President of the company under the table.

E - I try to be flexible.  This is a big one when it comes to working with the team members of my clients.  The last thing you want is to have a client's programming or PR team think you're stepping on their toes, so you need to remember to see their viewpoint, and consider their job.  The world doesn't revolve around SEO (as much as we would like to believe it does), and in the business world, sometimes you have to make compromises and work in situations that aren't ideal.  At the end of the day, we're all just people on the planet Earth, and you need to be able to have some give and take.

E - I try to go above and beyond, be it with the information I give out for free on forums like this, the blog posts I create to help educate people, the work I do for my clients, or even the proposals I create when I'm talking to a prospective client.  Being exceptional pays dividends through and through.  I've converted people I gave free advice to into clients countless times, and by working hard and offering a great product, I've managed to enjoy a high customer retention rate.  Work on every campaign as if it is your own!

I couldn't find it anywhere in the settings.  I believe you just have to start a new campaigns.  They're going to have to re-crawl everything, but they have a starter crawl that works pretty fast nowadays, so you can get going somewhat quickly.

It's not the prettiest blog, but I've always found Matthew Umbro's PPC advice to be solid.

Other PPC-related blogs that I like:

• http://www.gordonchoi.com/
• http://www.semgeek.com/

Also, don't forget about the PPC categories at SEOmoz and YOUmoz.