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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.

I don't know if you saw this. Its very good timing that Rand wrote a blog post about this very subject!

Check it out, as always its a worthwhile read.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-citations-5-tactics-to-earn-links-for-your-local-business

Nope. iFrame is a link juice free zone.

I don't think it will hurt to do that, but there is probably no SEO value to doing it either.

It could be a good idea if you want to use an easily remembered URL in offline media and advertising thought.

Well thats a pretty easy experiment. And the results appear to be that a proxy is not necessary.

I searched for SEO firm on google.co.uk from my office in San Diego and from a UK proxy @ http://goproxing.biz

Here are screen shots of both SERPS. While not an extensive test it appears that US based IPs can get UK results when searching google.co.uk

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Eric,

Let me add that the keyword difficulty tool doesn't necessaraly apply to local search. A LOT of other stuff is looked at as far as local SEO.

You should check out David Mihm's bolg. It is one of the BEST resources available in local search.

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/

Citations are the "link" equivalent for local search. If you go to your places page, there is a section that says "more about this place" That is info google has scraped from other local sources that mention your businesses. They may or may not contain a link.

Looking at your citations and your competitors is a good area to work on improving your listing in Google Places.

Heres an image of a citation section.

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Oh and a strong listing you would be more focused on number of searches if you feel it's realistic you could rank for it.

Oh and a strong listing you would be more focused on number of searches if you feel it's realistic you could rank for it.

It depends how strong your citations are. If your new or ave a weak listing I'd pay more attention to competition?

This is great!!! I only wish I hadn't missed the main post before it got deleted!

SEO is dead because you have spent 1000's of man hours submitting to directories. Thats awesome.

I've read tons of books on baseball and watched hundreds of games!!!! I just dont understand why the Yankees refuse to pick me up? I'm a pro!

Well the more specific the search term (longer tail) the less likely it is that there is any data on that term. You cant be confident that a specific long tail keywords will produce anything if there is no search data on it.

IMO I find the idea of "targeting" specific long tail keywords kind of funny. By targeting head match keywords and generating content around those keywords you will naturally rank for long tail (high converting) keywords. But to think that I can anticipate the actual long tail terms seems unrealistic to me, unless it is something like a product specific "branded" search.

Does that make sense? Am I way off base here?

NEVER!

The only downside is the $9.95 you pay to keep the registration. The downside to turning it off are many. You lose the PR that is is passing, even if there is no traffic coming from that old domain it still passes PR! Keep it forever!

The data is there but not presented as nicely and requires some manual sorting.

Traffic Sources --> Search Engines --> Add Metric "Landing Page" or "Keyword"

There may be duplicates you need to account for if multiple search engines are sending traffic via the same keyword or to the same landing page.

If you only want to see it for a specific search engine and therefore not have to remove the duplicates do this.

Traffic Sources --> Search Engines --> Pick Search Engine --> Change Main Metric to "Landing Page" or "Keyword"

Hope that help. I really like the way they format it though. It is a nice report. I wish they allowed for more custom reporting on those metrics though like adding custom dates and export to PDF, etc.

As I understand it nofollow still dilutes your link juice even though it does not pass PR (theoretically).

Google made this announcement to combat PR sculpting in 2009. Here is a post from Rand about it.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow

Unlsee something has changed that I am not aware of you could link in an iFrame and Google will not see it, nor will it dilute your PR passed out.

I hold VERY little faith that the numbers in Google's keyword tool are accurate. I think it is a good indicator of traffic levels, especially if you compare it against other sources, like WordTracker, but I try to normalize the numbers and look at them as relative values. I dont believe the actual search volumes.

The SEOmoz tool used to be difficult to use but I find it to be much improved. It is a good snapshot of what types of site/pages are ranking for a keyword and saves me a lot of legwork.

I really like Rands post here. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research

The process is pretty labor intensive, but I think well worth it if your client is willing to pay for it.

If you can get a really good relevant domain then go with that, but a hyphenated domain is not really good. I personally have found that I would rather go with short and easy, given the absence of good keyword domains.

SEO can't be my only strategy, especially for a new site, so being able to tell people about my site verbally and them find it easily is more important to me.

DO NOT add nofollow to your navigation! It still dilutes the link juice you pass out, it just doesn't actually pass the juice. It is like drilling a hole in your boat. Totally wasted link juice, for internal pages that should be getting link juice. The wasted PR doesnt go anywhere when you do that, it's just wasted.

I noticed that too. Kinda sucks. SEOmoz doesnt want to comp too many memberships i guess. Kinda lame, good thing SEOmoz is awesome, willing to overlook it.

BTW it's funny that you noticed that, yet neglected to thumbs up your own post on a question about the very subject.

There is no search operator, but you can access the cached version in the search results. Just search "url:websiteurl.com" then click the arrow > and it will open up options for the page. There is a link to view the cached version. See the pic below.

The site: search operator works just like it does in Google on Bing!

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