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Miriam,

Exactly the kind of response I was hoping for!

We will impliment your suggestions.

A couple of questions:

1. I recommended Debi taking 4 of her pages and optimizing them for 4 different geographic keywords of suburbs/cities near her. I recommended that she add (for example "life coach Pheonix" and "nlp Pheonix" to that page's title, meta description and that page's content one time) with the home page being optimized for her nearest geographic location ("life coach Scottsdale" and "NLP Scottsdale"). How can you improve upon my suggestions, as Local SEO is not my strong suit.

2. I only believe in adding citations (or directories in organic SEO) - because of long term experience-  that the citation site looks like it will be there for the long haul, a permanent citation. I've had too many problems with losing backlinks and the penalties of that and I imagine Google is doing that with citations as well. Provided that I do this which I believe is best, how do we find citations that are there for the long haul?

I'm thankful for your comments Miriam. Take Care,

Bob

Hello,

A friend of mine has a google places account. Her website is

http://debidonner.com/

You can see her places account listed under

"life coach scottsdale arizona"

I've attached a screenshot of her categories.

I just added "NLP Coach" and "Personal Coach" today, so results are only for the other categories.

We're looking for ways to improve it. We've had 43 clicks for driving directions. 4 map clicks, and 0 website clicks (how good is that, by the way)

Thanks!

screenshot-google-places.jpg screenshot-google-places2.jpg

I've used OSE on the top 10 competitors. But I'll check out the competitive link finder.

Hello,

How would you recommend finding and gaining backlinks for

nlpca(dot)com

other than looking at the top 10 competitors?

Also, we could do an infographic but the owners don't have time to produce a lot of additional articles.

Thanks!

Hello,

A client of mine has a site that gives advice to people. It's moderately competitive. It's a content site.

Using Open Site explorer, I looked up competitor's top pages and backlinks, and there were things such as sites that were heavy on directories, sites heavily on editorial mension, sites on juicy topics that I don't want to cover, and the rest was pretty much junk.

Just so that you know, I only link build with quality websites that look strong, long term, have a nice design, are high quality, and are not a directory (with a few exceptions)

What's the standard way to link build with a site like this? We've got 7 articles of good content that is from me spending hours learning about the subject and using my skills as a life coach.

Right now I'm just adding quality content and social media. I am not a top expert in the field, but I'm learning as much as possible.

How do we link build?

Will it provide all of this even though we are just now adding it? What will it provide on information on drops in ranking since we're just now getting it set up in GWT?

Hello,

Should we add our site

nlpca(dot)com

to google webmaster tools?

Everything's very white hat but we do have a section on each of our 4 sites for "Our other Sites" that link to the others. It's been there for many years.

We're looking for clues as to why we've dropped in rank

Thanks!

Thanks Miriam!

What do you mean if "Google got mixed up about our address", and would that affect national rankings?

Hello,

I think that us targeting 2 different geographic locations (San Francisco, CA and Salt Lake City, UT) is negatively effecting the rank of some of our main keywords.

My evidence for this:

Since December our main keyword (NLP) dropped in ranking for nlpca(dot)com from about 19th to about 40th. This is about when we started to really target 2 different locations. Other main keywords dropped a lot as well, like the important term "NLP Training"

Also, our name, nlpca(dot)com indicates NLP California (CA stands for California in Google)

The other day we bolded a sentence with the words "Salt Lake City, Utah" at the top of our content and in one of Google's Databases (the one I was looking at) we dropped in rankings for "NLP California" where we used to be completely sitelinked (where we took up a lot of space at the top of the search). Also, we shot up to 1st on my datacenter for both "NLP Utah" and "NLP Salt Lake City". At the same time, our rankings for the term "NLP" dropped off the map. It has come back up, but we've also targeted California again.

A lot of our anchor text has the word "California" in it.

We're thinking about building a separate site for Utah and just linking to it from the California website when we need to.

Does it sound to you, in your experience, that targeting both locations in our case is what's causing a decrease in rankings?

Thank you!

Good catch Jennifer!

That was it.

Thank you so much,

Bob

Hi Jen,

Thanks for the response.

My javascript is correct, I used HTML5, and I played with all of the 'manage permissions' settings in facebook with no luck

Age set to 13+

It happens with any like box I install, but I am currently using the one from http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/

Our site is nlpca(dot)com

I've attached an image of our 'manage permission' settings

Don't know what else to try

manage-permissions.jpg

Vahe,

I accidentally clicked 'Good Answer' twice for EGOL

Your answer was informative. I will be sure and get you next time.

Our facebook like box, no matter which one I use, gives us a blank box when the person is not logged in asking to login to see the content

We've changed our age restriction to 13+ in facebook with no results.

Thanks!

I'm in Joomla.

Take a look at my attached image to see the error (making people log in)

Hello,

Using the following code to display a facebook like box

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-NLP-Coaching-Institute-of-California/187804434598142" data-width="198" data-height="320" data-show-faces="true" data-stream="false" data-header="true">

Getting "log in to see this content" when we're not logged in. Our Age setting is set to 13+

example image attached

Thanks

Hello,

I've got SEOMoz Pro

Can 2 of us use the search toolbar at once, or do we need to pay twice?

Thanks!

Bob

Brent, I used to be a web designer. I was always told that absolute positioning was usually bad.

Also, is the code at the top that's seen first or is it the data that's absolutely positioned at the top?

That's OK Brent. I hope you enjoyed Mexico.

Yes, please explain more.

Thanks again for your always excellent information EGOL

Let's talk about this one:

-- doing something naughty that makes google drop your pagerank as a warning or as a punishment

I recently was adding 4 keyword phrases per title (and one or 2 per URL) to many of the internal pages of nlpca(dot)com. Some of the keywords were a little off topic, but most were OK. Before I could continue and add the same keywords to the H1 and content, we got dropped from a 4 to a 3 in pagerank and we slipped 20 positions for our main keyword 'NLP' and others as well.

I'm trying to determine if Google dinged us for this, or if it was something else, and if we will come back up - it's all fixed - I'm using one or 2 appropriate keywords per page except for the home page, and I've added appropriate H1 and content (3 times per keyword phrase)

But we're not going back up.

Looking for some of your brilliant advice EGOL

Is pagerank on-site or off-site factors?