Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Bob, I'd highly recommend building out your profile on LinkedIn (if you haven't already) and then maybe even opting for the upgraded membership for a month or two. Lots and lots of SEO jobs there. Speaking from experience, the jobs posted on LinkedIn are far more "real" than jobs you'll find other places (like TheLadders). If there's a company you're particularly interested in, call them directly. I cold called the company that I currently work for, they hadn't even advertised for an SEO, and guess what? They created a position for me Nifty huh? One final suggestion, you're getting into a realm where working for an hourly wage is not really the best approach, IMHO (feel free to disagree). But, I think that if you are looking for a steady SEO job working for the same company or agency, you need to come up with your expected salary and benefits. Keep those close to your vest and don't put them on your resume. The right company will make the right offer Best of luck to you! Dana

You should be able to crawl the entire site without increasing the RAM, once you buy the paid version.

An objective based resumé should be for someone just graduating or early in their career. Change that top part to be skills based. 'Bob is a fast learner' - don't talk about yourself in the third person. Don't say it's been a long time since you used PHP and MySQL. I'm sure you could brush up on it pretty quickly if you needed to. Don't include 'references available upon request'. If they want them, they'll ask for them.

Hi Dana, Thank you. I thought of that too but these pages aren't linked to anywhere in the site anymore so am I correct that screaming frog won't find them?

Thanks Mike, I just checked using the seobook.com tool, they're 404s No, no link equity is lost by not 301ing them. GWT shows no crawl errors.

Maybe it's the repetition of keywords in the titles and H1 that are causing the drop in ranking, like a title structured (just for example) brown shoes, athletic shoes | sportsauthority.com where "shoes" is repeated.

What happened was I was using a URL rename textbox in the back end of our ecommerce platform. For the past year I have been renaming the URLs to fit keywords, sometimes renaming them a second time when the page drastically changed. I figured the cart was doing a 301 redirect every time I renamed the URL, but instead of doing that, it did a 301 redirect the first time, then each additional time I renamed the URL, it just left a blank white page on the old URL. Do I need to fix these blank white pages, or are they being filtered out by Google and won't harm the site's rankings? I don't know if a custom 404 page - I could do that - is a good idea since they were once category pages. A custom 404 would be a good idea but I'm wondering if I have to do more.

Hey Federico, Actually Yes, the word "NLP" will be used twice per title on MANY many title tags of the site. I'm concerned. Some future titles are: NLP Practitioner Certification Training | NLP and Coaching Institute NLP Master Practitioner Training | NLP and Coaching Institute NLP Hypnosis Certification Training | NLP and Coaching Institute NLP Articles | NLP and Coaching Institute

Hi Bob, It probably wouldn't be hard for Google to go after sites with over-optimized alt tags - although I'm not sure they would think it's worth their time. What I generally do with alt tags is try to describe the image and if possible, include keyword(s) naturally. If you're picking out relevant images for your site, this shouldn't be too hard, but I wouldn't try to stuff keywords into every little icon. For example, if you have a computer repair website and the main image on your homepage is a technician working on a computer, you could use "computer repair services" as the alt tag, or if you wanted to be really descriptive, "technician repairing computer" wouldn't be bad either. But you probably don't want to force a keyword into a phone icon next your contact information. The point of alt tags is to describe images that search engine bots can't see. So as long as you are being descriptive and not stuffing keywords for the sake of stuffing keywords, you should be fine. Hope this helps. Tim

Moz shows here: keyword 1 - keyword 2 | branding That's kind of what Andy did, but with more of a phrase or description over plain keywords. My only question left is, should I lean towards a sentence like that instead of listing keyword 1 - keyword 2 | branding like keyword 1 -  and keyword 2 in a phrase | branding (like Andy did) in light of future updates?

For your on-page strategy that you have described, ask yourself how each part of that benefits the reader. If it really doesn't benefit the reader and you are only doing it because you believe it might help SEO, then skip it.  Put keywords in the back of your mind, not the front when writing titles. Sometimes, that means not having the keywords at the front of the title as well. I looked at the example page you gave and the title looks a bit repetitive: "NLP Practitioner Training, NLP Practitioner Certification" To a searcher, that doesn't look very appealing in the SERPs. The repetition of "NLP Practitioner" could even keep the page from ranking as well as it could. Try something a bit more human, like "New NLP Practitioner Training Locations in California & Utah". That's more people-friendly, and if I gathered correctly from a quick skimming of the article, is a better description of what is on the page than simply two keywords stuck together. So think firstly about what a person will think when they read that title in the SERPs, THEN worry about where you can fit your keywords into it.  Really, this is how you should think about ALL of your content, too.  Write about the topic, and make it your priority to convey your message well to readers.  If you write about it effectively, you will probably use your keyword enough times. The idea is that instead of worrying so much about one or two keywords, you will be able to to get more visitors who were searching for a variety of things related to your topic, in addition to ranking better for that keyword. Not to mention you will run less of a risk of over-optimizing. If you haven't seen the Blueprint yet, do check it out: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank  The part about "Dream Your Theme" goes into more detail about the way optimizing for a theme or topic works.  I have also touched on this idea in a few different articles: http://kercommunications.com/tags/topical-optimization/

Hey Bob, This might be an older post from 2011, but Cyrus does a great job getting to the root of what you are searching for. I don't want to rewrite his suggestions, but let's say I have this page bookmarked to reference whenever I need it Understanding Google's freshness factor and how it affects search rankings Oh, and read Justin's post on this as well! Great insight into the technical Google patents and breakdown.

I won't be doing it.  The Search Engines have changed since the early 2000s. Do you have a .us or .info to protect your brand?  To match my domain authority and brand awareness from Google, they would have to tons and tons of work.  "Protecting your brand" implies to me that someone will be pretending to be you and sell stuff that you offer.  They'd have to outrank me for my keywords and brand awareness.  I don't see that happening.  EMDs could still be worth it but people naturally search for things vs typing in the exact domain name with correct extension.  (I know Google had an EMD update but that effect mostly thin content EMD)  If you are truly a "brand" with recognition, people know what outlets you have.  If someone is pretending to be BobGW.blog, I find it hard to believe they would be overtaking your efforts.  I just don't see it working out like it did early on in the web.  Brands matter now and microsites (though they still work) are going by the wayside.

Yes, this is a great video by Matt Cutts.  But I think he's mostly addressing how Google perceived people were trying to abuse their system, and what changes they made as a result. Basically, he's saying that a subdomain doesn't make a big difference to Google's search rankings, and that in the past, people would use subdomains so that they could get additional search ranking placements (one for the main domain, another for a subdomain).  He's made it clear that Google has put an end to this practice. What he doesn't discuss is whether putting content on a subdomain is going to affect how Google scores the site, and if it scores a subdomain separately. Most of the research out there still shows that the domain ranking is set differently for a subdomain vs. a subdirectory.  Perhaps this might change in the future, but the general school of thought is that if you put all of your inbound links, social media shares, and content development into one domain (www.domain.com), it will do better than splitting the effort (part goes to shop.domain.com and part goes to www.domain.com). Thanks!!

Hi, honestly, as long as the page you want to plant your link on does not allow many other doing the same, you should be good. If your content, back on your page gels well or is related in someway to the content of the linking page, it would be even better. To put it short, you should plant links on a clean site which in this case is and it does not matter how many such links you have. Such links will definitely have a positive impact to your SEO campaign. Another suggestion would be, you should take enough care about your link profile and make sure it looks natural with links coming in from different quarters rather than only from a single source (type). Good luck friend. Best, Devanur Rafi.

I don't think there is a hard and fast rule on that Bob.  So many things are involved--value of the page, value of the domain, follow/nofollow, velocity, the value of the non-guest post links, domain diversity, the future quality of those guest blog sites.  I'd hazard a guess that you're safe with 3/10 but I have nothing to go on for that number.  The thing is, as with all link building, if you put too much emphasis on any one kind of link, you risk of getting burned in some fashion down the road goes up substantially.

If people are clicking 'like' just for a discount rather than because they like what you are posting on FB they may not hang around. It's very easy for them to unlike once they have got the discount and they probably will if your posts are not good. Better to invest in writing great FB content and adding great pics then people will follow because they want to and these people will be worth more to you then any that click for money. They can even turn out to be brand advocates.

My pleasure any time

What would be a 100% white hat way to get the same results?