Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your help.

How do I get my site featured on Google Local?

How do you transfer a wordpress.com blog to a self hosted domain. The domain name is purchased through GoDaddy and will be hosted through GoDaddy.

No problem,

I'm more than glad to help. Enjoy your weekend.

My advice is to have a like button and a link to your Facebook page. Most major brands do this. Reason is that the search engines, especially bing take into consideration your social media efforts, also having a bunch of legit likes are like votes from users and show new visitors that your site is respected.

That being said you do want to engage with your visitors on Facebook so having a link to your fb page is recommended.

This way you get the best of both worlds.

Here is a link to a great like and buttons for your site.

http://sharethis.com/

Let's look at it this way. If you have a site that is competing on a local level and you have 100 +1 and your competitors have none. It is my assumption that google will recognize this and rank you well for those in that same area that may have not +1 your site yet. Especially since google is focused on local results now days.

On another note, I would also try and get google reviews and yelp reviews. This can also help since the search engines sometimes add this info.

Hello Kristy, every industry is different. Some are easier than others. I would focus first on making sure your on site seo is optimized first with great content and code that makes it easy for the search bots. Then I would focus on a social media campaign to reach out to your online sphere of influence. This can also help out with getting links. In time you will rank better. Check out the links I posted earlier on 301 redirects and canonical.

I would advise on focusing on Google Plus for your local seo and all 4 major social media sites for your larger demographic sites. Google plus is highly used by google of course to personalize an individuals search. This means that you have a greater chance of ranking well when a person +1 your site. On another note Bing takes into consideration Twitter and Facebook. So I suggest you work all 4 with an emphasis on Google+.

I totally understand your hessitancy of messing with HTACCESS.

Here are some great links for PHP 301 redirects and canonical.

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php/

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

This will make life easier for you.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

I hope this helps and good luck

I would have strong call to actions prominantley displayed and contact info with lead generation forms.

Last I checked Analytics still gave insight on keywords.

If you use google analytics it will give you every keyword that a person uses to get to your site. You need to follow the reports. I have the app for my iPhone and iPad. I monitor my site daily. One of the best features is seeing how people get to my site.

Analytics shows me their operating system used

Keywords Used

Unique visitors

location of the search

and a crazy amount of data

Best part it is free.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Hope this helps.

There are no concrete rules when it comes to ratio of no follow / do follow but a rule of thumb is that you should have an 80/20 ratio of do follow versus no follow.

It would be suspicious if you only had do follow but wouldn't look right if you only had no follow.

As you already know, do follow links hold a lot of value. No follow links just gives the impression that your link building is natural.

That being said I would't remove the no follow links to get a better ratio. Just make sure your link building strategy focuses on natural white hat strategies

Hope this helps.

You should also have an XML Sitemap, make sure your site is search engine friendly, meaning careful with javascript and flash.

Make sure you have alt descriptions for images.

Depending on your site you can have more than one keyword optimized per page but don't go over board.

Loading time is important. Less than 5 seconds is important.

Create lots of unique quality content for your site and market them heavily on all social networks.

Create a Privacy Policy

Links in footer are not a good idea.

Hope this helps.

Can you provide a link to your site?

Best thing to do is empty your cache and delete all cookies and site data. Also you can set up private browsing in most platforms. You can go to google and go to web history and have it all removed and set it up as private browsing.

Safari also has a private browsing mode. Just click on Safari in the upper left hand corner and click Private Browsing.

Chrome you can do the same

Firefox also.

You have a nice looking site.

I would increase the Font size by 1pt or Pixel. It would make it easier to read.

Also some of the pictures look a little warped you might want to scale them in photoshop to make sure they render well.

Otherwise compliments on your site.

Buying Twitter Followers is not a good practice and actually against Twitters Policy. My advice is to cross market yourself on all the social networks and you will see that in time you will attract real followers. Buying Face Book Likes and Twitter Followers is like buying links. Seems easy but in the long run is not worth it.

Also most of these likes and followers aren't real and won't provide much value for you as a business or marketer. It's nice to have 10,000 followers but there is a different of genuine versus artificial.

You can also potentially hurt your efforts. I am sure that Twitter and other Social Media Networks are aware of this tactic and will in due time penalize sites for this practice.

Remember Panda and Penguin.

XML Sitemaps are important for search engines. It makes their job easier. Even if you rank in the #1 position today you still want to take care of the maintaining your position. Especially for the simple stuff.

Here is a link for an XML Generator

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

I hope this helps and Good luck.

You might have a duplicate content issue. You will want to check if you have the proper 301 redirect and a canonical command in the head of your code. If you don't have this set properly then the search engines will see the www and non-www versions of your site as duplicate. Also remember that the search engines also by default place this at the end of the url /

Here are two links that can help if this is the issue.

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-re...

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel...

Hope this helps. Good Luck