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Thank you for your advice. I have heard from some companies that changing hosts changes the ip address and this can have an impact. My key issue is that i need a 301 redirect because both the www and non-www version come up as two different sites. I have told google and bing through the webmaster tools which I prefer and I've put in the canonical link tag in the head of my doc but I hear it still needs a 301 redirect.

The best way to be close to "real rankings" is to use Chrome with incognito window. BUt again like you said there are additional factors that it looks are becoming more and more important that you can not reproduce - location, google plus circles and so on. Cheers.

My site is hosted by Yahoo and I don't have htaccess, what do I do in this case?

Is this solved Joel, I had a similar question that related to Rich Snippets and was to post the answer but justsaw the date?

Hey Joel, you got some nice suggestions from others just adding on to that, you can also make links to your Google plus profile page. That increase your PA (Page Authority). This helps transfer the link juice back to the blog links or other custom links that you have in your profile. You should read Mike's blog regarding this-  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-prepare-for-authorrank-and-get-the-jump-on-google Further, you can add your website link in your Profile introduction section of Google plus profile (and you can also chose the anchor text as you like). This will be a good followed link to your site !!

Hi Joel, Without actually being able to see your specific business, the cause of your lack of first page rankings is hard to judge. Some things a Local SEO would look at in reviewing your situation might include: Your proximity to the centroid of business (are you located within the main cluster of businesses on Google Maps for your key search phrase or are you far away from the cluster) Potential existence of duplicates. This comes up frequently in industries like real estate, law and the medical field because multi-partner practices took Google up on their guidelines that stated you could have 1 Place Page for the main practice and a unique Place Page for each partner, as well. This has all gone to heck now, and no one I know is recommending doing this anymore because of Google's tendency to merge similar listings, sapping rankings, and also, their official refusal to remove duplicates. See: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/hot-topics-catalyst-blog-archived/8-google-places-duplicates-�-have-doctor-dentist.html and http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search-general-discussions/861-dr-dupes-google-local-user-edits.html So, that may be an issue affecting your ability to rank. The consistency of your citations across the web. If you work for a mutli-partner firm, there is a chance their may be mixed up details out there about you or your partners. Lack of consistency can definitely hamper rankings. Your domain age. If other firms are older than yours (web-wise) they may have a slight-to-moderate edge over you, even though you are making greater efforts than they are. Also, real estate is one of the toughest verticals, particularly if you are in a populous area (a big city). It can be tough for newer competitors to break into established SERPs that already have a ton of strong businesses in them. Those are a few things to consider. It sounds like you are doing a lot of things right, Joel. I recommend you check out 51 Blocks' local competitive analysis tool to be certain you are actually doing more than your competitors appear to be doing: http://www.51blocks.com/online-marketing-tools/free-local-analysis/ It's free and a very cool tool. This is as far as I can go without seeing your actual business in action. I hope these ideas are good food for thought.

Hi Joel, A very broad question but you've basically got to do 2 things: Bounce Rate - Ensure your search terms closely match up to customer behaviour. If they search for "Washington Real Estate" you have to ensure that the page they land on matches what they would typically expect to find on that page. Your site must have an effective layout and present info in a way that is useful to your customer. If they land on the page, you want them to then visit subsequent areas of your site (be it for sale, for rent, info about the area etc). Time on site - This is coupled with bounce rate. If you create quality landing pages with quality content on the rest of your site, you'll be seen by customers as a resource in this area, and they'll likely stay on the site for longer searching for more information. Basically, quality content and a quality user experience.

Yes, definitely. Here are a couple of blog posts that give great explanations as to why this is the case: http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/getting-video-results-in-google/  and http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/getting-links-and-seo-value-from-your-youtube-videos/  and  http://www.danatanseo.com/2012/09/creating-video-seo-strategy-is-hard-but.html Enjoy!

Hi Joel, Hopefully, the stuff we discussed via PM and your other thread about your company will have helped you to understand some of the reasons you are being ranked on Page 2. Beyond that, one of the best places to learn about this subject is David Mihm's annual Local Search Ranking Report. This report surveys some of the top Local SEOs in the world. Here is the 2012 edition: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml Also, I recommend you become a regular reader of the following 3 blogs: http://www.blumenthals.com/blog http://www.ngsmarketing.com/blog/ http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/ In addition to this, I have recently published two comprehensive blog posts that received quite a bit of industry acclaim, covering both the psychological mindset and tactical approach to Local SEO. Here are these posts: The Zen of Local SEO http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1314 The Rudiments of Local SEO http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1344 I hope you will find these resources to be truly helpful!

Joel, It's also important to point out that you should use the same Google account that's associated with your Google+ page.  This way the two can be paired together.

Thanks for the help.

Read this: http://searchengineland.com/google-places-is-over-company-makes-google-the-center-of-gravity-for-local-search-122770?utm_source=pluspost&utm_medium=plus&utm_campaign=stream and watch this: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/content-for-local-sites-and-local-search

My thought here is that this is a causation vs correlation issue.  I don't believe that registering a domain for more than a year will have any effect on SEO. However, if you look at well established websites, they are more likely to have their domain names registered for a longer period of time.  A well established website is more likely to be well managed and to have accumulated worthy backlinks.  As such, the well established site is going to rank better in the SERPS.  But this increase in ranking is not because the domain name is registered for more than a year. See what I'm saying?

Sounds EPIC! but in my opinion you at least have to share your niche and goals to answer your goals... because: There are pre made codes for social networking sites already available... are you going to go with that and alter as per your requirements... What special feature are you going to make public.. Will it be mobile friendly? these are few questions.. and on basis of that one will be able to answer about the total players in the team what should be their skill set and all!

Great tip, hadn't occurred to me for some reason. Here's a post from Rob Ousbey at Distilled going into more detail about how to do it.

Thanks everyone for your tips and advice. I appreciate the help. That's why I enjoy SEO MOZ, it's a great community to be a member of.

Thank you for your feedback.

I'm not sure what you mean?

This is one of those questions that doesn't have a definite answer. It's an example of where SEO is more of an 'art' than a science, but in a best case scenario, you're only targeting 1 keyword phrase per page. The single most important place on a page to place your keywords are in your title tag. A title tag should only be 65-70 characters in length, so there are only so many keyword phrases that you can fit into that space. Your target keyword phrases may include city names automatically making those target phrases longer. You also want to place your target keywords as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible. So say for example you had 'California Real Estate Agents | California Real Estate Brokers' as your title tag, that page, all other things being equal, would have a better chance of showing up for 'California Real Estate Agents'. So the 2nd keyword phrase that you're targeting in your title tag is going to be less effective than the first one, and if you're targeting a 3rd one, it's going to be even less effective. In theory, you want want to take a look at all of the keywords you want to target, and map each of those keywords to a specific page on your site.