Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As far as accredited courses, the closest one that comes to mind is Market Motive which works with some colleges and has some excellent courses on SEO. (They have a couple free webinars each month that you can sign up for as well).

I have been trying out DistilledU ($40/month) which provides beginner and advanced modules on SEO and I think it is really well done.

A good starting point is to watch all the Whiteboard Friday videos by SEOMoz. They are very informative and cover a wide range of important issues.

I think the Facebook widget is great for social proof if you have a lot of people who like you. (the widget that shows faces of people who like you)

Let's say that you create a resource that gets 100 likes. Do those "Likes" only count at the page level or can they be aggregated into a total "Likes" count that you can show on your home page and on the Facebook widget?

Or are "Likes" in the Facebook widget only for people who like your Facebook page? (not those who "Like" your site).

Any marketing program is an investment with inherent risk. By requesting pay for performance, you are basically shifting the risk from the business owner to the service provider but not providing a strong enough return for that risk. If you are looking for a way to reduce your risk, you could ask friends and colleagues for a referral to a provider that has done great work in the past. I don't think any quality SEO companies would take the unnecessary risk because they will have more business then they can handle due to referrals from happy clients.

I recently developed a nice article for a career site and they agreed to publish it as a guest post.

Once they published the article I noticed they had removed the link back to my site in the byline.

What is a best way to approach this situation? Would you ask them to take down the article if they are unwilling to link back to your site?

If you are trying to rank for a keyword phrase that is a question (e.g. how to ___) does it matter if your page is the home page of your site or an article on your site?

I suspect that Google would treat question search queries differently and would show preference for articles over a home page in most cases. An article would be more likely to satisfy the searcher by providing the answer to their question, whereas the home page usually doesn't provide specific answers.

I looked at one keyword phrase that is a question and only 1 of the first 20 results was a home page.

Any thoughts or experience with this?

If you have a great resource on your site that earns a lot of social shares, does that improve the authority of your entire site or just that single page in the eyes of Google?

Hi,

I was recently reading how the Penguin update can penalize your site for having too many links because it looks unnatural or over-optimized. It seems that this depends on your niche and how many links your competitors have.

If you are comparing your site's inbound linking domains compared to other sites in your industry, what is a safe percentage to exceed your competitors. For instance, is it okay to have 120% more linking domains than your competitors but risky to have more than 200% more than your competitors?

Thanks!

A 301 redirect is generally the preferred option to keep credit for any links you have gained to those pages. You can check if the page has links in Open Site Explorer but it doesn't always find every inbound link so there might be inbound links you don't know about. My suggestion would be to create a page that explains that the product line has been discontinued with links to recommended alternatives. Then 301 redirect the old pages to this new page. Otherwise customers might be confused as to why they are being redirected to your homepage and bounce.

Some SEOs might say that there is no such thing as too much good content. Do you try to limit the words on a page to under a certain number for any reason?

Thank Keri. Yes, I am referring to forums like Warrior Forum.

Let's say you get a ton of traffic and top ranking for a plural version of a keyword but almost 0 traffic for the non-plural version. Is it a good idea to try to allocate resources to the non-plural version?

I spend a lot of time on SEOMoz and would like to get some other perspectives on SEO. Do you have any recommendations of other good SEO forums? Thanks!

Thanks for the input. In one Mozinar, Rand suggests that it is good practice to link to sites that link to you (naturally) because it helps Google index the page that linked to you which is not something I've heard before but makes pretty good sense.

Hi Mozzers,

Do you think there are any negative effects of having no images on a page but several hundreds words of text? (There is a logo image and call to action buttons).

Thanks!

Thanks Rambo

I guess the difficult question to answer is whether Google will give more weight to something like a niche association website or a niche blog with higher authority. I'm guessing the blog would help more if their links are quality. A lot of associations don't attract that many links it seems (maybe an opportunity for SEOs to help out).

Best,
Charles

The customer quote/testimonial would be in the middle of the content. It seems like if there is enough unique content around it then it should be fine. Thanks for the help!

I don't think pages on tier 3 of a URL folder structure have issues with indexing. As long as there is a good link structure to the pages they should definitely be indexed especially because the main domain has strong authority. I've had experience with publishing content on the third level of a URL and have had no problem indexing. It might be slightly harder to rank because you are essentially telling Google that the page is less important than pages on the second or first level of the URL structure.

I tend to favor building a microsite on a subfolder like regionalsite.com/theme if you want to see faster results. However if you have an exact match domain it is usually easier to rank for your top keywords. Also if the topic of the microsite isn't closely related to the main site's topic, it is probably better long term to use a separate site in my opinion. Having two unrelated topics on the same site may confuse Google. Another option is to use the subdomain: theme.regionalsite.com. Google will consider this a different site (example: http://blog.hubspot.com/) but it should pass some link juice from the main domain.

Is there any risk with placing the same customer quote (3-4 sentences) on multiple pages on your site?

What if the most trusted sites in your niche have relatively low authority? Should you still spend a lot of resources to get those links or go after easier links with higher link authority (as determined by MozRank)?

How do you approach balancing load time with making a page linkworthy?

For example, if you create a page with a lot of rich media like infographics, images, videos, and audio, this will probably increase page load time but it will be more likely to earn links.