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Danny Dover's book looks like a text book but reads more like a blog and focuses more on how to be an SEO practioner and what you need to do and know whereas the Art of SEO is more about the SEO knowledge.

I'd definitely recommend reading both.

There is a difference between the crawl start date and crawl completion date so that may be why you think it should be different than is actually showing.

Try and make sure the link isn't a nofollow link too.

Hi Eric

The guidance above means that Google when it looks to crawl your site won't its not a message to Google telling it never to come back.

Once everything is sorted, remove whichever approach you took to block the search engines and supply a sitemap to Google via the Webmaster tools. Your site should be crawled in no time after that.

Hope this helps.

In the process of natural link building I would expect that anchor text will vary and won't always be the exact keyphrase that is being targeted. Sometimes it would be the company name, the site URL, a longer sentence with the keyphrase in it or even "click here".

The suggestion is that if a high % of links are just the keyword that this sends a signal to Google that their acquisition may not be from purely natural means.

I would be highly suspicous of the claims and although the sites may have some authority how much relevance will theu have to your site? The value of links is made up with that combination of relevancy and authority.

If you are strongly tempted as them to provide some examples of companies that have used it, then check the links using Open Site Explorer to see what sort of approach they are actually taking.

If you are confident that your on page optimisation is done then as is recommended on other responses the focus should switch to link building.

Don't just comment on blogs, create quality content that people will want to link to.

Sometimes there are relevant sites to contact to ask for a link such as a supplier or sites that multiple competitors are linked from but you are not that might be worth chasing.

The most I have seen is a triple plus a Google Places listing. Definitely worth optimising some internal pages if persuing SEO for ORM (Online Reputation Management) purposes.

Danny Dover's new book "Search Engine Optimization Secrets" has a chapter on the SEO Consulting process including preparing for the first meeting, paperwork etc that may be of use to you.

It has been rolled out to English Google.com but is due to be rolled out in time. Also only shows if logged into Google account so for many people they won't see it anyway.

Any links gained to the sites in strategy 2 will be shared and only benefit those sites

Any links gained in strategy 1 will benefit the whole domain.

A brand new site can take a while to gain decent rankings although it may have the advantage of a keyword matched domain name.

Hope this helps.

I would be more tempted by Andrew's suggestion of hiring someone, instucting them and then putting them to work rather than completely handing over control to a 3rd party - especially one based on another continent, where as many of us know, there are many dodgy link buidling and SEO outfits (there are many probably good ones too but we don't here about those).

You could perfectly optimise your site on-page and still rank below competitiors due to them having a stronger link profile.

As mentioned in the other responses I would hope to see results inside of a month BUT it may be that you have to work for a number of months to catch up to where competitors are depending on how string their link profile is.

The general line is that we should design for the user and not the search engine so if a meta description is compelling and attracts users then that would be exactly what you are doing.

If you believe that putting the price will increase the click through then I would go for it.

Had some advice from Will Critchlow when I asked about the use of the £ symbol in meta descriptions and he said that we should "use HTML encoding (£ rather than £). We tend to advise going for ASCII only as character encoding opens you up to a world of pain, but HTML entities should generally be fine"

Depending on how often google crawls your site you may be amending the title and then amending it again before it even gets a chance to re-crawl the site.

In that case Google may not even know about the short term version. It would probably be worth optimising once, leaving and seeing how much of an SEO impact the changes have made before tryign to change it again. Generally once you have the "right" title you won't need to keep switching it.

The meta description tag doesn't influence SERP's.

As you know search engines often use it as the description for your page in search results.As such a relevant, unique, compelling meta description can have a positive influence on how many clicks you get on your search listing.

To paraphrase the Beginners guide to SEO from SEO Moz:-

Keyword density is, without question, not a part of modern search engine algorithms for the simple reason that it provides worse results than many more advanced methods of keyword analysis which take into account keyword proximity, distribution, co-occurrence and topicality.

To quote a post from Rand on perfect page optimisation:-

"It's impossible to pinpoint the exact, optimal number of times to employ a keyword term/phrase on the page, but this simple rule has served us well for a long time - "2-3X on short pages, 4-6X on longer ones and never more than makes sense in the context of the copy."

Hope this helps.

Hi Joseph

The info you sent me looked fine. Have you seen if other users on other browsers or operating systems are having this issue? Also have you cleared your cookies as advised in the warning message?

If you upload a htaccess file with just one redirect do you still get the same issue? If so it would suggest that it may be a server issue. As such it may be worth talking to the relevant people within the organisation that deal with them or as may be the case if there is no one then it may be worth contacting the web host.

Hi Wazza

The best practice listed on SEO Moz is....

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword

.....personally I usually go for Primary Keyword (or phrase) | Brand name

Rankings may have changed not just because of what you did but may have changed due to the Google Farmer/Panda update or because of the actions of competitor sites.

The original post was made in response to a comment in the SEO Moz Webinar today.