Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Anyone here run an agency? Do you outsource your link building to another company overseas so it's cheap, or what is everyone else doing nowadays?

It's very important to my company that all websites for our clients validate. Why? Because we feel they pay for a service and we want to provide the highest quality service.

It's like building a house and not sticking to code. We'd rather stick to code and do it the "right" way, rather than just have something that "works".

It's also a sales tool! Because none of our competitors build sites that are compliant, our sales guys use this and it works well. We explain what W3C is, why it's important, and although it doesn't help rankings, we feel it's important because it's simply a matter of doing it the right way. They like that!

Yes, that is duplicate content and is an issue. Robots.txt is unreliable at best and there are very stringent guidelines to using it properly.

Instead, use an actual meta tag of noindex! That will solve the issue.

Proper sitemap that tells the SE's to come back can help.

Write content daily. If you have a blog, ping google when you post a new piece of content. If you show Google that you write content daily, they'll come back.

I did SEO for a very successful conservative news website and Google crawled them 15-20 times a day and indexed things in sometimes seconds.

Make good use of pinging!

An SEO who does not optimize for conversions should be fired. That is their job. What good is a ranking if half the people do not click it because the SEO failed to use text that would convert. Getting rankings is only part of the battle. SEO's cannot be 1-dimensional, this industry is not meant for 1-dimensional people.

Hmm, tough question

For me... triple monitors, a high-end Mac Pro w/ Apple Cinema Displays. An exercise ball at my desk so I can switch between that and a chair so I can maintain great posture (I have horrible posture).

The desk should be quality, nothing cheesy or flimsy, big surface area.

For the actual office...

Pool table and air hockey are a must. Unlimited supply of purified water. Unlimited supply of grass-fed beef jerky that was made with no sugar, sugar substitutes, or MSG. Also an endless supply of meats and cheeses.

There should be a nice 60" big screen somewhere w/ xbox/PS3 and cable. Tied into Netflix.

Ability for each employee to customize their work environment, paint the floor, desk, etc... personalize, no matter what they want.

Personally, I like to fit in the site name or business name whenever I can. What I recommend doing is disabling any kind of auto-tagging for the site name and enter it in manually only when it fits and if it's relevant.

For example, All in One SEO Plugin for Wordpress by default appends your site title to the end of all title tags, no matter what. I disable this and do it manually so I know I have 100% control over my title tags.

It helps for branding purposes!

All I could really say is the higher up the better. However, it depends upon the context of the website.

If you are trying to run a local directory site, it's ideal if you have the location/info/image and relevant information as high as possible.

If it's a website and you have footer information with your business address, that is perfectly fine.

What GeoTarget tool are you using?

The link doesn't need to be broken. 301 redirect the existing link to the new one and anyone that is linking or typing or clicking into the old URL will be forwarded to the new one and they wont know it. Make sense? Yes, do it!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-bing-confirm-twitter-facebook-influence-seo

That should give you some insight! Get on FB, Twitter, and Youtube!

The actual extensions don't matter. In fact, you should be using mod_rewrite to remove extensions on all your pages! All it does is add clutter and unnecessary junk to your URL strings. HTML is HTML, it doesn't matter if it's static, created using PHP, or created using ASP!

Matt Cutts said in a video with Rand that you could use either way, but he recommends choosing one way and sticking with it. He said using a trailing forward slash was preferred and is the more technical way. So, I would use that way, since you seem to be using that anyway.

What you need to do is setup server-side 301 redirects so if someone goes to www.mysite.com/blog it will automatically redirect them to mysite.com/blog/ --- using a 301 perm redirect will eventually clear out any bad indexed pages and willl get you going on the right track.

It's a pretty well known fact that non-US versions of Google are not using the same algorithm and therefore are "behind". This could be the case where you are employing methods that a couple years ago were effective and are working well for .CA but on .COM not as well.

The biggest thing you can do is work on high quality content and build links. Remember, linking is somewhere around 70% of the algorithm alone. Work on getting more .COM authoritative links from sites like NYT, USAToday, etc...

Also, if a good portion of your links are from .CA, that very well could affect it too!

There is no difference. ASP is just a web programming language that can output HTML code the same way a straight HTML page is HTML or PHP can output HTML. No difference.

If you mean having the actual extension in your URL, there is no difference.

Are you utilizing server-side redirects? (301 PERM) for non-WWW to WWW? Do you have a lot of links that point to the non-WWW version? Give me your URL and I can look into it further.

Don't worry about it. As Rand says, if it is a ranking signal, it's tiny. Why waste time/energy focusing on that when you could focus on the things that matter, like content and linking!

http://www.seo.com/blog/ranking-well-in-the-baidu-search-engine/

Let me know if that helps!

Hi Samuel,

In my opinion it is easier for a Fortune 500 company to get authoritative links than a new company. Personally, I think blog commenting and forum marketing is not that effective.

If I had to do SEO for a Fortune 500, here is what I would do:

• Write amazing content. Write content that provides huge value! Being that you're a Fortune 500, it's very easy to get media exposure and as a result, links. Providing high quality content is where its at!

• Next, definitely implement a company blog and start engaging your potential customers, existing customers, and anyone in between. Write blog posts that provide value and are insightful for your industry, typically you can get a good amount of links for a valuable blog post. Look at SEOmoz

• Press releases through a top-tier distribution wire like Vocus are great. They're expensive but do work well. For a Fortune 500 company, it shouldn't be an issue.

• Donate to universities or sponsor them in some way, shape, or form. Generally you can get a nice .EDU link in exchange! (In a relvant and contextual manner too!).

• Donate/sponsor a bunch of non profits or well-known organizations, they generally have a lot of authority and a link back could be huge from them.

I hope this helps?

I've never seen a phone number in the title tag hurt rankings at all. In fact, there is a chance it adds relevancy to the query and could increase your rankings, possibly.

Beyond that, while the meta description is not used for rankings directly, I am of the personal belief that it does influence rankings using CTR.

Since we do not know every piece of the algo, I would venture to guess that Google uses CTR as a determining factor for rankings. So by providing a piece of content that could increase CTR, it could increase ranking.

I really don't think it would make a difference. Worry about providing high quality content that provides value and is engaging. That'll benefit you far more!