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Ideally you should only have one H1 tag on the page. If your logo is the H1 then that prevents you from getting the most out of any subsequent (keyword relevant) headings.

Unless you're in a tough battle to rank for your own brand name I'd remove the H1 tag from the logo

If the 'technical' side of SEO doesn't appeal then another useful set of skills is media production. Before I got into SEO my calling was working in video and radio production - writing, interviewing, filming & editing. I have found these skills invaluable particularly while working with small & micro businesses. If content is king, then the ability to produce high-quality multimedia content on a low budget will always be a welcome asset. I find it opens the door to more interesting SEO strategies.

The best book on film production I've ever read is Shot by Shot by Steven d. Katz. It's more tuned towards film directing, but it's a great way to throw yourself in the deep end if it's something you'd be interested to learn.

Radio, I've found, is not as useful online - unless producing a podcast. Probably the most critical skill to get your head around on radio is interview skills. Look up Nardwuar the Human Serviette - he's a bit.. different.. but probably one of the most professional interviewers in the radio world today. If he's taught me anything it's research, research, research!

Oh and Photoshop! Photoshop never stops being useful. I'd go mad without it. There are hundreds of great guides online.

Hi Ron,

Would need a little more info to know exactly why they are outranking you. It is unlikely to be solely because of those paid links (though they could obviously be a factor).

Long-term, paid links are a questionable investment. Like you said, Google can devalue them at any time. You are unlikely to be penalised for being linked to by these paid directories (just make sure you don't link back to them).

It's generally accepted that if you have an otherwise natural and positive link profile, a few paid links won't get you penalised. However, if your backlinks consist of mostly paid directories you can expect to be blacklisted sooner or later.

If you have the cash to spare it might be worth experimenting. But you also need to consider that their site may just be better optimised for those keywords. Take a look at their site layout and copy and compare the authority of your site to the page that's outranking you. It's also quite possible that they have more links than are showing up in OSE if it's been a while since their site was last crawled.

Hi Don,

Text contained within a hyperlink applies to the page which the hyperlink points to.

So, let's say your parent page is named "Expensive Cars", and your sub-page is "Expensive cars for old people". If the text on the parent page reads "This webpage is about expensive cars", then that text will count towards the parent page's relevence. But if it instead reads "This webpage is about expensive cars for old people" - then those words highlighted in blue are used to determine what the other page, the page the hyperlink points to, is about.

The parent page will not be considered relevant for 'expensive cars for old people' because that text is hyperlinked.

As an aside, if you read up on SEOmoz's 2011 search engine ranking factors, you'll see that Google now appears to be favouring non-exact match anchor text > exact match. This means that the hyperlink pointing to your sub-page would be slightly more effective if it said something like "old people's cars". instead of "expensive cars for old people"

Hope that helps

In addition to all the other suggestions;

Web design competitions & web design galleries.

Submit your work and if it's good then the links will follow!

Chances are, from a purely SEO point of view, it would be more beneficial to have your site on mywidgets than on mywidget.

Whether or not its worth it financially will depend on how big a boost you get out of changing the url, and this will primarily depend on the competitiveness of the new keywords you are targeting.

If you do a quick google on "website widgets" or "free widgets", you'll see that the top few sites don't actually have 'widgets' in their domain name, it's 'widget'. This is probably because they're incredibly competitive search terms and those websites are simply far more authoritative than their 'widgets' competitors. The lack of an 's' in their names verges on insignificant in comparison to their massive backlink profiles which have been necessary to put them at the top of the SERP.

Including the 's' is likely to help, but don't count on it doing the job all on its own.

The worst thing that could happen is you go through all the trouble of moving and find that it hasn't made enough of a difference to justify the loss of traffic while moving. With this in mind, if I was in your shoes I would start by experimenting with Meta Titles and on-page copy on a few of my pages to see what difference that makes, before moving the entire domain - temporarily 301'ing mywidgets into mywidget.

One last thing to consider is that a 301 does not pass all the link juice from one domain to another. It's estimated that you tend to lose about 10% of the 'juice' in the redirect. Redirecting from mywidget to mywidgets will result in a more relevant, but less authoritative website.

Hope that helps

Devin

• Agree with Albin. You don't stand to gain anything from putting a nofollow on the links.