Welcome to the Q&A Forum

HI Mike...

I'd love to discuss with you a couple of my findings, any chance you're on Skype?

I believe distance from the city center has also become extremely important.  It seems this took a back seat for a while, but may have made a comeback.

HI Justin,

If I were in your position I would first take a look at the competition for the keyword or keyword phrases to try and assess the level of difficulty to surpass them in the rankings.

Once this is known, you will have a better understanding of their popularity, related backlinks(quality, quantity, targets) and at that point should consider your best course of action.

I personally do not trust the links done by the vast majority of services that offer link building.  Again, depending on the level of competition, I like the concept of trying to personally build a number of links each day that are of substantial quality.  That way you know you will not be punished at some point for being found in a bad area, and will also have a complete list of your presence on the web.  Over a 30 day period, you would have the ability to build 300 quality links, and will not put the future of your online presence(or lack there of) into the hands of somebody else.

It might take some time, but it would be worth the effort.

In addition to that, you might be able to build some quality connections with people within your industry, and start a network that could help your SEO a great deal in the future.

I always have a tendency to use Youtube as well since they are owned by Google.  I believe there is a good chance that makes Google have an affinity for the site.

One of the issues I found embedding Youtube code while using Wordpress is that many validation errors appear, which I despise.and Google doesn't appreciate either.

I would highly suggest using this plugin, which will correct to valid code:

Viper's Video Quicktags

In addition to this, make sure you have filled out all of the content, titles, and geo elements properly following the upload to Youtube.

As wtih everything, the size isn't what matters.  It's what you do with it.  Anywhooo...

The CSS attributes should not effect any legitimate style choices, unless the search engines detect hidden text due to size, placement, or color.

Unless I was dealing with a LARGE network of sites that did not correlate with eachother all that much I would just stick with the folder/subfolder structure.

The biggest issue comes down to why anyone would want to divide content into a bunch of individual sites instead of having them mesh together.

The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

If they are not doing it now, they will be soon I am sure.  Why?  Since it would be great for business.

I have little doubt that discount travel companies utilize the offline data to signal what type of deal they may offer your or accept.

Depending on what Zip code you are in, or if you use a regular bank card or Platinum American Express to pay.

This will no doubt translate to individual user results via search engines.

This question also got me thinking about the potential of an "Online ID Card" or license to surf the web.  While I hate the idea, it would lessen the problems for anti-piracy groups and crime (tracing IP's and proving who did what etc), and would be a marketers dream know exactly who was doing what on the internet.

It would certainly ruin much of what makes the internet great, but it would bring some type order to it for government and corporations.

Sorry I mentioned it.

I think you might need the help of a professional SEO company since you have so many specific questions and theories.

Currently, you are cherry picking a few odd examples, when I believe your time could be better spent making sure you have registered at places that are relevant to your business, onsite SEO, offsite, SEO, linkbuilding, content building, following David Mihms guide...while this will take away from your investigation, it will put you a position to improve your SERP.

Dwelling on a competitor can be a huge waste of time and effort since you can only control what you do.  I very much doubt the paid positions are helping him at all.

The concensus from recent posts has been that it is not worth changing to a subdomain and losing the pagerank that had been established from the home site.

It has also been established that currently, having a folder that has a high keyword density is superior to that of the subdomain in the short and long term.

It would be best to stay away from the subdomain if you currently have your structure setup with folders.

Hi...

The ability of gaining an SEO advantage by utilizing article sites, and to a lesser extent PR sites, was all but abolished by the Panda/Farmer updates.  It can be disheartening since many spent so much time, money, and effort trying to get a leg up producing content for these sites.

Only Google knows for sure, but my speculation is that certain PR sites are better than others, and the ones I am thinking about usually are of the paid variety.  The need for payment usually prevents spammers from utilizing the service, and from the things I have read, these paid PR sources end up sending the PR's to quality sites that have high local and organic authority.

My guess is that MANY people have had this problem, and it is time to build better content on local sites and social media, and build strong relationships that will help build trust and authority.

The more I learn about SEO, the more I realize it's all about the basics, and doing them correctly.

Best of luck.

You've asked quite a few questions in one post, but I will do my best to answer a few.

If you are focusing on local SEO, get into as many local directories as you can, and make sure you Name, Address, and Phone number are IDENTICAL in each directory as it is found in Google Places, Bing Local, and Local Yahoo.

When you are listing in the free directories that Google seems to appreciate, e.g. Yelp, Kudzu, Hotfrog, Merchant Circle the search engines will more than likely find them on their own.  However, if you are worried about them being crawled/indexed or not seen in a reasonable time frame you could always post the links to your profile to Twitter or Facebook, or in your blog which will also show up in your RSS feed.

While you shouldn't over do it, this can potentially help the process of being found.

Attempt to get into the powerful free directories before you start spending money on the paid, IMO.

Classic.  Well maybe he shouldn't change anything if he is currently ranked #3, but I assume that is due to the strength of his domain, stupid.com.

All of this talk about bacon reminded me of a couple of fellows here in Seattle who come out with a new bacon product every year, and to promote they also come out with some type of bacon art.

May I present to you, Bacon Kevin Bacon:

Bacon Kevin Bacon

I would love to see a webinar on the Local Google 7 Pack, and the rel="author" as suggested(as well as proper implementation.)

In addition, I wouldn't mind seeing something about the benefits of silo/flat architecture.

I agree with Ryan.

The best practice would be to include the full name and/or description of the product.  It is doubtful that the Bacon Dental Floss competition is extremely fierce, so the first link with proper title tags and content will most likely end up as a top result, but why not do things correctly for maximum impact over time.

I do not expect any free bacon dental floss for my participation in this thread.

I am sure nobody wants to pile on what seems to already be a tough situation, and I am sure the professionals do not want to be stepping on any competitors toes, since they are above that.

If I were in your position I would be extremely upset with the amount of work done for the cost.  While I am sure there are SEO companies that charge far more than 2k per month, they also do a whole lot more than what you have listed.

Hopefully you are not in some type of contract, and could quite possibly ask for a refund.

I do understand that SEO takes effort, and time, so I do not want to sell anyone short.  I, however, would export more for my money(and that doesn't even include results at this point.)

Hi...

I definitely can understand how frustrating it is to be in such a competitive market and industry, especially when people seem to be using blue/gray/blackhat type of strategies that seem to be pushing them ahead.

My best advice is to stay the course and know that these get to the top quick schemes will eventually be dealt with by the major search engines.

In the meantime, try to learn as much as you can about:

Organic SEO techniques

Local SEO techniques

Social Media Marketing

Genuine link building, which includes building relationships with local businesses, communities, and blogs.

Building relationships with your customer base

You have to start somewhere, and like I have said before, Rome was not built in a day.  So work on each strategy, and move on to the next.  By the time you are done many of the search engines will have caught up to your work and your rankings should improve.

SEOmoz is a fantastic place to start, from the beginner seo guides, to the forum posts.  If you think this will take too much time, consider becoming a client of one of the pros.

Best of luck

Excellent post.  Thanks for sharing EGOL. The Matt Cutts example of the multiple autho profiles usage, rel="me" makes things extremely clear in the purpose for the author page and the potential intention by Google in recognizing this data.

Hi Bill,

As I currently understand it, the proper use of an author tag will allow Google to collect data on relevant content.  As an author produces relavent, popular, and accurate data, Google may give this person an authority type fo status.  This could increase the validity of a site that has published the data, or possibly allow Google to figure out where superior content is showing up in the present and future.

The code itself makes the data consistent and easily seen, similar to an hcard.

Hi Elias,

While the mention of certain keywords and phrase may be important, I think the value of such news articles ends up counting on popularity.  So creating articles that will draw interest with exceptional copy, great content, and will be considered link bait are ideal.

I am sure you could flood Google with 100 articles that are optimized to the umpteenth degree according to certain statistics, but one single article comes out from a competitor that is headline grabbing, goes viral, and puts the 100 articles to shame.

Interesting content is key with copy that will create sharing/linking.

While Google might account for spelling errors, and possibly the understanding that a "z" is sometimes used as an "s", I dislike it when the "z" is used, speaking as a consumer and business owner.

While not use an "a" at the front of the domain, or "my", or "your"?  www.mykeyword-guides.com.  Or even better, without the hyphen, mykeywordguides.com?

Going back to the spelling aspect of things, I have always disliked it when a business uses a "k" for a "c", e.g. Johnny's Used Kar Lot, and the same goes with the z.