Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The biggest issue will be in the need for proper 301 redirection so errors are not found.  There are plugins via wordpress to help you along with that.  As long as wordpress properly redirects old post locations to the site.com/blog location you should have many issues or loss of rank etc.

I would recommend contacting your host(hopefully not being godaddy) to help you in the transition/swap to make sure nothing is lost. as some server side issues need to be changed to cause the least amount of hiccups.

Pay attention in your webmaster tools after the move to make sure you're on top of any issues.

Lastly, you are not changing domains, but are changing the permalink structure of your site.

Thank you for clarifying and sharing your knowledge.  I think it is easy to get stuck in a link building rut with little variance when working on local, so this will very much help.

HI Dan,

The only way there would be value in purchasing those, IMHO, is if you had a stellar piece or hardware or software that may have a chance at dominating the industry.  An informational site would not be worth the potential high cost of such ketyword rich domains, as software or hardware companies that dominate them have no need for this.

The keyword rich domain name ship has already sailed.

I agree with you Alan in respect to the need for geo modifiers.  I was just thinking of my own individual brick and mortar business.  Making me extremely selfish in my questioning.

Do you see any value in linkbuilding for a local brick and mortar business without the geo modifier in the anchor text?

Utilikilts.com

While most people currently search with the geo modifier, my belief is that many will no longer use this modifier in the future as they become comfortable with the understanding that searches know where they are located automatically.

I think it is important to be ahead of the curve and work on terms that may not be readily searched for, and that includes simply typing in the "keyword" only into google and looking at the local results.

For that reason I would love to know if backlinking for the "keyword" only will have an effect without the geomodifier to influence the local results.

I was under the assumption that it made no difference if the site was set for local under webmaster tools or not, and Google would figure it out.

Is this actually of benefit in local search?

As far as the local search volume goes, I am unsure how that matters, since their are two sets of results with and without the geo modifier.  So how can backlinking influence the one without the geo modifier?

If anyone here is familiar with local SEO, you may have noticed that there are different local results for:

"city + Keyword" and just the "keyword".

When building links will you end up targeting both with a geo modifier in the link, or is it beneficial to build links without the geo modifer for the keyword?

HI Alan,

I'd love to know your setup in regards to using Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.

I put together a system to work with my block, where Hootsuite posted to certain areas in Ping.fm, but I am unsure if it was as streamlined as it should or could have been.

Trying to get Google to undo a negative could never be a fun proposition I assume.

For local SEO I believe David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal, and Andrew Shotland are some reasonable ones to follow.

Without getting into the good vs. bad conversation, my mind wanders into the necessity of giving anything away for clients to give you a review.

If a company has a strong client base, it could be as simple as asking for a review via:

• Face to Face Meetings
• Social Media
• Email
• Mailers

With a properly worded request, and an easy to follow link, many clients will give you the review without any incentive.  Simple loyalty goes a long way.

While I am sure more people might fill reviews out for a prize/gift, but is that the way a business receives accurate, non-biased reviews?

Reviews are great for a number of reasons, including SEO and placement in Google Places pages, but they also serve a different purpose.

When a person gives an honest review, positive or negative, that information can be passed on to the business owner to continue what is successful or look at the needed changes to get back on track.  This actually happened with my business recently, as there ended up with a few complaints about my staff.  I had to look long and hard for solutions to tighten up the ship, and luckily those truthful reviews didn't get lost in a bunch of ego stroking fake reviews.

Honesty is always the best policy, and false or inaccurate reviews will be found out at some point.

I find this frustraing as well at times, but guess what?  I had to start somewhere too.  Hopefully many of the people who have found a quality source, such as this site, will be guided in a great direction.

At some point in the future it will be absolute common knowledge that the meta, title etc. will have to optimized well, and the SEO questions will revolve around schema.org, seo strategies for specific industries and networking etc.

I believe things will evolve rather quickly, but some will have to still start at the beginning, and some will have evolved into cutting edge industry leaders.  In any industry this is how it begins, and what you are asking is what will separate the best from the rest.

In such a fledgling industry, I would love to see more outside the box thinking and speculation on where SEO should be heading.  I've had responses about this from some leaders in this community, and many mention that Matt Cutts says SEOers should never be chasing Google.

While some might be chasing, it would be wonderful to see honest speculation to stay ahead of the search engines, where the value added by SEO experts is what Google and the like will start to consider as superior, and change their algos to have an affinity to the best webdev and SEO practices.

My opinion is that both have properly optimized websites, with the listing in the A position having the potential of strong backlinks and extremely well optimized site(although I have not done much analysis.)

Since the listing in the A position is rather far from the city center, and it has not even claimed the Googles Places listing, any optimization that has occurred locally would be from info Google has scraped from the web.

The listing in the B position has claimed/verified their Google Places page, but has done a poor job optimizing it.  However, it does have a city center location.

I believe a company that wishes to compete in that market listing could do well if not better than the current top listings by doing appropriate SEO on the local and organic level.

Hi Michael,

Good question.  There are a number of ways listings can show up ranging from organic only results, local only results(google 7 pack, and a mixed result of organic and local.

In your example, the organic/local mix is what we are seeing.  In this case many optimization factors are taken into account that include local and organic factors.

A well optimized page + strong organic seo is what would be needed to give a company the best chance at ranking in a high position.  This would include a verified and well optimized Google Places page.

It really comes down to the overall revenue and industry.  Mom and pops gasp.  The Target and Deloitte type companies do not.

In my opinion, as a small business owner who gets contacted by SEO folk on a weekly basis, I would hate to hire anyone who thinks I have deep pockets.  I am also of the opinion that chasing people/companies because you want the big score is the best way to ruin your SEO business.

The key is being able to explain the value of SEO and internet marketing in a way that makes sense.  Whether that is to a mom and pop business or a multinational company, they have to see the value.  If you are turned down often by these "stingy" folk, you may be doing or saying the wrong things.

That has to be it.

It truly depends on what was done with the domain previous to them coming for purchase, or before you "found" them.  There is also the potential that someone purposely built up the rank only to abuse it, and the rank has not dropped yet.

If the PR's are legitimate and rather high, I might consider turning them into effective blogs on the subject they are dealing with and trying to maintain or improve it.  I also might see if I have clients that might need the domain for their business.

I do know that Google pays attention to this stuff, so if utilized poorly it could have a negative outcome due to "trickery."

I think you might be referring to localeze or whitespark?

While I have read that the importance of a business name matching the domain name exactly could be deemed extremely beneficial, having the city name in with the appropriate keyword, and proper optimization should make for an extremely strong listing.