Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi mcardenal.

Given you're a newbie you might just need to walk yourself thru the site and make sure all your title and description tags are unique.

Your site is not huge. I would start with a screaming frog crawl of your site. The basic software is free. It's an extremely easy way to crawl your site and quickly and easily find duplicate tags.

If you're looking for a more indepth answer to your question, keep reading.

A standard Wordpress installation isn't SEO friendly. But you're in luck! Back in February there was an advanced SEO webinar hosted by SEOMoz and lead by Nick Herinckx. Nick explains what you need to do maximize your findability.

Here's the link to the webinar - http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo. It runs about an hour and a half including Q&A, but it's well worth your time to watch it.

You have unnecessary repetition in your tagline as well. "Conquer student student debt!" You might want to fix that at the same time.

There's another possibility too Ronald.

You could have more than one page eligible to rank for "Barista Classes Los Angeles":

• One that achieved a low ranking on Google and scored a "F" on the on-page optimization reports.
• Another that ranks #1 on Google and scored higher than a "F".

Here's something else you will find helpful.

This blog post, published earlier today (4/22/13) by Phil Rosen at LocalVisibilitySystem, identifies all the well known local directories on which you can create a business listing without having to disclose your address. Places like Angie's List and the Bing business portal.

Just the usual.

Good content.

Good promotion.

Best practice is to optimize one topic per page. If your site is designed so that it's entire content resides on one page, that will be hard to do.

Probably not what you want to hear, but I recommend changing the design so you have more than one page on the site. You're not going to make much headway, in my opinion, with a single page, single topic website. That is unless your goal is to rank well for a highly non-competitive term in an obscure location.

How is your own site doing wrt inbound links from external sources Jesus? Do you have many? Are they coming from quality domains? Related domains?

I share your frustration and see this type of thing all the time. It seems you have to go above and beyond in order to neutralize the advantage keyword incorporating domains have.

I would do as Dan has suggested and go after some very high authority links within your industry. That's the fastest way to level the playing field in my opinion.

Hi Eric.

Just to be clear, is the attribution a must have or will the canonical tag suffice? If it's necessary, is there specific wording to be used?

Donna

My client is publishing their own articles simultaneously on three sites, sites which they own. What can and should they be doing to ensure the get maximum exposure without penalty?

I just want to point out that I have noticed a tendency for many SEO bloggers to use the Genesis theme. Not sure why. Maybe someone else has insight they can share.

Sansonj,

Did you ever figure this out?

I was wondering if the changes you introduced made the keyword density too intense in the headers.

I clicked on your link, but got a 404.

Thank you Miriam.  I was hoping you'd pipe in.

I've been approached by the company to use their tool. It has functionality beyond just populating local data sources which I'm not concerned with. I just want to know how it ranks in terms of local directory coverage. They claim 85% of the local directories will be populated.

Google does measure social activity so your question is a good one.

I personally prefer shares versus likes.  I'm going to quote Mari Smith, as she best explains the difference between the two.  "Note the Facebook Like Button now functions (almost) the same as the Facebook Share Button. The big difference is there isn’t an obvious place to write your own narrative before posting to Facebook, plus you cannot select the thumbnail. Clicking the Facebook Like Button automatically pushes the full story into your personal Profile stream. So, you may wish to add the Facebook Share Button with Counter to your registration page instead."

So from a SEO perspective they're equivalent. From a useability and conversion perspective, I would think share would be better.