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Another option would be to set-up a redirect based on the referrer and point any traffic from their site to a specific page stating that there is no commercial relationship between the two businesses. Probably not worth the effort. I'd just document it and get on building my own business.
I'd also add some research upfront...
You and your business - What are your business goals and how are you going to measure the success of your campaign. It's not just about the #1 rankings or even the traffic, you'll want to be looking at sales or business leads etc. Once you know what you're trying to achieve you can start to work on a strategic plan to achieve them!
The greatest template in the world isn't going to tell you what your goals are or how to achieve them!
You mention brand, so you'll need to figure out how you'll measure brand influence (searches for your brand and/or direct traffic can be one indicator, as well as mentions of your brand in social) but look at how this branded traffic is converting.
You need to understand the market your operating in and watch out for any seasonal variations or any external factors (economy, competition, policy/law) that may influence your business.
What's your budget and what resources (esp. people) do you have available. Are you going to do this internally, with help from a consultant or with the involvement of an agency.
And you can't forget your customers...
Your Customers - Who are your customers, what are their needs/problems and motivations. What are they trying to do (their intent) when they visit your site. How does this affect their choice of keywords when searching (and remember that the same people with the same problem may use different keywords when they have a different level of awareness of their problem and the solutions that exist. Don't be afraid to talk to existing customers. Discovering the language they use can be enlightening and will help you avoid industry jargon etc.
Your Competitors - You need to take a good look at your competitors, and not just their link metrics. Look at their websites, social, customer services from a customers point of view. Be realistic about their strengths and weaknesses. What are they doing wrong, what are they doing right and how can you beat them!
Your content - What assets / content do you already have that you can exploit. Once you know what your customers goals are, and how they are searching how can you build content that helps them achieve their goals. How can you optimise your content so that you're not covering too many topics on a single page - keep your content specific and relevant.
Make sure you've got your analytics and reporting set up. Make sure you've got your goals set up correctly. You'll need to know how your website is performing today before you start working on your strategic plan. Make sure you're happy segmenting your audience to reveal the different behaviours of these segments and specific opportunities.
Audit your website - Carry out a full audit of your website.There may be some quick fixes/wins that you can easily make straight away. It's important to know if you have any technical problems or limitations that your campaign is going to have to work with.
Here's a good site audit article: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit
There's no point optimising your titles if your pages aren't being indexed!
Planning - When you start looking at the tactical actions you can take, make sure you understand their cost and commitment, the difficulty and likely impact. You'll need to prioritise. I don't know how big your team is, but trying to do everything at the same is likely to be a nightmare, especially if you've got some of the more challenging things to do such as changing the culture of the business to provide more/richer content and increase customer engagement on social platforms etc.
Also make sure you understand any risks. Make sure you're aware of search engines policies and any governance/guidelines you're going to need when you start doing your social outreach. One badly written email,tweet or a poor customer review can undermine months of effort. For the risks you can anticipate, plan a suitable response.
Review - Make sure you set up regular reviews to look at the results of your campaign and evaluate how well your metrics and tactics continue to be relevant to your business goals. Don't be afraid to ditch metrics that don't provide actionable insight and avoid death by metrics! Don't fall into the trap of tracking too much!
Good luck!
Here's an article I found about search snippets affecting click throughs. (In this case it was the presence of an article date that was causing a drop in CTR.)
Evidence of “SERP Snippet” Impact on Clickthrough Rates
And this article about boosting traffic by changing your snippets:
Easy Way To Boost Your Search Engine Traffic
I agree, that it would be to do some more testing of the impact of optimising the snippet for conversion.
I don't think I'd bother with the type of directory you've used as an example. You'd be much better off getting the kind of high quality links that your competitors aren't going to be able to get near just by getting directory entries.
If your customers would expect to find you there, it would be a different matter.
See EGOL's response for the kind of things that would really make a difference.
If you're still climbing up the ranks then it's not time to give up and succumb to the dark side!
The ALT attribute is part of the HTML code used to include the image on your page. It should look something like this:
The ALT attribute is displayed when the browser can't display your image (and used by screen readers).
The reason this is important for SEO is that it can help provide search engines with a clue as to what the image is about (and if you can use keywords that you're tying to get your page to rank for it should also help overall page relevancy). The text surrounding the image will also be used by search engines to provide more information for what the image is about.
Hope this helps.
The more links you have on a page, the more the value of any link-juice needs to be shared. You may be better off getting a larger slice of a small pie, than a minuscule amount of a large one.
The number of links aren't the only factor though. This article by Rand has a number of nice illustrations showing the value of different links:
All Links are Not Created Equal: 10 Illustrations on Search Engines' Valuation of Links
Hope this helps.
Having a website deliver platform optimised pages from the same URL is better than some of the alternatives such as having different URLs or subdomain delivering mobile content. Responsive web design should avoid the problem of having duplicate content all over the place!
Assuming that everything else is equal (position on the page etc etc): The available "link-juice" will be split across all links. Both destination pages will benefit, but beware that the more links on the page, the smaller the individual share will be.
You might want to use the full legal name of the company on your home page title and then a snappier version on other pages (after all, for those other pages it's unlikely that the searching will be looking for your company)
As Mat and Kevin have said, it's probably not an issue unless you're trying to distinguish yourself from other similarly named companies - especially if you're got a broad/generic company name. "Bristol Plumbing" for example.
I'm wondering if adding Ltd against company names might add additional credibility - especially for local searches / tradesmen etc. If I'm looking for a local plumber should I go for "Doug's Plumbing Ltd" or just "Doug's Plumbing?" What would the effect on click-through from the SERPS be?
I suspect it depends on the business and it's niche. The nice thing about page titles is that they're easy to test!
Whatever you decide to do with the page title, if you're optimising for local search, make sure you're using a consistent NAP.
How much difference has all these blog comments made? What other link-buidling activity are you involved in? Blog / Forum comments are pretty low-value.
How about picking a handful of the more authoritative blogs, with the higher numbers of subscribers and seeing if you can get some guest posting opportunities.
Blog comments are a great first step when building a relationship with blog/blog author, but you need to get involved in the discussion and not push your own site.
Once you've got some engagement going then you can approach the blog for guest post opportunities...
I think if you've commented on 1500 blogs then it's probably time to move on to some higher value tactics!
Tried to crawl your site with Screaming Frog and noticed that your http response header contains a x-robots-tag which is being set to noindex, nofollow.
You can check your http headers on this site: http://web-sniffer.net/
Whenever I see one of these "100 best websites" lists, the cynical part of me (95%?) suspects that someone is link building and looking to get 100 relevant links to their site.
Take a good look at this list with a discerning eye. Are these really the best 100 sites? Do you or they really deserve to be listed? Does the person/site/business building the list have any authority to make the judgement in the first place?
If a reputable trade journal had an article on the top 5 businesses in your niche and you were one then it would be significantly more valuable than a small website that nobody has heard of trying to get some links!
From an SEO perspective, if you want to look at two was linking such as the 100 best listing, then also think about the value of the link. What's the page authority of the linking page and how many links is this being spread across (100+). Then think about the one link you're going to provide back - is that worth more?
Are you going to get any direct traffic from this list? Is it being promoted? Is it on a well known, high traffic site?
It's quite common for businesses/sites to have two-way links for example where a legitimate relationship between the sites (this can be many things, such as topic, industry, shared market demographic, business relationship for example supplier/customer) This is something the happens naturally (just look at the big SEO sites and how they link to each other in their blog posts etc...)
What you need to be cautious of are those link opportunities that require or ask for link just for the sake of getting the link.
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You campaign settings have an option to archive or delete a campaign. Once a campaign is archived (or deleted) it won't count as one of your 5 campaigns.
I'd be cautious about adding unnecessary links for the sole purpose of getting some anchor text relevancy.
Do make sure that if you are naturally linking to another page/product that you use clear relevant anchor text that makes sense to your visitors in the context of the page that you're linking from.
Do consider the user experience, and the goals of the page you're creating the links on. You don't, for example, want superflous links drawing your visitors away from your conversion goals, adding confusion and uncertainty. Unlike your main navigation, in-line links can disorient visitors to your site. (What works for a wiki type site isn't necessarily a good idea for an e-commerce one!)
If you have a blog, or ever-green content that's been around for a while, attracted some links, been shared then do remember to go back to some of the popular content and update it, linking to the latest products/services/articles. It's easy to remember to link back to older articles, but updating your old content to link to the latest material can really help, especially if you're old pages are ranking well, attracting visitors and are still relevant.
Doug.
The overall objective of any SEO is to deliver relevant high quality traffic. Referral traffic can be better quality traffic that much of the search traffic you get.
From which page are they going to give you think link from? What is the best page for visitors from the brand's website to arrive on? What are they going to expect to see when they follow the link?
If they are looking to buy the brands products, then you're better off getting a link to the page on which you sell those products (especially if the link is something along the lines of "you can buy from these sellers..."
How well does your brand page differentiate your service and communicate your USP. Why should people looking to buy this brands products buy from you rather than your competition.
My best guess would be to see if you can get the link to your brand page.
(Besides, you'd brand page has a link to your home page right?)
What about Moz's Google Algorithm Change History or Beginner's Guide to SEO?
Edit: Or what about Jon Cooper's link building list (pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies) which has 1517 links from 407 domains.
Google can/and will replace your titles if it thinks it can return a better title to searchers.
Try the following Google query and notice how a different title is being returned for the same URL just because we added the keyword "toilets":
site:http://www.goldcoast-plumbers.com/blocked-drains toilets
Google certainly has a preference for "Keyword - Brand Name" style titles and from experience, the more you diverge from that, adding additional keywords to your title tag, the more likely you are to see your title replaced.
It's not necessarily a problem, how are you ranking for your target terms? Just keep an eye on your click-throughs from search.
Can't see this being a good idea any more. We're not in an "every link helps" world any more and I can't see what's in it for the customer when you just ask them to give you a link.
I think you'd be better off using the space to either try and build the relationship with the customer and/or up sell other products or services.
That said, apart from quickly checking the details of the order confirmation I'm not sure how much attention people pay to the "boiler plate" content.
I agree with Chris. It's really a case of educating and supporting your client as best you can. And making sure when you request these calls you do it in a coordinated fashion with the client.
I've had some absolute nightmares with companies that have a shared receptionist answering the calls.
The only thing I'd say, is that as you've probably found, what a client says will happen when they get these calls doesn't always happen. It's important to carry out a test by calling the contact number from an "unknown" phone and asking to speak to someone to verify a business listing and see what happens.
If this is the same number that they're using for sales enquires it can reveal some interesting things about their ability to convert leads.
I'm not sure it's quite as black and white as that Bob.
It's not just about getting more search traffic, you want more traffic that converts, achieived the goals of the site. The last thing you want to do is to add more content to these pages, and find that your conversions/sales go down.
What's the engagement like on these pages? Do people read this content? What is the exit rate and bounce rate like on these pages? Segment the different types of traffic in your analytics to see how these pages may be affecting direct/referral traffic, new vs returning visitors etc.
What is the goal/purpose of the category pages. Does adding additional content help achieve the page and site goals? If the page's function is mainly navigational, to help people find what they are looking for, then you'll need to be careful that you don't compromise that. Make sure people can still find what they need to find!
You say you've got 40 different categories to play with. I'd look to conduct some tests so that you're not guessing. You can always look at increasing the amount of content on one or two of these and see how it affects things. You might want to carry out some split testing too to see what the impact is on your conversion goals.