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We did make a couple of videos. I took your (Seomoz) advice and started shooting some short clips. They are already on Youtube for a few months know and we are working on several ideas to create a long term plan for releasing at least 1-2 videos per month. This is how it looks: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCiPV17s0Y&feature=feedlik).

About ranking in local search, I talk to Rand about it on a private question and my opinion is that unless I have an exact match domain and tens/hundreds of local reviews, I'm not going to be able to outrank my competitors. Google seems to rank companies based on their listing address without checking the facts and this is so frustrating. For example, I know for a fact that NONE of my competitors have an office downtown Chicago but they do on their Google listing and that counts a lot because the closer you are to Downtown Chicago the better you rank. Also, they use very strong keywords as their listing Title instead of the name of their company as per Google guidelines. It seems that not only they are not getting penalized for that but they are even being pushed at the top. When Google still puts so much weight on exact match domain, when business are taking advantage of the system by posting  fake reviews and using other shady tactics to rank high in local search, there is not too much I can do. Everybody here is preaching a white hat approach and I fully supported but for smaller companies like mine is not that easy to put up with spammy websites because Google doesn't do enough about it. I don't want to lead this discussion somewhere else; I just had to say something about it.

Your thoughts are always greatly appreciated.

I kind of knew you gonna say that...when I see my competitors ranking so high up using spammy techniques, all my patience goes away and all I'm thinking about is is how to gain back my position in Google. The problem is that I need results fast, 70% of my company's revenue is coming from our online presence. We don't do ANY paid advertising which means that if we go down to page two in Google, the phones stop ringing.  You see, it's not always what you should do but what you can do. I need time and money to find very good writers to create that kick-ass content that you talk about and when I do find them and have the articles ready it is very hard not to publish them online where the results will appear much faster.

Egol, I saw your response after I submitted my answer above. Although you gave good advice most of the time, I am not sure if your answer is wright more me. As I see it, you create awesome content most of the time, the websites that you put your content on are very strong or at least strong enough to rank for the keywords that you target on those articles. I understand that but if my website is not as strong as yours, shouldn't I have to use, even temporarily, other means to get the word out until my website grows stronger?

Sha, I like your response, a very professional approach. My press releases are going to be submitted to major online Release sites. It was just a question if I should put them on my website or not. It does make a lot of sense because the whole idea of a press release is to generate the attention of journalists who then use your contact information provided to call you and get a conference for information that they can write about. They want things that are of general usefulness for the public, not just simple promotion, that's what advertising pages are for.

The thing is, I have been doing SEO for about a year now and it seems to me that there is no wright answer. What works for you might not work for me and vice-versa.  I am not going to have my press releases on my website. I read that the articles SHOULD be put on your website although even the best content guys on Seomoz have different opinions about this. What’s your take on this subject? Do you publish your articles on your website before or after you submit them online?

Although I agree with people like Egol or Ryan who supports the idea of having the articles published on your website first ("why give it away to somebody else if it's that good")__, this approach is not for everyone. For me, it makes sense to have them pushed through bigger article publishing websites because I get much more exposure. My site is not as powerful as I want it to be to get the most out of those articles.

Robert,

Your assumption is correct, I do have dedicated pages to those keywords. Our site has only a blog, would you recommend creating a new page "In the press" or build a new category on the blog with that name? I would have all my press releases hosted there, what do you think?
I am using some companies recommended by Seomoz.

I have started a long-term article marketing campaign and press release distribution. I will have about 4 articles and press releases in total every month. Although the press releases will not be self-promotional, sometimes they will be talking about a certain product that we unveil.

The question is, due to the high quality of these press releases, should I put them on my website as well as publish them on third party websites? If so, because they target a specific service/product which we already have a dedicated page on our website, wouldn't that put Google in the position of choosing between the two pages?

I was thinking to put them on my blog and link internally from there with the keywords that I target on those pages as anchor text. The same question for articles. Any suggestions?

I just discovered that the actual crawl date is Nov 16 and we change our template on the Nov 18. Google cache still shows the last template. I just don't know what to do anymore. There is no duplicate content, it must be something else.

Both websites were built in Joomla. We did not remove any url's especially because we were afraid of this drop. Anyway... we did not expect such a huge difference.

The content changed a little bit but not from seo point of view. The on-page optimization is pretty much the same, but the way the content is organized... this changed a lot. We did a crawl test when we were still working on the website and the way the content was read seemed to be fine.

To increase the usability of the site, we have also added a slideshow and a rate look-up form (table style).

Thank you!

We recently changed the template of our website but we kept the same url structure, most titles are the same, the content changed a little bit, the description is the same, and the same on-page SEO. Although we have been very careful and the actual template change took less than 5 minutes, we experienced a huge drop in rankings (even more than 10 positions in Google serp).

Does anyone have any idea what could have caused such a drop? The weird thing is that Google still has the old website in cash and not the new one. We resubmitted the sitemap, made a few more redirects... but anyway... what else can we do?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

I haven't decided yet which one to use; do you have any experience with any of them?
More importantly, once the press release is out, you are just hoping that the page where it will be published on will have a high Page Rank? I have seen my competitors’ articles on other PR websites and the pages they are on have a high DA, above 60 but the PA is 1! I mean, if you spend a couple of hundreds of dollars, you expect at least a good backlink if this is what you are trying to get, right?

this is an example:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/groundlink-launches-first-mobile-app-providing-access-to-global-network-of-private-cars-through-ios-and-android-131975958.html

Can I use the same video (hosted on my website, static URL) for 2 completely unique press releases/articles)? Would this make it less unique although the subject on those to press releases would fall into the same category (travel) but will have different content?

I like your answer, I just don't have much time, I thought in my spare time to learn something by reading how others have become good content writers.

Does anybody recommend any book about content writing?

This is the template that we are going to use.

http://demo.pure-joomla.com/pj_velocity_15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=74&Itemid=110

I don't want to put too much content in the slides, it will cover the pictures.

I agree. "Not too bad" is absolutely horrible. Your goal should be to build a world-class site.  I know it is not easy to create great content because we cannot be great at every single thing we do. In real life, sometimes we have to pick and choose. In the beginning, I did not have enough time to spend on the website but I needed to start somewhere.
-We have no broken links, the site is W3C compliant, we do not have e mobile version (mainly due to the fact that we did not have time to look into it and GA shows only a couple of people accessed our website through mobile devices). It will flow much smoother than before once we are done with the re-design. I know my website is not great but we are getting there.
The niche that I’m in (limo service) does not require too much content; what it does require is great pictures of our cars, competitive prices and an easy to use booking system. That is where I concentrate my efforts. I do need great content to gain links and now that I reach the point where I can spend around 6 hours a day in front of the computer I need to know where to focus more, what would be a good plan to get the word out.
I recently watched Rand talking about how evil low quality article marketing has become and I agree with him, we need to create great content for our customers although having a couple of great articles published it doesn’t mean the job is done. There is so much more than that.
 In a few words, this is what I gathered so far about article publishing:

Create great content, have it published on:

_- Your website (90% of the time)

• Other websites (10% of the time), good, solid, reputable PR sites_ Submit to sites like Reddit, Digg...
  Get the word out via Twitter, Facebook...

My site has a PR3, DA 45 and PA 34 (Homepage), I did not write any article or press release yet and I want to do it the wright way. I do not have any spammy links (not added by me anyway). I think I have submitted to enough directories and made useless blog comments and it is time to build some quality links.

Time permitting, this would be my plan:

1. Create one great article every month; by “create” I mean find a content writer in my niche/city, verify his work, integrate keywords to create an SEO friendly article; keep the headline between 8 to 10 word, body count 300-500 words, 2-3 links; Incorporate your keyword into the headline, subhead and first paragraph and the anchor text links to the most relevant page/s on my website, not just the homepage. We have some unique pictures and very informative videos that I believe will attract visitors. The question is: should I post just a fragment on sites like the ones Egol was mentioning (Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon...) and have the rest on my site or use somebody like PRWeb? Now, I have done some research about that and I found some of my competitors ‘articles on PRWeb but the links they have there didn’t pass much juice, the page where the article was published on has PA1; I mean I know their domain is very strong but is it worth it? There is no way of telling how much PA the page will have before they publish the article.  If I publish all articles on my site, does it hurt to have them published on other well-known websites as well? Any issues with content duplication? I mean, if you publish an article or press release on a huge PR site eventually they will appear across the web on lower quality websites anyway. On the other hand, there is a big chance that if you publish your kick-ass article on those reputable PR websites, you will probably gain more links than by having them on yours. What is your take on it?
2. Search Quora, Linkedin and other sites like it and create blogs around hot topic in my niche
3. Find 10-20 blogs and by being an active participant,  I might get a someone’s attention and eventually a direct link
4. Mix in some small to mid-size blogs. They have fewer comments (more link-juice per comment). I know blog posts get archived and fall off the link-graph (or at least get reduced in value). By focusing my commenting hopefully I will keep the links fresh, to some extent. A mix of home-page and deep links while keeping the anchor text looking natural.

This is where I am at this point. I guess I need reassurance from somebody that spends more than 30 minutes on SEO per day that, what I am about to do is wright.

I am in a limo service industry where people are not looking for great content or product description, all they want is a nice Lincoln Town car and a competitive price. Because I need to get more pictures in front of my customers rather than more content I am not sure if by not having the content high up in the page will affect my rankings. We are transitioning to a new template where we have more control over the layout of the website but because of the slider that we have on the homepage the content needs to go further down.  We could insert some content in each of the slides but the page would start looking too "busy". We want the customers to see very clearly what we offer. They see the picture, click for more info and book the service.

How important still is to have your keywords in the first hundred words on a certain webpage? Can we get away with having the content read by search engines after 3 - 4 slides and their description (about 20 words total) ?

Thank you!

Ryan, is there no downside for having AddThis button with 4 -5 outbound links especially if they are placed high up on the page? Did you apply the no-follow attribute?

I understand, we can format the pages on the blog as we want. That is the answer that I was looking for. 
Thanks!

The $1000-$2000 was the budget for link building per month and I am the link builder. We are in the process of re-designing the website to make it more user friendly but as it is right now, I think is not to bad. As far as the content goes, we need to make improvements as well. The content was written mainly for SEO purposes and it needs to go. We are adding some widgets, better pictures, better content...better everything. I want to start fresh.

Link profile: I have started link building about a year and a half ago, mainly with directory submission, some blog commenting and forums post (just a few). I did not know much about SEO but after I start using the information on this website I have seen positive results in a matter of months. I pulled my competitors backlinks profile using OSE, tried to get their links, sometimes it worked sometimes it did not. I spend some money on some big paid directories recommended by SEOMOZ, found other ones on my own.

I had to work and do SEO for my company ((echolimousinedotcom)) in the same time. It was very hard but I thought that, in the long run, it will be better if I learn from the best in the SEO industry and apply that knowledge rather than using an SEO company that I did not know what they were doing; I needed it to understand the process.

I have seen the backlink profiles of my competitors and I knew I could beat them and, in some case I did, quite easily. Majority of them has exact match domains and it is very difficult to outrank them without a very solid link profile. Now, I have spent many hours reading blogs on Seomoz and I am ready to take the next step and invest some money any time into real link building. The goal is to rank for a few very competitive keywords; all I need from you guys is some direction, where to start. I think part of my problem is that different people here on Seomoz give different kind of advice on the same matter; I do not know anymore who is wright. Maybe nobody, maybe everybody …I start to think that there is no right or wrong in SEO just some general rules and lots of testing.

I know who Egol is, I followed his posts and I think he gives great advice every time. If I could hire him I would but I know I can’t. So I study more. There is a lot of information floating around and I know content is still king but if my website does not rank well to be found by others, would not be better to have an article/press release published on a larger, more trusted website where it could gain more links than having it on my website? I am talking short/medium term until I get my website to rank higher then I will put all articles on my website. What is the benefit of investing $1000 in a press release/article publishing if you get 1 or 2 very good links from high ranking websites but in a matter of weeks your article/PR gets archived and loses the ability to pass link juice? Is this all about the money? The more money you have the better results you get? I mean, you have the knowledge but can you really make it to the top without investing a considerable amount of money?
Now I have time to study, give me something to do.