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Awesome, thanks again for your clear directions Dirk!

Glad it was useful!

Thanks for the confirmation Richard!

Hi Rick Thanks for your response! According to WMT and Moz I have added the CcTLDs and Hreflang tags correctly and set up geo targeting seems to be fine. Just can't seem to find out why the .com and com.au isn't ranking or showing any sign of being in the top 50 for a long tail keyword yet?  I launched in Nov 2014 and we rank reasonably well for the NZ search, but it seems the .com doesn't appear to show anything. I'm mindful I had submitted the same sitemap for the co.nz to thecom.au and also the com and wondering if that had any effect. We are in the middle of a site re-design so I wasn't going to submit the new sitemaps until the new design had been updated to the live environment.

Thanks Christina!!! Appreciate your feedback!

All in all, more pages would definitely increase your website's authority and provide strong signal about it's topic. So yea, it would better for seo, but only if those pages are valuable to the users - coz creating pages just for the sakes of it, would mean spamming.

Thanks so much Patrick! Interesting points you make as well! I'm looking to bring out the quality in the industry and grow it from there. Can you tell me I had a question from a potential "contributor" who wanted to know interms of copywriting if usually a contributor creates an article for the blog who owns the copy right? I'm not so big around this side of things, but it wasn't something I was actually aware of until she mentioned it.

Check with ahrefs or majestic, check the links manually or using a tool like link detox and then you'll know what needs to be done.

Nothing to worry about there Justin, your article will always rank above the copied one.

If they copy it then  submit a DMCA to Google.. I don't even bother asking people to take down content.  WHat I was referring to was legitimate referencing when they write their own unique article because they like the idea of my own article.  This latter thing is what I would like to achieve.  Social sharing helps get your content in front of other bloggers which can help facilitate this. Basically if you have good content, people will over time give you links naturally.

What I usually do is  set the website up on a staging area set up at example.com   and modify my local host file with the ip address of the staging area with domain and access the site via example.com

Thanks Dirk! This feedback has been very helpful! Appreciate your time and effort!

I had a couple of people who worked on our SEO a few times but we never really got much good advice.  The best advice I have had so far comes from MOZ and our most recent SEO guy, and people such as yourself.  Asking these questions on moz helps reduce it.

Well, depends, if it´s a GOOD domain there are some very interesting benefits against a new domain: Domain age is still a positive SEO factor:-) Domain authority, will also help you to rank If the domain has domain authority, it probably has some inbound links ( as i said, its important to check if they are good ). This practice is may not be so ethical, but it´s possible that looking into the domain past with archive.org, you may find interesting content to use that is not longer indexed in google results. You also can use an older domain to do a redirect 301 to your new domain and take part of the old domain authority, but as always, just do it when the old domain is completly clean and the topics match!

Of course adding unique content is the only way. add unique categories description if you have a blog, last excerpt of posts related to the category alternative categories info try to figure out possible user generated content, category related define an algo to present different set of products for each category, even if many products fall on multiple categories you don't have to show always exactly the same multiple product descriptions for the same peoduct, one for each category... do some brainstorming and you will come up with more ideas

The 302 response code isn't an error, per se. It's a redirect code that generally means 'found'. It doesn't pass 'link juice'. Some of the common uses I've seen include using 302 codes for external links, when they can simply be set to nofollow. The nofollow link attribute is handy when you feel it's necessary to link to an external source, but don't want any of the baggage that comes with passing PR. In the worst case, someone moved pages 'temporarily' when the pages were actually moved permanently. Which may mean pages with incoming links at the old URL aren't passing 'juice' or 'PR' like they should to the new URL. Here's the Moz Guide to Redirect Codes for further reading. I don't know anything about your site, so there may be a good reason for the 302 responses. But the good reasons are quite limited.

Hi Justin, Ahhh the bias of the Google keyword tool. I once read an experiment where a guy built a site, based on a hunch, around a keyword that had zero search volume. After ranking 1st for that keyword for a month, he checked his analytics only to find that his site had received a 1000+ visitors that had all arrived via his main keyword. (This was when analytics used to show your main keyword) For cases like this, I'd just go with my gut instinct Justin, as that's sometimes the best keyword tool. Even your instinctive keyword tool search volume varies a lot, depending if you've had your morning coffee or not. For any keywords with search volume under 1000, I don't pay too much attention to the keyword tool. I have a few home renovation sites targeted to specific areas. All keyword research on these keywords is usually zero searches per month. These are keywords such as 'Home Renovations (Suburb)'. After I rank first for those medium density suburbs with the keyword 'Home Renovations (Suburb)', I usually get about three calls a month for that service. Remember these are home renovation jobs at $20K+ a job, so they turn out to be pretty lucrative jobs leads I can give to my clients. And all from '0' searches per month! Perhaps you'd have better luck asking the physic for next months search volume ... lol.

Hi Justin, I can see that you already got good answer from Dirk & Christy. I would also like to share few Google Analytics resources on my personal experience http://www.lynda.com/Google-Analytics-tutorials/Google-Analytics-Essential-Training/160343-2.html http://www.lynda.com/Analytics-tutorials/Google-Analytics-Tips-Tricks-Tutorials/135364-2.html Currently 10 days free trial available on Lynda.com** Thanks

Everyone here has some great advice and tips. I tend to disagree with a few of the ideas here. First, I don't think that having links from people that you have built relationships with is a terrible thing. If it is done properly it could probably generate some great referral traffic for you. That is very important. There is no link juice passed if there is no traffic. You absolutely have to make sure that you watch the anchor text, but you also what to do a quick check of their link profile. As the Penguin updates are becoming more evolved, you can be penalized for just being in a bad link neighborhood. I would just run their domain through Open Site Explorer and see if there is anything that makes you nervous. If these are sites that are related to yours, and they have the potential to generate good, engaged traffic, I think you don't have too much to worry about.

I would argue against Fiverr, not just on the grounds that it cheapens the landscape, but mostly due to the quality.  I tried using it multiple times from semi-technical and click bait style articles and every time the quality was poor to the point that editing them took more time and effort then just writing them would have been. I agree with Alberto about Odesk.com, it is a great resource to find freelance writers with.