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I don't have any problem with multiple articles targeting the same keyword on one website as long as they are extremely different and they also target different secondary keywords.  If competition is thin you might be able to get #1, #2, #3, #4 for that keyword in google with multiple pages targeting the same keyword.  I have that for the main money keyword for one of my sites.  I have another site that has a dozen #1, #2, #3 rankings and scores of #1 and #2.

Before I produce a second article for any topic, I make sure that my first article is comprehensive, substantive, well illustrated, kickass and no less than the best on the web for that topic.

If I purchased or inherited a site with many articles targeting the same keyword then I would try to combine a few of them into the best comprehensive article about the topic.

If I was advising a company that produces some kind of software who has all of this duplication, I would tell them to start creating "how to do it".... "how to understand it"... practical stuff content that helps people use your software and shows how your software is better than the competition.

I would be publishing the reference book for accounting in that industry.  Each industry has its own accounting situations.  I would have the Bible of Dairy Queen (or whatever) accounting published on my website and everybody everywhere in that industry would be talkin' about my site and referring their bosses, employees, and other staff to my website where they can find everything anybody ever asked about Dairy Queen accounting.

Why Dairy Queen?  answer here...    And after you have read that, you will understand why accounting Bibles are needed for each industry.

Where to begin (SEO-wise) with my Website?

Educate thyself....

I've been toying with the idea of just trying to accomplish some SEO myself

Do this even if you intend to hire someone else.  It is really important for you to have some basic understanding about what you are buying.... and what methods are safe vs too aggressive (risky).   Lots of people buy poison.  You want to avoid that.

** I'm a full-time military pilot, so this seems like it involves more time than I have to give.**

OK... consider this....

Online printing is highly competitive turf.

You have arrived late to the fight.  You competition occupied the high ground years ago, they are dug in, fortified and now have all of the approaching ground carefully sighted in with a doubleoverkill of weapons.  They have highly-trained reserves that they can call in at any time if you threaten and they might see you coming before you arrive.

What do you think your chances are to assault that part time and without skills?

Some people like that type of a challenge.   I do - but pick my fights very carefully.    Just saying what you are stepping into.

If I was in your shoes and was offering walk-in service to people in Phoenix my first line of attack getting onto the local search map and getting established in Google Places for Business.   I would be optimistic about doing this.

If you goal is to use a website to generate orders nationally then you are going to need a big investment and an SEO team, at least for the short term.   I would consider this to be a gamble.  I might pick another fight - at least for now or until I got dominant locally.

I would hire someone else.  This guy is stinking up your brand.  He is also defacing other websites.

Your question is intelligently worded, reads easily, perfect spelling and more.  I bet you have some really nice sites.  So, you would probably be irritated if someone posted illiterate crap all over them.

This site has lots of product pages that contain an image, a short description and a link to an affiliate site.

I think that it could be considered a "thin affiliate" by google.

The pages that present these products contain "unique content" from what I can tell, however they do not contain "useful information" about them (which would make you informative), no selection of items (which would make you a shopping destination) and no content depth for the category (which would make you authoritative).

For that reason, I think that you will always rank below at least one or more websites in each of these categories:  A)  manufacturer,  B) major retailer and C) category enthusiast.

I think that this business model started performing poorly a few years ago and will continue to decline over time.

It is also possible that people might not give your site a lot of respect when it comes to SERP clickthroughs.  If I am looking to purchase the Shallow Raider Magnum, I am going to think that I am going to a knowledgeable site by clicking into BassPro, JoeBucher, MuskyShop or LakeLink... certainly not ChristmasGifts.

If they do click in they don't see selection, useful info or product category panache... so the bounce rate is probably high.

Your question was....  What can be done to raise the rankings?   I don't know because I think that google is starting to use different metrics for ranking websites than what has made you successful in the past.

If I owned this site I would ask... what can I do to give the visitor what he is looking for when he sees me in the SERPs or lands on my pages.   The answer to me is one or more of selection, useful info or product category panache.

This is all personal speculation.  But if I owned this site, it is what I would do or I would be looking for a second business model.

PDF documents are crawled, cached and indexed by Google.  They can be optimized and will rank well in the SERPs.  Text in those documents can be found by searching.

Does Google consider them in their search for duplicate content?  Probably.... because .pdf documents can be find in a search for duplicate content in quotes when you encounter this....

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 42 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

=======================

More about pdf documents in google here...

http://www.seomoz.org/q/will-a-pdf-pass-pagerank

Honestly.....   You don't want people who have no idea who your customers are, who your client is or what you are selling to be guessin' and kibitzin' about this.

You need to test this and see which one makes the most money.   If you don't test a bunch of different options then there is almost a certainty that you will leave a lot of money on the table month after month after month.

I'd be working on a bunch of options to test and a method of collecting good data.

How long have you guys been arguing about this?   The website visitors are the ONLY people with the answer.

Should I still try to rank my page even though the image is ranking as the first image displayed in the google results.

Absolutely YES.  I have lots of first image in the SERPs and first listing in the organics.  Both of these bring traffic.  That traffic is generally not as valuable as traffic from organic web search but you can still make money from it.  (Visitors to Google image search are given the option to view your image or visit your page.  Sometimes when they view your image that viewing is done on Google's website, sometimes the visitor is moved to your website.  Google is known sometimes to frame your website within Google image search.  Google changes how image search works from time to time and some of their configurations produce almost no traffic for the owner of the image.)

Will this count against me by Google if I do?

Absolutely NOT.   It may actually increase your opportunities.  You then have great content from web search and great content from image search.  They should want to show that page to everyone!

Or should I try to make the image being ranked more enticing for google searchers to try to increase traffic?

Absolutely NOT.   Get two images on that page and attack with both.  Three would be better.  Four or five, better still.

As in other things, much of this depends upon how much time you have to spend on it, how valuable the traffic might be and whether you are reaching for the competitor's throat or farting around. 

Asking an SEO company to accept  "payment for results" is asking them to accept your business risk.

In most good money niches your competitors are not sitting on their ass.   That makes SEO a "battle of resources".   Your competitor throws more money at it and you must throw more money at it and the battle escalates just like Crocodile Dundee and the knife.

Lots of webmasters go into a fight without the proper knife because they limited their SEOs budget.   He applies pressure, competitors respond and defeat is assured.

So, if you want the rankings be prepared to pay for the attack and then be willing to pay for an escalation... and then there is the most dangerous competitor of all - the one who has yet to arrive.

I think that most good SEOs have gotten their ass kicked at least one time and they know not to accept pay for results contracts.

You could write a blog post for YouMoz..

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc

Go to your profile page and look in the right column under "My Moz Stuff"... then "Manage YouMoz"... then click on "Compose a Blog Entry".

I think that anyone can submit a post... but they have a filter on what gets published to keep crap off of the site.   If you read what's out there you can see a lot of really high quality postings.  The best ones are promoted to the SEOmoz blog.

I agree... "Barrier to entry" was smart smart move.  500 mozpoints and paying members are serious people who don't want a forum full of noise.

The spammers and bottomfeeder SEOs have burned me out on another forum where I have posted for a long time.

One of the most important jobs of the SEO is to have a feel for the amount of resources that will be needed to be competitive in a business niche.

Some SEO projects require $100,000 (or a lot more) in resources while other can be accomplished with a few days of intelligent work.  The amount of time required to accomplish a goal (achieve rankings) can also be highly variable.

I have been working in a few specific niches for many years and am still surprised when I overestimate or underestimate the difficulty of a SERP.  I can also be surprised by the success or failure of content.

Without specific experience you can use the tools at SEOMoz to get some feel for the difficulty of a keyword or the power of a competitor.  If I was in your shoes I would get some direct experience with a few projects and then use the SEOMoz tool data to benchmark and project into unknown areas.

It is probably best to take easy projects in light competition at first and then accept more difficult work.   The last thing that you want to do is take on a tough job and not be able to advance a client's rankings into potentially profitable rankings.  That can happen when the SEO has a budget of $1000 per month but a budget of $10,000 per month  is needed for success.  You not only have to gain backlinks but you have to gain them at a much faster rate than the competition if you expect to advance above them.

Good luck, keep asking questions here while you progress in experience.

A short product description on my sites is about 100 words and a unique photo with a generous caption - so about 150 words total.

Most products get a much longer description of at least 300 to 500 words and at least one unique photo.  The short description described above is often upgraded after we receive a few questions about a product or after we get more experience using the product ourselves (we have experience using almost every product that we sell).  When the descriptions are improved, the rankings often go up and the page starts pulling in traffic for long tail keywords.  These are the two benefits that we see from improving product descriptions.

Better selling products and those that receive lots of questions can have even longer descriptions of 500 to 1000 words and more photos.  Best selling products also usually have separate articles that explain how to select the product, how to use them, how to maintain/repair and more.  We always have links to these articles within product descriptions.  Our product pages and article pages often rank #1 and #2 in the SERPs.  We also have lots of #1, #2, #3 positions as a result of our article pages.

These really long descriptions usually have the essential info in the first one or two paragraphs.  Information after that has subheading to make it easy for shoppers to scan and skip/read parts of the description that they want.

If we have a product that gets a few returns we often add information about the product that caused people to return it.  We would rather kill a few sales than incur costly returns.

I might not advertise.  I would go looking for him/her.  I found an awesome author writing a personal blog in my topic area.  I got to see that the person was a prolific writer of very high quality material with great photos and style.  The articles were placed on my website where they would yield the highest value.

I ran an ad on Craig's list for a person who held a degree in English with honors and newsy writing experience.  I was really surprised by who applied.

Good luck.

There is an opposite of "asset" and that is "liability".

Some infographics are assets because they are artistically well done, informative, and about topics that people want to know about.  However, infographics that are poorly done artistically, contain factual errors or have other problems can be liabilities because they stink up your brand.

Most of the infographics that people send to me and ask me to post on my website are weak assets because they are poorly done or of zero value to me because they are irrelevant to my website.  So, something that is an asset to you might have no value to me.

I have learned not to behave like a trained dog and jump through hoops at Google's command.  They often don't have their ducks in a row when they tell you to do stuff (the case here in WMT), they often change their mind about stuff that they tell you to do (authorship), and they often do things differently without tellin' anybody (nofollow).

If you have read what people who immediately jumped through this https hoop have to say about their experience you know that some of them are cussin' about it.  (And, not one of them said that they see any positive difference in their SERPs.)

Amazon does not have https even when they say "Hi EGOL".... ebay doesn't have https even when I am in my bidding account,... and MattCutts.com does not have https.   Wikipedia didn't do it.  The WhiteHouse didn't do it.  The Pope doesn't got it.   And, NSA, Department of State and Interpol are still farting around.

Must not be too important because Moz doesn't have it yet.

So, keep fightin' the fight and do this https stuff after Christmas.... if then.

The only websites that I know that have long been completely on https are google, wikileaks and CIA.

I have a site that has a great deal of duplicate content because my clients list the same content on a few of my competitors sites.

Is there any way to ask the clients to give you some additional information about each listing?  That information could be used instead of or preceding the current information.

My homepage does not seem to want to pass link juice to these pages. Is it because of the high level of Dup Content or is it because of the large amount of links on the page?

How do you know this?  Toolbar pagerank has not been updated across the web for about a year.  I can find some of your subpages in Google.  (dupe content has nothing to do with pagerank)

Would it be better to hide the content from the results in a nofollowed iframe to reduce duplicate contents

Google usually gets upset when you show content to spiders that you do not show to visitors.  This is the opposite.  I personally would not do this on one of my sites.  You never know how Google will behave in the future.

increasing unique content with articles, guides etc? or can the two exist together on a page and still allow link juice to be passed to the site.

Increasing unique content is almost always a good idea.  Again, linkjuice flows through links and that flow is irrelevant to content.

My PR is 3 but I can't seem to get any of my internal pages(except a couple of pages that appear in my navigation menu) to budge of the PR0 mark even if they are only one click from the homepage.

Many people focus a lot of attention on PR.  It is almost never an issue.  Relax and spend your energy on content.

I would place this site in the Campaign Based Web-App in the SEOmoz Research Tools area and see what you learn from that.

There are a few ways to solve this problem when you are offering very similar products.

1. Spend what it takes to write unique and substantive content for each product variant.  I use this for my most important products, often writing over 1000 words and adding several photos and sometimes a video.

2. Combine similar products and offer them all on the same page.   I do a lot of this with color, size, material variations.

3. Publish pages similar to what you currently have and risk a duplicate content problem.  (this is called "take your chances with Panda)

4. Noindex similar pages or use rel=canonical to assign the duplicates to a single URL.  I have a site with lots of pdf documents.  All similar documents are offered via an image and a download button on the same page.  The pdf documents are blocked from indexing and assigned to a single .html page using rel=canonical via htaccess.  (I had a Panda problem on this site because of the many pdfs and their host pages.  Rankings went down across the domain.  After I noindexed pdfs and assigned each pdf to an html page with rel=canonical via htaccess my rankings came back in a few weeks)

This response is my personal opinion.  You will find lots of people who strongly disagree.

The opinions that people have about guest blogging can be strongly biased on whether they are the guest blogger or the blog owner.  And the blog owner's opinions are based upon the care and pride that they put into their blog.

My experience is that almost every person who writes to me about "guest blogging" is looking to give me a low quality article to post on my site that is nothing more than a sign post with links out to one or more other businesses.  The goal is to get a link for SEO purposes, maybe a little traffic, nothing more.  And 99% of the time the quality of the content is far far below my standards.  Most have been crap that I would never want to show to my visitors and would not publish if they gave me ten times as much money.

Another thing to keep in mind is that many of these people are hoping to use your site as a platform for link manipulation of search engine results.   If google doesn't like paid links - and that is what you will be publishing.  If you have a lot of them (or maybe even a few) on your site then google could decide to reduce your rankings because you are selling links.

The litmus test, in my opinion, is.... would this person still want to do guest blogging if the link was nofollowed or if there was no link to their website?  If the answer is "yes" then you might have a great guest blogger who will produce great content - because they have a message to get out instead of a bunch of links that they want to get out.

Since a LOT of people want to do guest blogging I am expecting to receive a lot of thumbs down for this post.  I have just given you my honest assessment of 99% of the pitches that are given to me.

oh man... I think that you should be banned from the computer for at least a couple of days!

From what I can see you have entered the ring with the heavyweights.

This is a techsavvy niche and the people you are challenging work really smart and really hard.  And they have been doing that for a long time.

I pay very little attention to DA, PA, etc.  Instead I look at the content of the site and the buzz about the biz.     To beat them you are going to need a popular site and a praiseworthy business.

Go to each of these sites and get a measure of their social cred....  cartridgesave....  33,000 Google reviews... stinkyink... about 10,000 reviews.  Check twitter and FB for their brands.

(I don't even live in the UK and I have heard of these businesses.)

These are businesses that people are singing about.  People are typin' their domains into Google - asking for them by name - over and over again - every time they need a cartridge.

Lots of people will disagree (especially hard core SEO linkbuilders).

But I think that you will need a lot more than SEO to defeat them.

I don't think that google is going to look at the links of a website and rank them above these guys without a huge human popularity factor.