Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ask LOTS of questions here.

Pay close attention to who gives good and generous answers.

You will see that different people have different answers and different styles.   Different answers does not mean that one is wrong but a lot of the answers that you receive will not be "best answers" in general or not be the  "best answer" for you.  Still, different answers are informative.

Seeing a diversity is important.

After you have asked LOTS of questions you might realize that someone has a style that you like and gives answers that you believe are valuable - and get lots of thumbs-up from members.  That is when I would select a person for paid consultations.

All of the people who I have paid for consultations have first demonstrated to me in forums that they know their stuff and have respect of their peers.  After this type of screening of consultants I have not been disappointed.   However, if I would have hired people without this screening I would have been disappointed many times.  Why?  Much of the free advice given on forums is bad advice or not good advice for you.

Read the profile of anyone who you consider hiring.  Some are available for clients.  Some are not.  Go to their website if they list one and look at it critically.   You can get fantastic assistance from many of the members here, but be careful to be sure that you get the right person for you.

Good luck.

Write all new content for the site that does not have organic rankings.

With a name like that, even the PhD's at Google will be able to tell that they are trying to manipulate SERPs. 

wondering why these companies pick names that paint targets on their butts

I can't see the forest for the trees.

I looked at the title tags of the content and I think that they are in that forest of trees.

For example..... these titles....

What could you do to bring joy to your heart?

Gifts of Family Memories

Medicare Open Enrollment 2013: Part D Prescription Drug

Keeping Your Aging Parents Safe at Home

Learn About Home Health Care

The topics of these blog posts are either:  A) composed of very common words that do not distinguish them in search; or, B) go up against an enormous enormous number of other pages on extremely powerful sites with the same words.

You are in a forest of trees that are really hard to tell apart or in a haystack with so many pieces of hay that getting yours showing up at the top of the search engines is going to be improbable.

Pulling in traffic from search with the types of titles that you currently have is going to be very difficult for a small site without a lot of power.   To generate traffic from search, in my opinion, will require writing about topics and titles that have some more unique words that still have search volume.

I used to live in a tiny tiny town and someone asked me about getting a brand new site ranked for "gift baskets".  There were almost zero customers who would drive to the town to purchase one.  That left national search competition to obtain traffic.  There are so so so many sites selling gift baskets that the resources required to become competitive would be enormous.  Even going after long tail queries would be extremely hard because the web is so flooded with competitors.  That, in my opinion, is what you are facing for these "common word" and "massive competition" queries.

Figure out a way to find topics that are not so crowded and competitive.  Some of the current blog posts might be able to be retitled or refocused but it is probably better to build from scratch than recreate.

Google knows that Tenerife is a geographic location in the Canary Islands.  This website has the word Tenerife on it many times.  It has pages with Tenerife in the title, in the URL.

Even though you did not give them a link you gave them a mention... and in the same sentence you associated it with the keyword that you are searching for.  All of that helps them.

Google thinks beyond the page.

If you think this website is hard to beat, wait until they get an SEO who knows what to do.

Do you think these are good services to start consulting with?

Any service that can produce measurable positive value for your client is a good one to start consulting with.

The question is...  Are your skills and expertise strong enough to produce value?  Can you point to at least a few items of content that are at the top of the search engines for valuable queries or that have pulled in massive traffic that resulted in conversions?  Have you taken small businesses from invisible on the web to the top of local search in a moderately competitive market?

Anybody can say... "I can do blogging".    When it comes down to numbers most of those blog posts pull in less than a dozen visitors per month.

So, if you have numbers that would make a client smile and deliver them at a price that works for you then you are ready to offer the service.

.....are requesting i put a link on my home page...

The Pope can't get a link on my homepage.

Fifteen years ago almost anyone could toss up a website, slap ads on it and make a little money.  Lots of people discovered that and started cranking out websites.  Some people grew their business into large companies and did that work at scale.  Companies who were already large heard about that and sent large teams of employees into the fight.

As this happened the competition became smarter, more fierce and more powerful.  It is exactly like traditional warfare where people first started attacking with sticks and stones, then armies with arrows and swords wiped them out, then armies with muskets and cannons wiped them out, then airplanes, bombers, rockets and look where we are today.

The skills, resources and smarts needed to succeed in website competition today are far greater than what was needed 15 years ago, 10 years ago or even just 5 years ago.

i mean will seo live forever ?

As long as search engines are used to discover websites, SEO will probably be important.

Will i loose my seo job ?

Maybe you will.  Maybe you will not.  If your company has been changing their methods as competitors evolve and search engines become more picky then your company might survive.   In the past couple of years, panda, penguin and  other types of search engine efforts to eliminate websites that they don't like have significantly changed how SEO must be done.  If the websites of your clients are being hammered by these then your company might not succeed.  They have to change from old SEO methods to new SEO methods that depend mainly upon quality websites and quality content.  If your company can't do that then you might lose your job.

Again, it is like traditional warfare.  Armies with smart generals who know how to do battle and how to adapt to the advancements of their enemies will have the best chance of survival.  However, even if they are the smartest general around, if they don't have the resources to compete their army will be overwhelmed.

Pay attention to the success of your company's clients.  If they are struggling then you might want to change employers.  If you are a smart and ambitious person who is good at code and good at writing then you might be able to survive personally by going to another company where the general is smart, adapts with vigor, enforces quality standards strictly and has clients who are having success.

Learn as much as you can so you are personally a valuable asset.  Improve your coding, improve your writing skills and pay attention to news about search.

Good luck.

In my opinion, a title tag that quickly communicates what you have on the page is very important for clickthroughs. It can also focus your optimization. How to Handle this? There are several options, all dependent upon your individual situation.

If your title tags look like this....

<title>Blue Widgets: Huge Selection and Free Shipping | MyBrandNameThatNobodyGivesAHootAbout</title>

Then I would cut the brand, but lots of people will argue with me. If your standard title tags is just a keyword melange then I would start rewriting them. If you have top rankings in all of your SERPs and people are buying stuff like mad then I would ignore the error and go out for beers.

Yesterday I went to several sites such as HuffingtonPost, TechCrunch, WashingtonPost and Mashable who were reported to be "partnered" users.  The number of people using  +1 was puny when compared to the number of people using tweets, Facebook shares, and email.  Almost nobody using it.  Facebook was  500:1 above it.   When I googled the titles of their articles I could see the counts displayed in the SERPs.  It's still early, usage will probably increase over time.

I have the  big AddThis chicklets at the top of my site set to "preferred services and personalization" (it displays services that the visitor has already used to share).   Yesterday I changed the last preferred service to force Google Plusone but it produced a chicklet with a count that broke my design.

So, I am going to watch this for a couple of weeks to see if the usage rate picks up.  I  think that getting a bunch of +1's for your site will be extremely valuable in the SERPs.

My concern about +1 is that the initial information that google has put out about it is not very easy to understand, clicks to dead URLs and has content that will turn off people who worry about privacy.  Also, +1 has been around for a while in other forms and people might be tired of seeing yet another iteration.  I am not betting big money on this one.

As a matter of fact all my post are good (IMHO), but I can churn out only 2 or 3 masterpieces per month.

Yes.  This sounds like me.  I spend a lot of time on a good page of content and usually have help with graphics, photos and data.  A lot of what I produce is among the best-on-the-web for the subject.

With that kind of content I am not sharing.  No way.  In fact, I would not share pedestrian content with other sites because I believe that it feeds competitors and produces new ones.

A few people have offered me great content and I have published it on my site and it now outranks their site.  Some have been happy about this because they have a "message to get out".  But others have not been so happy because they don't like my site above them in the SERPs.

Or should I strengthen my own site striving to be such authority in my niche?  But without strong external link profile  Google shall frown upon me and my site.

The route of not syndicating content for links is very slow to get traction.  Very slow.  It can take a few years to get rolling.  However, after your site is established it becomes hard to beat and then you can spend zero time on promotion and as much time as possible on content creation.  But for this to happen your content has to be really good.  If it is only "better than average" this probably will not work.

Good luck!

I agree with your assessment.

This hosting service is being run by either noobs or stingy people or both.

I would get a new host right away.  ASAP.  Your rankings in search will die completely if you remain on this host.

In addition to what you have seen here they probably have other practices that are deadly.

I would install my site on new server, then change the DNS before informing the current host.  Then call to cuss 'em out. 

Built a small website.  Nuthin' happened.

Read about SEO.  Tried something.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.  Rankings dropped.  Couldn't remember what I changed.

Started writing stuff down.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Read more about SEO.  Tried something else.  Watched what happened.

Stopped doing SEO.   Instead spent time improving website and writing content.  Got better results.

What google wants is authority, relevancy, quality and engagement.

This part is great.

Maybe write "Confessions of a Blackhat". 

The best way to understand it is to go here and experiment.

http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php

When I thought that pagerank was really important I went to this tool everyday and almost wore it out.  I learned valuable things and benefited from them.

Today, I think that pagerank flow is a very tiny part of ranking on the web.  I think that visitor response to your site is a lot more important and focus my attention on building a great site.  Knowing a little about pagerank is good, but I would not invest a lot there.

Because domain authority is capped at 100, it has to be a comparison of how the assets of your website compare to the assets of every other website out there.

To increase your domain authority, you must increase the assets of your site faster in comparison to all of the other sites on the web.   So, a person could be working to improve their website and actually make progress, but domain authority could drop because other websites are doing more.

Rankings operate the same way.  If you improve your website, but your competitor improves his more, then you will not advance to a position above him, even though you might have done a ton of work.

This is a very simplified explanation.

I think that "nofollow" should be used when links are "paid for" or the destination of the link is "not trusted" or "potentially not trusted".

I would link to my social accounts with followed links.

I can understand how it would be attractive for a company to "own" the content that it publishes.

However, it is possible, if you are getting articles from very high profile individuals in your field, to obtain value from having those individuals associated with the content.    The author also gets credit for the content that they write for you.  This could be "win-win" in many ways and be very different in an author's mind from "they own".

I would not worry one bit.  Not one bit.

Those recipes have the names of your products in them as ingredients, thus they are related.  You probably link from recipe pages to product pages, that increases the relationship.

If I owned your site, I would have at the bottom of my cinnamon page a link to every recipe that uses cinnamon.  On every recipe page I would have an ingredients list and beside each ingredient I would have two links... one to the page where I sell that ingredient and one to a article page that tells a lot of information about that ingredient.

In my opinion, the key to successful online retail is NOT running a retail site, but instead, running an information site that also has a store.  All of my retail sites have more content pages than retail pages.  Sometimes that content is perfectly related one-on-one to to retail products, sometimes it is tangentially related, and sometimes it is kinda loosely related, but all of that content brings people in and some of those people buy and some of those people engage with the adsense that I have on the content pages.

Lots of people type my domains into search engines, not because they want to buy something on my site but because they want to read something on my site.  Google sees these people asking for my sites by name.

If anyone should be worried about you offering content on a product site it should be your competitors.