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I'll try that; in the meantime, I've been using Yahoo to find links.

I don't have a percentage but I read somewhere that nearly 1/2 of the "buyers" on Google look at shopping results. I think that shopping is important.... and becoming even more important over time. The down site for me is that to get good sales from that channel you have to be very competitive on price.

Peoples love video, invest time on it and money. Host in a professional video hosting as wistia.com Make a embed anchor to ur page. Delivery it to the peoples you want to focus in. Make a e-mail marketing with the video and send it by wistia. Probablly gonna help u a lot.

I took a quick look a quick look at the plugin and it seems to explain what each area is for right below the boxes you are asking about: Canonical: "The canonical link is shown on the archive page for this term." This allows you to modify the canonical output on the archive page for any specified category. Breadcrumbs: "The Breadcrumbs title is used in the breadcrumbs where this category appears." You are able to modify the breadcrumb output accordingly for SEO purposes in regards to the specified category. While I like the vast majority of the functions on the Wordpress SEO plugin, some of these options seem redundant, or would only be needed if poor site structure/naming was implemented originally implemented.  If that is the case your time may be better spent correcting that. There is a good chance it would be best to contact Joost directly since this is more of a support question for him than SEOmoz, but I hope my answers clarified a few things for you.

100% agree with this. Depending on the size of the site I would also try to make sure you don't have any dupe content anywhere and that you have unique meta tags across pages (again, depends on size of site). As you never know where traffic may come from and what surprises are in store. Then super focus on the sections of the site you feel are valuable, conquer and repeat.

Hi Donnie, Thanks for your reply.  The links are great.  However, I was hoping that Rand would provide his perspective in a blog or weekly whitepaper.

A quick little tip, whatever SEO plugin you choose, make sure you choose one you like and want to continue to use. If you write a bunch of meta descriptions in one plugin and decide to switch you'll need to figure out how to migrate your existing descriptions or you'll lose them.  This is not so much an issue for categories as it is for posts and WordPress ages.

You are very welcome!

Kevin and Eric, Performance issues aside, I prefer the simplest URL structure: http://sitename/postname Unless you really need advanced categorization, siloing, etc., bringing your content up one level and having shorter URLs is always better, IMO.

As there tends to be a risk for clients due to the fact that we can't ever guarantee anything, what we do is tell the client that they're not under any contract tying them to us so if we don't deliver they can cancel at any time. That minimises the risk a bit for them. Also, if you're thinking in just terms of rankings with them for the moment you can say that if you don't get x number of keywords (whichever keywords you decide between you are optimal) to page x by date x, and then page y by date y, etc... then they stop payments until you do.

No, that's not correct. Think about the way link juice flows as well. Remember that it is the professionals who say neither of these practices are good. If you want a good strong SEO position, you need to avoid these practices.

Hey there Eric, I can't think of any right now but you did remind me of this great blog post by Richard Baxter that you may find useful: http://seogadget.co.uk/solving-site-architecture-issues/

Great explanation.  Thank you!

Eric, you are absolutely correct - "and" and "or" are stop words and are ignored by Google. While doing the keyword research you will come across key phrases consisting of stop words because they were searched for. What Spencer has written is absolutely correct but i feel that here we are merging two different things. You can definitely use "exercise and vitamins"

Eric, Rand's post really carries weight due to how search engines evaluate content relationships, and topical focus.  It's inevitable that your page, with enough unique content on it, will be found for variations of whatever core phrase you target, so you might as well integrate a couple or a few highly related relevant phrases.  Not only does it make sense in regard to ease of optimization, but the fact that you're integrating a few additional highly refined phrases just reinforces the emphasis on the primary phrase, while not coming across as trying to stuff that single phrase. Search engines are very good these days at looking for those signals - the relationships of two topics.  Not just cross-page, but definitely on-page as well.

Thanks, Richard!

Great info!  Thanks.

I know that this is an old thread, but I must say that it's EXACTLY what I was looking for!!! I too have been puzzled by the Competitiveness scores produced by different tools (Wordtracker, MOZ etc). Many of the keywords I've researched in my particular field (refurbished laptops and computers) show Low Competition in these tools, but when I perform a regular search on Google, the first two pages are often populated by big name brands (Amazon, Bestbuy, NewEgg,Walmart, Sears, Overstock etc.)... which I assume would be difficult to rank above. The interesting thing here is that these big brand pages don't often score high on backlinks, In-Anchor-and-Title or other Competitiveness indicators, but yet, they rank high on the SERPs. I'm definitely a newbie at this, but this article puts the missing pieces together for me. THANKS!