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Hi

If you have not checked out these few resources, highly recommended for local;

Local Search Ranking Factors

Local SEO Guide

Advanced Local SEO Tricks

Your plan sounds pretty good, although I am not familiar with "Build My Rank".

The one thing I am curious about is, how is his website?  Is it technically sound (crawlable, indexable)?  Does the navigation/architecture (albeit small) make sense?  Is it optimized for on page keywords?  Does it have a great design, and is it full of useful information that's easily digestible?

That's just my general sense, that you have a good focus on off-site seo, but just don't forget about on-site, especially when it comes to users arriving at the page and taking that action; calling, emailing, sharing or whatever it may be.

Hope that helps! Its exciting, and good luck!

-Dan

Hi

You have to go by "phrase" or "exact" in the keyword tool, as broad could entail any search with the word "hire" even if it doesn't have "jet".

See image

-Dan

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Hi

Did you 301 Redirect the old pages to the matching new pages?  Anytime you change URLs you have to do this, it redirects your link juice as well as anyone trying to access an old page with a link or bookmark - they'll arrive at the new page instead of getting a 404 (page not found).

You do 301 redirects in your .htaccess file (insert them after the wordpress info) in this format;

Redirect 301 /oldpage/  http://www.mydomain.com/newpage/

One line for every page you're redirecting.  If you are using the new Yoast WP SEO plugin, you can edit your .htaccess file directly from WordPress, otherwise you have to edit it via FTP

BONUS: An easy way to get your old and new URLs so you do not have to type them all out, is run something like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Xenu Link Sleuth on your site, and export the URLs into excel.

-Dan

OSE is showing shares of your homepage (118 shares / 57 likes) - you need to enter each individual page URL to get shares/likes for that page. Running your first page "Post 1" URL in OSE shows 35 shares / 13 likes.

However, more importantly, its good to know what actually counts as a "share". To capture the most from the actual "share" buttons on your site, you need to install the facebook open graph meta tags on your site. This treats your site "like a facebook page" and will thus count of of the shares from people clicking the share button.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

This tool is a great extension for Chrome

Check My Links

Hi

The difference to understand about pages vs posts has to do with how they are organized

• Pages are organized by nesting (into folders or levels)
• Posts are organized by categories, tags, date, authors, etc.

or another way to think of it...

• Pages are for when you want the content to be organized in a traditional format; root/sub-1/sub-2/ etc. which is more or less static or linear
• Posts are for when you want content to be organized in a dynamic format; in other words, you could access the same post multiple ways; through a tag, a category, a date, or the 'blog' page.

So, use pages when you have more or less static pages, organized in a folder type format like described above.  Use posts anytime you have content that you want organized dynamically; ie blogs, news, product catalogs.

Some of the themes you can get make this more confusing than it needs to be too.

Hope it helps!

-Dan

Hey Adam

The best place to start is really diagnose where and when the exact organic traffic loss is happening.

Is there an exact date in analytics you dropped off for organic traffic? Or is it gradual? If it's an exact date, you can match it up to the algo history and determine if it's panda or penguin related.

Then secondly I would look at your average position report in webmaster tools under queries to see if your rankings have dropped. Sometimes traffic loss can occur without ranking drop, so you'd want to see if that's in fact what it is. Or maybe you're tracking rankings.

If it is lost ranking then you may want to start segmenting organic traffic in analytics. Is the loss across all keywords? Can you pinpoint a few high volume keywords that were hit? Or were certain pages hit?

Let's walk through the site a little on video;

http://www.screenr.com/PDgH

(the first few seconds is a little jumpy, sorry!)

First time trying this in the Moz Q&A. Let me know what you think - helpful?

Lastly - your question about the crazy numbers for indexation in WMT. I see this a lot too. This tells me Google is not sure what pages on your site are important or not. There's probably a lot of extra pages which are not important being crawled. I would mitigate this with a great XML sitemap as well as noindexing of things like subpages and pages that present the same content but just filtered and/or sorted differently.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hi Maria

While I can't say I know of the best theme for SEO, here are some considerations;

I would purchase from a trusted vendor like woothemes or themeforest  If from themeforest, look for a theme with a 4-star rating or higher, a decent amount of purchases, and look to see that the developers actively provide support and respond to questions.

I'd say more importantly, is what you do with wordpress, no matter what theme you use.  I have been trying Yoat's seo plugin for wordpress and am very happy with it.

-Dan

Hey Derek

First, check this out to be sure of your understanding of broad, phrase and exact match: google documentation

I almost always use exact match to gauge search volume.  A search for "how to be a freelance" counts as a broad match.  Even "freelance" or "writer" counts as a broad match.  These aren't relevant at all, so thus a very bad assessment of search volume.

Even phrase match is misleading. "Hire a freelance writer" could count as a phrase search, totally not relevant and therefore shouldn't count.

It is therefore, I ONLY want to know how many people are searching, exactly for "how to become a freelance writer".  Its guarenteed to be that exact search, which guarentees relevance.

If you optimize and rank for "how to become a freelance writer" you may also rank for similar or related phrases, like "how to be a freelance writer" or "be a freelance writer".

Exact match is your best bet when judging search volume, because phrase and broad are way too unpredictable, as to whether the search variations are going to at all relevant.

So choose a good phrase with a decent amount of exact search volume, optimize for that, and you may also naturally rank for related long-tail more specific phrases as well - like "how to become a freelance writer from home", etc.

-Dan

Justin

I personally prefer lowercase because to me it looks better.  And I prefer hyphens for the same reason, and it seems like these days everyone from WordPress right to the SEOmoz site does it that way.

-Dan

Google recently updated how they prefer AJAX is handled:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html

They now recommend using the PushState Method - I won't pretend to know all the intricacies of how it works for implementation, but that's the best method to go with. If you need any more help let us know, and I'll have another associate jump in and take a look.

-Dan

Hi Jayson!

WordPress actually has a solution for this now - site redirect - the only requirement really is that the new site has the same permalink structure as the old site. And I think it costs $12 a year. But that's nothing really.

So, I would recommend combining the sites into one, using the WordPress site redirect to manage getting the old blog redirected over to the new one, which will sit probably in a subfolder http://pardons.org/blog/

To handle the transfer of the actual content, you can use WordPress Transfer

I would always advice utilizing existing content whenever possible, never get rid of it unless its just too difficult to move over or its low quality.

Hopefully that gets you in the right direction!

-Dan

You need to 301 redirect old URLs to the corresponding new ones. You typically do this with a few lines of code in the .htaccess file.

This article is the best for info on how to do this.

And see this article and the section on 301s for additional info.

-Dan

Hi There

You could generate one for the whole site, but this will be a pain because you'll have to update it very often. What I would recommend is;

• Let Yoast generate one for the blog area. This will sit under site.com/blog/sitemap_index.xml
• Create one for the static part of the site - you can use a sitemap generator (google search). Just don't include the blog in it.

Then you can submit each separate to Webmaster Tools. This way Yoast will update the blgo sitemap automatically, you'll just have to update the static one on your own.

-Dan

No problem

What you would want to do is learn a little about site architecture, and how different pages will target different thing. Think of a sire like Zappos:

• homepage - targets something broad like "shoes" and "shoes for sales" etc
• shoes categories - target things like "men's shoes, men's dress shoes" etc
• subcategories - "men's dress shoes black"
• finally products - "size 9 men's dress shoes black"
• even resources - "how to choose the most comfortable men's shoes"

So your homepage should target the broadest concept / keywords. Then you might have category pages targeting things slightly more specific. Then your posts would target informational searches of very specific things people are looking for.

Walter

Looks like you have a "rel=nofollow" in the <a>links for every image.  I would remove that, and your images should get indexed.</a>

<a>-Dan</a>

Hello! Roman's answers are really good, but thought I would add some info as well.

Article or BlogPosting Schema can help in some of the following ways (vs hentry)

• Give search engines backend / structured info about the contents of the page
• Google's reference on Article schema shows all the snippet and SERP features
• Using article schema is the only way to get into 'in depth' article spots on Google
• I've had luck with Google showing the 'Last Updated' date in search results, which shows a newer date when using it in conjunction with article schema

So even though you'd technically be doing a 'blog post' I would use the parent Article schema as it's more widely recognized.

Hi

Honestly, I don't think you should worry much about pagerank.  I'd be more concerned if your traffic or rankings dropped.  Check out this whiteboard Friday on pagerank.  There are many more important things to worry about!

-Dan

PS - In about a 5 second analysis of your backlinks, I'd say you might want to focus on improving that. Not sure if someone has been helping you with linkbuilding or anything, but your backlink profile is severely unnatural.  WAY too many exact match anchor text links from irrelevant sites.

Hi

I hate to use the "it depends on your situation" answer, but it really does. It depends what your link profile already looks like (an off-site audit would tell you), it depends what industry you're in and how the competition is, and it depends on your goals.

Maybe you've got a good idea of your existing backlink portfolio? And the competition?

I would highly suggest having a look at this resource on seomoz.  Eric Enge gives a fantastic overview of the entire linkbuilding process.

If you can give us some more info, perhaps we can give you a more customized answer.

-Dan

PS - At your hours vs pay, is this $1,000-2,000 per MONTH?  At 140 hours a month (35 hours a week), for $1,500 that's about $11 an hour.  I would highly suggest thinking about paying more per hour but finding someone who can do a quality job in less time. Unless I've assumed the math wrong

Rand had a FANTASTIC flowchart to answer this question: Splitting Keyword Targeting

It was from this post.

-Dan