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Until the public gets educated on the "Alternatives" we're stuck. Sorry

How is this related to the question?

David, that's exactly what I was looking for! THANKS!

If you had a website "Food for Dogs" and:

1. Food for German shepherds was improving in search traffic & conversions
2. Snack Food for German shepherds had no change and never resulted in conversions but resulted in many leads for #1
3. Food for Poodles was unchanged but improving conversions
4. Here's the kicker... Food Container for Dogs was super high traffic but with no conversions or any activity to other categories

Would you redirect "food container for dogs" to a different site and delete that tab from the original site completely? It's still related but does not offer any $ value or leads to any of the other categories. Just note that we have a different interest in this category that will support the other categories at one time, but not any time soon. We also have a major group on LinkedIN that's grown to thousands of members for the "food container for dogs" category. On top of it all, the "food container for dogs" has been increasing in rank on Google for several keyphrases to positions 2-5 (nationally)

Other important question:

1. Would keeping "food container for dogs" influence the ranking of the other keywords? (by dilution of the site's PR or any other reason?)

What's better for SEO and why? (any references would be greatly appreciated)

For the purpose of a URL of a page is it better to use:

1. Hyphens
2. Underscores

Would hyphens or underscores be better for Google Adwords?

Was it a .edu site?

LOL, and how many words (on average) do You tell your story EGOL?

I disagree with that.

Great marketers can tell a story in a natural language in 800 words, but others can do it in 30 with a smart punch line and an image and perhaps an embedded video.

For example, in my niche, there are super-high-ranked sites with just a title on a wordpress page, a short video and 20 words of content just in the caption (It happens to be a competitor so I'm trying to figure out what the "better" approach would be considering we have everything else at tip top shape)

We've been having phenomenal results with our interactive content on our blogs and now want to integrate the social world into it. (I'm well followed in my niche and it's time to share the knowledge and get the "Likes" and "Shares", frankly our users asked for it.)

What are the Pros and Cons of adding social media buttons

1. through a service like Share This via a simple JS code (it'll take a few minutes)
2. ... or should we invest the time, effort, and money to get a website designer to integrate the buttons one by one into the website?

I'm still torn whether we should sacrifice page load times versus getting well-designed sharing component to increase traffic and awareness...

... or perhaps there is a middle ground?

I'd love your opinions.

(example - I tested the Share This integration on a small blog -120 visitors a day- and it added 3 whole seconds to page load time at peak time ... but we got 13 shares over a 3 hour period)

We recently spent analyzing some of the best SEO software companies on the U.S. market fishing for the best practices in SEO and I saw one thing in common :

• They all had website titles in all the page title tags separated by " | "

Is that the best practice for SEO or is it just for Branding?

Interestingly enough, the website titles were completely unrelated to the pages' content or keywords. (Here's my personal opinion on what it looked like: "riding on a bicycle" | Ferrari )

But when I looked up the keywords ... ranked #1 or #2 spots, in some serious competition. (So in the example above, "bicycle" would be in the top spot)

Aside from well optimized meta tags, alt tags, captions I could use some help figuring out:

1. What's the recommended number of words (original of course) on page?
2. What should be the keyword % ?

We've recently engaged an SEO company to provide an audit, and hired another for comparison and guess what ... 2 different viewpoints. I consider this to be the worst $3 grand we've ever spent!

I look forward to your opinions

20% is repeat traffic. 80% is new. In past 2 weeks impressions increased around 30-35% and the only thing I can attribute the change to is the interactive stuff.

I have what you may call a niche market. All the competitors out there are focusing on selling products, we're offering a service on top of education. In many cases we're sharing the stuff the product companies would never want clients to know.

But it doesn't hurt to be prepared once other competitors arise, and I'm sure they're coming.

It would be good to find out about the correlation of Time on Page vs. Rankings from others that have tested this.

I'll be sure to post an update in a couple of weeks.

David, like I said though... we did get an additional 100+ link backs from high PR sites (6+7) that were in the PRweb network where the release was distributed to.

Yes, we did get interest from reporters and got interviewed but I was asking about those 100+ links from the PRweb network.

I was curious about how much page load times affect rankings. Here's what I did:

• I put together a lot of interactive media on specific landing pages
• Time-on-Page from organic visitors went from 50 seconds to average of 34 minutes
• Bounce Rate decreased by 20%
• Page Load time increased from 1 second to 6 seconds and at peak times to 8 seconds (on 56KB test)
• In the meantime the page was re-indexed and re-cached

My question is three-fold:

• Would the time on page give higher rankings for keyword
• Would decreased bounce rate enhance rankings?
• Would the page load time decrease rankings?

Did anyone do a similar test? What were the results?

5 Steps:

1. Take screenshots of ALL webpages
2. Get a report on exactly how many pages were scraped and have evidence (usually Googling the site titles is very effective)
3. Take screenshots of the meta data: Right click, click on view source, and take screenshots
4. Once all is recorded send the website owner a Cease and Desist letter informing them to take everything offline and manually take off the pages from search indexes
5. If they don't comply at that point any IP lawyer will help if you have all the documentation. Some will take the work pro-Bono because there's huge money to be won, especially if you did all the work for them already.

Do NOT issue Cease and Desist letters without the screenshots. Usually what these guys will do is to change the appearance and add content to the meta tags and at  that point they will claim it was not plagiarized while still hurting you. It will not stand up in court.

However, if you documented the scraping the only option the website owner will have is to take the plagiarized content offline completely. Any edits they do at that point is considered a scraping/plagiarism because you documented the offense.

We've been able to prosecute 13 companies already. One company we publicly called out on Twitter during a popular chat leading to the company's downfall in 4 weeks.

FIGHT FOR YOUR CONTENT!

I'm having a bit of a conundrum with Press Releases:

I recently sent a press release on PRWeb (which I personally think is just "average" compared to others as it focuses mainly on the CBS network and is not focused at all unless you pay for an expensive release) and got over 100 incoming links from high PR news sites (according to Webmaster Tools) but these links had PRWeb in subtitle, so for all I know these were syndicated releases and not "Pick up By" as PRWeb reports.

• Will this affect Page Rank value or rankings for any keywords?
• Are these links treated only as temporary links or permanent back links? (I know sometimes they appear in Google News or Yahoo News, but disappear the next day)

Was it valuable to the company?

Our business is in health sector exclusively on East Coast U.S. and the release was seen all over the world and not one of the links coming back was from a health-related section. They were high rank online sites, but is there value in such links?

added 11/30: I was reviewing competitors' link backs I found they did a lot of press releases and gained a high-level link back from each one. These were the best/highest-authority links they had. The syndicated releases were not even listed anywhere. And then I reviewed their SERPs... and guess what, their ranks increased with each one. (So I don't think "duplication" is an issue. If anything only the syndicated copies were penalized, but not the original one)

One Keyword per Page & one variation of keyword.

Ensure your title & description tags have the keyword. Ensure your body contains one keyword per 100-150 words. Include one variation.

Example:

1. Dog Leash

2. Variation: Leash for dogs