Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Kevin,

As far as I know the domain and content are the same. The site went live March 19.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Holly

I have a client who's rankings dropped after switching to out site. We know that rankings can drop a little after switching, but we are concerned that hers are still low. Any suggestions? As far as I can tell, the links to her site remained the same.

Thanks

Holly

I have  a client that currently has a side navigation and wants to know how changing to a top nav will affect her SEO. We always recommend top nav for user experience but I am not sure if there is a direct effect on SEO. Would the change affect it? Thoughts?

I am trying to improve rankings for a national website going after keywords product + state/city. It is a very competitive space and I can't figure out why our competitors are ranking above us (the ever enigmatic Google). Any suggestions for improving ranking for these kind of keywords without going black hat?

Thanks!

Looking into Boostabilty as an option for doing SEO for our clients, will still keep SEOmoz and will still be doing SEO for our own company. Has anyone used it or heard things about it? I am very skeptical when it comes to outsourcing SEO and when it comes to any kind of automated SEO but thought I'd ask if anyone had thoughts on it.

Thanks,

Holly

I've used some social bookmarking sites but have found that it can be tricky to keep up on a lot of them. I know for a lot of people things like stumble upon, delicious, reddit, digg, etc. work well. It also depends on your industry. I would recommend whatever you do use, make sure you are getting involved in the site and not just quickly going there to get a link. Get involved and use it for what it's meant to be used for.

Good luck.

I would definitely take a look at the list given by SEOmoz (below) and stay away from places that will sell you hundreds of links for x amount of money. Buying a bunch of spammy links can work for a little while but will bite you in the end.

best of luck

Holly

In the end I don't think the physical location that your links come from matter as much as the website and its quality. Keri's response has some good suggestions. I would add in, are you a member of the Better Business Bureau? They will link to you and it's a high quality one. Also, when it comes to link buiding, do what makes sense. If there's a good reason that someone from another town or state should link to you, then that's great. You just want links that are high quality and not just a bunch of spammy links or links that have no reason to link to you. I also strongly recommend adding content whenever you can. Make sure it's good quality content that people care about. Perhaps give a deeper look into the properties you sell or talk about the town, etc. Great images or videos of the town would draw in people as well.

Best of luck.

Holly

I know this question is already answered, but I thought I'd add my two cents. The more I do SEO, the more I realize that nothing can replace the human mind. What I mean by that is that no matter how hard companies try to create automated software to do all of the work for you, they will not be successful when it comes to SEO. As you said, this is especially true with the recent changes Google is making. Google doesn't want just anyone to become number one in the organic results with the click of a button. (ppc is a different story). We have to earn it. We have to work hard to build relationships and get links, write great content, network socially, etc.  Unless software can write quality content that  people will really care about, it won't work. Nothing can replace the thought process and relationship strategies of the human mind.

Good luck,

Holly

Dr. Pete,

Thanks for responding to me. I appreciate the explanation. I had always thought that it could take a long time to get those high quality links (the ones worth going after), so I was confused when I misunderstood what you said. Anyway, thanks for clarifying. I am a big proponent of content as well. Luckily for me, I have a degree in English. Now I guess I just have to come up with something brilliant that everyone will love. No problem right. haha. anyway. Thanks.

Holly

Rick,

First of all I want to say that I think what you're doing is great and Noah is adorable. I am a mother of twin boys that are 5 months old and have a good friend with a 3 year old that has down syndrome.

As far as choosing words to rank for - It looks like you have a good list, have you taken a look at Google's adword keyword tool? This can give you an idea of the competitiveness of these keywords. Also, look at the keyword difficulty tool on SEOmoz.

Once you decide that you know which keywords you want (it already looks like you have) I would recommend using those in your page title tags on pages that it makes sense for.  - I haven't looked, maybe you already did this.

For your homepage, I would be careful in making changes to the page title and description as it can hurt you if you are already doing well with the ones you have. I do recommend deleting your meta keywords as these aren't used anymore and there is discussion that they may even hurt you.

As far as ranking for the wrong spellings, I see where you're coming from and have tried to do it in the past. Now, I would recommend not doing it for a number of reasons. First of all, you don't want to decrease your site's trustworhiness with incorrect spellings. Also, because Google often does the "did you mean __" thing or showing results for the right spelling, I would stay away from trying to rank for the incorrect one. Google may also dock you for it.

As far as your category ideas, I think it's a great idea to put them into categories. Can you put them into categories and keep them in a timeline list too? If you can, you'll also want to make sure that the links in your category lists aren't different, or Google may see this as duplicate content. See - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Besides these things, I would recommend keep posting great content as you are, building links,  keep reading SEOmoz, and watch the prowebinars if you  have access. Rand did one on link building earlier this year that I recommend. Also, work on social marketing (I'm not sure how much you've done already)

Good luck! I'll wait for your response

Holly

I have a client who's rankings dropped after switching to out site. We know that rankings can drop a little after switching, but we are concerned that hers are still low. Any suggestions? As far as I can tell, the links to her site remained the same.

Thanks

Holly

I know this question is already answered, but I thought I'd add my two cents. The more I do SEO, the more I realize that nothing can replace the human mind. What I mean by that is that no matter how hard companies try to create automated software to do all of the work for you, they will not be successful when it comes to SEO. As you said, this is especially true with the recent changes Google is making. Google doesn't want just anyone to become number one in the organic results with the click of a button. (ppc is a different story). We have to earn it. We have to work hard to build relationships and get links, write great content, network socially, etc.  Unless software can write quality content that  people will really care about, it won't work. Nothing can replace the thought process and relationship strategies of the human mind.

Good luck,

Holly

Thanks everyone for your help. We can't host it on our server at the current time, sorry if I was unclear about that. I have been searching and have found that Pagemodo will probably work for us. I'm still deciding. Thanks again!

I am trying to improve rankings for a national website going after keywords product + state/city. It is a very competitive space and I can't figure out why our competitors are ranking above us (the ever enigmatic Google). Any suggestions for improving ranking for these kind of keywords without going black hat?

Thanks!

In the end I don't think the physical location that your links come from matter as much as the website and its quality. Keri's response has some good suggestions. I would add in, are you a member of the Better Business Bureau? They will link to you and it's a high quality one. Also, when it comes to link buiding, do what makes sense. If there's a good reason that someone from another town or state should link to you, then that's great. You just want links that are high quality and not just a bunch of spammy links or links that have no reason to link to you. I also strongly recommend adding content whenever you can. Make sure it's good quality content that people care about. Perhaps give a deeper look into the properties you sell or talk about the town, etc. Great images or videos of the town would draw in people as well.

Best of luck.

Holly

I've used some social bookmarking sites but have found that it can be tricky to keep up on a lot of them. I know for a lot of people things like stumble upon, delicious, reddit, digg, etc. work well. It also depends on your industry. I would recommend whatever you do use, make sure you are getting involved in the site and not just quickly going there to get a link. Get involved and use it for what it's meant to be used for.

Good luck.