Welcome to the Q&A Forum

BTW, have you ever heard of PPC companies managing campaigns in return for a percentage of sales generated via PPC?

I have talked to a few reputable PPC companies. Many of them want what amounts to 30% of your PPC spend if you are on a small budget (around $1,500/mo), PLUS a setup fee of a few hundred dollars.

I talked to one that suggested starting with products and moving to other categories/section - a narrow to broad approach. This seems like the best way to go if you are starting.

The others want similar startup/monthly fees, but they will do the keyword research, ad group creation, etc.

It seems to me the best way to go is either create my own feed via MC and connect to my adwords account, or pay an exorbitant amount to a very reputable PPC company and hope their expertise will bring in revenue. I am leaning towards the product feed.

We are starting out with PPC for our site. I wanted to know what the best starting point is for our site. First, some basic info:

• We sell thousands of products from a large number of manufacturers

• We can offer the same prices as competitors, but we can't beat their prices

Here are my questions:

1. What would be my USP if my prices are the same, and we have the same store policies as competitors?

2. Is it best to start with product pages (as opposed to keywords)? Meaning, setting up a feed via MC and connecting to our adwords account.

Any advice is appreciated

I have seen a number of personal blogs, ones that clearly state that they get some sort of monetary benefit for reviews, that have dofollow html links to some large retailers. I was actually surprised to see this, given the recent Penguin update.

It seems to me that if you can offer content for a link back, you should be able to offer a product for a review and a link. Any thoughts?

We have been spending a lot of time creating unique and relevant content that is helpful to users in order to garner natural links. However, I still see large companies getting paid links to their site.

They still rank despite the paid links - many higher that before thanks to the increased brand/domain authority bias by Google. I have seen a number of blogs with posts that have dofollow links to sites like Amazon and Dirtdevil.

Are small businesses just getting buried or am I being too cynical?

If I were you, I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole.

He probably just needs a handful of links from local sources. Maybe local business associations, etc.

If it is very niche and local, you have very little work to do compared to a site that needs to rank for a competitive keyword nationally. But you already knew that!

The PA is based on onpage and offpage factors. The links to that page have the highest impact along with the quality and freshness of content. Just looking at the metrics is not going to answer your questions. That site may have fewer links that yours, but not all links are created equal. One link from a quality and relevant site is worth 10 (just throwing a number out) mediocre links.

I don't know how often SEOmoz indexes pages. I assume they are always crawling and indexing. In my experience, majestic SEO has a larger index of links/pages. The best place to checkout the links and rankings for your site is Google WT.

Based on what you answered:

I would ask the site owner about question one. He should have a firm idea of other ranking drops or possible penalties. What other sites are doing is also a factor, but I don't see how a page would drop off the index due to title tag modification.

I have seen pages move up and down by tweaking the title tag. In my experience, when you make the title tag cleaner and less repetitive, the page ranks better. Even if it were to move down, it would not drop off the index. That seems bizarre!

But, I am speculating without knowing the site or keyword the page is ranking for.

Changing the title tag is not something that would cause that page to drop off the index. A fewof questions:

1. Has the site lost rankings for other pages?

2. Has anything else been done that might have an impact on rankings (i.e adding links, removing links)?

3. When you paste the URL in Google, does it come up as the first search result? If so, it was not dropped from the index.

4. Is the keywords still at the beginning of the title tag?

5. Is there another page on the site that now ranks for the site? You may have more than one page on the site targeting the same keyword.

Anyone used an SEO or SMM company that they would recommend?

I know about the recommended sites on SEOMOZ, but I can't afford to pay someone $4K a month for consulting or link building.

Anyone still feel safe outsourcing?

I know that within the past couple of months, Google as made algo updates so that freshness of content is used as more of an indicator for relevancy, and hence, rankings.

see:

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/06/search-quality-highlights-39-changes.html

I understand that freshness is important across the board, but it is obviously more of a factor for certain search terms. My questions is, how can you determine if your product category (ecommerce) is one where freshness is  becoming more of a factor? Is there any way to know which terms are considered to require fresher results?

Any input is appreciated.

I agree with Anthony, his comments are accepted guidelines. However, it really depends on what the content is you are talking about. If it is a blog, as Anthony assumes, then he is right.

But, sometimes sites want to offer a service or product that does not squarely fall within the product categories currently represented on the site, and they choose to use a subdomain.

You may also want to glance at this:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain

The meta tag recommendation seems to be for the keyphrase ""Registered Degree". You seem to be looking at the onpage optimization report for that keyphrase and not music degree, and you are getting thrown off. You do NOT have registered degree as a keyphrase in the meta description, so if that is a term you are trying to optimize for, then it would be good practice to use it at least once (I wouldn't do it more than once) in the meta description field. Hope that answers your question

Do you have an e-commerce site? Is the site as a whole hit, or is it certain keywords/pages?

I would be careful with removing links, unless they are really spammy. You might do more harm than good.

I wrote about this here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/using-dripable-to-build-url-links-too-dilute-link-profile

Anyways, good luck.

I am helping a retailer out with their site. They were hit hard with the Penguin update, and traffic has dropped by about 75%. Here are the stats:

• It is fairly new, has been up for about 3 years.

• Has partial match domain name

• Is nearly fully indexed with over 4K pages

• Has NOT received an unnatural link message from Google, so no manual penalty.

• Has had most keywords BURIED in the search results.

• Link profile: Has done about 50-100 blog comments, 500 directory submissions, 800 social bookmarks, 5-6 press releases, 300 article submissions (most removed), about 30-50 guest blog posts.

I am thinking it may have just been hit because of aggressive use of anchor text as opposed to massive spamming. Then again, the site has never really added great content and the product pages have no unique content.

Any thoughts?

I want to add some script to my site so that a given page publishes a different paragraph of text every time the page loads. Something like randomly displayed testimonials (but with more text).

So, when you look at the page source, you would see all the text (e.g testimonial-1, testimonial-2, etc.), but the user would only see one paragraph randomly.

Would this be considered hidden text (one code for search engine, one for use)? Is there a safe number of words you can do this with without setting off red flags?

I appreciate the help.