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One option may be to hire an individual or smaller company, rather than a big, established one. You can expect lower prices for comparable services - as long as you do your homework and make sure they are reputable, experienced and transparent in all activities.

Hello again, I don't have much insight on this one, but I can share a personal experience that I think is relevant. I launched an Atlanta, GA based printing website about three months ago, and due to some pre-launch SEO efforts, ranked fairly well after the initial index. Approximately six weeks later, after a "live beta test," my team decided to upgrade the CMS (Magento), and redesign the site to add some functionalities that were missing or buggy. The site was "Under Construction" for about three days, and our rankings increased slightly after the new site was indexed, despite it having less content (products) than the previous version of the site. Recently (about three weeks ago), we added several more products, and our rankings increased dramatically (Google - 52 improved, 0 declined in SEOMoz rank tracking, 4x increase in queries, 2.5x increase in traffic). These updates did however coincide with other SEO efforts, so it's hard to nail down what cause the improved metrics. But... I definitely think that the addition of new content helped. In my market (Atlanta Printing) many of my competitor's websites have been updated very little over the last several months or even years, so it doesn't require much to win that battle. In other markets, this will of course be a different story. I do think freshness of content will impact any search result, like you said, and it absolutely can't hurt to have the "freshest" site in any given market. Again, depending on the search term, fresh content could mean three days old, or it could mean 3 months old, but I advise my clients to publish new or updated content at least every 30 days. I think it all boils down to the competitiveness of the query and the rate at which other pages competing for that query are publishing fresh content. Thanks! Anthony

Thanks.  I've watched the video before but it's worth reviewing.  Still seems a bit strange that someone can violate terms of service which G never bothered to enforce for years and get slammed with "Double Secret Probatiion" while a malicious site can clean up and eventually get the penalty lifted.  No doubt a malicious site manual penalty should result in a long time in the penalty box but at least it's obvious what to fix.  There doesn't seem to be a reliable consensus or even many case studies on garden variety Penguin recoveries yet.  Not knowing what Dean Wormer wants me to change is irritating.

You can simply use a bit of ajax or javascript to do this or even a dynamic php script. Search engines will see all of the text within the html, as all you are doing is showing the user certain parts of the text. It is completely fine, search engines are ok with this. You should however give the option so that the user can choose to view other testimonials.

Niche sites are like cherry trees: the best time to start one was 10 years ago. The second best time to start one is today. That said, don't expect stellar results without putting in some hard work. Setting up a wordpress autoblog and commissioning 5 textbroker articles does not a business make... You'd better have a good design, coupled with good content, and a non-spammy way to integrate affiliate products or other monetization methods, or you'll get mediocre results, because you won't stand a chance at building any good links.

That was what I initially thought, but SEOmoz has usage data and social signals as separate factors.

Hi ! SEOmoz recommends a lot of companies and most of them are very expensive. Small companies can't afford their services. If you are tight on budget you can outsource your link building to reputed companies in India or other countries and you can afford services worth $5000 in $2000 or even less.  Not all companies are good but some of them are at par with any world class SEO agency. Companies like SEO Corporation and Brainpulse has established a great reputation. SEO Corporation's own brand name has more than 40,000 searches per month!!!!It is famous for its very personalized customer care and quality of service. Talk to them for references, results, prices etc . I hope you will find a match. Best of luck. [Screen Shot 2012-06-15 at 6.20.25 PM.png](Screen Shot 2012-06-15 at 6.20.25 PM.png) [Screen Shot 2012-06-15 at 6.20.25 PM.png](Screen Shot 2012-06-15 at 6.20.25 PM.png)

Howdy! Did this responses help answer your question, or are you still looking for some more assistance?

Neither access denied nor not found crawl errors are dealbreakers as far as Google is concerned. A not found error usually just means you have links pointing to pages that don't exist (this is how you can be receiving more errors than pages crawled - a not found error means that a link to that page was crawled, but since there's no page there, no page was crawled).  Access denied is usually caused by either requiring a login or blocking the search bots with robots.txt. If the links causing 404 errors aren't on your site it's certainly possible that errors would still be appearing.  One thing you can do is double-check your 404 page to make sure it really is returning an error of 404: not found at the URL level.  One common thing I've seen all over the place is that sites will institute a 302 redirect to one 404 page (like www.example.com/notfound).  Because the actual URL isn't returning a 404, bots will sometimes just keep crawling those links over and over again. Google doesn't necessarily crawl everything every day or update everything every day.  If your traffic isn't being affected by these errors I would just try as best you can to minimize them, and otherwise not worry too much ab out it.

No. I don't know how often the OSE index is updated. Knowing my own backlinks, I know only a part of my links appear. Google seems to be more thorough with the links, and it is coming from the search engine that is ranking your keywords.

As a predictive metric, both Domain Authority and number of linking root domains are among the highest in terms of predicting a site's ability to rank for a given term, all other things being equal. But there's a better way to answer the question. If you want to know what it takes to crack the top 5 for a given keyword, run the query through the SEOmoz Keyword Analysis tool. If your a PRO member, be sure to run an Advanced Report. This will give you a good idea why the top 10 are ranking the way they are, and what you have to do to beat them. Each keyword is different. The reasons one set of results is returned in Google will inevitably vary from the reasons it returns a different set for a different keyword. Sometimes you need social shares, sometimes Domain Authority, sometimes raw links.  Most often, it's a subtle combination of dozens of factors.

You also have to be fairy knowledgeable with Adwords to make it work, aside from the resources. I have a lot of experience with SEO, but a limited amount in SEM.

You are correct they have little value, It would be a good idea to place them on your own site instead, only that they are probably copied onto many other sites by now by screen scapers and you would not get credit for being the original. You can try copy scape to see if they have been copied http://copyscape.com/ no dont point links at them, point the links at your own site instead.

Maybe Google includes all sub-domains.  I just tested my site, and got the following results. site:handsomeweb.com 340 results (all have www) site:www.handsomeweb.com 231 results (all have www) The difference is the first query includes pages located at:blog.handsomeweb.com

Sorry to rain on your parade, but article directories are next to worthless. these are the sites that goolge has been cracking down on. Matt Cutts recommends that you dont do this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY

I live in social media and I dare say I still don't understand Twitter except in very limited circumstances. My thought is that you have no business outsourcing any of this until you get an actual grasp on what it is these consultants are actually doing. Until you do, you'll hear all sorts of tales spun, reports generated showing upward trends, etc. Invest some time in speaking to different people, do a little bit of research to get an understanding of what these guys do generally and then make an educated decision.

Try to focus more on those competitors who don't have an exact match domain, it's much harder to rank when your URL does not contain at least a partial match. Google still puts a lot of weight on exact match domains.  I would focus more on creating valuable content and post them on your site or use websites like Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon to get the word out. Put a snippet on those sites and the rest of the article on yours. In addition, if you can share it with minded-like people, such as through Facebook, I'm sure that will improve the results. Try googling with industry-relevant keywords and advanced search operators to find sites that Google itself currently sees as authoritative, which are also publishing guest articles, then try submitting your articles to them if your website doesn't attract to many people.

I tried job boards for other jobs (other than writing) an didn't have much luck. I should try again! Thanks for the advice.