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Hi Jason, It depends on what CMS you're using.  If you're using WordPress, you can definitely use SEO Yoast or any other plugins to change the meta title and many other SEO required areas.  Please let us know what CMS you're using to further help. Can you clarify your 2nd question? Thank you!

In my experience, pure spam penalties are either super easy to clear or darn near impossible. The easy ones are ones where someone buys a new domain and doesn't realize that the previous owner of the site had used it for spam.  If this is the case then you can file for reconsideration, tell Google you are a new owner and they usually lift the penalty. But, if this isn't the case, then I'd be concerned. I've seen other internet marketing companies get pure spam penalties on their sites when Google feels that they are breaking the quality guidelines in several ways.  In my opinion it's like Google saying, "We don't want this site in our search engine results so we're going to call you pure spam and remove you from the index."  Usually pure spam is a mixture of bad backlinks, on site content that is not good for users and other things.  Your backlink profile looks very unnatural.  Every link I am seeing is anchored with a keyword like "atlanta web design" and "atlanta marketing". But, a pure spam penalty usually goes beyond the backlink profile.  I didn't spend a lot of time looking at your site but I've seen SEO companies get pure spam penalties when they are using techniques that are against the quality guidelines for their clients.  Or, in other cases, if the website is describing how to manipulate Google then this can invite a pure spam penalty. If you made the keyword anchored links then part of your recovery would involve removing as many as possible and disavowing the rest.  If you feel that they are negative SEO, then you still need to clean up what you can.  Google's generally good at not letting negative SEO happen, but if you feel that you are 100% innocent and did not build these links then explain what you can when you file for reconsideration.  Google is always interested in hearing about possible negative SEO. Only you know what kind of techniques you are offering to your clients.  If the methods that you use for ranking go outside of the quality guidelines then I am guessing that you will not get rid of the pure spam penalty without a complete change of your business practices.  (I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case, but I do know that Google doesn't treat pure spam penalties lightly.) Is the penalty related to the hacking of the other sites?  From what you have described I would guess no.

Nice to see a fellow Wisconsin person here! I live in Bristol Robert has some good points. Do you have any customer reviews that you can add to service pages? If you can add the reviews to the page with the date, city and state it should help. On your contact us page, you can add a map with pins to the cities that you serve, with a link in them back to the service page for that county. That will help also. The most important thing is having really great, descriptive content. I would utilize a blog to better geo target. The blog is so helpful because you target long tail key terms, make the entire content location specific and have really engaging, shareable information.

Seems like these results are consistent with each other, 3.66s and 3.52s are very close, if you repeat the test few time and all results are around those times you should consider around 3.5s as the realistic loading time for your users. Have you checked your analytics account for the site speed section? My favourite tool (developed and supported by Google) is webpagetest. If you check your website with it you will notice few area of improvement, in particular the TTFB (Time To First Byte). The two metric you should care about are TTFB and the total page loading time. TTFB is a factor in google algo ranking of your pages. The total loading time is affecting your UX, and potentially damaging your bounce rate. In the webpagetest your site is getting an F for TTFB, which seems to be between 3 and 7 seconds. Which is really bad and potentially hurting your SERP ranking.

Hey Jason! You're getting excellent feedback from the community here. Local SEO is all about physical location and face-to-face contact with customers. If both of these describe your business model, then you can definitely build citations. If you have to say 'no' to either of these two prerequisites, then citation building isn't the right marketing strategy for your business.

Nice community feedback here! Thumbs up all around ... and I do hope that Local Landing Pages post will be right on the money. Thanks for linking to that, Robert.

Justian....if it "looks like" keyword stuffing to you then it is! Google will see it that way too, eh! Bad practices, I'd say....

Hi Jason! The marketing practice you'll want to bone up on involves the creation of city/local landing pages. I think you'll find this Moz Blog post to be right on the money: http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide Hope this helps!

Yeah the line above - "...should do the trick in a non-spammy way...." is worrisome to me. You need to think on various counsel here and here's some ideas fyi... Miriam (a leader here in Moz) offers up these great tips... https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors (is the big David Mihm LOCAL factors reports that many of us here have contributed to!!!) Great places to start! Me? Yeah, I think the G local algo is now good enough to parse when someone is trying to get way too much ranking juice using that kind of "stacked" location page trick. Beware, bad local tactics HURT!!!

Hi Jason, I've had a look at the Search Metrics 'Ranking Factor Study' PDF and have looked at the relevant information. I believe the 'negative correlation' you mentioned refers to the fact that the H1 is now less important regarding the ranking and the SERP, according to their report. The H1 tag is roughly 55 - 60 characters, or 4 - 5 words as Moosa Hemani has said. I hope this has helped you understand what it means!