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I'm pretty sure if you just chop off the last tag, , you are going to be perfectly fine.

There should be one canonical tag and it should point to the URL of the original document or the version that you want search engines to view as the main document.

Thomas made some great suggestions. I personally use, and love, Team Treehouse (http://teamtreehouse.com/).

Distilled U is also great, you can find a Moz perk for them here: http://moz.com/perks.

I would definitely just start with HTML. More than knowing how to write simple tags, you should understand the structure of a webpage. Then focus on how java and php actually work. You may not need to learn a whole lot of java or php to do a great job at SEO.

You may also want to try Google Trends. This will give you a much larger view if you are looking for trends over a couple of years in order to identify patterns over months.

I think it would be in your best interest to only have one shop instead of two with the exact same products. Also, you should provide a unique description and title for each product and page.

There is no guarantee that you will experience great results by just deleting the 3k item shop, but if the content and products are the exact same, they are most likely competing with each other.

Click on the 'Moz Analytics' button in the top right-hand corner. Then you will find 'Back to Pro' under the Moz logo, under the 'Select a campaign' drop-down.

I just did a search for both of your examples and it appears that the answer is, yes. You should be perfectly fine whichever way you go. However, if you know that your audience/customers/prospects use a specific way of writing the keyword over the other, then that will be the one you should go with.

Whatever meta description you provide is not necessarily the one Google will use. Be sure to provide unique descriptions for each page optimized for the user searching for those terms.

When is the last time content on the site was updated?

My first thought is to look at the freshness of your content, even more so if your competitors are providing fresh content at a regular pace.

It's really hard to tell you what is going on with no information or without the ability to look at the site. It is not unheard of for a newer page to pop up with relatively higher rankings and then eventually settle into a lower position. Sometimes referred to as the 'Google Dance'.

Also, are you using the tools available in Moz for page grading and competitive analysis?

If you feel uncomfortable about sharing info openly in QA, but would like a little more help, you can private message me. I don't mind taking a really quick look to see if I notice anything outstanding.

What exactly are you trying to do? Maintain high rankings for that page or somehow capture the high rankings for your new landing page?

If you change the contents of that page into a landing page, your rankings will fluctuate. If you don't redirect, you will lose all of the links pointing to the content you move.

Why don't you just gate your content for members only and point your paid media to a new URL with the landing page?

I was having the same issue. I kept disconnecting and reconnecting with no luck. Apparently, many other users are also experiencing this bug.

Moz gives a solution to the problem, here: http://moz.com/community/q/trending-bugs-in-moz-analytics

But it basically tells you to do what you have been doing.

What worked for me is disconnecting the account, then navigating away from the settings page, and finally going back into settings and reconnecting. The error seems to have stopped since doing this.

Hope this helps!

I agree that, for all the reasons listed, selling SEO may be harder. But, for all the reasons listed, you have an opportunity to differentiate yourself. You have access and knowledge of the reasons why potential clients would say no. Address the objections head on and find ways to assure the client that you are different.

If you approach SEO as something that does not differ between providers, then you will only end up competing on price. There are lots of good agencies out there. How many are truly great? In what ways can you edge out these good companies by delivering great value?

Thanks for sharing this Chris. This raises a question for me; does a page that is redirected lose its pagerank over time? Since that page doesn't necessarily have any value itself any longer. And, if so, then wouldn't it be wiser, in terms of link juice, to just place a link on a well-optimized page rather than a 301 redirect?

Many factors contribute to how well your site ranks in the SERPs. The content (both quantity & quality), structure, code, and the quantity and diversity of links pointing to your pages are just some of the factors.

As Jeremy suggested, you can use the tools on Moz to reverse engineer your competitions ranking strategy.

It could possibly be that Google doesn't view many of your URLs as being unique. I notice that almost all of your URLs could be grouped into two sections. Each section of URLs being almost exactly identical since you have almost no unique content on any of your pages.

Also, and I may be wrong on this part, submitting a sitemap doesn't necessarily guarantee that all pages will be indexed.

I have a site that I don't really use any longer but still has some okay rankings.

I'd like to take advantage of the links point to that site. Is it better to redirect that site to my new one or to just place a link on the homepage pointing to my new site?

I highly recommend Wordpress. You are going to get a lot of flexibility and support both with the CMS itself and all of the available plugins. Not to mention the availability of theme and plugin developers in the event you need something custom.

One thing you might look into for Wordpress is premium.wpmudev.org, I have been considering this for a long time but I thought of it when you mentioned mini forum, might be a good resource.

Glad to help! I'd love to discuss further if you have more questions.

So, my question here then revolves around relevancy to the user. If someone is searching for "fitness management software" and sees your site in the results but your page's title is "Client Management Software" and your competitor's title is "Fitness Management Software", which do you think they are more likely to click on? Furthermore, lets say they do click on your page, your reader will not be sold as well as they would if the landing page addressed their specific need. If they then decide to compare your solution to a more targeted solution, who do you think they will pick?

You could use your blog post as a means of explaining how your product solves their specific problems. Or, you could create a whole new page dedicated to fitness management software, which would have a much higher chance of ranking well in the search engines and would probably convert better than a generic page.

Google will have to spider the site before any loss in rankings due to design, right? So, if there is a drop in rankings, it won't necessarily be recovered in a re-index.

But, so long as there are no errors and the site remains the same structurally and content wise, there shouldn't necessarily be any issue. Even if there are no errors with the new theme as far as SEO goes, if the new design affects the load speed, this could affect the ranking of your page.

Are you talking about a banner ad or just a banner on your site?

If it is just a banner on your own site, I don't really see the harm and Google can't tell what is on the image. You should also contain the information in text on your contact page and possibly in the footer of your site.

If you are talking about an ad that appears on other sites, I wouldn't recommend this. You are using up valuable ad space and more than likely someone isn't going to call you or jot down your address before they click on the banner and check out your site.

I agree with Federico, the styling should be fixed through CSS and probably before you start doing any other work. Making these changes really shouldn't take that long.

Since the site owner is wanting SEO done for his site, he/she would probably listen to your advice on getting the site cleaned up as soon as possible. Just state the issue and let them know that this problem is potentially costing them money.