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This lives in your Google Webmaster Tools account under Your site on the web > Search queries. You can also access this data in Google Analytics if it's synced to your GWT account, under Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries. This will give you impressions, clicks, average position, and CTRs of different queries you're ranking for in Google.
Ryan Kent is #1 on the users board, and his answers that I've read in the pro Q&A are always right on. He's the director at Vitopian, and it sounds like they've been helping out sites with Panda and Penguin issues (he wrote a great Penguin-related post here).
He'd be the first person I'd look to for advice.
Take a look at the Moz recommended companies here. I'm sure you can find someone that'll help you out!
I think the norm now is to not use rel=canonical when using rel=alternate hreflang tags (see here or here). The reason being that rel=canonical is telling the search bots that only the canonical version should be included in any SERPs, and the rel=alternate markup is trying to tell it which versions should appear in which SERPs. Ideally, you can just use the rel=alternate markup, and this will help the bots consolidate the signals properly across the various international pages.
Also, you can set a default version for each page (see here).
If all the pages on the .hk domain 302 redirect to the .com domain, it won't rank the .hk site for Hong Kong searchers. There's pretty much no value to doing that unless you're going to start to market the .hk domain. The .hk domain won't be showing up in search results.
Yes, if you set up a /hk subfolder with the hreflang markup on its pages, and your regular pages, you should be fine.
If you have the resources to set up a /hk subfolder with the hreflang markup, for most sites it wouldn't be much more work to set up a new ccTLD domain with that same content. Things that would throw a wrench into that would be dealing with secure pages and a new SSL certificate, or if you have specific logic tied to your site being on a .com.
A good rule of thumb is to do what you think is better for your users, and not necessarily for SEO, as search engines are always moving in the direction of optimizing their users' experiences. Since those shorter URLs are easier for users, you've got your answer right there!
Since your domain is hookah.org, people will know that /blog/ and /forum/ are going to be related to hookahs, so there's no need to repeat the word in the URL. If the domain was more general or a brand, or had more than 1 blog or forum, then adding hookah to the URL would make sense.
Make sure you let Google and Bing know that your site exists! Set up Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also, you can submit URLs in both to try and get your pages indexed faster.
Yes, you could do this. Googlebot almost always comes from the US (I've seen it come from Canada before), so Google will probably only see your US content, and use that in SERPs around the world. An ideal set up for this would be doing geo-based redirects to distinct URLs depending on the locations. To keep from having duplicate content, you can set up rel=alternate hreflang. With this set up, Google can find all your different international versions, and serve the right pages in international SERPs. With this set up people in the UK who search will see your UK pages.
You can also sniff out Googlebot-Mobile and serve your mobile pages to it, so that Google uses your mobile pages in their mobile SERPs.
I don't think it's necessarily bad. I'm just not sure it's as compelling as stating the savings and an expiration date in your ad. You could try running an ad with the code, and a similar one without it, and see which does better.
If the user doesn't write down the code and later forgets it, they may might not be able to find it again! If you do use a promo code in your ad copy, make sure it's easy to find on the landing page, or automatically added the customers cart when coming from your ad.
One article I found reinforcing this: http://certifiedknowledge.org/blog/be-careful-of-using-discount-codes-in-your-ad-copy/
Is the folder itself also a page? Why not just make domain.com/xyz-products/ serve the domain.com/xyz-products.php page? That seems like the most intuitive way for it to work. When people want to get back from a product page within the xyz-products directory to the top level page, they may just edit the URL and delete everything after that (I do this all the time).
If you want to stick with the structure you listed, it shouldn't have any issues other than what I mentioned above.
Using the Adwords tool works to find the high volume and low competition keywords. You should have an instinct for which of these will convert best. Build your content around those, and over time you'll see which keywords produce the highest value. I don't know of a tool that will measure the value of keywords for you. Since everyone's site is different, I have a hard time picturing how that would work.
Your whois privacy settings shouldn't do much in terms of rankings. Beyond submitting your sitemap, you can also submit URLs of actual pages through Google and Bing with their Fetch as Googlebot and Fetch as Bingbot tools. I'd do that for Bing, as it might help you get into their index faster.
I'm taking this as comparing Adroll vs. Adwords as an advertiser... if you mean as a publisher, then ignore my answer.
First, Adwords has all sorts of different display advertising, Adroll is all retargeting Advertising. I prefer Adwords because it's completely self-service, and I can see all the data and statistics for my placements. You can see a lot of stats in Adroll, but they don't display conversion stats in the interface for your specific placements. Also, with Remarketing Lists in Google Analytics, I can get pin-point remarketing based on custom events and goals within Google Analytics. You can duplicate a lot of this within Adroll, but it requires communicating everything with your reps.
With Adroll you'll get some reps who will help you optimize your campaigns, and with Adwords, if you don't already have reps, you'll be on your own. Adroll has a further reach than the Google Display Network, so your ads can reach other display networks, as well as Facebook.
Where I work, we use both to maximize our reach!
The article addresses this. Setting the language in the content-language meta tag will override the lang attribute in the html tag or the title tag. They're recommending to use one method to set the language and stick with it, rather than setting the language in multiple places on a page.
So, setting the lang on the tag is fine, just don't set meta content-language tags that specific a content, or set the lang in your <title>tags.</p></title>
He's got the right idea, you shouldn't be serving these pages (unless you have a specific reason to). The problem is these index pages are returning with a status code of 200 OK, so Google assumes it's fine to index them. These pages should either come back with a 404 or a 403 (forbidden), and users then wouldn't be able to browse your site with these directory pages.
Disallowing in robots.txt may not immediately remove these from search results, you may get that lovely description underneath the results that says, "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt".
This doesn't really make sense because when you 301 those domains to your regular domain, you'll be passing on all link juice, and those domains won't appear in search results. You won't get a bonus just for redirecting good keyword domains, unless they have backlinks to them. Once the search engines crawl the page, and you redirect it, what's stopping the search engines from crawling the page again and picking up the redirect?
This feels to me like it would be gaming the system. When your instincts tell you that, either it already doesn't work, or if it does, the search engines are working on ignoring it as a signal.
I like Shane's way.
I think switching the two versions should be fine.
You can set up rel alternate hreflang tags if the content on your site is duplicate between English and Spanish. This will help the search engines understand that these are alternate pages based on the language, and help Spanish searches get the Spanish version of pages, and English searches get the English versions. Google talks about that here. You can do it on the page, or in your sitemap.
You can use the meta language tags or set the language in your HTTP headers for Bing to understand what's going on (see here).
I think all the implementations work just about the same. We chose to do it in our sitemaps because that was the easiest for our developer to implement. You should choose one or the other, there's no need to do multiple implementations.
Usually the best thing to do is use subdirectories on one domain, to consolidate your domain authority/strength. Here's some reading if you want to learn more:
I don't see how redirecting that domain to your site is going to help your SEO all that much, unless that site had a lot of existing links pointed to it. People aren't going to link to your pages through redballoons.com; they're going to link to your domain now. I would be very surprised this would get your from rank #21 to page 1 on the results pages (unless that domain had a bunch of relevant links pointing to it).
If you're building a brand name at your domain now, buying domains with the keywords you're targeting and redirecting those to your site aren't going to help much. I wouldn't bother.
I can think of one use for buying this domain... if you're doing PPC, you could try using redballoons.com in your display URLs instead of your current domain and see if you get a higher CTR and/or more conversions.