You mean Google have jobs going, if you cant beat them, join them !!!

Crazy stuff .... there is no way that Google can absolutely legislate that an "editorial / advertorial" is paid for or not if you are smart ... Unless its blatantly obvious (site A sells backlinks)

Then again, they have never ever needed to legislate on anything before.

For example, we approached a large wedding paraphernalia blog a couple of weeks ago to cover a new website, the client was happy to "exchange goods in return for the client to "evaluate" the good pre the editorial ..

We received a nice review but more importantly a link back to the website form a website with a high DA.

Now, how does Google qualify that as paid service for a link ... the content was relevant, it was actually about wedding jewellery, the clients website is a wedding jewellery store, the content was relevant and appropriate, of contextual and useful information to their readers ...

To answer your question, a span tag within a H1 tag will not have any negative effect, its quite normal to use markup to add visualize appearance, and a span tag is not  "semantic" markup.

Once you are not splitting up the word, as is using

Nike

, I have read that the robots would read that as N "space" ike ... hence not the word nike

BTW, thats a very crude and unsemanctic way to style that phrase, why the div within the H1 tag

I would use a below, without having the benefit of seeing your website layout of course

Big Shoes for Big Guys

Nike Shoes

Then add your markup and styling within the the classes

If you need anymore help with the styling, give me a shout

Regards

John

Great blog here which can help answer your questions ...

http://moz.com/ugc/is-your-website-being-replaced-with-google-plus-local-listings

Regards

John

Insure you have no pages directories / blocked by your robots.txt file, has Google indexed your pages yet

Is it a WP website ?

Are you sure you have the right Google set up in SEO Moz, for example if you live in the UK when you search Google it will default to google.co.uk and show results within that, as opposed to google.com. If we are ranking a client locally in Ireland, we insure to have SEO Moz report results for google.ie, as google.com will obviously shown different results

Also, insure you are not logged into Google while searching the results, as Google can show local results within the SERP associated with your location.

Lastly, has SEO Moz ever shown any results, did your last report contain results, or have they never ever shown any results, if they have never shown any results and your client is rankign for some time, I would suggest you verify as indicated above

SEO Moz can be sometimes late updating results, but its never happened where over a prelonged period of time they did not update with the correct results

Can you give us one of the terms you rank well for and i can check with the search engines, oh and where you are located, or the client is

John

Are we allowed to hate it ...

Wow, that's great news ....Congrats

Without trying to rub salt into the wounds of anyone hit hard, on the flip-side did anyone get some good news.

We have one particular client that was effected in an immense positive way today, for the last four months we found it difficult to outrank one of their competitors ... but they have vanished of the face of the earth today, well Google's earth .. which meant our client moved up the SERP for a number of their key-phrases, which gave me a sense of immense delight.

I could see exactly what they where doing, not so natural link building, creating a lot of sub-directories, naming each index file by the key phrase and linking all their internal links, while disturbing all their backlinks form the same source to each index page ... I wondered of they stayed under the radar cause each term was a sub-directory almost.

No doubt they will be back, but not after a clean up and a restructure to their website

Anyway I digress, anyone else seen any major improvements

Anywhere proactively advertising that they will help your SEO profile if you pay to "advertise" with them is in my opinion a place to steer clear off ... (in their FAQ section)

Their goal as an "honest product review portal" as they claim should be that, not championing selling you links.

That for what its worth is my opinion

Peter.

The markup is added to content (text) on your website already.

For example, if you have your address and phone number placed in your footer or sidebar, you would add the markup to them.

So naturally where ever you fell your content should sit within the aesthetics of your website, you just add the schema markup around that content.

If for example you have your address in the footer on every page, yes add the markup to every page. Marking up as much content as possible can help the search engines.

Or if you have an events page, with several events on that page, you would add the markup to each event.

Have a look here ... if you have not already http://schema.org/LocalBusiness

There are lots of properties  you can use ...

Hope that helps

Regards

John

Hi George,

Firstly, I am not sure you will find a better resource for materials ,seminars, tutorials, and most importantly people than you will at SEO Moz (and no, I am not paid to say that)

The wealth of information here, not only in documented material, but in the community's know how is staggering.

At the top of the page is a tab dedicated for learning the basic SEO techniques ... and let me tell you once you master those, they kind of give you a great base for going forward.

There are tons, and I mean tons of websites offering advanced training SEO courses out there, do they offer an official accreditation at the end, I would be very skeptical.

I am sure though, where are you live, there must be some colleges offering qualification in SEO, most of these courses will offer a lot more like below, and usually don't come under the title "Diploma in SEO", most usually because they cover so much might be advertised as "Diploma in Digital Marketing"

Digital Marketing, SEO, PPC, Email Marketing, DDA, Mobile, Analytics, Social Marketing.

I live in Ireland, I do know of at least official accreditation  in above that can be done online, to be frank and honest, I am not sure you would learn much doing the course that you couldn't learn from studying the content is SEO Moz

A brief synopsis of the catergrised SEO section of the  course is listed below

• Keyword Research
• How Google Works
• Search Engine Factors
• OnPage & OffPage Optimisation
• Meta Tags, Images, Content, Video
• Links and how to get them

Not exactly mind blowing new techniques covered above, yes its the base for everything, but nothing you cant teach yourself with the resources available here. (maybe the academics will disagree with me).

My opinion for what its worth is, the better "SEO experts" are people with a great understanding of the basics with a talent for developing their own skillset through tweaking the fundamentals as they go, its not necessarily something they where thought, not something they read in a book, but usually something they learned through good old trial and error ....

Lastly, obviously I cant offer anything in relation to some top consultant taking you under their wings, but without doubt, I imagine those sort of people will teach you more than any SEO course, though finding someone to that that may be quite hard.

Lastly, you could look at the Google resources for training with them, they cover a lot of the basics, I know they do charge, and cover aspects in PPC and analytics and GWT ... they can be done by individuals as opposed to just agencies

http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwords/partnerprograms/index.html

Hope that helps, not sure it answered your question, and  I am far from discouraging folk from educating themselves ... I am just saying be wary of the magnitude of so called SEO experts offering training courses online

Regards

John

Links are aren't that important, quality links are important ... but they are not everything (but they are important to getting the results you want, but don't ignore other aspects also).

But there are other major factors which are as important as well, just adding keywords to titles is not really optimising your website ..

Other factors which are as important is content, content and well content, insure your page contains quality relevant content for the phrase you are trying to rank for.

Insure you pages are structured well and easily acccesabile

Build a social profile around your website, this plays a huge part these days

There is no 100% proof way Jonathon ,but just adding a few backlinks and adding a keyword to a  title is not a sure proof way to get results, you got to work at it.

Oh ,and just to add, your placement is the SERP is not something that will usually stay static, there will always be movement, and lots of factors that will cause this, like your competitor out ranking you and naturally pushing you down .... but dont expect your website to always stay att a spot for a certain key-phrase ... there will be movement

Hope that helps a little

Regards

J

Another good article from the community

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mobile-serps-usability

So after a little it or research as I never ever came past this before as all the site we do are responsive, I found this

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72462

It seems Google wont index a website that they think is a mobile website within the main serp, and vice verse ...

Hope that helps, cause it had me puzzled

Regards

John

Which directory are you storing your mobile website files within ...

Just to add, change the details in the snippet to your sites url

Add this to your .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Or, you can do it in GWT.

Regards

John

Hehe, great bio ....

Oh, sorry, on further investigation I see its just  your mobile site that are being blocked ...