Welcome to the Q&A Forum

And there's less back end to manage, which can be a huge obstacle to SEO if you don't manage it well.

Yes, great starting points. Some of the fields may be different but the overall concept is the same as page SEO (page title, headline, text, etc.). Adding it through their site is also great as is social sharing.

I agree - I think it's important to do more than just the home page. I don't agree there's a specific science / ratio to it for a few reasons: if it was that specific, everyone would do it and we know Google wouldn't let it be that obvious because people would game the system.

There's relative factors to consider: some pages on your site may be way more competitive to rank for than others. If your overall domain authority is a little lower, you have to compensate for that. On my site, I can get some pages to rank well pretty much just with on page optimization because it's not a competitive term. There's others that are taking tons of links, strong keyword hierarchy and such to even get into the top 20.

The best strategy for you will (I'd assume) be based on evaluating how competitive your field is and what pages you want to rank for the best user experience to drive conversions. Will just your homepage do that? Do you need other pages w/in your site to offer a better experience?

The goal should be the fewer clicks to get to the RIGHT item. (Which is subjective, for sure.) People will do more clicks to get to better data, however we shouldn't put them through any more clicks than needed - so, if you can do it in two, great, but if you need 3-4, then do 3-4.

The one thing I have noticed is that (depending on how big your site is) more clicks to get to deeper content can make it harder for search engines to get in and crawl those pages, which can reduce ranking opportunity.

As someone who is currently dealing with the making a WP blog look like it lives on a subdomain, I will agree with Dr. Pete that it's very tricky.

Going back may not solve anything, given that enough time may have passed that enough content has been indexed and the "damage is done" so to speak.

The 301 redirect is a good step - search engines don't penalize, the issue is just that you essentially confused things and you have to now untangle, like with the duplicate pages and content.

You #3 - I'm not sure I am following, so getting back to the redirect, if you were previously "www" and now are without, then the "www" pages should redirect to the without URLs. It sounds like there may be a risk of a redirect tangle going on that needs to be fixed?

Once the redirect situation is taken care of, pull together a site map for the "www" (if you can) and upload it to Webmaster so Google knows to index those pages and then can make the association that you changed domains.

Be skeptical of paths that involve buying links - usually a sign that it's not a good route.

I'd target both; short tail words can be harder to rank higher for, and the long tail can help sooner since they are often less competitive.

I agree with Ryan - you need a strategy. I think one of the biggest mistakes we can make when targeting SEO keywords is going too broad and hoping that we can capture things that quite honestly aren't the right fit. You really have to know them, their terminology and how they search. The article link Ryan shared is a great layout for how to go about a sound strategy, which will eventually answer your questions.

However, as for the global monthly searches - personally, I say ignore that. Check the "exact" phrase box and look at the local monthly searches. I want to have an idea of how small of an audience I can end up with if I select certain words. It's a very different perspective to find out a word you thought was really popular actually gets 170 searches a month and at best  I can only hope to capture a percentage of that.

My two cents? I spent 12yrs in the PR field (and transitioned into SEO/social media) and I'd be very careful to ask the right questions to determine what PR agency to work with. I know - and worked with - few who knew how to properly optimize a release. And, while they did have media contacts, PR Newswire did a lot of the leg work. Pitching a story to a reporter or blogger was really the value the PR person brought to the table. And, link building was never something that was regularly brought up. In the past two months, the majority of the PR pros I network with like to tell me "SEO is dead" which tells me everything I need to know about their understanding of SEO.

Again, I am sure there are plenty of seasoned PR people who have an understanding - there's also lots of agencies who like to sell their services even if they don't have the depth of knowledge. Like any business endeavor, it's just a matter of due diligence to find the right fit.

Freelancers have way better prices because they don't have the same overhead costs as agencies, so that could be a more affordable route.

My answer, and I admit it's obvious, is to start carefully. Look at the project as a complete project and not parts. Meaning, before hiring or starting and focusing on content, look at the technical side, too. Updating content may not matter if there's technical barriers to your site being user friendly or search engine friendly. For example, I've increased rankings and traffic, but because of on-site issues that were out of my control (and ownership), conversions weren't increasing.

People will try to sell you one thing and it's not always the right answer - no different from any other business. While you may not have time to train your internal staff, having the high level insight you mentioned is critical so you can be a good client and be a wise client and having a handle on if something will work or not.

Define what you expect to see - higher conversions? Higher traffic? The ultimate goal is always sales, however how does this SEO help play into that - ranking improvements? Site UI changes? To say the goal is more revenue is like saying that the sky is blue; duh. You need to be able to map SEO back to something.

Mostly, watch out for people who just want to sell one solution or suggest buying links. SEO isn't just one thing and one thing isn't going to get you great and lasting SEO. And link buying is something that I rarely see as being a good investment. Good luck!

It depends on what you want to get out of it. I've had issues with releases ranking higher than our product pages - or, really, the pages we'd like to have rank. So, that's one possibility. For driving links and such, though, it can work well. Keep in mind though that releases are still viewed as ways to get news to the media - old school, but that is the audience these services cater to.

As for which service, the price points vary significantly and I will say that I prefer to stick to the big dogs. PR Web is OK, but I default to PR Newswire. I think names like PR Web are kinda misleading because Web is only one part of their audience (and I see the attraction for SEO; however, think quality sites vs quantity for links). Again, I'll admit my bias as I have worked with them for about 15 years, so I witnesses their online evolution. Not all SEO support is equal!

One last comment: look at where the big brands go and what services they use. I get smaller groups usually go for cheaper, but you get what you pay for. Aside from price point, there's usually some rationale as to why reputable brands stick with a partner.

You are welcome (you also aren't alone; I don't have problems often and it's great that the Moz team has such terrific service).

Question - when you say major video sites, do you mean like YouTube and Vimeo? I'm just curious why you'd want them to not be part of your own account/channel within each for better branding...which is part of the strategy.

First, what's your goal with the videos? And why would you want them to live outside of your hands (ie., have a third party manage and post, and I assume then also oversee all the title/description/tagging, etc.) when the best SEO would come from keeping it under your umbrella? While you may not think there's time to manage this on your own, what do you want to get out of it and then is that worth the trade off of losing the ties to your ownership?

(Granted there are a lot of variables to take into consideration - like if you have embedded links in the video that can drive viewers back to your website, and ultimately what the CTA for the videos include, etc.)

I agree - try Screaming Frog. I use it - and prefer it to Xenu - and it's free for up to 500 URLs or $99 for a license for unlimited. Even with a slower computer it can run in the background (leave it on overnight).

That's interesting - it's totally different from what the head of one of the Google offices told me, as they like to keep their PPC and SEO businesses separate to avoid some clients getting preferential treatment.

Do you use Google Webmaster? You can check page load times times there. It's not quite the same as section-to-section but gives a better idea of what search engines (I don't really understand the focus on what matters about moving section to section) experience -and users - with your site. And if you install the page speed browser add-on, you can get more data.

Given how Google likes to be cagey with things an the fact that G+ is still evolving, right now we may not know the business impact, however, like anything, why wouldn't you want to claim your online brand if you have the opportunity? Or if the opportunity presents itself?

I think there's been some awesome views here and there's so many viable options. If I were the SEO you wanted to hire, here's an issue I'd force: I can't control if you keep your website working properly. I can't control if your back end measurement is accurate.  I would insist that if it came to light that you somehow couldn't properly calculate your sales (and my performance was tied to revenue) there'd be some lump sum or something payment to me anyway.

Why? I worked on a site where leads were the most important thing wanted; the coding to track leads got messed up and for four months there was no accurate way to calculate what leads came through SEO vs other channels. Also, there ended up being major instability issues with the site and it kept crashing, creating major technical issues (that flowed into the need for technical SEO support).

Anything can happen with a website. The SEO can only do so much.

URLs - headache! We have a terrible URL structure because of the ways we have to pull data, so this is something that I have checked into, too. Now, I will say there's lots of differing opinions on this. I will share with you what someone from Google said last week at SMXWest: they just want you to know about bad links, they don't penalize you for them.

I'm not saying that's the end-all-be-all answer, but she knows that there's a perception that it can 'ding' you when the reality (according to her) is that they drop 404 pages from their index because they don't serve up bad pages. You have lots of bad pages, less linking ability, less pages to have rank and you can lose online visibility. There's a difference between losing visibility because your overall content offering is reduced by bad links and those pages never having existed in the first place.

There's a good chance there's something else going on -one of the things I adore about this forum is that people here have crazy skills and I have witnessed them uncover an issue the original poster didn't even know they had.