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Posting new content to blog.corporate.com is still better than publishing nothing at all. For SEO it won't help www.corporate.com as much as www.corporate.com/blog/ would help, but SEO is not the #1 goal of every content program.

You can still get tons of value from driving qualified traffic to blog.corporate.com using tactics like Facebook Ads and other paid social media, and that blog can still rank in search results and eventually drive prospects back to www.corporate.com. As Patrick mentioned, creating links in blog posts that point back to key pages on www.corporate.com will help on the SEO consideration.

So to answer your questions:

1 - Will it help boost ranking of example.com if we share frequent content on our blog https://blog.example.com/? How much impact it has?

Yes, but good internal linking will be help. It has less impact than if you were to get that content onto www.example.com/blog/.

2- Everybody says content is the king, Ok fine, but when you are not allowed to share it on the main corporate site, then where to share it? Blog and social media sites? please help.

Subdomain is next best option if a subfolder on the main site is not an option. So, post content on blog.corporate.com - and then share that link on social media.

3- We are in a business where clients do not bother to go on sites and read, so in this scenario is it correct to say that you hav to create the content for search engine consumption even when your clients dont need it/or have not in the habit of reading it?

In most 'boring' industries there are still decent ways to get users on to the website reading your content, you just have to be more creative. Here's a few posts with ideas and examples:

• https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-content-for-boring-industries
• https://moz.com/webinars/content-marketing-in-boring-industries
• https://moz.com/blog/the-guide-to-developing-a-content-strategy-for-boring-industries

Hey Sri,

Multiple Images on the Same Page:

In a single blog post that has many images, ideally you will want different alt text for each image.

For example, a page of content talking about chocolate donuts might have three images:

• chocolate-donuts.jpg (appropriate alt text would be "chocolate donuts")
• chocolate-donuts-and-coffee-mug.jpg (appropriate alt text could be "chocolate donuts next to a coffee mug" or could also be "chocolate donuts and coffee")
• chocolate-donut-shop-los-angeles.jpg (appropriate alt text would be "Jimmy's donut shop located in Los Angeles")

Hashtags:

Regarding the use of hashtags, I don't see a point to doing this. While a quick test of "donuts" versus "#donuts" in Google image search is showing me different results, I don't think there's enough keyword volume for the hashtag version of any word to both doing this.

That said, you can write whatever you want inside the alt tag, it just won't provide much benefit in my opinion. All of the following are technically fine, however #1 is the only one I would use:

1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 

For the same reasons, I don't see a point in using a hashtag in the <title> <em>unless</em> you're trying to target search queries for that exact hashtag.</p> <p> </p> <p>Hope that answered your questions but please let me know if I can clarify anything.</p></title>

That's an interesting question - if you have examples of some of the secondary keywords you're looking at, that would be helpful for comparison.

There's a few things I would recommend.

The first is rather than guessing or trying to search for the right keyword, analyze competitor domains or specific competitor URLs to see what they rank for. For example, here are 400+ keywords that https://www.coursera.org/learn/songwriting-lyrics is ranking for. That number of overall keywords will typically make up for low volume on some of them.

The second thing is that lots of long tail searches, when combined, can produce meaningful traffic. So it is often worth testing out publishing a page on a keyword and seeing what type of traffic occurs naturally over 3-`12 months. 10 people who really really want a $10 or $100 solution to a problem and more valuable than 1,000 people not interested in buying anything.

The third thing is that sometimes people aren't searching for a product, but, if you rank for another term they're interested in, you can make some sales by giving them something worth buying. "how to write a song" has 11.5k-30.3k searches per month - I'm not certain you can make 500 sales off of those types of volume ranges, but, you might be able to make 10-50 when you rank for a big head term, or lots of longer tail terms. This "rank for other stuff and then sell our product" approach may be what is working well for the competitors you mentioned.

Finally - consider other types of queries that might make sense - 'music production classes" instead of "learn music productin online", for instance.

The Yoast team has plenty of experience with large publishers, so my guess is that this is the most robust option you have for Wordpress.

But, I don't have any insights for you on the peculiarities of the plugin and things to watch out for. Will forward it along to other folks in case they have any notes.

Hey there. To answer your first 2 questions:

Do "the PA & DA rating(s) in the results page for a domain search takes into account any penalty signals the site may be showing"?

Kind of... Page Authority (and DA) are calculated using a number of factors, one of which is MozTrust. MozTrust can be used as a rough indicator of the trustworthiness of a site (as measured by the "distance" in links from trustworthy websites like universities and government websites). I wouldn't describe this as a "penalty signal" however.

"whether there is a 'real' way to identify how much value links from the source will give you (if for example, there's already x10 other links away from that page or x100 links away from that domain)"

I personally don't find much value in calculating this. I don't care too much if there's 20 links on a page or 500. If it's a high quality site that's relevent to my website, and there aren't links to spammy sites on the page, I still want that link. Furthermore, there is value from the link that goes beyond raw Pagerank. You're still increasing your total Linking Root Domains (a very important link building factor) and other misc metrics that Google may take into account separately from Pagerank passed by the link.

"Basically - what else needs to be taken into account when using this app to identify link sources, etc."

Assuming you're currently looking through your competitors' backlink profiles in OSE and trying to replicate those links, the only links I would skip are links that appear to be from spammy websites. This is a subjective measure based upon a number of visual indicators, and a handful of objective indicators (like whether that site is indexed in Google for example). Here's a decent post that goes over some of the red flags you should look for when deciding whether or not you want a link from a site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-evaluate-guest-post-opportunities

The video links that Branagan left are also good resources to learn more about OSE's link metrics.

If you switch a direct link to a 302 redirected link, you're absolutely going to lose the value of that link.

See this 2010 post on SERoundTable about ways to retain that link value and pass affiliate IDs: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022446.html - read the comments on the page as well.

As a sidenote, If I recall correctly, I have seen it indicated either officially or unofficially that Google doesn't 'like' the passing of link value through affiliate links - I think they rightfully consider them a form of paid links.

To your first question:

If the text on the product page is only duplicated on that page, then it's fine. That's not much different than having a text pull quote in an article. Also not much different from Amazon having a short description, and a jump link down the page to a longer description.

To your second question:

We generally don't worry too much about duplication on category/tag/aggregation pages, so long as it's only excerpts, eg 5-50 words. If the pages are really thin, and 100% of the text content from the distillery page shows up on the category page, then you need to write more text for the distillery pages to fix the problem.

Instapaper publishes a standards guide here: http://www.instapaper.com/publishers

Looks like that will allow you to control Title, Body, and Ignored content via custom classes.

Typically when using widgets as a linkbuilding method that contain iframes, the code you give users will look like this:

<iframe></iframe>

Anchor text

There was a report not long ago of a test that demonstrated links within iframes do indeed pass link value. Nevertheless, I think the general consensus is still that the links within iframes won't give you the same value that a normal link would provide.

Agreed with Matt the comparing your site to #1-10 in the Keyword Difficulty Tool is a good start to highlighting what could be the missing component.

I'm willing to bet nofollowing all of those links is the biggest factor as well. Footer links for web design companies are a tricky business. One option that is safer than a sitewide footer link on a client site is a homepage-only footer link from a client's site. If you do that, I'd recommend "Fast Track Sites" being the anchor text, not "Website Design and Hosting by Fast track Sites", which is too keyword heavy for this type of link.

SEO is a zero sum game as well. If your site looks stagnant to Google, and competitors are active, it's typical that you're going to drop in results.

Some other notes:

It looks like you've got some relatively duplicate content on the site. EG:

• https://www.fasttracksites.com/web-design-college-station-tx/
• https://www.fasttracksites.com/best-web-design-college-station-texas/

Those are probably slightly aggressive and over-optimized. You could probably merge them into a single page.

Your SSL certificate is expired or incorrect, which is causing Chrome to add an ugly red security warning to your URL in my browser. That would be good to fix for users whether or not it makes a difference on SEO. If you don't have SSL setup, then you'll want to fix Webmaster Tools, because Google is indexing your https URLs.

Hi Jeff,

http://www.advancedemt.com/ appears to work fine for me, and http://advancedemt.com/ appears to redirect just fine.

We can't view your first link since it's only for your account, and the second link you gave was missing the colon in http:// - I don't think that's related to the SEOmoz error you're seeing but just pointing it out.

Is it possible that the domain was spelled incorrectly in your site settings? Also, if your proper domain has the "www." prefix, and you typed it without a prefix into your SEOMoz settings, they might view that as an error. Was your domain entered without the "www." in your dashboard?

You should have a policy of requesting that they quote material from other sources, and include a link back to the source. Aside from that, just be happy you have an engaged and active userbase.

For stuff like press releases, have a no PR policy except in specific subforums.

I wouldn't worry a ton about the duplicate content factor unless you expect this to be a huge amount of your content. Even then, if the community is producing lots of other original content, especially in the same thread as the duplicate content, then a certain amount of this type of content should be OK in my opinion.

For low to average competition:

My preference in this situation is to start by building location pages and service pages, but not location + service pages. As you mentioned, it just feels like a better user experience across the entire site.

In other words, I would have a

• Kitchen Remodel page
• Bathroom Remodel page
• Mytown page
• MyOtherTown page

I wouldn't create a Mytown Kitchen Remodels page or a MyOtherTown Kitchen Remodels page.

Services pages should focus on that service, and briefly mention the areas you serve and link to the area pages for more info.

Area pages should focus on the area (testimonials and photos from projects there, for example), and briefly mention each service individually and link to the service page for more information.

For higher competition keywords:

I wouldn't stray from that model for most of my local clients unless it got fairly competitive for a specific keyword, such as a large city for the location.

For example, metro areas like "Seattle bathroom remodel" and "Tacoma bathroom remodel" will require their own pages. I wouldn't necessarily create a separate page for "Kirkland bathroom remodel" and "Redmond bathroom remodel", however - just depends on what I'm seeing on the SERP for those keywords.

If it is that competitive for each location, then go ahead and make the Location + Service pages, and get unique content on them.

In other words, "Seattle Bathroom Remodels" should have photos from bathtroom jobs done in Seattle, testimonials from Seattle bathroom remodeling customers, list of neighborhoods served, etc. That content will all be unique and different from what you write on the "Tacoma bathroom remodels" page.

Try searching Google Products or Shopping (can't recall what they're calling it nowadays) - most big operators will have a presence on there. I'm sure some industries like clothing aren't represented as well, but I'd imagine it works for many.

Shouldn't be an issue - in the example you gave, removing /estate-planning from the middle would still make sense because it's under the /education-center/ subfolder. I think this works both for users and for search engines - after the 1st or 2nd subfolder level I personally stop the hierarchy in the URL in most of my sites. You have breadcrumbs in place, which is going to be much more beneficial for users than having full URLs in my opinion.

I'm pretty sure Keyword Difficulty and PA are not correlated like that, they just both happen to be on a scale of 100.

Take a look at the DA & PA of the top 10 sites for that keyword. If you're in the middle of the pack, you've certainly got a chance. If you're below everyone, you better start link building and getting your site trust and authority up in order to have a competitive chance with that keyword.

Then use the On-Page Analysis / Grader in your SEOMoz campaign for the page you want to rank. Score an A and you're on your way.

Depending on the niche, I would follow that with more link building to the specific page. Keep an eye on rankings, it could take a day or it could take a few months, depends on difficulty. You should be seeing progress after doing the tasks above.

Do that stuff, and if it doesn't work come back here and let me know, we'll take it to the next level...

Sounds like you're getting bounced from the SERPs because your content is very similar to other content.

I clicked on the link in your question, not sure if you put it there on purpose or accidentally. Frankly, the reason all of those press release sites like Yahoo Finance and CNBC and Bloomberg.com are ranking ahead of your main domain for the exact term is because they are way more important sites.

If I'm correct that you're wondering why Y_ _ _Companies.com isn't ranking at the top for the exact search term used in the Press Release, don't worry about that, that's not the goal of a press release.

Your site is ranking for the exact name of your company, which is good, and it's getting links from all of those press release re-listings, which is also great.

Content stricken out is not relevant to question, see below

Not sure if that gets to the heart of what you were trying to ask, let me know if not.

Hi George,

I can vouch for Thesis as very SEO friendly. I don't go outside the thesis framework very often as a result.

Nowadays most theme issues can be fixed with Yoast's SEO plugin but every theme has 1 or 2 things that aren't ideal, even Thesis.

I can't comment specifically on studiopress, headway, or woothemes, but I have found that most of the larger theme developers are decent.

I don't consider myself an expert on IDX & listing integration, but I'd personally choose a Wordpress-based site with a reputable real estate agent theme. I'd choose Wordpress because it will be a lot easier to add additional content than most custom CMS options (and I'm biased towards Wordpress in general).

A couple I've heard of (can't vouch for any one in particular):

• https://placester.com/
• http://themes.agentevolution.com/
• http://www.wp-agent.com/
• http://www.premiumwp.com/the-best-real-estate-wordpress-themes/ seems to have a good list as well and updated recently.

Also, you could try Googling competitive markets (e.g. Chicago real estate agent, New York real estate agent, etc) and open up the top 10 results, and see which ones are based in Wordpress. If they're ranking in those SERPs, it's a good sign that the SEO aspects of the site are working just fine.

Whatever you would do, don't let someone looking for blue widgets only see stuff about your red widgets and bounce. Are they related products (like guitars vs. keyboards vs. drums) where the customer wouldn't be confused if they saw one or the other, or are they fairly different?

I would go big and visual and let visitors see each option at once. Sliders are nice looking, but only if they don't confuse the guest.

Be Really Obvious:
You could literally have silos on the front page with each category in a column format if you really need to hit people over the head with it.

Use the Nav Wisely:
The purple nav on a site like http://www.zzounds.com/ is a good example of getting the keywords up front so they're not missed. (I have no connection to that site, I just search for musical instrument sites)

Test, Test, Test:
Whatever you do, A/B test all of the versions you come up with so you're not operating on a hunch.