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I would second Ryan's point.  Its what you put in.  Many people have domains with no content so it is the activity and quality of content that matters on the domain.

I read this post and it reminded me of when this actually clicked with me recently.  I have read thousands of words on blogging, writing good content and the list above resonates across the top bloggers that you can read who all beat this drum constantly.  I was recently in the process of putting a guest post together for a blogging forum when after a day I realised that I had put more effort into the guest post than any post that I had for my own blog.  So I **abandoned **the planned submission and used it on my own blog.  I had spent 2-3 hours tweaking, looking for good images, deleting wasted words,  working on all the formating and so on.

A lot of us who are email slaves and quick content junkies should revert back to our English High School class where we spent time on our essays for exams and tests.   I have even applied this logic to forum replies like this.  In the past I would have been much pithier and not as informative (I am being informative I hope !!)

It is worth looking at some of the blogging resources out there Problogger to see that they constantly expound on this topic.  Even guys like Matt cutts say it again and a again about making your content STAND OUT like just thereWe

You may say how do I do this for a product like a Blue Widget.  At first glance this may seem impossible.  But if I am looking to buy a blue widget and am doing research over the web I would like to see

• Product Information in depth
• Reviews
• Some usage of it
• How to use it in different situations.
• A user forum
• Some evidence of good product support
• Some social media juice about it and some fan love

Replace blue widget with website design (my area), cameras, puppy dog collars and so on.

You might say that this sounds like complete overkill but believe me it isn't as the effort will pay off as over time your site will become a rich resource of solid quality information that can't be gotten anywhere else and there will be good payoffs.

There is a well known saying you wont get better by doing the same things every day so work on your blue widget page today then move onto the red widgets and keep going.  Then revisit them all and polish again.

Just a point - on Chrome your site does not display correctly at all.  I would fix this ASAP as despite traffic and people landing I would bounce back straight away if I landed there   Get your design guy to fix this as Chrome has a significant footprint so you may be losing customers alone by this.

Kieran

A theme wont' help your SEO but some good plugins will make it easier For Wordpress theme feedback why not ask the theme creators the questions as their level of support and speed of feedback is often what makes choosing the right theme a good or bad idea.

If your product is re Huey get-2015-45B then putting some thought I to even some modest optimisation of the product page is worthwhile. SEO is often about experimenting. So for the above widget why not test expanding g the product description, working the detail for 3-4 products and see the before / after impacts.

Just to update people on this topiuc and what has changed / not changed

My URL is http://www.grangewebdesign.com and target keywords are website design Cork, web design Cork and Cork before each of these as well as that is the city I live in

• I made some subtle change to the address (removed the area I was on as Google Maps did not recognise the actual area and now it matches the people above me.
• I made sure my content was solid on the page and guess what
• For the search terms website design Cork where I was 5th on the Google Places list I am now on page 2
• For the search terms web design Cork where I was bottom of Page 1 for SERPs I am now on Page 3

Time for a stiff drink.  But really I have really worked hard on this and now it seems I am doing more damage than good..

No problem I am a compulsive bad speller (its why I use Autohotkey all the time now for so many things).

Two very interesting ways to proceed here the guest blogging and the getting someone else to do  the work

Have you positive expereince with using Odesk.  I had a glance and it seems like there are thousands of options so need to wade throught he mrie a b it.

Thanks for the tips - what I am seeing with the competition is hat nearly all their links are footer text from their original sites.  I have done some research for directories but will up the ante.

Guest Blogging - hmm - havent tried that but will..

the URL above is incorrect it is actually http://myblogguest.com

WIll try out these for a bit and see wht happens then the bottle of Jameson

Feedback from Matt Cutts recently hinted / said that having the keyword in the domain although helpful isn't as significant a factor as before.  And on the answer to your question.the order should not be significant really.  Having a Generic word may even help a little to give the site some color as may people go for the generic and having a descriptor may help.

Best of luck

Hi All

I have been working busily on my Google Places to try and improve my listings and here are some updates (with no visible progress unfortunately).

• I added reviews - only one of my competitors has more reviews than me and these reviews are genuine.
• Based on other posts in this forum I looked closely at how my address was formatted as Google Maps does not recognize my street so my address format wise is identical to the top 3 <street ,="" street="" name,="" city="" county=""> this is in Ireland so that is a typical address.</street>

I am still below the fold and I have analysed the links of the competition and to be honest I see that they are in business longer and their links from the many websites that they have created over the years.  They have more links than me by a factor of 3x and 4x.

Am I screwed?  As you all appreciate being over the fold is so important and I am currently below the fold and it is not an ultra competitive keyword combination  (1600-2000 searches) website design Cork on google.ie.

As a websie person even getting 2-3 extra contacts for me per month can mean a HUGE difference.  I have read long and hard on this topic for the past 12-18 months.

I have not put any serious attention to link building myself - should I get emailing people to try and get those quality links to raise my profile.  The problem is getting the time to do this.  Does the forum think that if I sent (for example) 20-30 emails per day to a range of related businesses asking rfor links for 'say' 30 days I would get some links without actually having to pay for them  Is link building the critical item that I should focus on considering the problems above?

All help appreciated and bottle of Jameson for the person with idea that works - (really!)

Thanks Gianluca

I agree 100% I was thinking of the actual site Title tag when typing this so answering it from that context.  Yes Keyword(s) + Hook

In my opinion putting it in twice is not a good idea.  I assume that you have done the appropriate keyword research in this area and that the keywords are appropriate.  I personally don't even think there is value in adding the AXA Sunlife as AXA is meaningless to the Search engines.  It does help when the title is displayed to give some people idea.

I think your title should be along the lines of Main Target Keyword in Body of the  Page x 1 to 3 then stop.  I would not use multiples.  If you have multiple keywords you want to target create an additional page for the keywords.

So

Life Insurance Quotes

Life Insurance Premiums

Life Insurance Special Offers

the Title is of course only the beginning.  Get some nice meta description under it as well to if your link with this Title does show then it makes sense.  this may be the place to mention AXA or the company so people get some good company name visuals

I havent seen any studies but you could create two pages with different meta and see the results. It is hard to be empirical with this I would think as Google now limits it to two lines but ther could be options for A/B studies that you could follow?

Just to keep you up to date.  I got 5 more reviews and now I have 6 and the increased reviews have not moved my placement.  I suspect that irrespective of the activity that you do on Google Places that your site's actual authority, links etc etc still have a strong factor in the placement.

I am actually creating an excel table looking forensically at the people above to see what really stands out from their Google Places listing from mine to see if even the smallest tweak makes a difference.

What is interesting is that for a different order of the exact same keywords there is only one Google Places listing presented which I find very interesting as well - any ideas on that one ?

The only thing that possibly helps with Wordpress is that it does come with plugins that you have to install by the way that automatically updates your sitemap to Google.  I know a sitemap is not any significant help in ranking but it prods Google to tell them "Hi look a new page" but again as the previous posters mention this is usually just a receny bump.

There are lots of other 'SEO' (deliberate italics here that make life easier for titles and descriptions.  But as far as Googel cares your site is just text and if you make it attractive they will/may come back more often.

You should be able to write your .htaccess to cope with generic paths and URLs There are tons of good sites out there on how to write a good .htaccess and to be honest it is time and effort to wade through the site and get it back in shape.  I have been there and feel your pain.

Thanks for that working on getting them as well.  3 so far in last week.  It's a pain in the behind when the reviewer has to have a gmail address though as my hundreds of satisfied customers (:-)) don't all have GMail addresses.

Thanks Ryan and appreciatethe speed of your answer.  I have actually read this article before and have implemented nearly all the items that make sense.  I do notice that the Google Categories have changed slightly recently with Services - XXX as new ones for a range ot items.

However after implementing these it has not made a huge difference.  I think this URL is a good Intermediate primer for people but I think that it is very small details in this area that will make the difference for me.  Has anyone seen subtle tweaks hat have made differences?  My keywrods by the way are far from competitive and are in the 1-2K range.

As we all know Google Local Business/Places now has significant real estate for many searches.  What I find hard to understand is what makes the difference between the different positions.  Is it solely based on the content in Google Places itself or is it regular ranking factors.

I am (like everybody) on a hell for leather search to try and rank above my competition but having studied their Places information I do not think there is much I more I can do.

Suggestions hat have actually worked for you?