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Hi All:) Popping back in here with a little proviso. While I think The Sage's suggestion is creative, I would strongly stipulate that if you do choose to go with a multi-domain approach, your NAP (name, address, phone) must reside on only one of the two websites. And do not use the second domain in any of your citation building. You do not want Google getting mixed up finding the same basic contact details on two different websites - it can create a nightmare of merged and duplicate listings, negatively impacting the clarity of your citations and the ranking power they provide. As you can tell, I'm not a big fan of multi-site approaches for local businesses in most cases, because of these risks, and if you do decide to go with this route, do be careful to run the second site as a completely separate entity that does not share basic NAP with the main, local site. Hope this advice is helpful!

Thanks for cleaning that up, Dennis.  That is great advice.

Hi Sheena: Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. Previously I worked with an SEO firm that had prepared a keyword matrix. So we tried to integrate those terms and perhaps have gone over board. What do you mean by making the home page text more "brand and user" focused? We tried to eliminate promotional type add copy and cliche type language like "best", "great" etcetera. Tried to focus the content on why users would be in the real estate market for office space (search scenarios). Do you think that approach is too remote and academic? THANKS, Alan

Hi there, Google tends to consider text in the main content areas more than text in supplemental areas (like the sidebar) and text in certain areas (i.e. the meta keywords tag, title element on images/links) may be ignored entirely. On the other hand, keyword stuffing in any area could lead to problems. Keep in mind that keyword density isn't a ranking factors. Never has been, never will be. Google tends to look at your page more holistically (or at least they try to) so taking this approach usually requires a bit more natural approach than inserting keywords at strategic locations. Not to promote my own post, but I highly recommend reading about these advanced SEO concepts for on-page optimization: http://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts These help explain how Google may judge your page beyond keyword usage and placement. Finally, you typically won't get in trouble for duplicate content if you stuff keywords, but you could easily suffer other algorithmic penalties. The best advice is to write naturally, make sure your content clearly communicates your main ideas, your content is focused around your primary keyword topics, and you provide a user experience that makes people want more.

My opinion is that the URLs are less important than the actual content on the page, including title tags, headlines, body text, etc. Unfortunately, there's no way to manually determine when you've crossed the line of "near-duplicate" content, so it's best to make each content experience serve a unique experience targeted towards a specific purpose.

I agree with Don.  Google ultimately wants to see that not only are you an authority in your field, you go out of your way to give your visitor as much information as you can by means of linking to further resources.  Although personally I would avoid just dumping in Wikipedia links as they can be viewed as thinly veiled lazy links.

Tom, congrats on reaching Oracle status!

Hi Alan, Shameless self promo here, check out our services: http://ppcplans.com. Since your business is locally focused, your monthly fee would be $400 or $650 per month (depending on number of areas/specialties). And we have no contracts and no setup fees. Call or email us and ask for Chris! Best, Pashmina

Hi Alan, you've received some excellent responses. Did any of them help answer your questions? We'd love to hear from you! Christy

I'm in agreement with Chris on this one as well. That said, your checklist is an excellent idea, just don't put it on the home page. Instead use the home page to explain why your company is different from all the competitors you have alluded to, and direct them to a separate page with the checklist. Make it compelling. "Get real-world, practical advice in the form of a checklist" or "Avoid over-spending using our requirements checklist" or something else that clearly states what's in it for them.

Good idea, however according to Google Webmaster Tools under Google Index>Index Status the number of indexed pages has been dropping. It is down by 120 which is about half the 250 which we have set to "no-index, follow" on August 20th. I suspect it may be down a bit more as the results on Webmaster Tools may lag a bit. I just can't explain why the pages views per visitor has not increased if the bounce rate is down. If the bounce rate has decreased from about 69% in August to 63% in September which means that 37% of visitors are staying on the site instead of 31% which is significant improvement (about 18%). I would think this would translate into more page views per visitor. But it has not. Pages views per session was 2.38 in August and 2.18 in September. This seems impossible. Thanks, Alan

I think those look good and you should give them a shot. You can always do some fine-tuning to them over then next month or two. Happy to help and good luck! I look forward to see how this helps your conversion rate.

Hi Alan, automation is generally bad. By linking through to other relevant pages using a variety of anchor text you give a google a warmer feeling about your site - avoiding over optimisation penalties. Cross linking between pages. There's a lot on site link structure and what is optimum. I tend to ignore this and thing of my customers buying behaviour. So in your case  If in real life you'd offer a couple of buildings to a client then link them on the website. If not, then don't. For me social media is a waste of time. We're a B2B industrial market. See what brings traffic and conversions. The end goal really is to produce something amazing - a labour of love.  think of it as investing a dollar a day in the website. To start with nithing is going to change much. After a while compound interest is going to start giving you momentum and there will suddenly be a crux point where you realise how much of an advantage you have over your competitors. It'll take a while though.

I don't think that can be had for the price. I pay around $260 for a single xeon with a ssd and 8 gig.

Last time I looked at GA's terms of service, it couldn't be used to capture personally identifiable information. This would help Alan see how many people are staying on the page versus how many filled out the form, but not collect the actual data of their content information.

I believe your problem is in your robots.txt file. You're attempting a wildcard blocking of the search results pages with this line: Disallow: /listings/search**?*** However, the asterisk ought to precede the question mark. If you want to block all URLs that include a question mark (?), do this: Disallow: /listings/search***?** Try that and see what happens. I've also found Aaron Wall's article on robots.txt to be helpful. Good luck! Also, adding "noindex, nofollow" to the section does not necessarily keep a web page out of Google's index. When you think about it, you realize Google has to crawl the page the see that meta tag in the first place. Robots.txt is much stronger.

Hi Moosa: Actually we were hit by Penguin in April 2012, and then by Panda 4.0 (for thin content) in late May of this year. Regarding the Penguin issue, we identified bad links, requested removal and filed a disavow with Google listing the domains that refused to remove links. We are also re-writing as much content as possible. In terms of creating links, I have been instructed that the best way to do so is to create high quality onsite content that others will link to. So I am hoping we are on the right track. But getting back to my original question, I don't know why the home page has been punished disproportionately. Thanks, Alan

Yup!

Hi Kingalan, Feel free to mark the response as good / thumbs up / answered. To answer the other question. Should you have an SSL, last year I would have said no if you don't collect any user information. However, today my answer would be a little more murky. Google recently announced they are in fact factoring HTTPS in their algorithm as a ranking factor. To have HTTPS you would then need a SSL, to get an SSL you then need a dedicated IP address (you may already have one). If you are not hosting your own website you then have to pay for SSL and possibly the dedicated IP in addition to the normal hosting cost. The benefit right now, probably wouldn't be immediate as this is a relatively new announcement. However, if you think about why Google would incorporate it into a ranking factor you really understand that it makes since. To get an SSL you have to verify your domain with a trusted 3rd party, and have a dedicated IP, these 3rd parties are competing for your money so they often offer fraud insurance which looks good to users (which is what Google cares about). Now that last part of the statement can be expanded on to a full blown article, as Google makes nothing from users and everything from businesses. Suffice to say, in the end Google wants to serve the best user experience results, and if a website goes through the process of getting an SSL all other things being equal that website should rank higher. Hope that all makes sense and is helpful. Don

Personally I think its madness to "no follow" any internal links.  When you "no follow" you are throwing link juice out the window, the days of sculpting links ( the practice of "no following" some links on a page so more juice flows though other "follow" links)  are long gone, yet is still see it being attempted all over the place.