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Hi David

Without knowing what your errors are, it's hard to say but, I notice you have a wordpress site, so I'll offer another add-on suggestion to the other excellent suggestions above.

Some of your errors might be 404 errors - there is a great plugin called redirection.  If you have 404 errors, work through each one and redirect it to an appropriate page.

404s usually happen when you change the url, or remove a page.  Google has indexed those pages/urls and if they are no longer available Google will return a 404 error page.  With redirection you can point the old page to a new, appropriate page with a 301 redirect.

Hope that helps.

It depends on what you are wanting to achieve with it.  I you were looking to rank in local search I would definitely be setting up a page per store, with the location in the title, such as 'Store Name' + 'Location'.

If people are searching for specific products in one of these towns you could optimise each google place/page.

If it was more about online and national/international brand awareness then I'd have just the one page and give it all the focus.

Do you use wordpress?

From my initial glance, it does look a little like you are overoptimising for lifestyle magazine.

If it were my site, I would be rethinking my approach on that keyword altogether.

I would concentrate heavily on optimising all the articles for the content that they represent.  For example, the article, members of staff too scared to take time off work.  I would be looking at changing you title tag and optimising the content to appeal to people searching for articles, news, tipes etc specifically around that subject matter.  You'd need to get creative for each one and do the research into what the exact message of each article is and who your audience is.  What might they be searching for etc.

The title tags of each article do not need to be the title of the article. I would start with optimising each article one by one.  The backlinks will come as your readers find exactly what they are looking for on an article by article basis.

If you optimise the content on your site for what it actually is, you will become known as a lifestyle magazine just as a matter of course.  I'm not saying don't optimise for that, but I think you are focussing on the wrong topic.

If you do find people nicking your articles, try sending them a polite message telling them you have no problems with them borrowing your content as long as they link back.  If they don't, give them the heavier email!

You need to identify all the pages that are producing the 404 error, i.e. the pages that no longer exist.

After that you need to put a 301 redirect to that of a customer clicks on that link you have redirected the page to something similar (if that product no longer exists).  So you are linking

example.com/oldpage

to

example.com/neworappropriatepage

I'm not sure if there's a nice easy way to do in Magento, but if you google 301 redirect magento you should find some good information.

Hope that helps.

I think that would be fine to set up.  As long as you have four distinct adresses for each shop I would have a place for each.

Just using the example of Clinton Cards in the UK, a high street chain of Greeting card shops.  They have dozens of shops throughout the UK in probably every town.  I just did a search for

Halifax Card Shops

Bradford Card shops

For both of these, two totally separate google place listings exist for Clinton cards, as local businesses.  They are maybe 15km apart.

SEOmoz isn't affiliated with any of the search engines so there is nothing that SEOMoz can really do to actually help you achieve higher rankings for you.

The only way you can improve your rankings is to employ tried and tested best practise techniques and use the SEOMoz tools available to help you research, track and improve your chances of progression.

I don't believe there is a piece of software out there that can genuinely improve your rankings.

Hi.  Everything Tom said and I also wanted to add another extension to this - If you use Firefox this is for checking nofollow and dofollow links.  When you add the extension, if you right click and select the nodofollow it hghlights nofollows in red and dofollows in blue.  I use it all the time.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/nodofollow/

Bing webmaster tools is pretty helpful when it comes to this sort of thing.  Verify your site with Bing WT and in Diagnostic tools you can run SEO tests for your URLs and it will give you an outcome.  If there are any biggies on your site it will highlight in red and amber and so on.

Bing WMT is a great tool and I think it's widely underused.

Hello

The answers to those 3 problems come bac to the strategic decision on whether to have one page and build as a brand, or to have 4 pages and build as a local brand.

1.  If you have four pages you will need to update all four..I think there are ways of automating, but none of the automated G+ content I've seen looks any good - I think I've only seen people able to send their tweets (and they look as wrong there as they do on facebook).  Bufferapp is working on adding G+, but in the meantime, if you are looking to build locally, I would keep the four pages and update them all manually, individually and tailored to your local audience.

2. If you have a user circling one, you would hope or expect that it's because they are attracted to the local page and they are circling as it is locally relevant and interesting to them.  e..g if they live in halifax and circle halifax, then thats fine.  The bradford page should be of no great importance to them.

3.  Google places for business technically doesn't exist anymore.  They were replaced by Google+ Local pages.

I've attached a screenshot of what you should be looking for.  You need to go to your dashboard -> users -> all users -> then select any user.

There should be several fields including your bio area...as per the attached.  Mine is filled in with my google plus proifle.

Something I forgot to mention is that your user will also need to add themselves as a contributor to the blog on their Google plus profile.  I have attached a link to my google plus profile.  If you check out the about section you will see about two thirds down a section where is says 'contributor to'.  Here you add the url to the blog.  This links the two.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/101142923283224674423/about

1. You need to link the blog to the G+ Profile

2. You need to confirm in G+ that you are truly a contributor to that blog (or you could add any old superior influencer)

That should be it.

g+jpeg.jpg

Re changing the title tags, no you don't need to add any redirection.  Yo only need to do this if you also change the url and the existing url has already been indexed.

I've done quite a bit of redirection on some sites when optimising and so far suffered no issues, but I'm going to go away and view that video!

Yep, definitely looks like a case of keyword stuffing.  You'll need to go back to the drawing board and rewrite the content for that page (at least).

I'd suggest using the On Page Optimisation tool here.  I just ran it for you and it graded it an A but there are a lot of areas that still need fixing, primarily keyword stuffing related and also it looks like you might have too many onpage links.

Do all the suggestions there first and then resubmit the page and see if that helps.  I haven't looked at your link profile - have you had any warnings in WMT?

I think it depends on the nature and the quality of the sites.  For example, say I got a link from the Guardian and I was so chuffed I posted a link back to the article on the guardian on my blog, I'm pretty certain I would still reap the link juice benefits.

Edit - I just want to add that I do have direct experience of this on a new clients site. As a UK jounalist for a british new site he has dozens  of backlinks to his site.  They;re his only backlinks, his site isn't optimised at all and hasn't been updated in years, yet he has amazing rankings for highly competitive keywords.

pdfs are indexed just as html pages, so you should avoid duplicating what is on the pdf, as it will look like two duplicate pages on your site.

You can add, summarise or make sensible and good use of the html page and add unique content and that would help.

I'm recently inspired by Red Bull.  The opportunities there are endless.

hmmm....I'd want a more indepth conversation with your developer, because that doesn;t make a lot of sense.

You can get loops but that happens when the redirect has been incorrectly set up, or you have a really long convoluted chain of hops..  (I have done this myself personally and got in a couple of knots).

At the end of the day, you need to be able to reasonably rewrite your urls and it is your developers job to facilitate that and do whatever is technically necessary.  You might need to look back at the history of what you've got redirecting where to prevent it going haywire.

I hope you're right Tom!  I'd hate to have to go and start de-optimising

Hi Derrick

Back in November I built a website for a client that is already ranking between 1 and 4 for several keywords and I had similar concerns at the outset.  One thing I noticed about that report you ran was that all the directory style competition had very low page authority scores.  Good page authority can outrank directories.

What I've written below is based on what I did...It started off with a lot of work in the initial set up, but it's generally just a couple of hours maintenance a week..

As it's local, get a google + page and link the page to your site and focus on getting some good social signals for each page - tweet your pages, facebook like and share you pages, google +1 your pages and so on and if you are blogging, do the same.  A good bit of content and plenty of social sharing can work wonders.  Set up social media accounts on a few of the main networks and use them to really connect and bulid relationships, rather than churning our rss feeds.

Also ensure you have cast iron on page, pick a keyword per page and make sure the page fully reflects that keyword so that when a search lands on it they are truly finding what they are looking for. Have that keyword in the title tag and a good meta desc that tells the user what your page is about.  Don't stuff the page with the keyword, just make sure it appears a couple of times, particularly in headings if you have it broken up.

You can also get yourself some free decent directory links - proper local business directories, not spammy ones and industry specific national directories.

The verified google plus page is invaluable and you can well optimise your google+ page, get reviews etc.

I agree with the previous poster.  SEO is a long winded and tough nut to crack - you either need to do it yourself or you need to outsource it to a professional SEO.

If you have made the decision to do it yourself, you need to learn how to do what SEOs do and that means starting at the beginning and learning from the ground upwards.

There is no one answer to your question, it's just a steep learning curve from the moment you accept taking it on yourself.

That said you are very much in the right place for learning how to do it properly. The only advice I would give is to do everything with caution and make sure your understand the actions you are taking for your site so you don;t end up getting penalised by not understanding the consequences.