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Keri is completely correct. Citation building is a Local SEO technique, and virtual businesses are not local. Good question!

Hi Mark, Best practice is to create a number of different descriptions - maybe 5-10 of them, just to vary things up. However, you cannot prevent duplication even if you create a different description for each entity, because of the way certain data sources populate the data of other websites. So, duplication, to some degree, is baked into the citation building process and, thus, is unlikely to have a serious, negative effect. So, go ahead and write a handful of different descriptions to use, but don't fret over this area too much, because you can't avoid a certain level of duplication.

Agreed that link building and therefore increasing the trust / authority of the website are the hardest or most time consuming parts of marketing a website in search right now. You may not see the results of good links immediately - it can take months for rankings to rise as a result of good link building, and the bar for "good link building" is very high right now.

Content needs to be good enough to share, and to be shared in the first place you need to be aggregating that content through social channels relevant to your target audience. Try - Wow, Why and How Content to "Wow" and stop them in their tracks - A big enough "why" to stay - A big enough "how" to meet their immediate need. I agree with much of what has already been said here, however quality is not always engaging! Its nice, but it has to be attractive enough that it wows your visitors in the right way, and this is not easy, but definitely worthwhile. Another problem with content that answers questions to quickly is bounce rate - if the answer arrives to quickly your audience will leave too quickly. finding content that slows down a visitor and holds their interest is important, but its a fine wire to walk.

Great job, Mark! I can see from this end that nearly all of those unwanted URLs have already dropped out of the results. That's far quicker than even I expected! And the ones that aren't gone are leading to a 403 Forbidden page, which is great. One last thing you can do if you want. Because you are on HostGator, they are displaying their custom 403 error page, which has their branding all over it (nasty, kinda ugly) You could create your own simple 403 error page, add your own basic branding to it, and for instance add a line that says something like "You don't have permission to view this page or it is blocked for security reasons. Drop by the home page [link to home page] to find what you're looking for, or to conduct a search." This basic page can be used to replace the one that HostGator provides by default so any visitors that hit it by accident will still feel like they are on your site, and will have a suggestion for what to do next. Your hosting control panel will have instructions for how & where to provide your own custom error pages. Hope that last little tweak's useful. Paul

Hi Mark, Once you've got the website properly locally optimized, on-going activities will typically include content development, citation building and earning reviews. You may also want to pursue earning links and social mentions. I recommend that you read this article to see how you're doing on the Top 20 Local Search Ranking Factors: http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide Hope this helps!

You shouldn`t take those numbers too serious although they are not really wrong... just see this info as a recommendation. There is a unwritten rule which recommends that the keyword density should be between 2 and 4 percent but you should focus on writing a good text in general. Of course you can keep in mind to use your keyword in a propriate way but what you do is: you write for humans not for machines... Its undeniable that your text wont rank for a keyword if you do not mention it (this might change in the future) but as I said: don`t focus too much on that. Write a good text (everybody has a different opinion about the definition "good" by the way) and review it... think of using your keyword so that your text will still be a good one...

Agreed with Alan, do as Alan said and Google will actually figure out what is the original version of the website.

Hi Mark, I agree with Gyorgy. It will likely do more harm than good to change the underscores to hyphens because then links to those pages will have to go through a redirect. However, if you are set on making this change here's how you can do it using the .htaccess file. Hope this helps! `RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.(gif|png|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ [NC]` <code>rewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*)([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2-$3-$4 [R=301,L] rewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2-$3 [R=301,L] rewriteRule ^([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2 [R=301,L]</code>

Hi Mark, Agreed, you should definitely change the contents for the duplicate websites; however, you don't have to remove the duplicate contents from those sites as it might've generated a few links, authority or bookmarked.  I would suggest using 301 redirect from the duplicate site to the Main site's content.  Make sure content A of duplicate site redirects to content A of Main site.  Another method is to use cross site canonical to tell engines that the content on the Main site is the original. Good luck creating new contents!

To throw another possibility out there, Mark: As a MOZ Pro member, you can take advantage of a MOZ Perk for PiktoChart, which is one of the top online infographic design sites. (You get 60 days of PiktoChart Pro for $1.) I have to agree with Dennis though - you might very well be better off hiring an experienced designer to create one for you. As with so many digital technologies, just having access to the tools is not automatically going to produce a worthwhile product. Good infographics take considerable design skill. It's just like photography - just because you have a copy of Photoshop doesn't mean you will be able to create beautiful photographs. If you do decide to create it yourself, be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time in the project. Good luck! Paul

That is a very open ended question and one I wouldn't even try to answer. Tell your client that there are hundreds of factors at work with Google's algorithms and this is something that is completely out of your control. Even Google couldn't tell you the answer to that one. If they want to know more, then tell them that each of the 200+ primary ranking signals, have their own set of criteria. I think it was 'assessing how links appear on a page', had something like 2,000+ individual signals that Google used. Now imagine that each of the 200 primary signals each have 2,000 of their own signals - this is hundreds of thousands of possibilities that Google will be looking at when ranking a site. -Andy