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Hi Luke

I wouldn't particularly worry about the actual keyword density of the page but more about whether your keyword optimized text actually looks natural and not stuffed with a set keyword. In regards to meta data this doesn't have an direct value in relation to your search engine ranking. I personally don't use meta tags as this tells my competition exactly what keywords I am going after. As far as meta description goes this is important because it influences what text is displayed against your page in the search engine results. Good meta descriptions can help influence whether people click through to your site from the SERPs. Hope this helps.

Keyword density is so old hat - if I were you I would stop measuring your pages by keyword density and make sure that you right decent content that contains your keyword. Also placing your keywords in important elements such as the title tags, H1 header, etc. In direct answer to your question if you insist on measuring keyword density meta data won't count as it is not a ranking factor - the days of meta crawlers are long gone!

Hi Brian

I think you might find this helpful - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6634302/how-to-leverage-browser-caching-at-asp-net-iis-7-5

and...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/642954/iis7-cache-control

You should be able to do this by making/editing (if you already have one) a web.config file in your root folder, which is explained in the article above.

I think this should help you - https://pro-sitemaps.com/

I have used the tools to generate sitemaps on websites in the past and found it very handy. The pro service sounds like what you are after...

Glad I could help and give you something to think about - I would definitely think about 301 redirecting one site to the other site and push forward with building one great information resource for customers new and old..

I have found to some extent that this is natural, however in order to combat this with one of the sites that I work on we have made sure that the exposure, especially through social media has been staggered, not hitting everything at once, so that it has been clear to search engines that the fresh content is still important in relation to the terms that it is ranking for. I have also produced content related to this in the form of a series clearly linking to the original so that every time one of the pieces of new content get traffic, links and social recognition so does the original piece showing that it still has relevance in the current rankings. I have found this has worked and we have kept pieces ranking like this.

Is your domain a brand name or an exact match domain targeting a specific keyword?

If it is an EMD then it could be as simple as your site doesn't rank as well as the others and these types of domain don't have the same benefit they used in terms ranking for the terms they match quickly.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214115/Google-Warns-of-Upcoming-Exact-Match-Domain-Algorithm-Change

Without the "site:" query in Google it is common to only have one result when doing a domain search - this may have multiple sitelinks under one listing. An example of your typical domain listing would be amazon.co.uk typed into Google - a strong well ranked brand but it only appears once for its domain search on page 1, yet it does have multiple sitelinks for the one listing.

When you say you had a robots.txt live at first - many well ranked sites have them live all the time, but it is more a question of what was in the file? For instance where you restricting access to any or all parts of your site?

A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and passes 0% link juice, where as a 301 redirect is permanent, so passes around 90-99% of link juice, so you are correct in thinking you should go for the 301 to make the link juice flow.

For further info see here - www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

I think it is a good thing for a website to have some external links that are pointing to relevant sites that will help your users. There is no hard and fast rule to this, but if you think that 4 links is too much then you may want to consider placing a nofollow on some of the links but I would definitely leave some followed and not worry too much about this.

On a side note if you wanted to link to one site on four parts of your site I would leave one natural and nofollow the other 3 personally.

I wouldn't have a section on my site that is basically a link page to other sites - it would be much more relevant and natural, in my opinion, to link to the relevant sites in context with certain areas of your site and this would provide much more value to the visitor as well..

Robert gives you a very good answer; a page with low ranking is ideal for being improved through optimizing the on-page factors and gaining links to your pages. If you have a blog linking to these pages is a very good idea to bring them to visitors attention again.

Just to reinforce this point - Thankfully page ranking doesn't carry over otherwise there would be a lot of us in this industry struggling!

In relation to internal linking I would look at where these pages sit in your site architecture in terms of links to them - are they prominently linked to in your navigation or are they buried deep in your site. If they are buried deep would you be able to include them closer to the top of the site navigation (in terms of including them higher up the navigation levels, such as only taking one click to get to your low ranking pages from the homepage) with approrpriate keyword anchor text linking to them? Depending on your site this is not always appropriate but it is a concept worth considering as it will make a difference in my experience.

Personally I would look at creating a main category page and then have the services in pages below that allowing you to fully optimise each of these services. Having separate pages means you will be able to optimise all the on-page factors specifically for each service strengthening the chances of ranking for more of your services as key factors such as the page title, h1 header and other on-page content will have the specific service keyword in them. Don't forget to make sure your meta description is also specific and has a good call to action in order to help encourage the all important click-throughs from the search engine results. Also make sure your URL is optimised to contain the relevant service/service related keyword. As you say you need to create unique content for each. Having separate pages in your internal link structure allows you so much more freedom to optimise for the specific services based around relevant keyword research for each. I would also consider how you could possibly earn relevant links to these pages as this will also help increase their authority and ultimately ranking.

You might find having a look at this useful - http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

Hope this helps!

As far as I am aware Google doesn't index urls with a hashtag as this is pointing to an internal part of the page - essentially it will only index the url without the hashtag, so it isn't creating a new URL. However to be certain of this I would stick a site: query with your url including the hashtag and see if it appears with the hashtag, if, as I expect it doesn't then you shouldn't have an issue with duplicate content under two urls. As far as them being ok in relation to your SEO efforts I don't see why there should be a negative impact as you are essentially making your site more user-friendly and pointing to a specific part of the page that is already indexed - your are not duplicating that part of the page by creating an internal anchor to that specific content.

Just for your confirmation I can tell you I have a page that uses an internal anchor (#) and when you do a site search in Google this page doesn't appear. When you search for it without the # it does...

Have you considered verisign - http://www.verisign.com/ and one of their SSL solutions, with extras such as

http://www.symantec.com/verisign/ssl-certificates/secure-site-pro-ev?inid=vrsn_symc_ssl_SSPEV

Hi Quilbur

These guys have all given you some great answers I just thought you might like this extra little bit of info - Bing actually takes meta keywords as a spam signal since about 2011.

Have a look at this article by Danny Sullivan - http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874

As the only thing that meta keywords actually do is make it easier for your competitors to know what keywords you are targeting  (as jamesm5i stated) I never implement them.

I always make sure that there is a strong call to action on the meta description as I have seen the results of implementing this with sites already in postions 2 and 3 - a strong call to action increased the search traffic generated by them significantly.

Good question - I have experienced something similar and I would personally go with your second location in a sub-folder as you say you have already established this site and you will be able to benefit from the authority already gained. I would place relevant anchor text including the location possibly in the main homepage navigation pointing to this second location. When I worked on a similar site I had three locations from one site and I placed the relevant terms in the main navigation anchor text and obviously did the other basics such as keywords in URLs. Then I concentrated on building the authority of each locations homepage, including using competitions to get social interaction to each of these and building great local content that I then exposed to the relevant local audiences. Each one of the location pages then started to gain more natural links from local sources and I found they all ranked really well for their local terms.

Hope this helps..

Use canonicalization to resolve this common duplicate content issue.

You need to place the canonical tag pointing to your preferred URL.

See this SeoMoz guide on how to do it -

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

See

Rel="canonical"

this actually uses the example of capitalization and one page appearing as three to search engines...

Hope this helps!

I agree Andrew it has been a good discussion - that is the great thing about this community you can actually bounce ideas off like minded folks that have knowledge and understanding of what you are doing. I think it also shows that there are always several ways to go about things - it is like this discussion it has really got me thinking and I think that can only be a good thing! Thanks

I think that none keyword anchor text such as your websites URL is safer if you are going to have a followed link from a press release. Although I would be careful if you are creating a press release to gain authority from the link(s) in it with the recent changes by Google. Remember the main aim of your press release is to gain your brand exposure and even if the link from it are no followed if you do it well and what you have published is news worthy you are likely to pick up followed links and social shares from other sources indirectly anyway.

Always a good recap I think - http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339

Obviously there is absolutely loads that you could do with this but the place I would start is with a focused local SEO campaign.

Read all you can around local SEO and think of ways you can strengthen your clients online brand - for instance I like to use video and YouTube as part of my marketing strategy.

I would start here - http://moz.com/learn/local

Consider signing up to Moz Local for your client https://moz.com/local/overview as this will help strengthen your local presence as it will help manage your sites local listings

"Moz Local creates and maintains business listings on the sites, apps, and directories that factor most into local search engine results. Once you upload your location data to Moz Local, it’s easy to push business listings to the major data aggregators. You can use Moz Local to create and update your listings, manage your location information at any time, re-verify your listings, and find and resolve duplicate listings."

Also make sure your have structured data in place such as http://schema.org/LocalBusiness

Hope his helps as a starting point..

This is a common issue with sites in relation to duplicate content - I would look at setting up a 301 (permanent) redirect from none www version of your page to the www version.

Have a look at the SeoMoz guide to redirection here - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Hope this helps

Hi Luke

I had the same problem and this is how I fixed it - I registered the development domain with GWT and then put in a removal request. I also got our developers to setup a robot.txt file to tell search engines not to index any of the site - the contents of the robots.txt file are as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This soon fixed the issue for us. Hope this helps - obviously you don't need the robots.txt if your are just going to take the site down completely as there will be no worry of people finding it in search engines and mistaking it for your live site or search engines finding duplicate content. I used this strategy as we still use the development site for testing etc before going live.

Can I just check is the URL on a separate domain? If it isn't and it is part of your existing domain for instance you can still block that URL using either a robots.txt file or a no index, no follow meta tag. You can also request removal of specific URL's within a site in GWT.