Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You need to use the HREFLANG markup.

If you Google my site on Google.com, it displays and takes you to highonseo.com, if you search Google.com.au, it takes you to HighonSEO.com.au  Make sense?

Add these tags to your pages in the head area.  This should take about a week to "kick in" and far less time if you update regularly and Google comes and crawls you sooner.

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<link rel="alternate" <span class="il">hreflang="en-Us" href="http://www.example.com/US" /></link rel="alternate" <span>

<link rel="alternate" <span class="il">hreflang</link rel="alternate" <span>="en-UK" href="http://www.example.com/UK" />

<link rel="alternate" <span class="il">hreflang</link rel="alternate" <span>="en-AU" href="http://www.example.com/australia" />

<link rel="alternate" <span class="il">hreflang</link rel="alternate" <span>="en-CA" href="http://www.example.com/canada" />

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More on HREFLANG:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_hreflang.asp

Hi James,

I'm glad it helps and excites you going forward with your business.

Check your Analytics data as well - see if there are ways to quickly improve time on site, loading speed, bounce rate, average pages per visit - anything Google gives you could be an insight into what they want you to improve.

If you have any related questions, just ping me to let me know and I'll check back.

~Matt

Thanks Dana.  I love talking about SEO and I type fast so it helps get those thoughts out. Appreciate the comment.

Hi James,

I (and others) have answered this a number of times recently so I'm mainly going to link you in.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-this-site-rank-higher-than-a-seemingly-better-one

http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-t-for-the-life-of-me-figure-out-how-this-is-possible-any-ideas

http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-would-a-site-with-virtually-no-external-links-and-low-authority-rank-very-high

The basics of it are you are looking at maybe 3 or 4 metrics of maybe 200 that affect SEO.  DA and PA matter but they are heavily influenced by other factors such as domain age, page loading speed, time left on registration (surprisingly!), number and quality of anchor text vs branded text, follow vs. nofollow (not in the ways you'd necessarily expect), and again, like 175 other factors.  There are always a million "could be" answers.

Let's say the other site had a PR7 SEO site before and it is now offline.  Maybe they used it for the "black hat" version of their business.  They've seen the light, black hat works less than ever, and they've gone all white hat.  Now they 301 that domain over to the new one.  You can't "see" the 301 but the effect would be massive.  Maybe they have one big client who they managed to ask for and get a big link that isn't on the Moz index but it's showing up in WMT.  Maybe their average visitor visits 3 times as many pages as on your site or stays for 10 minutes longer per visit.  Those type of metrics make a huge difference in SEO.

I hope that helps answer your question!  A huge amount of factors control SEO - social, possibly, the platform of the site, +1s on Google, local citations that may not include a live link so they aren't picked up by Moz.... see the issue in figuring this out?

~Matt

You're not considering a lot of factors that go into SEO:

1. Page speed could be better on #1.

2. Over optimization on page 2 - with many links with anchor text that includes "editing"

3. "editing" appears 80 times on page 1, 66 times on page 2, despite page 2 having more text.  I'm not saying this is a case of keyword density/spamming it, but maybe they're on the line and #2 is under it.

4. Better overall inbound link authority to #2 possibly.

5. Page 2 has repetition of both keywords in the title.  Google already punishes this if you don't have noODP by replacing your title with a more suitable one.  They aren't big fans of duplication but even so, #2 has a much different title.

6. Co-citation.  Even with a better DA and PA, the related inbound links may be more relevant to essay editing on page 1.  Also, more domains may point directly at the subpage essay-editing.html than they do the absolute page at /essay-editing/index.php

7. Analytics matter.  If #2 bounce rate is double #1, and the time on site for #1 is 4 minutes longer per visitor and they get more traffic through an email list that actually stays on site, they'd have a natural boost in the "analytics" department, as well.

There are always a million reasons why one site could or may outrank another.  All you can realistically do is improve your site as much as possible, create relevant links back, get citations that all match, engage on social and have a site that responds well when people click it.

http://gsitecrawler.com/  GSiteCrawler is the standard.  Have indexed about 75k pages with this and  know someone who did 180k with it.

http://rapid.searchmetrics.com/seo-tools/extras/sitemap-generator,25.html  I don't see a limit on this one but someone said 10,000 on another forum.

http://wonderwebware.com/sitemap-generator/  Downloadable sitemap crawler. Theoretically this should do an unlimited number of links.

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/google-sitemap-generator/  This has an unlimited option.  Not sure how well it works.

• http://www.ubersuggest.org
• http://lsikeywords.com
• http://www.soovle.com

As well as all the ones Moosa and SEO 5 mentioned.

Same - EMDs that have real content and a real site are doing fine.  EMD "penalty" if you want to call it that, affected more the people who are just putting up simple microsites or filler/fluff sites on emds.

The biggest thing I've seen affect EMD is domain age.  Domains over a year or two old seem unaffected.  New EMDs with under a year left on their registration have been slammed hard.  EMDs with thin content are definitely under the gun.  But anything "real" seems unaffected or only minor hits here & there.

I agree with you on the way to produce top content. I agree that not everyone can - but we need to do what's best for our clients and that's not always going to be the theoretically "perfect" answer.

"If you want good stuff you gotta pay the price."

This answer completely eliminates at least 70% of small businesses from creating great content.  There are always ways.  We do SEO profitably at a level that you would not even talk to the client.  It's all about the goals.

The question posed is "what's the best way to move forward without costing a huge amount of money" and you say "there isn't."  99% of the content on the net isn't written by a team of 6 people taking 10 days to write 500 words.  Hiring a professional copywriter is a LOT better than writing it yourself, hiring a content expert is a great choice when the budget allows.  In everyone's "perfect world" this is a great answer - but here in the real world, you have to make some choices.  It's not "squandering" your money if you're putting out the professional content in your niche because everyone else is writing it themselves.

Of course, you'd never hire a single general copywriter to write technical manuals on computer systems they don't understand.  But to write some articles for a small business?  C'mon.

Got a couple things for you.  http://bit.ly/TCXNqR

She is definitely listed in Singapore.

Here's the G+ you were struggling to find:

https://plus.google.com/118348840093159483018/about?gl=uk&hl=en

Try to verify with "manage this page" on the right sidebar.

It depends what is a "huge amount of money" I guess.

We get our in-house copywriter at a great rate. She is a talented writer we found on Twitter.  We charge her out at $10 per 100 words so if you wanted 5, 500 word articles, it would cost $250.  That's middle-level pricing.  Super expensive would be hiring a full time copywriter who knows what they're worth for a half day.  Could be $600-1000 easily.  I have one we use sometimes for big jobs b/c she knows what those clients want.  On the other end, you could easily get someone on Fiverr to write the 5 articles for $25 but you will need to edit them and pretty them up.  It just depends whether their structure would work for you.  Also, you could probably find someone to go the other way - present an outline and have them do the writing bits and then you just edit again based on that.

Other than Fiverr, other low cost places to get writers (high chaff ratio though) are oDesk, Elance and Guru.

Hope that helps and happy new year!  

Shew, this one was hard to pull apart.

I looked at your site VERY briefly then dug in. I should've looked harder at first.

1. First I did a link profile - nope, you looked like everyone else.  There's no consistency here so I think a bit of the higher DA links wouldn't hurt you but that's not the problem.

2. Then I went to see if it was keywords - I tested these domains against you on specific jobs and no, they usually outrank you so you're right, there's a problem. It isn't that one keyword.

3. I checked your actual page.  Oh.

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**The answer seems to be your registration wall.  **

You have a registration wall up here:  http://www.bayjobs.com/administrative-jobs/listings-214475.html

The same text is virtually 100% duplicated on every logged out result.   Everything from "Job search Login" to "San Francisco Bay Area Jobs" is duplicated.  Then, you have the same links on every page, the same internal link to your own site, etc.

You are also creating a big problem on anchor text.  You have "Office Support / Administrator" linked to the registration wall, Site Services Coordinator linked to the registration wall, etc.

How to fix it

I think you don't have FCF (first click free) going on here.  I would try that.

http://heelatch.com/blog/2010/12/how-to-rank-and-monetize-restricted-content/

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536

That should help... I think that's the problem, though.  The registration wall seems to close off access, Google can't see it, they see anchor text with all your job titles leading to one repetitive page that has exact anchor text to your own site and they don't see much related to the actual anchor text of the job title, no description, no job there, etc.   I think the problem builds on itself.  Your anchor text in the registration wall page is probably why you got penalized on EMD day, although the setup itself is problematic.

Rafi has it exactly right - as I would do it.  301 the subdomain to the appropriate page.  Then make sure you resubmit a sitemap and ping all of your pages.  I think you'll be fine after that.  Great post Devanur Rafi.

According to the https://plus.google.com/authorship page,

1. Make sure that you have a profile photo with a recognisable headshot.
2. Make sure that a byline containing your name appears on each page of your content (for example, "By Steven Levy").
3. Make sure that your byline name matches the name on your Google+ profile.
4. Verify that you have an email address (such as stevenlevy@wired.com) on the same domain as your content. (Don't have an email address on the same domain?

A brand is rarely an "author" - someone did the writing.  Google wants that person tied to the work they created. Now, there may be ways "around" this but getting "around" stuff in SEO is why so many people scrambled so badly this year.

This page dissects it further: http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/google-optimization/pros-and-cons-of-google-authorship-for-businesses.html

Most notably:

A company or brand’s Google+ page cannot be designated as the author of any web content. Therefore your company and brand name will not come up as the author in the web results.

**Warning:**If you’ve considered creating a company persona under the guise of a real person in order to have all authorship attributed to that particular Google+… Don’t do it! This really undermines AuthorRank and defeats the whole point of authorship. Google may also penalize you for trying to cheat their system… just as they’ve done for poor SEO practices through Google’s Panda-Penguin algorithm updates.

That's what I would follow.  I would not suggest trying to game Authorship at all.

Penguin doesn't (AFAIK) penalize "too many links."  It penalizes "too many _______ links."  What I mean is "too many unnatural links" or "too many footer links" or "too many links from the same domain" or "too many purchased links."  It's "too many ________" in our experience.

We use a link profile graph like the one I did for Scott on his blackfriday site.  http://scott.offord.me/KvTb

See how the blue graph is WAY out of alignment with everything else?

THAT is an unnatural link profile that got slammed.

I think they were an idea, never standardized, and therefore not something I'd bother with.  In our experience, Schema & rdfa matter more than DC.  I would focus on the standards Google is talking about and remove the ones that they are not.

The only place I can see Google mention DC at all is negative.

Google Scholar’s Webmaster Inclusion Guidelines site cautions to “use Dublin Core,(which cannot express bibliographic citation information adequately for academic papers) only as a last resort,” and recommends other metadata schemas instead.

The fact that the only time they seem to mention it is negative means I'd avoid.

Strange thing:

If I search

[run a sweepstakes] it should be exact match but I see the 1300/800 you're seeing.

If I search  run a sweepstakes and then use "match type: exact" I see the ones I posted, <10, <10.

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At any rate, Adwords tool aside, you can rank for this term although it depends on "how" you want to rank.  A page by itself will be hard.  The lower DA pages are all blogs (new content) and you're definitely competing with chron, ehow, etc.

It's hard to give you specifics without knowing what you're trying to do, exactly.

It doesn't seem that difficult to rank for, but why? Google gives that exact phrase under 10 searches per month globally.

<colgroup><col width="146"> <col width="116"> <col width="174"> <col width="170"></colgroup>
| Keyword | Competition | Global Monthly Searches  | Local Monthly Searches  |
| [run a sweepstakes] | Medium | < 10 | < 10 |

Why this exact match?

I don't know that they're mutually exclusive.  I think you need to create a page for each of the recipes.  Then I think you need a great search engine for it (search by ingredient, by course, by main protein, by what's in pantry, etc.)   You'll want to definitely get your ideas from successful sites like AllRecipes.com, Taste.com.au, FoodNetwork.com and such.

Also - from an SEO/on-site perspective, you need to figure out how to get integrated hRecipe (schema/rich snippet) data into Google.  Search "banana bread" click "more" then "Recipes"  - at the top you'll see Search Tools > Ingredients.  You need your ingredients for every one of those 10k recipes to show up in this part of Google.  This is how food bloggers search and they're going to be a HUGE part of your audience.

Make sure each can be rated, and if I were doing this from scratch right now, I'd make sure everyone who submits UGC in the future has a place to put their rel=author on each recipe.  If you can integrate ingredients, rel=author and ratings, you'll be on the way to great food SEO.