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I don't have a perfect answer to this yet but since you don't have any, I'll take a stab at it.

Basically, I have my site setup on .com and .com.au  - I have used the hreflang tag  to identify a specific domain to be shown to Australian users.  This means on Google.com searchers see .com and on Google.com.au they see .com.au  but the content is essentially the same.

So far, the difference is that my sitelinks have not (yet) been indexed in Google.com.au even though they have in .com  So it's not a perfect translation but the hreflang tag is new.

What we have also done is simply direct the site over.

http://highonseo.com.au/blog/

http://highonseo.com/blog/

You should also check out one of our best Australian SEO blogs on the topic.

This is a pretty common trick among the photographers I've worked with.  I can say from what I've seen, there's no benefit to having a keyword in the link like that, but as far as changing, no, it shouldn't hurt you.  Short term there may be some movement but that could be positive or negative, depending on about a billion other factors (how relevant to the cities are the page, are the other pages on the site, etc.)  Google could love the changes, could hate them.  From our experience, it's usually worth just setting it up how you want and letting Google figure it out from there.

There are quite a few reasons it's not ranking at the top of Google (.com or .ca)

1. Spammy meta.  Your title contains the keyword twice. Google dislikes this and tends to use another title if possible. Since you haven't  used noodp/noydir, they're using whatever they deem suitable to the search.  Do a search for "silver creek press" and you'll see them change your title.  That's a hint that they don't like your own info.

2. Spammy meta 2. You're using the meta keywords and have repeated your main keyword 11 times in the meta keyword tag.  Take it twice in the title + 11 times in keywords and that's not so good.  Especially since it appears only near the very end of your description.

3. In Chrome if you do a "View Source" on your page, the keyword only appears at the very beginning (meta) and at the very end of the code.  Your page goes from line 7 to line 522 without mentioning "human resource" at all.  This would suggest that the actual page content is not necessarily about what you're telling Google it is about - thus not helping you.

4. Your copyright tag is out of date. (2008-2010).  While some people disagree that this is a factor, and I don't know, IF it is, you're telling Google you haven't updated the page and don't maintain it.  Google ranks older pages that have been "let go" worse than they do new, updated sites.  At least, that's the theory.

5. Your H1 doesn't include your keyword.  There is some evidence that H1 still matters.  Whether or not a larger sample would yield the same, I don't know.

6. Your site does not support your main keywords.  Your "About" page should tell Google pretty clearly what you do.  The phrase "human resource" does not appear until after line 250.  Your meta tags for this page are very basic compared to the home page.  The keyword does not appear at all on your Books, eBooks, Discounts, Guarantee or  even your Resources page.

What that all means is the only page on your site that even remotely seems to be about "human resource" is your main page, which is meta-keyword stuffed but only includes relevant content 90% down the page and no other page on your site supports the main.  It's just a single point of data standing on its own.

7. According to OSE, you have 10 linking domains with 265 links and no social shares to speak of.  One of your page one competitors, www.learn 4good.com, has 600 linking domains and 27,450 links.  www.cite hr.com on page 2 has 168 domains and 8264 links.  Your numbers just aren't anywhere close.

That's not everything, but that's where I would start.  Sorry for the long reply and hope it helps.

Hi Brett,

I moved to Australia a year ago and dealt with the same thing.  Most citation sources are US/UK.  I have compiled a list of AU and CA ones for my own use.  To help you along, I just posted the CA list here:

http://www.highonseo.com/2012/12/canada-citation-list/

Hope that helps.  It's a compilation of a LOT of lists from around the web.  If you download the XLS at the end, it has the pagerank, mozrank, domain authority, etc. for every site on the list, update as of this morning.

There are two reasons you see fewer than 10,000 results.

1) The LSAPI has a max requests of 10,000 but your actual number of results will be the "Total Links" number when you first run your OSE search.   So that part is "Max" 10,000 not necessarily what you're getting.  Let's say your total results are 2500.  Assuming unique domains, you'll get an export of 2500.

2. On the other hand, you see 2500 in the search but only get 450 but when you export.: OSE only reports the top 25 results from each external domain so if you have 500 from one domain, you're going to "lose" 475 results when you export.  Do that for a few domains and 2500 quickly becomes 500, etc.

Make sense on both parts?

The size of the Mozscape index has steadily gotten smaller this year as they work to make it more efficient.  I think what you'll find is that when it was triple the current size, you may have had more sites indexed.  When it grows, you'll find more included again, as well.

With sites that don't have a lot going on in Mozscape, the best thing you can do is use other tools to complement.  AHrefs, Majestic and Webmasters Tools will help.

I think search engines will do what they do: continue to get smarter.  They'll take into consideration author rank, definitely agree on rich snippets, but I doubt they'll pull away from G+ - the data is too much for them to ignore.  I think we'll see G+ grow, actually.

I think SEOs will continue to talk about: content marketing, snippets, brands, big data, negative SEO, disavowing links, guest posting, author rank, citations.

The biggest thing I see changing now is that SEO is becoming a part of a bigger thing, call it "digital marketing" 2013?  I dunno.  People are starting to understand you need more than SEO or more than Facebook ... so we put social, SEO, email marketing, ppc - all into one bubble and do "that" for our clients.

No shock, I also think we'll see video & multimedia use grow.  Mobile, tablets, phone searches, SoLoMo, etc.  I think we'll see the beginning of the end of some spam as it stops working.  Blog comment spam, forum profile spam, article spam - hopefully those 3 first.

These are the things we're starting to prepare for here.  I'm interested in what others think will change and what will grow.

Worse than using a keyword 30 times in a very long article would be using it twice redundantly in the title of the article.

"Growing garlic: a guide on how to grow garlic"

Your garlic article does contain 1250+ words, including garlic 30 times.  Your title includes it redundantly.  The question you really need to know the answer to is: "how do the top sites rank well for this without putting it in the article 30 times?"

http://www.greenharvest.com .au/Plants/Information/GarlicGrowing.html

This is one of the top results here in Australia.  It uses the word garlic about 25 times and ranks very well despite having garlic on page very frequently.

<title></span><span>Garlic growing information</span><span></title>

^ Their title also contains the word, but just once.

So, I would focus more on the structure of each page and less on the keyword density.  I don't think you're overdoing the density, although the repeated title may hurt you.

A few things are probably affecting you more than you are seeing:

1. Your main site has over 1200 links but this page of your site has 4 that I see: http://bit.ly/S0YetL

2. You say this isn't a competitive search but at the very top, it is.  Not that Moz data is the be-all end-all but your Page Authority/Domain Authority is 31/23.  The lowest PA on the top 10 is 45 and the lowest DA is 35.  Both beat your site by a hefty margin.

3. Of your 1200 links to the main domain, their DA dropoff is very rapid. OSE only shows 18 external links from 10 unique domains.  That really isn't going to compete yet with www.orange coat.com who Google shows with 86,000 links and OSE shows 15,000+ links from 122 domains.  Your numbers just aren't there.

I've seen well optimized Joomla sites rank well - I just don't think yours commands the authority necessary to take on the top domains on this search.  It may seem like a low competition search but even Adwords shows it as "high" competition, despite just 1300 searches / month.

Another with no video is the Game Mechanics Mozinar.  So yeah, I'm guessing most have slides, some don't have anything except audio.

(Edit: it seems it IS broken ... the end does have visuals, as Oleg pointed out.)

Subdirectories are treated as (almost entirely) separate sites so your best bet is to just get the name you want, optimize it how you would a full site and not worry about the address being on.volusion.com

The keyword you choose for the domain won't matter much (EMD for weak sites) so all that matters is getting the on-page done quickly and starting your content/networking/growth.

If you have a specific subdomain question I can try to help but generally, just treat it like its own site.

Now would be a great time to do some blogger & site outreach. You can also use the exposure for a big social media push, and of course, a landing page featuring the designs would be great to drive ppc traffic if you use it. "As featured on" is your new favorite phrase for awhile, I guess.  Congrats to the client on the feature.

I think everyone else has been talking about it a bit but I think you're on the right track with Local.  You can't win "auto insurance" in Quakertown but you can absolutely be the A) Local listing if you increase your citations.  Try Whitespark, see what's out there?

Bob J... is C) for quakertown PA auto insurance with a DA 10, PA 23.  Not exactly impossible to beat. Organic results, yes you'll struggle because the big agencies have it setup right - unless you're working for one of their partners, you'll find it rough going.

Looking at your keywords in Adwords Tool, the only one with even "Medium" competiion is "insurance company" - by adding company the search gets SO large that even big competitors don't monopolize it.  If you're ranking locally, adding "company" to at least some searches may help you as well.

Your best bet otherwise may be long tail keywords.   Don't forget county searches.  Bucks County insurance, etc.  Auto, car, vehicle, home, house, homebuyers, renters, whatever - just do an Ubersuggest search and see what you're not using for important keywords, as well.

But I agree, it's going to be probably 95% local, 5% everything else.

FYI you are showing on international versions of Google because of the .md (moldova, as Casey mentioned) extension.  Here in Oz you're 9th for the search you mentioned.  So you are showing up internationally because you have an international domain.  I would suggest the "target users in the US" box as well.  You may want to get some local citation listings if you can for Maryland, as well.  That could geo-locate you in the "maryland" MD instead of Moldova, at least for Google's purposes.

Lower times are better so this is a definite improvement for your site.

Due to the size of the internet as a whole, you'll find that all of those type of tools have indexed different content.

If you really want to see as many as possible, do a direct Google search on your domain in quotes "yoursite.com" and "www.yoursite.com"  Then use Webmasters Tools, Open Site Explorer, Majestic and AHrefs as a starting point.

See Rand's blog on the size of the OSE database here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/octobers-mozscape-update

Moz crawled 55 billion URLs.  In May they were indexing 150 billion but have had issues with that.  Most importantly, on the crawl updates, they said:

"**This bit is important: **Next index, we're going back down to between 70-90 billion URLs, and focusing on getting back to much fresher updates (we're even aiming to get to updates every 2 weeks, though this is a challenging goal, not a guarantee). The 150 billion+ page indices are an awesome milestone, but as you've likely noticed, the extra data does not equate with hugely better correlations nor even with massively higher amounts of data on the URLs most of our customers care about (as an example, in index 50, we had ~53 billion pages and 82.09% of URLs requested had data). That said, once our architecture is more stable, we will be aiming to get to both huge index sizes and dramatically better freshness."

So Mozscape/OSE index, Ahrefs, Majestic, Google and WMT will all show different URLs - try to check them all once in awhile and definitely stick with Google, WMT and Moz for the big databases.

You have these two lines:

| class="schanger" rel="stylesheet" class="changer" href="http://www.simon-hot-dogs.com/wp-content/themes/feast/styles/orange.css" type="text/css" /> |
|

| <link class="bchanger" rel="stylesheet"class="changer" href="<a class=" " href="http://www.simon-hot-dogs.com/wp-content/themes/feast/styles/brown.css" target="_blank">http://www.simon-hot-dogs.com/wp-content/themes/feast/styles/brown.css"type="text/css" /></link class="bchanger" rel="stylesheet"class="changer" href="<a> |

|
|

You need to edit the files to remove the class="changer" from both.  schanger and bchanger seem to be your specific "changer" classes - you can't then say "it's also class=changer"  It just doesn't work.

Just sort out those link class codes and you'll be fine.

The main idea is to title your page based on what's actually on the page and then add SEO around it.

• Contact page - "Contact us for stairlifts in X | BizName"
• Gallery page - "Stairlifts in use - home elevators image gallery | BizName"
• Pricing page - "Prices for stairlifts in location | BizName"

As long as you focus on the content of the actual page, writing unique titles shouldn't be too difficult.  If you had to have 2 galleries, make one "Stair lifts in use image gallery and photo examples | BizName"  You can vary your word choice, as Davinia said, or you can add page related materials.  Either will keep them unique.

You said there are various kinds.

"Buy Type A stairlifts | BizName" is not the same as

"Purchase Type B stairlifts at Bizname"

As a photographer in a past life, what I did that did not work was use the same tag on every image in a post. That doesn't work.

What does work is variety.  Use the keyword, use related words, and use descriptive image words.  Say you had 3 images to keyword:

(image of an older guy on a bench) alt="osteoarthritis frequently affects elderly men"

(doctor, any health image) alt="healthy screenings can help reduce the symptoms of osteoarthritis"

(drug you're selling) alt="prevent joint pain and reduce osteoarthritis symptoms with X"

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