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What are the cities? Costa Mesa, CA is the only city we're dealing with at the moment How many links are going TO each of these pages (external and internal)? None of them have any external links pointing to them.  The ones ranking on the first page have this many internal links pointing to them (1st to Last): 1, 5, 3, 4, 4, 5, 2 The page that's being left out has 2 internal links pointing to it. What is the anchor text coming into these pages? All have their company name as anchor text.  The first one ranking happens to have "Costa Mesa" in their anchor text. Are they all listed in your sitemap.xml? All are listed in xml sitemap except for 1 and that particular page is ranking on the 1st page. When you do a "brand name + location" search, are you changing your browser's location settings? Yes, but the SERPs don't change when trying multiple locations.  It's always the same listings.

Couldn't agree more Mark.  SEO plugins just help with the mass production of handling certain tasks, but it doesn't matter if you are lacking development support.

Check out this discussion first: http://www.seomoz.org/q/geo-targeting-by-ip-address There's nothing wrong with dynamic targeting, if it's done right: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-level-demographics <-- That post is about persona-targeting Be aware that for many sites' geo-targeted content is not on the homepage per se, but a landing page built for that purpose. That doesn't mean it's the only way to go, but that's where you'll find more examples. It's probably best to do some multivariate testing before going all in on it...  If client's doing this to improve user experience, there's nothing wrong with it, but yes it could have unexpected effects on your results in local search.

Pleasure, glad it helped!

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We did have that kind of experience. While all of your links are low end, we had a major problem because some of their links were good. So we came up with a 6 week strategy. Simultaneously we started a content campaign and vertical business partnerships with links to the site. After two weeks the client company gave a month's notice period to his old SEO company. Once the period was over we did fall in ranks gradually for a fortnight (that was panicky) but we also started ranking for some alternative keywords (hence the client's business did not dry out). We regained most of the rankings after 6 -8 weeks. The downs of this strategy was the client had to pay two companies for 6 weeks, Their businesses went down for three months; but close to a year they have made up for the cost. My tips would be to 1)mentally prepare the client for the loss; you can add the ROI sheet to your proposal. 2) include some other keywords in your campaign so that you can gain rankings immediately and the client's business does not dry out.

This is definitely a good idea. I've just done exactly this for a large ecommerce site, as well as implement a new URL rewrite, and by adding this granularity to the sitemap you can really see which pages are being indexed and control it better. There was a blog post here on SEOMoz which I used for guidance and that demonstrated how the improved site maps actually lead to increased site traffic. (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic) If you're a Wordpress user, checkout the Wordpress SEO plugin by yoast, as his site maps do exactly this and are set-out very nicely.

Hi Michael, In saying that there are no blended results on the page, do you mean that the local listings being displayed for the client's search term aren't blended, themselves? Non-blended results have become a real rarity, in my experience. Does the first line in his search engine results link to his website? Do other parts of the listing link elsewhere, such as to a Google+ Local Page? In most cases, what is happening is that the client's local listing is, in fact, a blended listing, combining his organic ranking and his local ranking. Is this not the case with your client, too? I can't rule anything out these days, as there are so many oddities in Google's local sphere, but I did want to clarify this. If his listing is, indeed, blended local, then you can reassure him that he is getting the best of both worlds. A high, blended listing is gaining him critical visibility and he should be a happy camper. As to local and universal results appearing on the same page...I used to see this frequently, but in my view, this has become very uncommon. Unless the client is in an area of extremely low competition in which his website is one of the only things Google has to pull data from, it is less likely to have both a local and organic result on the same page these days. Miriam

Google does not support the crawl delay command directly, but you can lower your crawl priority inside Google Webmaster Central. So you are right using it the way you are. If you have it in the robots.txt, it does not really do anything and it will show in the webmaster console as well that GWT does not support it.

We had an excellent post about that from a YouMoz author in January. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance should tell you everything you need to know!

Using Google and I'm entering the exact URL in the search.  No results are found.  I know this means it's not indexed, but why does the SEOmoz crawler pick it up?

What's to stop google from finding them? They're out there and available on the internet! Block or remove pages using a robots.txt file You can do this by putting: User-agent: * Disallow: / in the robots.txt file. You might also want to stop humans from accessing the content too - can you put this content behind a password using htaccess or block access based on network address?

Thanks to both of you.  Cyrus, I took a look at those tools over the weekend and they're definitely going to help and exactly what I was looking for.

It seems like Google likes the newer Schema.org markup. But, they still crawl the Open Graph I believe. The OG tags do help Facebook categorize shared links though. Personally, I'm switching my OG tags and implementing the Schema markup. If Google likes that better for their rich snippets, I'm going to make the change. Here's a Google link about it http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1211158 Paragraph from Google "Facebook Open Graph serves its purpose well, but it doesn't provide the detailed information search engines need to improve the user experience. A single web page may have many components, and it may talk about more than one thing. Even if you mark up your content for Facebook Open Graph, schema.org provides an additional way to provide more detail about particular entities on the page." - Google

I found alot of conflicting info on the topic... It appears in September of 2010 they did change it, but I think it is only enforced and it is almost even worded as if you just cannot elicit the content of the review... But It seems to be sort of a grey area as alot still do it and flourish (much like everything else in Google) I have never personally tried this incentive strategy myself  but Have done the citation route many times and seen EXTREMELY good results. And in my look around incetivizing increased reviews by over 100% (of course) so this may have been why they stopped it, as those with the most money could have the most reviews causing an unfair advantage (but isn't that sort of true in everything?) Just in my personal opinion since I am not a lawyer nor do i work for Google Incentive's for reviews are good for all as long as you are not incentivizing the content 1. Customer - Get the chance to either come back and enjoy another meal/service or If they had a bad time the owner gets to try to make it right... 2. Perspective Customer - They get to learn about the experience and see the transpareny of the owner either rectifying or not. (of course i understand some clients/customers are unreasonable, but hey it is a part of being in business 3. Business They get the Benefits in both Word of Mouth and Search Engine Marketing plsu the chance of repeat business OR the chance to right a wrong therefore helping brand image. It also entices the business owner to strive to be better to make sure they do not incentive themselves into a bad review But hey this could get you in trouble, but their are lots of risks taken every day in business, must weigh the ROI potential. w00t!

I would take the desription and rewrite it as muchg as you can. Maybe in the beginning just past it so there is already som thing there but over time rewrite and place keywords choosen by you in it.

One thing I like to do to find fresh content to write about is the following. Set some google alerts for topics in your own industry as well as vertical industries. When you get the alerts you will be able to sift through them and find new stories, products, happening etc. This can give you things to talk about as well as gives you more insight into what is going on in your industry. There have been many times where I have also discovered other things I should be doing in my business this way.

Hi Dan, I am just trying to use MOZ system. What is the best link management add-on or system works well with Moz?  Thanks Lewis

Some of these directories take data dumps from DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org/rdf.html). So I guess it all depends when they grabbed the data last.

The official Google Response is: http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7091 Looking at the link profiles for a few of them they're certainly not the strongest, the only thing I can see that they have over the competition is the fact that 'Chicago' is in their domain name.