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Your clients address is probably on his website so Google finds him more relevant for the location which his business actually exists. Can you optimize for the business's actual location? Absolutely! But, it will be much more difficult to be found relevant for a suburb if his business's actual location is in Chicago.

Drop down menus do not typically effect SEO negatively. In fact a properly optimized drop down menu can be beneficial for letting Google know what your site and pages are for. Just a few things to check for: 1. Avoid Java script drop down menus - Use standard HTML or CSS driven drop downs instead. 2. Use live linked text and not images. 3. Use descriptive keyword in your drop down - For example a drop down for shirts use: Red shirt, Blue shirt, etc instead of just Red, Blue..... 4. Keep in mind the First Anchored text rule. Give seniority to your first anchored text link. 5. Make sure your links are absolute link. e.g.http://www.yourdomainname.com/services.htm 6. Use title attribute to describe the page the visitor will be taken to.

is that it, or are there any more specifics that count particularly for G-shopping?

OK i asume this is your title Chicago Web Design & SEO | Capacitr, Inc Chicago web design company, Chicago SEO, Video Production | Capacitr, Inc It is keyword stuffed. try somthing like

SpyFu (paid version) can do this rather nicely. Not every keyword, but it can give you the Google rankings of a site against an assortment of keywords going back for at least a year. You can enter custom keywords and it will give you the data if it has it. It seems to not work on obscure, low volume keywords, which is to be expected. If it comes back empty, it means that either it doesn't have the data for that keyword, or the ranking was 51+. Don't use it for branded keywords, for example, if your company is ABC Enterprises and you check that keyword, it will likely come back empty. Don't assume ABC Enterprises did not rank for it's own name, but rather, that the search frequency is too low for SpyFu to include it in its automatic data collection process. Google Webmaster Tools gives historical keyword data but it only goes back 90 days.

Hi Michael, It is not uncommon for Google to chose a page title to display and ignore your meta title. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable has written about this a couple of times, with examples, on the following posts. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-tag-13704.html http://www.seroundtable.com/google-titles-match-12779.html

When did you make changes to the title tag? The new title tag will appear in the SERP only when the page is re-indexed by Google.

You could do that too. The win/win is to always try and do something that's also of high value to the user and good for the search engines at the same time.  As long as its of value to someone visiting the site, go for it!

In my opinion the best solution is to automate the process. For any site with user generated content or where content is being added frequently, I set up a CRON job to create and submit a sitemap daily. It really is a one time, set it and forget it type of thing.

A lot of information outside of SEO should be considered before redirecting a domain.

I think Open Site Explorer uses the Linkscape link index which is updated monthly. So it is very possible that the link was taken down or moved to a different page (common with blogs when the link falls off the homepage) since the last time Linkscape was updated. Another tool I use to check links is SEOHeap which is free and you can quickly check whether a link is active by clicking a button next to the link data.

If I had a client who built hand-made kites and he enjoyed sharing information about them.  I would encourage him to start his own blog rather than tell him to go out commenting on blogs owned by other people. The last thing that I would do is to go out myself commenting about kites and trying to get links for him.  I don't know a damn thing about kites and my comments would make him look like an idiot.

Thanks for your input Sean.  Kind of what I was thinking.  I understand it's not the most natural process, haha.

You can target multiple keywords, but the words need to fit the same purpose and be relevant. You don't want to throw in keywords just so you can rank for them. Check out this post by Rand. It should clear some things up for you: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/keyword-targeting-how-to-employ-multiple-keywords-for-seo-conversions Let me know if you still have questions.

Thanks Keri!  I thought it might be something like that, so I'm glad you could confirm.

Here is a similar Q and A that I wrote a response to suggesting 4 tools which I have found immensely useful. Market Samurai also has some video tutorials that teach a really good strategy for finding great keywords. http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-keyword-research-tools-do-you-recommend-to-help-with-seo hope this helps.

This is actually a best practice IMO. If that page for whatever reason is duplicated somewhere else (could happen a year down the line) then you automatically eliminate the issue of dupe content and are already providing a directive to Google on which page is the original and which page to count.

Yes Trellian keyword discovery, it's not free but it's good. http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/engines.html Keyword Discovery collects search term data from over 200 search engines world wide. As a result we have the largest keyword database that contains nearly 38 billion searches. KeywordDiscovery also offers many language specific keyword databases sourced from regional search engines and users from those regions, including: Australian, Canadian, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, UK and US with plans to offer many others.

Michael, I would be interested to understand this question in a different way.  While you may optimise a page for say one or two keywords from an SEO point of view, how might that vary (if at all) for an SEM campaign.  In many cases the same page (especially a product page) will be used for SEO and SEM so I would be interested to extend your question and say in addition how many keywords should you optimise for an SEM campaign and then for a combined SEM and SEO campaign as well as just the SEO campaign?  Is there any real difference?