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Honestly speaking your website have tons of problems that might take your website to the spotlight and then Google took you down somewhere... here are the things that you should change immediately or may be heir some SEO to fix at least the one time problems so that things can work out well for you!

In the single look to your website, you probably need to change your title, title your images, add some content to the page if possible and fix almost all technical stuff of the page and then we can start looking in to off-page and link related problems.

Semantically the links in the footer should have to have lowest value but after the panda and penguin update same link in the footer of multiple website may question the quality of link and anchor text.

I think it’s good to have a link from few websites but having link from every website they made with same or slightly varied anchor text might hurt the overall link profile instead of providing benefits.

In case you are talking about buying a list then I would prefer to buy smartly keeping your targeted audience, age and other things in mind so that you can get the best out of money you spend on buying mailing list.

As far as you are talking about building a list then I would highly prefer to use mail chimp as it’s a free tool till 2000 and then there are some affordable packages that allow you to add more addresses to the list.

Building links was never a race for me it was more like how quality my link profile is and this is how I beat my competitors and rank over them again the money making keywords.

It’s not about how many links your competitors have and how many links do you have... after the panda and penguin update it’s quite clear that its more about the quality of links your competitors have as compare to you!

I would advise you to build some high quality, valuable links within your niche so that you can easily outrank your competitors for the desired key phrases.

Before you go with the link disavow tool it’s better to check your robots.txt and check if these pages are stopped from crawling r the page code says no-index which stops Google from indexing the page...usually this happens mistakenly when changing any plug-in or code from the website.

But if you think that the pages lost their positions or get out of the index because of the low quality and content then in that case you should better go with removing low quality link first and then after some time use the disavow tool but as a whole this process would take time may be more than a month.

If you are looking for my adivce i will suggest you to go without changing the hyphen and here are my reasons for that.

Changing hyphen simply means changing the domain name for your website and redirection on the domain level always loose the link juice so your overall redirection from old domain to the new domain will loose the SEO power.

Changing eCommerce platform is great but for that you should always keep in mind that the new platform have lots and lots of Seo plugins like the platform should allow the cahngings in robots.txt, indepandance on the xml sitemap level, titles, descriptions and more SEO related areas should be covered within the new platform.

My point of view about your situation!

Ok this is tough!

1. You need to shift your eCommerce Platform!
2. You need to change your domain name (removing hyphen is same is changing to new domain)

If you are going to take all the two major changes on the blog so there is only one thing which is important and should be considered that is redirection. Domain level redirection from old domain to the new domain plus URL level redirection as this will help you save the rankings and traffic from inner pages (categories and products) that are ranking well in search engines like Google.

Do check that your next ecommerce platform should have all the SEO friendly plug-ins available or else you might see a dip in traffic, rankings and sales instead of improvements.

Also, you need to recheck your robots.txt to see if there is anything else which is going to affect your new domain and URL structure... at the same time update your sitemap xml accordingly.

There are many thing that can be witness after the deep analysis of the website but here are the basics that you should consider as most important.

Hey Jason, I am glad that someone really asked this question!

Well everybody wants people to read whatever they are writing on their blog and for that one of the ways is to rank the blog well in search engines from the searchable keywords like you have mentioned in your question.

Actually the keywords that you are trying to focus is one of the money making keywords within your niche and that is why it’s more competitive than other keywords that you are not focusing. I think the better idea is create natural titles that may or may not focus keywords all the time but focus on the content on the page...and give indication to Google and users about what the page is all about...

As far as targeting keywords is concern try to focus on long tail keywords with less competition so that you blog will easily rank and get some attention and if it will really worth reading you will see people share far and wide naturally through social networks, emails and all other possible mediums.

Hope this helps!

My logic is very simple here, you are creating page for your users and not solely for search engines so if more than 100 links make sense on the page, go with it but if it doesn’t just don’t!

I have encountered many websites who got a positive jump in terms of rankings, and traffic after adding links on the page and you can research forum where people are writing about reducing links and why it is important.

In my personal opinion I think 100 links per page is just an indication but if you think you are doing it right, you don’t really have to follow rulebook all the time.

I agree with Matt here!

When you have tags and categories do follow you will definitely going to have lot of duplications within the blog..i think you should read some guide to wordpress SEO (available on SEOmoz) and go though it accordingly in order to kill the duplicate content and this will finished...

At the other hand it take almost a day or 2 to crawl the post page for Google so give some time until it get crawled by Google.

Never tried exactly what you are asking but with wordpress website i usually apply simple rules that are best from user as well as from SEO perspective...

1. Never Confuse!

Let’s not get your visitor confused when visiting your website or else you will witness a good amount of bounce rate increase on your website. If you think adding a category will make the side bar more confusing then try to avoid it because this will impact your SEO as well as user reaction on the website is one of the important SEO factor.

2. Over Optimization

I have witness quite a few examples of over optimization and honestly speaking over optimization is simply addition of similar content and keywords again and again on the page that does not make any sense but if adding a word around 4 to 5 times and its making sense with the content then i think it won’t be counter as over optimization of keywords on the page...

3. Always think about Visitors

Think for visitors and search engine will follow you! This sounds ironic but true as visitors are the end point and as search engine is changing on frequent basis it is more bent towards how users (visitors) think and react to different designs, websites, niches and how much time it spend on each page.

I think not with this particular problem but with very on-page problem you should focus more on users (visitors) instead of search engine bots only.

I mean the offpage strategy does include guest posting service but does not include quality of content where it will get posted and all this seems a little shaky! I am not saying you are in wrong hands but who ever he/she is, should include in the content production process and outreach relevant blogs and resources that includes new papers, journalist and magazines.

If the external consultant is not involve in these process you might not be able to get the better results that you should expect from this service.

Also, you should know the details of the plan like why you are going with guest blogging, what are the benefits of it, why blog commenting and what kind of blogs he is targeting for blog commenting and more questions like that so that you are clear with success and fail of the project and so as the consultant.

Hope this helps...

If you are talking about SEOmoz tool then you should email to help@seomoz.com as this is not the right place to respond.

They will go thought your problem and will respond you on emails. This platform is to ask questions from the community about SEO and related problems.

I don’t think anybody can say “good” or “bed” to it as there is no formula to it but I hope everybody will agree that Google do not like long URLs… so if your over all URL is coming under the umbrella of long tail URLs then you should avoid it but if the URL is still short or normal (usually it’s not possible when you are trying to tank for 4 to 5 word key phrase) then its fine.

So, the basic idea is to keep the URL to a certain limit and if targeting long term key phrases allow the URL to stay normal its fine but if the URLs gets long then it will be a SEO optimization issue.

hope this helps!

I don't think this is possible with Raven Tools!

Linking to low quality sites is obviously harmful but a website with 0 PR is not considered to be low quality or weak website.

I think if the website is within your niche and you really think that this website is going to grow and attain lot of natural links in the near future… I think you surly should link to that website!

The only reason you should avoid linking to that website is because the current link profile is bad (i.e: links coming from porn or different spammed websites)

Hope this helps!

I would highly agree with Takeshi on this… you should try to focus on sub folders that should look something like this (http://ww.example.com/france) and for UK the URL should be something like this (http://www.examle.com/UK)

Using separate domains and sub domains are treated as separate domains to Google and your SEO efforts might not transfer from one to another… where as in sub folders your SEO effort will help one another and less work will give you more results in terms of more traffic, sales and SERP rankings…

3 separate companies when offer 3 different services, it’s good to have 3 separate websites as 1 website for 3 different companies can be confusing from the user end and you will witness people bouncing from the website without completing the Goal.

Another thing that I really wanted to clear is that no paid traffic helps in improving the organic SERPs, this is the myth that most website owners have in mind which have nothing to do with reality.

Having 1 separate website for each service will help webmaster to easily work on it and get it rank well from the desired key phrases at the same time it will be easy for visitors to understand what service your company offer and use it when required.

Hope this helps!

After reading all your requirements there is no one name that can come in to my mind…I guess for retrieving page information there are many browser tool which can do this…I guess SEOmoz tool bar have the ability to check how many incoming links are on the page, how many outgoing links on the page, do follow and no follow links and more…

When you talk about management of links and check if the links are still available or not then in that case I think Raven Tools is better at this area…

These recommendations are my personal recommendations but are different alternate tools that can help you with the same.

Interesting question but got some easy answer for this!

Yes, links from unrelated sites are going to impact negatively on your website and possibility you will witness a dip in rankings from your desired key phrases. The reason why websites like newspapers and social media platforms like facebook are ranking when they are getting links from all Tom, Dick and harry websites is because news papers and social media platforms are talking various different topics… news paper in a day talks about international news, business news, talibans, and Hollywood movie reviews… similar is the case with social media so it’s possible for them to link from every different website.

Plus, Links when build have patterns that Google can track, there is a huge difference in pattern between building links and getting links naturally… Google possibility can track this and then analyze things accordingly.

Also, Google have 200+ signals that Google keep in mind when ranking websites against keyphrases so you never know if links are the real problems why you are witnessing a dip in rankings from your desired key phrases.