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Chad

My opinion on this would be to use the 800 number as the primary number and if their is a secondary number field, use the local number. Think about it, if you are a national company, like a United Airlines or a Coast to Coast moving company, would you rather see a 567-453-xxxx number or a 1-800-xxx-xxxx ? As Mike said, they are convenient and that's what you want to provide to the user. If not, what's the point of having those numbers in the first place ?

Again, I hope this helps.

I would run a test. A/B test both the situations. See what the difference it. This varies so much by who you are up against, today and your competition could change on a day to day basis. So run this test every few days/weeks.

Run a small campaign to bid for position #1 for x amount of time.

Another campaign to bid for position 2-3 for the same x amount of time.

The cost vs conversions, ROI calculation will tell you what's better for you. If the numbers make sense to stay at #1 and you can afford to do that, why not ?

Just use a crawler like Screaming Frog, crawl your website and see if you see any errors / 404s that you are linking to. And you can identify what all pages link to it.

I hope this helps.

In my opinion, your page is over-optimized for your primary keyword. I would look into some variant keywords you can optimize this page for. Here is what I see as "Over-Optimized" for that exact keyword:

Page Title = OK, could use some customization
Description = OK
Breadcrumbs = Exact Keyword along with the Exact Title Tag (Sort of okay, I'd say)
H1 Tag = Exact Keyword. As well as a Title Tag to your H1 Tag ? That's too much. That's clearly there for SEO and SEO Only.

In that 1 paragraph of copy, you have the same keyword in Bold, twice. The image with a good filename and alt tag is okay.

What I'd look into is, what are some other long tail keywords that you can optimize your page for. That would help you in 2 ways.

1. Remove the Over-Optimization
2. Help you rank for that low(er) hanging fruit.

Unrelated to this keyword/page, but overall:

You don't need the following tags on every single page:

I hope this helps.

Great idea.

Is this a wordpress based site ? What CMS are you using ? How were you able to get domain.com/sample and domain.com/sample.html be the same page ? Either way, canonical tag is the correct solution in this case. There's no need for a 301 and if you do 301 redirects, you are not really fixing the issue caused by your CMS System.

I would therefore strongly advise to use the canonical tag. That's the intended use of that tag.

Steve

Check the rankings manually using different computers / locations. Call family/friends and have them check to make sure your tool is reporting it correctly.

You are right, it should not move that much on a "daily" basis. There's no reason to.

Enam, I would not worriota out it. This is a natural link. Think of other social networks like twitter. If you were to tweet your link and 10,000 users retweet it, you have that many links from different pages within twitter.com

this s the nature and structure of the website, don't stress yourself about this. If this was coming from a crappy domain or spammy bloon other it would be something to worry about.

I hope this helps. Have a good weekend.

Mark, I don't think there's much I am able to say without looking at the site in question. How's your link profile ? What does your link profile looks like compared to the sites you are competing with ?

Danny

I found your question from last month. I am guessing by now you would have already pitched your client. However, I'll share an interesting post at Search Engine Land.

http://searchengineland.com/why-do-brands-overlook-the-seo-opportunity-for-non-branded-keywords-149542

It's not really fashion world, but it gets the point across.

I hope that helps you and/or other readers and business in similar state of mind

This is a very common problem in the world of search. Both in SEO and PPC.

Biance

I would add the .com in there for Branding reasons. However if your page titles and way over 66 characters, I'd leave the .com alone (not recommended). The question is, are you building your brand as Tripping or Tripping.com ? That should help answer the question pretty accurately :).

I hope this helps.

You are on the right track Dana. No, using absolute URLs is not going to cause a meaningful increase in server response time / page load time. I would look at other sitewide header/footer issues, javascripts / CSS and possible images on CDN etc.

Louie, are you sure you are not seeing personalized search results ?

I would suggest using Incognito/Private browsing and/or clear your cookies. Also use the Search Tools option at Google.com and change your zip code to a random city and then recheck your rankings.

If you are still on top of the SERPS, good. Congratulations. Google usually likes fresh content and sometimes it can have effects like these. Content is King = Almost all the time

EndeR, if you search on Google for https://www.google.com/search?q=marriage+photographer+New+York or your apartment rental keywords, you'll see that the SERPS of today have changed and evolved a lot over the years. Instead of trying to find a niche for a business, that's relatively easy to rank, I would rather concentrate on a niche you have business knowledge of. That way:

• You understand the business
• You have trade knowledge that you can apply to the website and
• You understand your target audience and customer.

This lets you operate that niche online/offline business much better. Other then that, whatever business you create, as long as you can produce the traffic, whether it's an online classifieds or  an online games website or an online user cars website, traffic = money.

I hope this helps.

Suzanne

Before your rankings started dropped, was there any specific you were doing on your website in terms of SEO/Internet Marketing ?

Any Social Media stuff ?

I see your rankings were relatively much better same time last year. This year, it's been much worse. However, you have not fallen off completely.

Did you hire any SEO services ? Any link building ? Any Google unnatural links warnings ? The timing of your rankings dropping coincides with some updates last year.

Are you signed up and verified in Google Webmaster Console ?

Link Building is always a tough one and all you need to do is to be creative. Look at your competition for your primary and secondary keywords and see what they are doing for links. Slow and steady build your domain profile.

The problem is, unfortunately, there are no short-cuts. And just one more piece of advice, don't overdo any one particular kinds of links. A mix and match of everything adds up to become a natural link profile. That's what you need to compete in the niche. It's also a steady on-going process. FYI.

I hope this helps.

My vote goes for jeremyparker.net as well.

George, just make sure in trying to rank for your primary keyword, don't get "too many" links, too fast, "contain your perfect anchor text", even if it's your brand name. Too many links, similar looking links, are always a bad sign. They are simply manipulated links. You need to get natural links and build more of a link profile, as in reputation. Simple words, something like Brand building.

So get a variation of all your anchor texts, good or bad, even acronyms etc...they all add-up towards your domain profile. Which is what you'd need for your domain to rank for a keyword like that.

I hope this helps.

Considering what's done is done and the point that your old domain is penalized, can you possibly do/try any of the following ?

1. Ignore the fact that those links are appearing in your backlink profile for the new domain. See whether this new website works/ranks.

2. If it doesn't (at all), can you possibly disavow those "article marketing" links for the old domain and do nothing at all for the new domain (since those links are not really linking to your new domain).

Coming back to point 1, what I'd like to ask is, other then seeing those links in GWT, are there any other red flags that you are seeing in terms of not ranking, any penalty messages, unnatural links warning on the new or was there any messages on the old domain when you got penalized ?

Looks much better Keri. Until yesterday it was supper difficult during certain hours of the day for pages to load, specially when you tried to answer. Looks great so far.