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Yes, it has to be a configuration entry in your host file with your website hosting company.

There could be a variety of factors that could influence your rankings and a drop of just 1 keyword is not enough to guage the magnitude of the problem. Did you rankings drop for other keywords as well ? Are you noticing both an upward and downward move in the rankings or just downward ? If downward only, I would suggest you check all your On-page SEO as well as Off-page and do a complete SEO Audit. Again, don't use a drop in 1 keyword's ranking as a decision maker for other actions.

Agreed the +1 button is better for your website. I am still not sure how to make a company +1 page. I have tried but it only sees my personal page. Honestly I do not like Google + I feel like we are being forced to use it because it "may" help our websites. Facebook is much easier to use in my opinion however, that is probably because I am used to Facebook I spend a lot of time on there.

Morning, Yep, the first step I would take is suppliers, contractors, partners etc etc. Basically anyone you have a business connection with that has a website. A lot of these will simply be happy to do this as a favour, some will want something in return such a reciprocal link (if it makes sense, go for it). Some you might need to be a little smarter with and play a bit of hustle to get. One great way we got in with a couple of software companies we were using was to offer a glowing testimonal for their website. It was win/win, they got a great review, we got a great link. When it comes to thinking of suppliers and partners, really be creative. Think about every aspect of your business, right down to the cleaners/caterers. If they have a website you want to be on there. In terms of directories, I would generally say avoid, however there are a few big national ones that pass value, and depending on your resource there are usually a few websites and directories that curate lists of local businesses. For me, the big key when decided whether to use a directory or not is down to whether their results are indexed and ranking. Follow the directory through to an obscure business page (e.g outdoor supplies > gardening > landscape gardening > turf suppliers) pick on of the business on their and search for their name. If the directory isn't showing up in the first few pages, it's really not worth being on. Regarding competitions; one benefit is the competition websites themselves, however the real win comes from the entrants. The blogging community are very active with competitions, and if you can think of a campaign that is particularly fun, engaging or has a kick ass prize, then you will see a lot of links coming from the blogosphere. The other option (and in my opinion the quickest way of getting quality links) is through Blogger and Webmaster outreach. Make a list of 100 target sites and approach them. The good old days of simply asking for a link a sadly gone, but there are plenty of ways you can reach out that will result in a link (offer a guest post, offer an interview, form a partnership etc etc). It can be time consuming, although you can make this scalable and see lots of high quality links flying in fast. Like you mentioned the answer you're going to get from a lot of people is 'make great content' which is pretty vague in itself. The logic behind it is if your site hosts great content, then it will naturally attract links and social shares across the web. There are many ways of doing this, from writing consistently good posts around your industry, to making infographics or videos with the intention of going viral. As a long term strategy, it's a great approach, but it is something that will need a lot of thought, time and often investment. Best of luck. David

The post at http://searchengineland.com/google-now-shows-you-your-most-recent-links-127903 gives you a screenshot and explains where to find things.

I've no idea what would be a good commission rate in that sector. It's not an area I've worked. However, if competitors are on networks then that might provide some indication. Tracking sales is very straightforward. You just need to drop a cookie whenever one of your affiliates sends a visitor and check those cookies when enquiries are made.  Depending on how complex your systems are and what numbers you are working with reporting can get fiddly though. There are lots of scripts out there that will do this all for you. We're big on custom building stuff, so I don't really know any of the 3rd party solutions well enough to mention by name. However there are a few and some seem to be quite well respected. What sites would I target? The regional focus means that I'd definitely start with local sites.  I'd dig out a list of every town and city in my area and see which have local community sites and start finding contact details for them.

Thanks for the replies, what do you think of the link and social profiles of the competition, and apart from forums posts what strategy would you use and why to take control of the SERPs for keywords such as double glazing, conservatories, pvc doors etc anglianhome.co.uk safestyle-windows.co.uk greenwayupvc.com everest.co.uk valuedoorsuk.co.uk yaledoor.co.uk/

Hi Steven On the index.php file I have included http://www.mydomain.com /> Is this correct?

Try this - http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ Another great free tool is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Hope this helps!

Hi Ocelot, If the review you mention, above, is new, it could show up eventually. If not, it may have been filtered out. I believe Google is stepping up review filtering, in which case it will not show up because it has been filtered. I'm going to excerpt some data here for you from Mike Blumenthal's Q&A roundup about review changes relating to Google+ Local. Here is the full post: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/05/31/google-local-qs-and-some-as/ If a user just has a gmail account will they be able to write a review or must they also sign up for Google+? They will need to sign up for Google + So our customers are not able to leave reviews unless they are on Google+? Yep, you need a Google+ account to write a review. See the help page. Can reviewers leave anonymous reviews? No. At this point it is real names only. Is there any way to choose a nickname like we had in Places reviews? No Why am I not seeing the “Leave a Review” button? These had been removed from the Places page in anticipation of this move and put on the new Google+Local page. If you are still not seeing the review button it is because you have landed on the old Place page which is still accesible. **Why would Google make my re-publish old reviews while I’m trying to publish a NEW review for a different business? ** Why it happens at that point in the process was an intentional design decision. It is a one time process needed since Google is moving from anonymous and nicknamed reviews to full, real identity reviews . This necessitated some sort of user approval process to explicitly allow your user name to be seen or to choose to make the review private. Oh Google, you are driving me CRAZY! Can you please tell me how a dentist can have a Zagat review rating on their places page? In this case it will be a single number indicating quality on the 0-30 scale. Best practices are roughly the same, but an increase in social engagement is definitely the direction things are going. I highly recommend that you read Mike Blumenthal's post on adjusting to the changes: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/0/08/google-for-business-places-forums-wrapup/

Time is what you need.  The more you write and get indexed in google the more traffic google will send to those pages and future pages you write.  Keep writing and then use social media to try and drive traffic to your site and help these pages rank better. Tweet everytime your write something, put it on facebook and make sure you interact with people who are following/like your page that way they will be more inclined to help promote and share these pages. I personally wouldn't put this content on another site as if their site is more powerful than yours and theirs get crawled first then you could well be in for duplicate content.

Hi Ocelot, I would advice you to register on http://myblogguest.com/. Great community in the background and you can find quite a lot resources on where to post your articles. Gr., Istvan

Hey, No worries I meant you could also ask for those companies that you've provided windows for to link back to you. Re competitions - I mean actually frame your competition around link building. For example you could run a competition with bloggers to give something away - to enter bloggers simply need to write a post and link back to you with the winner drawn from the hat. See - http://bit.ly/znm31w for an example of what I mean. I hope this helps, Hannah

Which direction things are headed is very dependent on the type of websites you're building and the type of clients you're serving.  A mobile stylesheet is much more feasible in many situations, and provides quite a few SEO benefits as outlined above. Here is a quote from Google Engineer John Mueller stating that single URL is preferred. That said, if you're going to go the route of m.domain.com, then you need to implement rel="canonical" on the mobile site and the desktop site, with the desktop site URL being the canonical URL. Make sure you have a proper redirect on the desktop version of the site that sends mobile users over to the m.domain.com version. From there, I would read the two Google resources below to make sure the Google Mobile Bot can access everything, and you should be good to go. More Relevant Resources: Google's Guide to SEO PDF (Scroll to page 24): http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf GWT Post on Making Websites Mobile Friendly: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

Hi All Thanks for all your insight and advice - it surprising the length some people go to in black hat practices to try and spoof the algorithm and try to boost their own sites by hitching a ride on your hard work! Anyway after a long night and help from these guys sucuri.net who manage to blast through the malware and offer insight and advice resulting in the problem on the site going. How long will it take Google to recrawl the site because as of 23:02 UK time the malware is still showing in the SERP

Hi Ocelot, Don't miss this Search Engine Land post which covers the top 50 citation sources for the UK and USA: http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938 There may well be some good ones on there you have missed, but as far as industry-specific directories go, finding them is frequently a manual task. Actually do some searching for terms and see what you come up with. See what offers free and paid inclusion. In addition to this, you might want to pay for usage of WhiteSpark's citation finder tool: http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/2-using-the-local-citation-finder It's an industry favorite for finding citation sources. Hope these resources help you! Miriam

Ian Meta refreshes should never be replaced with 301's, they are actual much worse than a 302 redirect. There are a few redirects you can find - http://www.aowaa.com/5-wordpress-301-redirect-plugin/ and http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/. The disadvantage I find with using plugins is that they extremely slow down your site. For doing 301 redirects it's entirely up to the server your site is hosted on.