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this is why I'm glad EGOL is around when I'm not.  Not only does he really know what he's doing from an SEO perspective, he runs his own site - proof from real world stuff. Myopic SEO says "how little can I get away with".  Sustainable SEO says "What can I do to eventually dominate in this niche, and not have to play the games other sites do." 100 words?  Sorry - My recommendation to clients is 400 words on category pages, 1000 on information pages. 400 too much for you to swallow?  Start with 200 each.  Do other best practices SEO tasking - if you still find you're not getting the visits and conversions you want, write more high quality content.

thats good to know thanks chaps I was getting worried for a moment back then.

I would welcome your feedback on my blog - http://blog.onlinemediadirect.co.uk It is listed on Google news so thats where I get most of the traffic.

If your tag pages are offering up some fresh content... either by their presentation that will get around duplicate content issues or fresh content of value to your visitors, then you should go ahead and leave them as indexable. If not, and you're in a fully-automatic mode with your template, I would suggest "noindex,follow" to provide more internal connections and to keep the link juice flowing

Hi SEO 5 Team, Just wanted to point out that this post is over two years old, so the question may no longer still be relevant.

Ok question is how can we hire wikipedia writers I see the logic but realistically trying to find someone with a genuine experts view for each industry you work in within seo is blooming difficult What's your way around this ? Do you just do it yourself ?

Strange I didn't notice that. (Maybe due to the fact I didn't have that many blogrolls to have significant impact). The only way to find out is to test it.

I don't see any reason why you would do this unless you are trying to manipulate the search engines. I would expect that Google and Bing would eventually find a way to ignore these links if they haven't done so already.

Hi Garry, A focus on two or three main keywords on your page is perfectly appropriate, even for longer tail keywords. It may be recommended to use longer tailed keywords for pages on your site appropriate for such keywords. As well, it is recommended to put the keyword(s) as close to the beginning of each tag as possible. Keywords can be combined to create longer tail keywords, but only if they are relevant to each other; try to put two unrelated phrases together will look like spam. If your business is located in a certain area, using long tail keywords with location can help your results; with other keywords, your site can still rank for longer tail keyword due to natural relevancy. With a focus of more than three keywords, your tags will be bulky and read unnaturally.

Well, lets hope that when they sort the h1 issue, it goes higher still I didn't check the source to look at the CMS, is it a custom CMS? Re: it's existing rankings, although h1's are important, like most SEO triggers, they are just a part of the pie... if everything else is taken care of nicely, then rankings are still possible even without optimised h1 tags. Oh, and thanks for taking the post the right way!

are html errors more critical than css?  for me css are more common

I believe that you can still take a site from nowhere to the top of very competitive SERPs.  However you are going to need fantastic content or a fantastic budget and maybe some of both.  Plus you will need some smart smart SEO and social media abilities to make it happen. Ten years ago there were a lot more small websites run by individuals that were "high quality sites of the day".  Today most of those sites have been wiped out by multiple Goliath sites in their niche.  Big sites like wikipedia take one or two spots on the first page. Ten years from now competition will be insane and we will look back at 2011 as the "easy days of the web". When I was a kid there were a couple small stores on every residential street in town. People sold from a room in the font of their house.  When I was a teenager small "markets" in every neighborhood clobbered the "front room stores".  When I was in college a "supermarket" on each end of town clobbered the small markets.  Then even bigger supermarkets came into dominance and today the SuperWalMart and SuperKMart are killing the supermarkets.   The same thing will happen on the web.

A fair few of our clients don't use PPC at all... they tend to be the smaller businesses and they just don't have the budget for both. Of course they would do better with both but they do pretty good with just organic. But yeah, I do get disillusioned at times too... not about the PPC side of things but when random, inexplicable and seemingly illogical stuff happens. Actually, disillusioned probably isn't the right word for me, I'd say more like upset and rageful lol.

This is more commentary for your next step, after you have this question answered. The links at the bottom right of the page seem more for search engines than users. As a user, I expected to be taken to a page about that particular topic, not have a paragraph or two display. My gut is telling me that some of the work that was done (in not the best way)  for SEO was at the expense of usability. You might look at installing Crazyegg or a similar tracking software that looks where users click on the page, even if they're not clicking on a link. In addition to making the SEO right on the site, you'll want to look at the user experience and conversions.

Yeah the clean-up work can be quite intense on some sites.  The fact that we are able to help clients is a big thing on so many levels.   Having the patience to address issues like you describe is one of the most important attributes we can have.

Yeah sorry about that Garry - EGOL helped clarify.