Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Glad to hear it, Chris, and welcome to the community!

I also read Tim Ash's book on Landing Page Optimization. Great read!

Hey Peter, I am considering doing a similar thing to the company I work for. How is this going for you? Many thanks, Aqib

Sure, good response. It is a waste of time as well with Yelp as if the reviewers are not trusted Yelp reviewers then the review will be at best ignored and at worst suspicious.

Kane, I could not agree with you more. For instance I have a client that currently has 26,000 visitors a day because of a awesome campaign that went viral could not be happier. One page that contains the news story receives 10,000 visitors. While the homepage might get much of the direct traffic from all the news sources online there is a call to action to view the specialty item. Sorry I can't get more into it. Either way we just picked up traffic immensely and because of the amount of social sharing along with the incredible link velocity being pushed to the homepage and the item page only granite the item page is starting to get more links and the shares are beyond what the home page is by tens of thousands. What I'm getting at is because of the links and the social aspect the fact that this keeps snowballing is something I'm extremely proud of. We are going to be on the largest news network morning show next week and I anticipate this is just the beginning of the attention focused on just to pages 1 being the home. So obviously I know you are right the more links and social shares the better the page will rank I could write gobbledygook is the title and it would still Get insane traffic. I hope that helps, Thomas

Hi Steve, So glad my reply was helpful. Good for you for getting the NAP into compliance. You've done your client a major service.

Hey Chris, Thanks for the tool list! I think I'll find a purpose for each of these tools in the research I'm performing; however I think I'll have to develop a custom solution for a starting point. Unless there is another way out there?

I agree it's best to communicate with people that actually need your product; however I'm talking from an SEO point of view on authority.  Let's say you sell a product that uses a certain type of technology.  For example you sell an electronics product that utilizes a new open-source logic board.  The people you sell this electronics product to might not care about, or be talking about the logic board, but members of the open source logic board community would certainly be interested in hearing about an application built from it. One of the big factors in SEO is the authority of pages and domains.  If the logic board community starts talking about your content about the application of their board, this signals to Google that it's an authoritative source of information, thus the domain it's associated with is authoritative.  While this might not seem the most productive in terms of getting sales short term, it raises authority which makes ranking for keywords easier. I wouldn't make a piece of content unless it's clear from the keyword research that traffic can be created from it.  If it's easily sharable this raises the authority of that content in a fast, almost automatic way. I guess a better way to ask my question is:  Is there an easy way to identify the kinds of things people are talking about on social channels?  Not only this but the people in your target market? My goal is to create content around social trends on these networks that has high search potential in it's keywords.

Hey Steve, We don't have any plans to pull data from GWT for our index in the future. We are focused on creating a larger and more up-to-date index of our own as we go forward and we prefer not to rely on other companies for our index data, since they can choose to remove our access to their data down the line. We prefer to grow our own index over time, though we do know this can cause some growing pains. Let me know if you need help with anything else. Chiaryn

Personally, I am a fan of your #1 option. The second option, to me, seems like it could send very mixed messages about what is most important on a page. The third option, in my opinion, is too  limiting and could be very prone to coming off as spammy. I'm a big fan of synonyms and weaving keywords together in natural ways that support the context and content of a page. If you throw all your efforts behind a single keywords, all I can imagine is a very boring page. However, this really all depends on the keyword itself and the content that might be right for it. For example, for a very specific medical condition, let's use "Meniere's Disease" as an example, this might be a time when you optimize a page for that keyword and nothing else because it something extremely specific, with a very specific name given to it by the medical community. However, if your term was "gas mileage," I would expect to see content that didn't just use "gas mileage" but also used terms like "fuel economy" "fuel efficiency" - Some keywords are just naturally more prone to having synonyms, and some aren't, so I wouldn't even set a hard and fast rule about it. Given your space limitations in addition to everything else, I would go with option 1. Hope that helps!

I just want to ask more questions regarding location in keywords. Can we treat these two keywords differently? "Calgary's best shoe repair" vs "best shoe repair in Calgary" or "Canadian shoe repair" vs "shoe repair in Canada" Searchers' intent is pretty much the same. but we should target two different keywords? if they are both popular?

Yeah that makes sense.  I also have a lot of experience with databases and the back ends of websites so I know your language. I'm wondering how Google correlates the url with the page entries then. Maybe each page entry would have a url field so Google knows the location of the live version to constantly update that entry in the "page directory" database?

Thanks for the response, I'll be sure to change my clients configuration. Do you know the specifics of why it's a disaster?  I think it has something to do with the technical explanation above, but I wanted to get some confirmation so I can educate my client as to why it's a disaster.