Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the idea.  have you done this before? The only worry i have with larger chains/franchises is that they would have to "run it up the flagpole" and i would get lost in the red tape.   Has this worked for you though?  I like the idea.

For those of us that operate business in other areas that we technically dont have an "address" in... are there any creative ideas/ways anyone has run across in securing a physical address that you can use for local listing?

I have already tried the virtual office type of companies, and their inventory is limited to major metropolitan areas.

Matthew is spot on here.  Has to be in the head or it wont work properly.  All the rel/link tags exist in the head (same with rel=canonical, etc...)

Peter is correct below.  I think you are heading in the wrong direction.  After your explanation here, I understand a little more about where you are going.  Here is what I would say to your question:

1. All "old urls" (and all versions of) will need to have a 301 redirect to the new SEo friendly url.  The currency is a different issue.  You cant redirect that because you would never be able to show multiple currencies to the right users.  In the curreny example, you could use a canonical tag to the most popular or default currency.

2. Directories and IA (information architecture) of your site have nothing to do with redirects or canonical tags.  As Peter pointed out below, /spain/malaga is a totally different page than /spain.  You dont do anything special with tags here, you just create unique content for each of those pages.  You pass proper link juice upwards by internally linking your /spain/malaga page up to your /spain page, and every other page that exists below a main level directory page.  Essentially, you want all deeper pages linking up to your main directory page.

3.  In the small cases that you will be using the canonical tag, you put those tags on all the pages except the original page.

Hope that clears things up.  I was/am still a bit confused as to your structure, but think this should get you in the right direction.

Not sure why you want to use the canonical tag in this instance.  If http://www.abc.com/spain/Malaga.html is truly a duplicate or replicated page of the new /spain page, then I guess you could do it.   But it sounds to me like you are re-structuring your urls to be more friendly, and if that is the case you will want to permanently 301 redirect the old urls to the new SEO friendly one.  That will pass on the SEO juice in a more effective way then canonical a bunch of the old pages that you dont want anyway.

Is that the case?  It kind of depends on the content of each of the pages, and how that content interacts with the other pages.  Typically canonical is used for paginated instances or duplicated content that is handle in a different matter, not redirecting juice from old urls/pages to new ones.

Totally agree with the linkedin crap that goes on.  I actually ignore most of the Linkedin online marketing groups for that very same reason.  Dont care much to get involved with a bunch of people that for the most part dont know what they are talking about.

I would just use it soley for the purpose I proposed. Find people that look like they have some good experience, and shoot them a personal email and take it from there.  I have never had success trying to get in the middle of discussions or groups on there.

As for the local groups- really any of them.  You will probably find that a lot of the same companies attend a lot of the same groups (thats how it is here).  We actually started our own online marketing organization here in Utah for networking purposes www.slcsem.org. But other ones that work well are ones like "social media club" (I hate social media, but its hot right now) and some entreprenuer/startup ones always attract young talent, and its easy sometime to offer them a bit more money.

Hope that helps.

Dont disagree with you at all EGOL.I actually dont mind a long page in these cases either.  Makes for really impressive page and good SEO.

I think you may be getting xml sitemaps confused with sitemap pages.  Your xml sitemap should live at /sitemap.xml as Alan pointed out.   The seomoz and other sites that have a /sitemap page is for different purposes.  Its not your xml file, its a "topical guide" to your website and all the major sections of your site.

Remember that you can also create a xml sitemap index if you need to have different sitemaps (video, news, content) that houses all the different xml sitemaps underneath it.

Do you really want each one to rank or get indexed separately?  In this case it would be good to have a "view all" page that becomes your main page of focus, and then noindex follow the rest of the pages.  I would also use WMT to tell good that the urls of the extra pages are "paginated" and they will treat them accordingly.  Then you dont really have to worry about the duplicated title tags.

Robert-

The million dollar question Here is what has worked the best in my opinion/experience:

• Poaching via linkedin- find people with your requirements in descriptions, browse their experience and shoot them direct emails to try to lure them away (actually how i got one of my positions, i was hit up on linkedin)
• Networking groups locally- At least here in Utah there are like 50 different little networking groups- social marketing, online marketing, AMA, women's councils, tech councils, etc... I have also found that those individuals that are active in attending these types of groups are always looking for opportunities, whether they say so or not.

Hope that helps.

Agree with Bill.  The link is still valuable.  Google has said (warned) over the last year or so that they are looking hard at link profiles, anchor text and other things to indicate link quality.  I think they are trying to really dig down and get a "natural link profile" together for websites.  A natural profile will have a good variety of keywords, brand name, website domain name and other stuff (like "click here").

The true value there is the domain authority that cosmopolitan is passing through to you.  Dont be too concerned with the anchor text.

The ultimate question.... keyword tools.  I have personally used all of them, and non of them are really very good at predicting volume.  Google is too broad, keyword tools are not accurate.  You should really only use a third party tool for getting keyword ideas.

I usually find that the top 3 keywords between the tools are generally the same, and you can get a feel for the ones that are the top.

There just isnt a good way to get very specific. Make sure that you are using the phrase or exact match option in the Google Adwords tool though for a more accurate number of searches.

The most accurate way sadly is to spend some money if you have it.  Open up an adgroup on phrase match for your keywords and let it run, and you will get a real feel for the search volume by looking at impressions.

These sites are good for a quick scan of the contextual formatting of a website, but not for really telling how Google (or any specific search engine) sees your site. That specific one you linked to is horrible.

Google does see title, H1, other headers, meta description and most elements of your site.  A more accurate way to see how google sees your site would be to:

1. See how the page looks in the index.  Type  "site:myspecificurl.com" into google for the page you want to see and google will just return the results of what it has in its index.  That is how google sees your site. If your site/pages are not in the index, get them in (#2 below).
2. Verify through Google Webmaster Tools.  In the webmaster tools you can see what pages of your site are being indexed/crawled through google, and you can also request specific pages to be crawled again if you need.  This combined with an xml sitemap will usually get pages indexed pretty quick, and then you can verify with the same methodology as i mentioned above.
3. Use the SEOmoz pro toolset here and set up a campaign and the tool will tell you if you are missing any title tags or other important on-page elements.  the seomoz "bot" crawls similar to google, so that should give you a feel for how it works.

These redirect type of links are for tracking purposes on the side of the referring website- which are usually systematically generated by the CMS platforms they have.

In short, no, these are not the high value direct SEO links that you are looking for.  However, search engines are able to follow these links and also follow the redirect to the website (adventuretreks.com in this case), but at that point is of little SEO value and gets tracked as a referral type of link.

If you are paying for these listings (which i assume you would be to a degree) you would need to evaluate the value of that link based on the traffic it would send, and not the SEO value it gives you.

Should have been more clear- usually for straight link building its 1 successful link response in 50 requests.  For bloggers its much better, usually about 1 successul link response in every 15 - 20 requests.

Another great secret for link building on regular websites (sometimes blogs as well) is to pay for a "text ad" on their site if i see that they have stuff like that on their site already.  They will come back with some sort of advertising rate (should be pretty cheap for small websites) and you should agree to "try it out".  Pay the advertising rate, they put your link up, and half the time they forget about renewing.  The other half try to renew, and usually at that point i tell them that they arent sending me enough traffic to justify paying an advertising rate, but i will give them $100 to just leave my link up on their site.  Works well.

The best option for sure is to house everything in one single domain.  Why not have it be "baseball.com/newbaseballproduct"?  Dont go subdomain if you dont need to- and dont go new url if you dont need to either.  Build your domain authority by maintaining everything withing a good IA through your base domain.

Welcome to the tough world of link building.  Here are some specific insights from my end:

1. I typically see about 1 response to every 15 - 20 requests.  If its a straight-up one way link request, its much worse.  More like 1 response in 50 requests.

2.  For blogging specifically, I have seen success in two ways: blog rolls and sponsored content.  Social/blogs are a bit different than websites.  Interlinking is viewed a little better, so I love to include the other blog first in my own "blog roll", then reach out to them, let them know "you added them to your blog, you like what they have and are following them.  Would they include your blog too on their roll".  then throw out a useful comment or two on their blog, and usually the combination of those two things gets you a link.

I will also sometime ask relevant blogs to "sponsor a post" for them.  Basically, write a nice article or post, and pay them $50 to post it on their site. You just say you want to get the word out to "their audience", and $50 is not bad for little effort on their end.  Of course your link is in the post

hope that helps.

Cant really think of one off the top of my head.  I would still follow the lawyers.com or business.com type of format, just imagine those sites as a section of your site, the directory/resources section that houses all that kind of stuff.

Would kind of depend on this niche that you are talking about.

Technically yes, people may click on links in the directory and leave your website.  With that you have a couple of choices:

1. Keep the directory within your website/domain and use it as an industry resource, gaining backlinks and increasing the overall Domain Authority of your root domain, while directing important internal links to valuable portions of your eCommerce site to boost the value of those pages.   You wouldnt create an easy way for consumers/users on the front end to get to this directory, using UX/UI to keep people in the paths that you want.
2. Create a stand alone blog/site that is the industry directory that is hosted somewhere else on a different domain.  It would look like a "third party" resource and people could still link to it, and it would begin to rank and gather authority on its own. You would use that as a sort of portal/link building site to your own ecommerce site as well as those who participate in it.

If you went with the second route, a site similar to lawyers.com or something like that would be a good one to look at.  Its an article directory, business listing directory and a massive link-bait type of site for resources.