Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thomas,

These guys look good! Is their service as good (or preferably better) than Rackspace?  Are there areas where they fall short?

Always looking for good hosts!

Ron

Thomas,

As I stated above I usually use Rackspace if it is a non Wordpress web site. If it is a financial institution with a disaster recovery plan Sunguard is a good choice for a redundant data center.

Ron

Tammy,

As a side note something I am doing in the Chiropractic and horticultural space is doing you tube videos and pictures with good key words.  This seems to shoot up in the rankings higher.  Especially if you have authorship set up.  I would also suggest virtual seminars on Google Air that are saved to Youtube.  These are great ways to get top rankings on harder key word sets. Another simple thing is to do a quick presentation in Presenter(powerpoint) with voice overs and export to video.  Either of these can be done on a fairly small budget and they get good results.

Ron

Tammy,

First of all this is not a silly question, it is very astute. The problem/opportunity is that the search engines are in transition and location is just one consideration on your ranking in any given search.  The answer depends on what your ultimate goals are as well as where your client is at now.

What I have observed is that long tailed key words like SEO Phoenix are in relative terms easier than general terms.  As you improve your ranking factors in general relative to your local competition you will start showing up higher in the rankings. As these other factors improve more you will start showing up everywhere on more and more general terms.

So if your goal is just local listings just track the long tailed key words. If your goal is to rule the rankings universe on the searches your client wants I would track the general terms as well as the more specific long tail strings for your area.

because of my own megalomania issues I always track both ;).

Ron

Jon,

I am willing to help as well but I need the data.   One other thing that I thought about based on Miriam's comments is you may want to use open site explorer to look at the relative in bound links, specifically local directories on the HQ vs the branch.  One thing that might have happened is whomever set up your directory listings gave a URL for HQ rather than the URL for the branch.

Ron

Brent,

Not all links are created equal.  This sounds like some "cheap" links that are sometimes outsourced.  They may have already paid in their rankings or eventually will.  For now I would ignore these and focus on the high quality links.  I would focus on these and see if there are any directories you can sign up for and/or if there are any sponsorship links that you may be able to sponsor as well.

If you are in the same general location you should focus on local directories and links.  I am working with a client that is up against a competitor that hs had a long term SEO program in place. Starting out the competitor had 4200 links and the client had 26.  To resolve this is did the following. 1) Used Getlisted.org to get all the easy local links. 2) I looked for local sponsorships (things like BBB(strong link by the way), Opera, Symphony, etc..) 3) We worked with the staff at their retail locations and had them actively promote the different local review sites (this can be up to 40% of the ranking if everything else is equal) 4) We had contests and promotions that involved commenting on their blog.

This was combined with a good content strategy. There is still a difference of about 3000 links but my client is showing up higher on most searches.

Jon,

Where are their relative locations?  Where are you when you do the search relative to each location? How many inbound links on the HQ VS branch ? Have you looked at the localized content ?

Ron

Clever PHD,

You are correct.  I have found that these little housekeeping issues like eliminating duplicate content really do make a big difference.

Ron

My initial crawl was screwed up because of a no follow that needed to be removed.  I would like Moz to recrawl the site right away so I can find any other errors.

I think you are looking at the pages indexed which is generally a higher number than those on your web site.  There is a point to marking things up so that there is a no follow on any pages that you do not want indexed as well as properly marking up the web pages that you do specifically want indexed.  It is really important that you eliminate duplicate pages.  A common source of these duplicates is improper tags on the blog. Make sure that your tags are set up in a logical hierarchy like your site map.  This will assist the search engines when they re index your page.

Hope this helps,

Ron

Try out the utility Jing by Techsmth http://www.techsmith.com

Dustin,

I would not try to game the system in this way as you may have unexpected side effects and actually hurt your rankings. Instead I would look at these subjects and ask the firm if there have been changes or updates relative to these posts.  Where there have been changes I would suggest you evaluate the value for each post based on possible revenue if they get a client, search volume and how this positions them against their competitors.  I would prioritize this updated content based on this.

I would add in a plug in that shows all the blogs on a subject and sorts them by date.  This way you may be able to simply write an update blog and then refer to the previous blog (the prize you should go for is to get comments on both ).  If the changes are significant enough I would write a new blog on the subject.

On all the blogs that are out of date I would have someone go in and add a comment in this regard with a reference to the update.

On the blogs that are older and not out of date I would add an amended post simply stating that the blog has been reviewed and that the information is still relevant.

This is not the only way to do things but my experience is that this more labor intensive approach that creates content is always the best approach.  With this approach my clients had an average of 45% traffic growth last year while increasing their conversion rate.

Let me know if you have any additional questions,

Ron

Gail,

That makes sense.  I looked again and the developer did add a custom plug in for the web site as a whole.  My guess is that he went in and fixed this problem with this custom plug in and that is why it works.  I would ask him for more detail but he is off line for a week in the backwoods of Montana.

If this is not resolved before the 28th ping me and I will ask him for more detail. These are both solid plug ins. It is crazy they do not work together natively.

Keri,

Thanks for the encouragement.  Are there specific areas I should expand on ?  Are there others that are more obvious that I should ot include or focus on?  What do you think would help the community the most?

If you need to do a DMCA takedown request I would suggest using a lawyer as this seems to carry more weight with whomever is violating. If the site has a DMCA page and they have filled out the paperwork they only 5-10 days to take down the offending content before they incur more liability.

Daniel,

I like the tutorial information on the SEO Yoast web site.  Their 101 section has a some great tutorials.  I like their information on duplicate content: http://yoast.com/articles/duplicate-content/

Rel Canonical:http://yoast.com/wordpress/canonical/

Good luck!

Ron

I would recommend Rackspace with redundant virtual servers at two or more locations.  I have had good luck with them on non word press sites. If you were on word press I wold recommend Zippykid which is basically Rackspace with a front end and word press support.

As a side note if you are ever looking for guest bloggers I spent 20 years in the space, have 11 issued patents(22 pending) and love writing about the subject.

As suggested above good keyword research provides good tools as well as creativity.  I would recommend the following:

1. I like Spyfu and they do have a 30 day trial if you want to check them out.  What I normally do is run a report with the competitors the client mentions.  Then I look at the the top guys on the key word searches the client wants to show up on and run a report with these.  I like to limit the competitors to 2-3 even though you can add more (sometimes too much data reduces clarity). I export the words that come up to CSV.  I delete any non applicable words and create a master key word list out of this.

2. If by any chance you don't have an overwhelming amount of key words at this point(unlikely) you can put the most interesting words into another tool Spyfu has Keyword groupie to get more.

3. Related to the answer above I like to sit in on a few sales calls and/or act as a temporary sales floor rep for a few hours if the business is retail.  If this is not possible another option is to call a list of customers and leads as a quality assurance person(or whatever other title works for the client) to find out how their experience is/was and ask them what they were looking for when they purchased and what features caused them to buy. During the conversation the clients will often give you several good value propositions and key words.  As a side note this is a great time to surf for case studies, references and reviews for the client as well.  All of these option do require the clients permission and trust. If they are OK with things like this you can get a lot of information.

4. I add any new key words out of this exploration to the list and review with the client.

5. Once I have a list I input this into my Moz campaign.

6. After the ranking report has run I evaluate the low hanging fruit and focus my content development on these words/phrases.

7. Once I have mastered the universe on this first set of words I repeat the process.

Hope this helps,

Ron

HI,

I took a few minutes and looked at several sites where we are running Yoast (our preferred plug in) and PODS.  None of these sites are having the problem you outlined. I took a few more minutes to see if there were any special settings on either plug in. There were not.

So my best guess is that your problem is coming from somewhere else.

@ Vadim I forgot to share that I have already set up each location with all the standard local directories including Google and Bing Local, Yelp, Yext, Dex, etc. etc.  We have also inspected the competitions in bound links for each location and added any local directories that are not part of the standard list.

What I am really focused on is the general content structure as well as the blog structure that will get the most local juice. This content strategy is part of the larger local and standard SEO strategy that includes reviews, social media, link building etc...