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correct, a higher number is more competitive

Best practices for on-page SEO say that the alt text for an IMG tag should be equal to the keyphrase that the page is optimized for. So if you are optimizing a page for 'blue widgets' then having an IMG with alt text = 'blue widgets' would be good. You may also want to name the image file blue-widgets.jpg (or blue-widgets.png or .gif). It's one of several on-page signals you can send Google that this page is all about blue widgets.

I don't have a specific answer, but some thoughts on how to look at the problem:

1. Either your site went down, or others went up. Maybe your competitors benefited some how from the recent changes in Google. So it has nothing to do with your site, but more to do with something about the other sites that now rank above you. Do you know if the set of sites above you has changed? ie are they the same ones that ranked above you before, or are there some new entrants to the top of the SERPs for your keyphrases?

2. On-page vs Off-page. I don't think that content on your site is an issue. I think the recent changes have mostly to do with off-page factors (unless you have a duplicate content issue, which I'm assuming you don't). The anchor text distribution for your home page looks a little skewed towards over-SEOd. you have 10K total links, but 3300 of them are exactly "the cardboard connection". I haven't studied where those come from (OSE says 136 linking domains) but it seems unlikely that a 'natural' link profile would include so many exact 3-word anchor texts. Maybe someone had you in a site-wide footer for a couple thousand pages and they all just got devalued?

Thanks for asking. A few ideas:

1. Review of link-building services or networks. Rate each on cost, size of network, page rank of network, spammyness, etc. Any of them worth the trouble, or is the whole group to be avoided as grey/black hat spam?

2. How to get .edu or .gov links.

3. Find a small site that ranks higher than the wikipedia page for the generic keyword category the small site is about, and then offer an analysis of how/why the small site is able to rank higher than such an authoritarian site for that keyword/category.

4. List of top 10 article databases offering do-follow links and their requirements, if any (min word count, links per article, is the directory human reviewed, etc).

5. How to cost effectively have video testimonials made (by actors not working at your company), and then top 5 sites to post them on once you have them.

I would be happy to help if I knew the answer, but I don't. I don't have session IDs in my URLs (I use cookie-based session management instead, mostly because I wanted clean URLs for bookmarking and SEO). Perhaps someone else who uses session IDs in URLs could answer (or else Google "session IDs in urls" and see what comes up. I found this one: http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/why-session-ids-and-search-engines-dont.php )

Crawl rate depends on your site size, your site's rate of change, how fast you serve pages, and I'm sure a couple of other factors. If you're not yet on Google Webmaster Tools then you should be (it's free). It will show you pages/day that the googlebot is crawling your site.

You should be okay with 301s. See http://www.atlantaanalytics.com/practicing-web-analytics/how-does-google-analytics-handle-301-and-302-redirects/

I don't know VB scripting but you could use a RewriteRule with a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file? You can redirect domain A traffic to a subfolder on domain B and by using 301 you'll pass all the juice. I'm not sure if your VB script response.Redirect is generating a 301 or not. If it is then you're probably not losing any juice.

Thanks for the pointer; hadn't seen that. I'm encouraged you've seen small sites outrank wikipedia for generic phrases. If you have an example of that you could post, that would be great. I'd love to look at the small site and see what they've done. Appreciate the help!

I've noticed the sites that rank above me for certain phrases are much larger than I am. Here are the results of the 'site:' command for the top 6 results for a phrase I want to rank for (yes, I know that 'site' is not exact):

1. 32,600 pages
2. 8,760,000 pages (wikipedia)
3. 684 pages
4. 148 pages (domain name equal to search phrase)
5. 1400 pages
6. 120 pages (my site)

Now, I appreciate that larger sites have more stuff to link to, and therefore have more juice flowing to them from external links. BUT, is it also true that they are generating lots of internal juice by having so many pages? I've looked at the PageRank algorithm and understand that the max page rank for a site (with no external links) is based on the number of pages of that site and how well linked they are).

My question is: based on all the experts here, is number of pages in the site an important factor (assuming good on-page SEO), or does it really come down to number of external links (from relevant sites with appropriate anchor text, of course)?

Can a small site with tons of external links rank above much larger sites? Has anyone beaten Wikipedia for a phrase they were targeting? How did you do it? Thanks!

Well, I just looked at the Google Keyword tool which says 'buy hosting' is entered 880 times per month (exact phrase, globally) and 'hosting' is 301,000 times per month. If you can make it on to page 1 for 'hosting' then you will probably get a lot more traffic. Yes, I recognize that it will be very difficult.

I'm not sure I would optimize for 'buy hosting' as your target phrase. Maybe some other closely related phrase? 'web hosting' is 246,000/month, 'website hosting' is 60,500, etc.

But if you are tied to 'buy hosting' then so be it. I don't think google will view 27% of your anchor texts as too spammy or over-SEOd. If you're worried about it then increase the variations part and do less exact.

Links/day depends on how many you already have and if you're going to have an ongoing process (which is best). If you can do 50/day for 6 months then do that. If you can only manage 5/day then do that. What you don't want is 500 in 1 week and then nothing (or close to nothing) for 2 months. That looks like you just bought 500 links.

You can use MajesticSEO.com to enter a url and see how many new links per day (or per month) your competitors have been adding. You may want to stay in that range.

I had this exact problem 6 months ago. I studied a variety of sites that appeared to have a natural link profile and came up with the following weights:

• 15% exact keyword
• 20% keyword variations
• 12% exact brand
• 13% brand variations
• 7% exact url
• 13% url variations (www.domain.com, domain.com, http://www.domain.com, domain.com/, etc)
• 20% useless ("click here", "this", "visit", etc)

I don't know if those are 'best' but I believe they look natural. Your keyword is probably 'hosting' not 'buy-hosting'; i think if people are looking for hosting they will enter 'hosting', not 'buy hosting' in the query.

Once you have more than 1000 inbound links the no-follows are a pretty small percent (like low single digit % on most sites).

As for home page vs sub-page it depends on how many sub-pages you have and how good the content on them is. I use 50% home page and 50% all other pages combined. The sites that I reviewed that I felt were natural seemed to have at least 50% of all external links to the home page (in some cases it was 70%).

Thanks, David. I thought I had read that meta keywords were still used by Yahoo or Bing (definitely not Google). Is that not true? Does it harm anything to have the meta keywords if I just leave them as-is (since I already have them), or should I pro-actively go remove them?

Thanks, Monica. That's what I thought. Just wanted to confirm. I've got the title tag, meta description and robots down, so i'll focus on external links more. Thanks again.

How many meta tags are appropriate? There is a page that ranks above me that has many more than I do. It has (I have removed the content of each to give a description of the type of content):

I only use meta tags for keywords and description, robots. Should I have more?

Thanks.

I noticed on a site that ranks above me for 'keyphrase" that they have two similar tags in their area:

<title>keyphrase</title>

I've used the first (<title>) on all my pages. I've not used the 2nd at all. Should I? I'm trying to optimize mostly for Google. I found this article http://www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/meta-title.html but looking for opinions from the experts here...</p> <p>Also, does it matter if the <title> tag is the 1st thing after the <head> tag or is anywhere withing <head> okay?</p> <p>Thanks.</p></title>

5C is the hex code for '' (backward slash). Maybe you have a backward slash where you mean to have a forward slash '/'? Ascii codes here: http://www.asciitable.com/

My understanding is that the 2nd and beyond links to the same url from the same page don't count (ie they are worth zero) and that their link juice does not get redistributed to the other links on the page. So it acts like the 2nd and beyond links to the same url are nofollow.

Only if the 2 keywords are very close together, like 'widget' and 'widgets'. Otherwise, 1 keyword per page works best, or else you'll confuse the googlebot as to what your page is really about and what it should rank for.

Article submission isn't bad, but those are generally low value links. How about guest blogging on other (hopefully non-zero PR) related on-topic blogs? Offer an article to a relevant blog in exchange for a linkback from the blog article. It's kind of like article marketing except that you pick the destination based on PR and relevancy, rather than just submit to a big generic article database.

You could also create landing pages for your site with the articles, and then promote the landing pages with SEO. Then have those landing pages feed into your main site.