Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Are users likely to use his name when searching for his site, or are they more likely to search for the kind of service he offers? if the later then forget his name in titles (except maybe the home page). IMO the title should match the likely search query for optimum SEO. And repeating the brand in every title is a waste, IMO. If you have 10 pages optimized for 10 different search queries then the title of each should be (or at least begin with) the likely search query that each page is optimized for.

Well, external links to pages are 80% of the ranking factor for the page. That has nothing to do with your internal nav link structure. But, yes, internal juice will flow 1/750th to each page that the nav structure points to.

Yikes. 750 links (even if split into sections so you don't see them all at once) on 1 page is not 'human-friendly' (as I know you know). Is that really necessary? I looked at the site and having navigation sub-menus that go 4-deep is kind of a usability issue for people that aren't great with a mouse. Maybe look at ebay's menu structure; they certainly have a large db of products in many categories and don't resort to 100s of links per page just for navigation.

But from and SEO point of view I'm not sure the 750 links are hurting your on-page ranking for a phrase that the page is otherwise optimized for. If you had a page optimized for "widgets" and you did all the correct on-page things for 'widgets' and then had external links pointing to the page with anchor text of 'widgets' then I'm not sure how much you'd be penalized for having 750 links on that page. Given that on-page factors are only about 20% of the ranking equation anyway, I'm not sure it's a huge deal from an SEO/ranking point of view. It's more of a human usability thing, IMO.

According to http://ispionage.com they only rank for 23 search terms and most of them include the words 'san diego'. So they're not exactly an SEO machine (unless you're in San Diego and a competing appliance company, perhaps).

Many links from different domains on the same c-class IP address are devalued by Google. Likewise, mininets (a collection of sites that link to each other for the benefit of another site) I suspect are easily discovered and devalued by Google, too. These kinds of games lost their effectiveness several years ago.

Yes, a higher QS will lower the amount you have to bid to get the same position on the ad list. And, yes, on-page SEO related to the PPC ad will increase your QS. See this: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=87411 and this http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=49174 and watch this short video from Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7l0a2PVhPQ

There are services that translate an IP address into a location: http://www.ip2location.com, http://www.geobytes.com, probably others. If you knew the location of each visitor would that solve your issue?

Can the seller provide you with historical Google Analytics data? If there is a sudden drop in traffic then the domain may have been penalized. Is there a visible site on the domain today? Does it rank for any phrases (should it? given the backlinks it has)? Maybe enter it in http://www.ispionage.com and then click on the SEO tab to see if it ranks for any phrases today. If it's on page 1 for anything then it is unlikely to be penalized.

Also, does it link out to any bad neighborhoods? Google cares more about what you link to than what links to you (in terms of giving you a penalty). If bad neighborhoods link to you then you won't get penalized but if you link to bad neighborhoods and Google identifies it as such then you will get penalized.

I think that's because it uses the LinkScape database, which is only updated about once every 4 weeks. The next update is suppose to be tomorrow so you might see a change by tomorrow evening (i'm not sure what time of day the update goes live). There is a calendar of updates here: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape-Schedule

You typically optimize 1 page for 1 phrase. If there are two phrases very close together, like 'widget' and 'widgets' then you can optimize the same page for those 2 phrases. You will have sub-optimal results if you try to rank the same page for 3 or more (or even 2) phrases.

If you have 40 phrases you want to rank for in the SERPs then you'll need 40 different pages on your site. Build a spreadsheet where you map 1 url to 1 phrase to help you keep it straight.

Query-dependent search results that redirect vs giving standard search results is kind of a confusing behavior for the user. If I'm the user then sometimes I get a typical search results page and sometimes I get a whole other look and feel for a category of results.

Instead, I would always give the search results in standard form (so all searches have the same behavior/results look/feel) and then, for certain queries that match categories you have add something above the search results that says "Looking for [query]? Here's our <query category="" page="">" or something where <> is a link to your dedicated category page. I think that's cleaner design for users and no redirects necessary.</query>

From an SEO point of view it shouldn't make a difference. See http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-internal-interlinking-relative-vs-absolute-urls/7000/ and http://www.seo-theory.com/2008/05/28/are-absolute-links-better-than-relative-links-for-seo/ and http://www.webpronews.com/absolute-vs-relative-links-which-is-better-for-the-search-engines-2004-08

There are cases when absolute is better (RSS feeds, PDF documents, or even on your site so that if it is scraped the links might stay in tact), but personally I like relative URLs on my site. If I ever have to rename a sub-directory (not often, admittedly) things go smoother.

Well, SEOmoz.org is a PR7 site. How many links do you have from PR7 sites? Even if on a sub-sub-sub page they are valuable, and hard to get. Plus, it would count as another c-block IP address that points to you, which has some value independent of relevance of the referring site.

I understand your point that relevance of referring links is critical, but there's also value from non-relevant, high-PR, new C-class IP addresses pointing to you. It's worth getting.

I recently found a new SEO tool http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/

It is fast, and has found some site tweaks I need to make. There is a free demo version that crawls up to 500 URIs. I recommend you check it out (I'm not affiliated).

One of the conditions it checks for is if your page <title>is exactly equal to your <h1> tag. The fact that they flag it makes me wonder if that's something I should avoid (?).</p> <p>When I googled it I found a variety of opinions. When I looked at Rand's excellent piece on the perfectly optimized page http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization I notice that the example Page Title and H1 are slightly different. By design, or a happy coincidence?</p> <p>Any opinions on whether I should make my Page Titles slightly different than my H1 tags to avoid the appearance of over optimization, or some other penalty?</p></title>

Yes, they use the unedited feed. I will add some deeplinks. Good idea. Thanks.

Thanks, James. The links in the feed link back to my home page, not the blog article on my site. I could change that. I also like the idea of adding additional deep links back to other parts of my site. I will do that.

I have a full text RSS feed of my blog available for users with RSS readers. A few sites have said they would like to republish the unedited feed on their site (so my blog postings show up on their sites with links back to my site embedded).

I'm wondering if this is a good/bad idea (to let them republish my postings) and/or if I should do anything in the feed to protect myself from an SEO point of view?

Am I at risk of some kind of duplicate content penalty from Google, or will Google figure out that I'm the original source (which would be good) since the blog postings have links back to my site?

Thanks!

Thanks, Keri. Great pointers. I didn't know Google had been doing 'title altering' for 6 months. Looks like they're using internal link anchor text to substitute new titles if they are related to the query. I don't really like them changing my carefully crafted titles but it's also true that I don't know if their change is helping or hurting my CTR in the SERPs. Hmmmm...

dmoz.org is a good place. Human edited. Submission process takes a while.

wikipedia.com if you have a relevant site to some article listed there.

industry-specific sites relevant to your site.

A few links from each of: article marketing, social bookmarking, guest blogging, forum posting (even a few no-follows is okay; looks natural).

I've been responding to HARO requests with good luck (www.helpareporter.com). Journalists post stories they're working on and you can respond as a relevant source (if you are relevant). Major media outlets use it. I've gotten several PR6+ sites to link to me because I was quoted in some story one of their journalists was working on. It's time consuming to create meaningful responses to their inquiries, and there is no guarantee they'll use anything you send them, but if they do it'll probably result in a high quality link.

Today I noticed that Google is not using my title tag for one of my pages.

Search for "covered call search"

Look at organic result 6:

Search - Covered Calls

Covered call screener filters 150000 options instantly to find the best high yield covered calls that meet your custom criteria. Free newsletter.<cite>https://www.borntosell.com/**search**</cite> - CachedNow, if you click through to that page you see the meta title tag is:Covered Call ScreenerEven the cached version shows the title tag as Covered Call ScreenerI am not logged in, so I don't believe personalization has anything to do with it.Have others seen this before?It is possible that "search - covered calls" was the title tag 9 months ago (before I understood SEO); I honestly don't remember. I cleaned all my titles up at least 6 months ago.Can I force Google to re-index the page? Its content has changed a few times in the last few months, and Google crawls my site frequently according to webmaster tools.

See Rand's piece http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-bing-confirm-twitter-facebook-influence-seo