Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Agree with Sean, time spent on writing for EZA would be better spent writing for your own blog or site. You can do some article marketing but don't obsess on it. If you outsource the writing then I would still keep it in moderation.

Duplicate content, perhaps?

Page too new? How long has it been posted?

Too deep in the link heirarchy? Have other pages at the same level been indexed?

For those of you who have been doing white hat SEO for many years, I'm curious what % of your time (and/or how many hours/week) you spend on 2 activities:

-- creating new, original content for your site

-- work on getting links to your existing content

I find that working at getting links via article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, etc, is an open ended time suck that never ends. But maybe a necessary investment for sites that have fewer external links than their competitors (?).

Adding unique original content to my site is also time consuming, and I'm not sure about the short-term vs long-term benefit of it.

I'm curious if you guys who rank in top 3 positions of the SERPs split your time evenly between link building and content building, or if you spend more time on one than the other? And does the answer change for a site that's been around for a while and already has several hundred external links and several hundred pages of original content?

Where should I spend my time on a site that is 8 months old, has about 90 pages of original content (all with good on-page SEO), and several hundred external links (with mostly relevant anchor texts)? My goal is to rank higher for the key terms people search on to find a service like mine. Currently I'm on page 1 in SERPs but not in top 3.

Anything that is human reviewed, has editorial standards, and enforces longer word length. The opposite, which would be sites that accept anything, including posts that are less than 300 words, would not be good.

In the 'good' camp I would include

www.ezinearticles.com

www.buzzle.com (600 word min)

www.selfgrowth.com (500 word min)

would be interested in hearing from others on which ones they use that are human-edited or otherwise have more strict than post-anything-you-want submission guidelines.

www.ispionage.com gives away some data for free -- enter a domain and then it shows you a summary of how much they think that site is spending on PPC, what their ads are, who else is competing for those same keywords with PPC, then some SEO stuff like what words they rank for on each of the major engines, and who they think the domain's competitors are.

For traffic you could use www.compete.com (use 'site profile' tab), or maybe www.alexa.com to get a relative sense of how one site's traffic compares to anothers.

Then you can combine the two -- use compete.com's traffic along with ispionage's estimate of PPC spend and you can get a sense for how much of their traffic is purchased vs free.

http://www.spyfu.com if fun to play around with, too, to analyze your competitor's PPC.

In my expience, the reports you see are the sum of two things (1) it automatically includes a report in cases where your site is in the top 50 results of the SERPs for each campaign keyword, and (2) you can manually cause it to add a report by going to the Report Card page (second sub-menu choice on the On Page page) and giving it the keyword and then the URL you want it to report on for that keyword. I believe it will remember these manual pairing additions between sessions (mind seems to). This manual process is very helpful when you are working through your on-page optimization so you can see how you're doing (from an on-page point of view) before you achieve top-50 status in the SERPs.

We have the same issue. Our site is 100% SSL. We use 301 redirects for any http requests to go to https instead. We rank well in the SERPs for phrases we care about. I'm pretty sure the link juice is flowing from http to https because of the 301s (many of our external links are http).

(and, SEOMoz folks: really looking forward to your crawl tool working with https sites!)

If you want the other pages to rank for the keywords they were optimized (on-page) for then you will need to do some external link building to each of the other pages (with appropriate anchor text for each).

When I've looked at the link profile of other sites and compared the number of external links that point to the home page vs internal pages, it looks like about 40-70% of external links point to the home page. Meaning, 30-60% of a site's links point to its sub-pages. Sometimes this is because the sub-pages have awesome content that people have chosen to link to, and other times it's because the webmaster has done standard link building exercises for the important sub-pages (guest blogging, article marketing, etc) that she/he wants to rank in the SERPs.

I've been using white-hat article marketing to post original content about my niche to credible article directories (yes, I realize many of them were recently devalued).

My question is: Is it a good or bad idea to have future articles link to older articles, as a way to increase the chances of having the older articles indexed, or increasing the amount of link juice they pass to my site (since they point to my site)?

I get 2 links per article and was thinking of using 1 to point to a prior (related) article, and the other to point to my site.

What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings.

Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article.

I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about.

I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic.

I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article.

Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)?

Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.

Saw this article on JC Penny receiving a 'manual adjustment' to drop their rankings by 50+ spots:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html

Curious what you guys think they did wrong, and whether or not you are aware of their SEO firm SearchDex? I mean, was it a simple case of low-quality spam links or was there more to it? Anyone study them in OpenSiteExplorer?

Two places capitalization comes into play:

(1) on-page use (title, h1, body text, img alt text, etc)

(2) external anchor text

I didn't think it mattered from Google's point of view for on-page usage (is this correct?) but I notice that OpenSiteExplorer' s 'anchor text distribution' tab shows different counts for the same keyword if it's capitalized in different ways (eg seomoz.org is listed separate from SEOmoz.org). Is that just OSE or does Google treat the keyword/phrase different based on its capitalization, too?

And if so, then should I be creating external links to my site with the 'regular' and 'Capitalized' versions of my key phrases?

After completing several months of on-page SEO for my site (one keyphrase per URL) and getting an "A" from SEOmoz on each page, now I'm venturing into PPC AdWords for the first time.

From what I've read you pretty much want one landing page per keyword/ad. So if I want to target 100 PPC keywords I need 100 landing pages. And each landing page needs to be SEO'd as if you were doing it for organic search purposes so that your ad has a chance at a high Quality Score (8 to 10).

I realize that an ad's QS is 2/3rds driven by its CTR but in the beginning when the ad is new the initial QS assigned seems to be driven more by landing page relevancy and some historical attributes of the AdWords account in which the ad or Campaign is located.

My question is: What, if anything, do you do different on a page designed to be a PPC landing page as compared to a regular page you would SEO for organic search benefits? Also, should you do any of the off-page things (external links with relevant anchor text) for PPC landing pages? I'm envisioning landing pages that only exist to receive PPC ad clicks and that will not be linked to from my site directly. Each landing page talks a bit about the keyword the user was searching on and then directs them to the most relevant page(s) within my site. Maybe that's flawed?

Thanks for any tips...