Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi John,

I would say that keyword research is the main activity to focus on. It can really make or break your launch. If you choose keywords that are very competitive , they will take a while to rank and bring traffic to the site. The idea is to choose keywords (long tail or low competition phrases) that you can get ranked for relatively quickly and start seeing traction.I've added some resources below to assist you.

SEO Chat discussion

New Website Launch

Quicksprout Article

Search Engine Watch Article

All the best.

Cheers,

SEO5

To add to Oleg's response, i would suggest you to do a backlink analysis for your competitors (each keyword) and compile a list of common directories that you see you competition being a part of.

1. IMHO .edu and .gove links if acquired in the right manner without any spamming tactics or redirects are still very effective for link building.

2. The percentage of image links really depends on your vertical. If you own a photography site, it might so happen that a high percentage of your links would be from images shared on different sites across the net. The keyword here is "natural". If it appears natural for your site to have a high percentage of inbound links from images, then you should not  have anything to worry about.

Good article on this topic here.

In our experience, having a country specific domain name makes a lot of difference in your placement for that keyword . For example, if you're only looking for Canadian traffic and want to rank high in Google.ca , then having a .ca extension makes a difference. You should also host the website with a hosting provider in that country itself.

This post might be helpful for you.

Another Video explaining the tool Here

Hi Fabrizo,

Some possibilities are mentioned below:

• Do you post new content on the site every Monday

• Is your site the kind that attracts a specific demographic that is more active on Monday than the weekends

I would look at the analytics a bit deeper to review this trend specifically what keywords are driving the traffic, the landing pages that are getting the most visits on Mondays etc.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

SEO5

We're testing this network Outbrain to promote quality content. Will do a case study on how it works out once we have tested the network.

Hi Colin,

You can check out the recommended companies in the link below provided by SEOMOZ.

SEO Companies

Cheers,

SEO5

This issue that you're facing is quite common with franchise related websites as they follow one master template and just some localized content changes on each of the franchisee sites.

Each of the individual franchisee sites should invest in original content that separates it from the corporate site. Just having a 5% difference in content will not suffice and will do harm sooner or later.

A really good discussion on this topic in this Link 

Hi Taysir,

In our opinion, the change in primary and secondary navigation (combining it) should not impact your overall SEO efforts as the content is still there, (you still have the secondary navigation terms merged under one nav)

If you have really good local ranks for the franchisee pages, then i would suggest rolling out this change in phases. Start by changing the territories that don't have as much activity in terms of search volume. Make the change and observe the rankings over the next 30-60 days. If there is no noticeable impact , then you can make the change across the board. Better to be safe than sorry

Cheers,

Rais, SeoMoz has some good info on the links below that can assist you in developing an advanced on site and off site optimization strategy.

Noob Guide to Link Building

Advanced on page SEO

In addition to David's choice, my recommendations include:

• Advanced Web Rankings
• GShift Labs
• SEO Book Tools

Hi Ben,

What's your motivation to advertise the same branded keywords for both the sites at the same time? If you want to do some A/B testing and seeing which site converts better for the same keywords, you can run site A for one month and site B for the next and see which one converted better.

Cheers,

SEO5..

Xml Sitemaps is a very good tool. If you want to have a collaborative process discussing the sitemap with the rest of the team i also recommend http://writemaps.com/tour/

Dont have specific thoughts on the company, however i would stay away from article marketing / spinning of articles especially right now with all of Google's updates taking place. You should try blogging on industry related sites specific to the client and trying to submit content to authority sites.

Totally agree with EGOL especially the over analysis bit. A lot of times we end up doing too much in order to rank for a particular keyword and that ends up working against us. We do all types of analysis (competitor, on site, link profile, the list goes on and one) and sometimes forget the fact that all it takes is good solid content and following SEO best practices when adding that content on the site and syndicating it.

You can use Google's keyword suggestion tool , type in fabrication and welding in the keyword list and the website , check the box that says "only show ideas closely related to my search terms" . You should be able to pull a good keyword list using this tool.

In addition to this tool you can also use SEM Rush , type in the client's website and see what keywords they are ranking for that are related to your site. You can also use the keyword analysis tool from SEOMOZ.

You have to be very careful because Google has gotten very aggressive with the over optimization penalty off late. I would recommend sticking with just one keyword and the brand name in the title tag ( Keyword | Brand Name) , use the keyword only once in the meta description and 1 for the alt tag.

You can probably get away with 2 keywords however it's better to be safe than sorry and use just one keyword.

I dont think Google will have any issues crawling the links as long as they are logical and meant for a better visitor experience. I looked at the site and it does seem that they are appropriate for the page so i dont forsee any challenges with that.

Here is another post referencing the same issue:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/opinions-please-on-duplicate-page-titles-too-many-on-page-links-warnings

Hi Sebastian,

How old is your site? Try a combination of social bookmarking your site/posts, using social media (facebook, twitter, google+) to push your content and pinging your site . All these efforts should help your posts get indexed faster.