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Meta Keywords are worthless. None of the major search engines use them as a ranking factor anymore. If anything, their use can actually have a negative impact since you will be revealing your targeted keywords to your competitors. (Most competent SEOs can determine your targeted keywords by looking at your site anyways but no need to make their job that much easier!)

That being said, Meta Description is still important, even if they aren't necessarily considered a ranking factor, they allow you to have control over the snippet of text that shows up under your listing in the SERPs.

I highly recommend using this plugin to scan your site for malware/exploits and automatically fix them for you - http://wordpress.org/plugins/gotmls/

Then once the site is confirmed to be clean, submit your site to Google within GWT to get them to review your site and remove any malware warnings from the SERPs.

From my understanding, you don't necessarily need to have an active AdWords campaign to use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner (which is replacing GAKT). You will need an AdWords account but you should be able to sign up and never run a campaign but still have access to the Keyword Planner to do what you need to do. (At least I assume and hope this is going to be the case...)

Relative URLs are not inherently bad for SEO, but they oftentimes trip up webmasters if less than 100% of the links on the site are valid. For example, using a link like "../blog" will tell the search engines to go to http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog and then http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog/blog and so on, causing the crawlers to get trapped in an endless loop which is obviously not ideal for SEO. So as long as you are on top of making sure the relative URLs are always valid, then you should be fine.

Do you have any SEO plugins installed for VB? This plugin VBSEO should fix your problems - http://www.vbseo.com/

Hmm, when I go to www.sombras.co.uk, I am seeing an error saying that there is no index file. This could be what is causing the problem.

Otherwise, where is the sitemap located on your server? Did you upload it to www.sombras.co.uk/sitemap.xml?

Can you share your URL so we can take a look? Feel free to PM me if you want to keep it private.

I get this question all the time from my clients and my answer is - Absolutely, you should bid on your brand name in PPC even if you are number 1 organically. Here are 5 reasons from a blog post I wrote about this very subject - http://streamlinemetrics.com/blog/top-5-reasons-why-you-should-bid-on-your-company-name-or-brand-name-in-google-adwords.php

**1. You will be able to control more space on the screen and more importantly, space that is above the fold. **Even if you rank number one for your brand name, having a sponsored pay-per-click listing above it ensures that anyone searching for you has to scroll a lot further to find someone who isn’t you. Getting your name to dominate like this should mean that you’re not just paying for clicks that would have been free; you’re actually increasing the number of clicks overall. This is especially important for ecommerce websites for well-known brands since their products are available on other major retail websites such as Amazon, Walmart and Target who all rank very highly in the organic rankings.

2. Your competitors can bid on your brand name anytime. If your company was not bidding on your brand name, those clicks and potential sales would go to the other major competitors that I listed above along with smaller direct competitors trying to take advantage of your brand name for pennies on the dollar.
3. It’s extremely cheap. Often less than a dime or even a nickel per click. Meaning you could get 1,000 highly targeted clicks a month for $50.
4. You can gain invaluable insights for keyword research. It’s impossible to predict every single different misspelling or variation of a brand name related keyword phrase that users search for, so by bidding on the company name we can look at the data to see all of the keywords the ad was displayed for and make changes as necessary.

**5. It gives you more control over your message. **With organic search results, Google usually picks up your meta description or the first bit of text on your page – but not always. With pay-per-click ads, you get to craft a bit of copy specially designed to increase click-through rates. Also, with pay-per-click ads, you have the flexibility of constantly testing new ad copy and seasonal promotions without worrying about losing your organic rankings.

Google Analytics does offer conversion tracking for all sources of traffic. You can set up Goals in GA and use a virtual pageview to load anytime the "Success" message is displayed to the user via AJAX. This might help - http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1032720

As for using Convertable on your site, it should work on http://www.nhfinehomes.com/Real_Estate/Canterbury/residential/4166838. Convertable actually uses AJAX/JQuery to display the success message so there is no traditional Thank You page either. If you have any other questions or need help signing up, feel free to email me at patrick@convertable.com.

You wouldn't necessarily get a "penalty" from the search engines but the pages will eventually disappear from the search results if they are returning 404 response codes, and thus you will lose traffic as a result. Your best bet would be to 301 redirect the inactive pages either to the homepage or to other relevant pages on your site.

I'm a big fan of putting some kind of contact form or at least a call-to-action on every single page of your site, so great idea. Anyways, that's not your question, so if you need to switch to index.php in order for your form to work, then go ahead and do so. But make sure you 301 redirect index.html to index.php since search engines will consider them to be two different pages. I am assuming your site is hosted on a Linux server with access to .htaccess so you should be able to accomplish this by adding the following lines to the .htaccess -

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule index\.html index.php [NC,R]

Interesting, I am now seeing what you are talking about...

There is a time delay in Google AdWords reporting, so if you are only looking at today's data then that is likely the reason why you are seeing different numbers. Are you seeing the same discrepancies for clicks yesterday or any other date? Here is a link explaining the time delay - http://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2544985?hl=en

I'm actually a co-founder of Convertable. We created Convertable to do exactly what Ricky is looking to do because we ran into the same problem not being able to use Google Analytics or AdWords conversion tracking to identify the source of any individual lead. And to add onto Guillermo's comment, yes, you can definitely track which specific AdWords campaign, ads, keywords, landing pages, etc. generated each lead by using our Campaign Tracker tool.

Please let me know if anyone has any more questions or suggestions for things to add to Convertable since we are always looking to improve the service for our users!

• Patrick

What page are you looking at? I checked the backlinks in OSE and found several anchor text links for "tactical gear" which appear to be paid links - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.patriotoutfitters.com. I'm assuming that the links were once on those sites but have since been removed and Google has yet to update the backlink profile accordingly.

I know that Amazon shows ads from AdWords since they are considered part of the Google AdWords Search Network (not the Display Network). I haven't used AdWords to advertise on Amazon since late 2011, but I just checked out a Amazon product page and checked out the Sponsored Links. The URLs are being sent through A9.com, but the landing page had the "gclid" parameter appended to the end of the URL which leads me to believe that these are AdWords ads.

I had a lot of success advertising on Amazon product pages by offering the product cheaper than Amazon did and including the price in the copy of the ad. For example, a ping pong table was on Amazon for $300 and so I created an ad for the exact same ping pong table and listed it for $279. Even though my site did not have the reputation/credibility of Amazon, shoppers were more than willing to click on the ad to visit a third party site for a better deal.

Anyways, that didn't really answer your question, so if you want your ads to show up on Amazon under the Sponsored Links, I suggest setting up an AdWords account and choose the Search Network.

Great call on both the canonical tags and breaking out of the frame. I imagine the site will be indexed properly within a week using these tactics.

It's important to note that competition metrics provided by the Google Keyword Planner are strictly for PPC (AdWords) campaigns and has nothing to do with SEO (organic) competition.

As for tracking organic rankings, I've become a big fan of http://serpwoo.com. I think you are able to track 3 different keyword phrases for free before you have to pay.

I just wanted to chime in that Convertable provides multi-touch attribution modeling. When a user submits a lead through the contact form, you will be able to see how many visits the user made to the site, date and time, the source of every visit, every page they viewed on each visit, how much time they spent on the site for each visit, and so on. This information allows you to determine which traffic sources, ads, keywords, etc. should actually be credited with the sale at the end of the sales pipeline.

I have to admit, I am still trying to get used to it. For some reason, I feel the old version of the Q&A was easier to read and just flowed better. Perhaps it was the variety of contrasting colors combined with smaller fonts that I liked in the old one. This new design seems too white and sterile. And the bright light blue color of the links against a white background is killing my eyes. :-X

That being said, I am still getting used to it so I'm not ready to come up with a final opinion just yet! Overall, I LOVE the new design of the site and the branding changes and can't wait to try out Moz Analytics. Congrats to the Moz team on the big launch!