Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi all,

Question about 'local SEO' or 'Google Places' or whatever it is now called!

My day to day work is in house for a UK national travel agency and I pretty much know what is expected and what I need to do with regard to SEO. However, I have a friend who owns an 'upmarket' hair salon in my city of Sheffield (UK) and after a rebrand and a complete new website he has asked for my help with regard to 'local SEO'

This is my dilemma, because the salon only wants to target the local area of Sheffield (5th largest city in UK with approximately 500k inhabitants) should I focus solely on 'Google Places' and if so, can anyone recommend any guides, books, or training that will give me an overview of what is required?

I have previously 'touched' on citations and claiming the 'Google Place' but I could seriously do with a refresh!

Many thanks

Andy

Hi Martin,

I wouldn't get too 'hung up' about plurals etc, they will be taken care of!

Here is what I would do;

Focus on writing and building content about your business, write articles and blog posts in almost story format describing your experiences with being a wedding photographer in Scotland - what will happen is that the keywords will take care of themselves, you will include singular and plural terms by default and you will find that you will rank for terms that you had never even though about!

Sorry if I didn't answer your question directly but what I'm trying to say is focus more on creating excellent and informative content and less about the keywords!

Good luck!

Andy

Hi,

As Peter correctly states, the best start is the Moz Beginners Guide but I can also recommend 'The Link Building Book' by Paddy Moogan.

I am by no means an expert (or guru) but I have been doing SEO for a few years now, I have just written a post on my blog title' What Is It You Do Exactly?' - That seems to be the question I am most asked when I tell people what I do!

You can read the post here, it might help, it might not but take a look and see what you think; What Is It You Do?

Please feel free to post back with any further questions, everyone is friendly and willing to help!

Andy

If you checkout the Google Keyword Planner and enter that phrase, you will see that it only attracts (approximately) 390 searches per month, however, there are an abundance of  other phrases 'thrown up' which you can use for articles.

With this niche you are blessed with content ideas, it just takes a bit of research...

Good luck!

Hi Bob,

Hope I'm understanding you correctly here...

Taking your first example; weight loss tips

I used; ubersuggest.org and entered the phrase...

This is just a small portion of what was returned - there are some great keyword phrases that can be turned into articles!

weight loss tips for men

weight loss tips for women

weight loss tips and tricks

weight loss tips for teenage girls

weight loss tips for women over 40

weight loss tips pinterest

weight loss tips for kids

weight loss tips for women over 50

weight loss tips for men

weight loss tips for women

weight loss tips tumblr

weight loss tips and tricks

weight loss tips for teenage girls

weight loss tips for women over 40

weight loss tips for kids

weight loss tips for women over 50

weight loss tips for women under 20

weight loss tips and tricks

weight loss tips after c section

weight loss tips after baby

weight loss tips anorexia

weight loss tips and motivation

weight loss tips and tricks for women

weight loss tips at home

weight loss tips and ideas

weight loss tips and exercises

Apologies if I misunderstood your question!

Regards

Andy

Hi all,

For discussion...

I am painstakingly working my way through a link profile, highlighting 'unnatural links' and contacting webmasters to try and get the links removed - I haven't got as far as 'disavow' or a 'Reconsideration Request'

I have found a large number (around 150) of links from http://www.bookmarks4you.com and when I have attempted to contact the site for link removals I have had a payment request in order to do so.

Now the amount being requested is low and so it may be worthwhile, however, I wondered what the consensus was with regards to this sort of demand?

I know I could simply add the links to my 'disavow list' but for the sake of a small payment, I could get rid of them much quicker!

Also, the majority of sites that I am contacting only have a contact from as opposed to an email address that I can use directly - what I am doing is taking a screen print of each contact form in order to have proof that I am actually doing the 'hard graft' as opposed to simply adding sites to a disavow list - is this a worthwhile exercise?

Many thanks

Andy

This is also worth a read and watch the short video where you will get your answer from the 'horses mouth' (English term!)

http://searchengineland.com/googles-cutts-got-bad-links-to-your-site-dont-fret-it-disavow-it-169131

Thanks to you all for taking the time to answer my very long question, it is very much appreciated!

I will post updates regarding my my progress!

Andy

Hi all,

A bit of a long questions so apologies in advance but please bear with me...

My client has received an 'Unnatural Inbound Links' warning and it is now my task to try and resolve through a process of;

• Highlighting the unnatural links
• Requesting that the links be removed (via webmaster requests)
• Possibly using the Disavow Tool
• Submitting a Reconsideration Request

So I downloaded my clients link profile from both OSE and GWT in CSV format and compared - the amount of links returned was considerably more in GWT than it was in OSE...?

So I set about going through the links, first filtering into order so that I could see blocks of links from the same URL - I highlighted in colours;

Red - Definitely need to be removed

Orange - Suspect, need to investigate further

Yellow - Seem to be ok but may revisit

Green - Happy with the link, no further action

So to my question which relates to, is it 'black & white' - is it a case of 'good link v 'bad link' or could there be some middle ground? (am I making this process even more confusing than it actually is?)

As an example, here are some 'Orange' URL's;

http://www.24searchengines.com/ (not exact URL as it goes to the travel section which is my clients niche) - this to me looks spammy and I would normally 'paint it red' and look to remove, however, when I go to the 'contact us' page;

(http://www.24searchengines.com/texis/open/allthru?area=contactus)

and follow the link to remove from directory, it takes me here;

http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/help/update.html

DMOZ???

My clients has a 'whole heap' of these type of links;

http://www.25searchengines.com/

http://www.26searchengines.com/

http://www.27searchengines.com/

http://www.28searchengines.com/

...and many many more!!

Here is another example;

http://foodys.eu/

http://foodys.eu/2007/01/04/the-smoke-ring-bbq-community/

...plus many more...

My client is in the 'cruise niche' and as there is a 'cruise' section on the site I'm not sure whether this constitutes a good, bad or indifferent link!

Finally, prior to me working with this client (1 month) they moved their site from a .co.uk to a .com domain and redirected all links from the .co.uk to the .com (according to GWT, over 16k have been redirected) - a lot of these 'spammy' links were to the .co.uk and have thus been redirected, should I even consider removing the redirection or will that have severe consequences?

Apologies for the long (long) post, I know I'm heading in the right direction but some assurance wouldn't go amiss!

Many thanks

Andy

<colgroup><col width="1317"></colgroup>
|   |

Hello All,

1st post \ interaction on Moz!

I'm now half way through my 4th week in an 'Online Marketing' role for an established travel operator \ agent in the UK and I now want to really start working on my SEO (and linkbuilding) strategy.

I'm using Moz for most things and I have highlighted (via crawl diagnostics) lots of warnings & errors (15,000 pages crawled, 12,000 errors and 26,000 warnings!) which I will be addressing with the web design company next week...

We engage (but not as much as we should) in Social Media and I have an excellent content writer who can write unique, interesting and informative content about our niche - which is quite large!

I am obviously keen to focus my SEO efforts on the content and I have created accounts on Web 2.0 (Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger etc), Social Bookmarking (Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit etc) and I have started to engage with other webmasters within the industry in the hope I can submit one or two 'guest posts.

Adding to that we have an excellent blog that 'sits off' our site and already has some great content on!

I am also looking at other content ideas such as; lists, infographics, quizzes, surveys etc

So my question is; do I continue with the 'content strategy' and if so, should i continue with the platforms I am currently using (as above)?

I don't think that I'm a million miles away but any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Andy