Welcome to the Q&A Forum

My first piece of advice would be to appeal to their human side - state your case that it's your hard work they're stealing and that duplicate content may actually hurt both of your rankings.

If that doesn't work which I expect it wont, dend a strongly worded Cease and Desist letter, you'll find some templates here:

http://minnesotaattorney.com/cease-desist-letter-template-example-sample-forms/

Ensure all of your content has a clear copyright mark.

Use the letter to make the point that legal action may be taken if they do not stop.

good luck!

Do you use cPanel? There's a nice redirect feature in there - most control panels offer something similar.

If not, you may need to get your hands dirty. I'm not that techie but I think it's the htaccess file.

cPanel Redirect

htaccess redirect

Good luck!

Why are we assuming that tweets may not be authentic? I'm not asking whether purchasing tweets will be beneficial, but rather whether developing a twitter campaign would have any direct SEO benefits, other than click-through rate and overall brand awareness.

I think Russ' point about indirect link building is a valid one, so thanks for that

But for example, a stream of tweets wont be crawled like a blog and add to you domain's authority if they feature your URL?

Cheers for your input!

Links within Twitter are NoFollow, so are there any SEO benefits to your URL featuring in lots of tweets beyond click-throughs?

Thanks!

All absolutely valid responses - we currently just write copy for our users and optimise HTML for the search engines, seems to be working well thus far

Thanks guys!

Useless metric?

Good as an indicator, but not of any real value?

Best way to judge how well content is optimised?

I've heard all kinds of opinions, what's yours?

Thanks!

Interesting point Simon!

Often times, search engines which aren't Google are overlooked. Perhaps for good reasons, but certainly worth thinking about.

Thanks!

So it's safe to assume keywords are no longer used by SEs in the old fashioned sense to rank sites, but should be keep them as indicators of site content?

It's been suggested by some that they're detrimental for two reasons:

1. Your competitors can snoop the keywords you're targeting

but mainly...

2. Over-optimisation is the enemy these days!

Thanks for your input

Thanks, that's actually very close to my current practise!

Should be focussing on consistent anchor text (for internal links) across my site to focus on specific keywords, or would it be more beneficial to variations of keywords?

Just food for thought

Assuming I'm not cloaking any content, how would the Search Engines know it's for them rather than users? Essentially I'd be adding relevant content which, as far as users are concerned, is superfluous.

I guess my point is, should I create content for users who are never going to read it, for the purposes of SEO?

Thanks

Shifts are definitely towards content marketing for SEO - i.e place more emphasis on useful and relavant content as opposed to in-bound link building.

That being said, incoming links are still a measure of authority. The argument for quality content is that this will organically increase links through shares and trackbacks etc.

To get the process started (and to start building links) comment on other peoples articles where relavant, share on social media and generally join / add to the conversation

Good luck!

Traditional thinking suggests sub-domains are treated as separate sites and so don't pass on link juice, but I've heard mixed opinions.

I'm very much a believer in sub-folders but I'm interested to hear some other opinions.

Thoughts?

Less that 500 words on average on each page; fairly well optimised in terms of internal links, key word density etc confirming to most best practices.

However, almost all of the content is static - so I'm concerned that we're not getting much in the way of fresh content, hence my question about creating content just for the SE.

Totally see your point and I agree. However, what if I'm looking to be pro-active and improve my rankings?

Competition is quite high and the site in question receives decent volumes of traffic but not necessarily for some of the search terms I want to target.

Thanks!

So we all know the importance of quality content for SEO; providing content for the user as opposed to the search engines. It used to be that copyrighting for SEO was treading the line between readability and keyword density, which is obviously no longer the case.

So, my question is this, for a website which doesn't require a great deal of content to be successful and to fullfil the needs of the user, should we still be creating relavent content for the sake of SEO?

For example, should I be creating content which is crawlable but may not actually be needed / accessed by the user, to help improve rankings?

Food for thought

Thanks guys - I appreciate the question is vague but I'm afraid I can't give away too much at the clients' request

I have taken over the SEO campaign for one of our largest clients. They already receive over a million visits a year due to the brand itself.

However, I'd like to start targeting some new search terms to diversify the incoming visitors.

Any advice on this type of situation, beyond traditional SEO best practices?

Thanks in advance!