Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Widgets are definitely a gamble if it takes you a lot of time to do.  Maybe you could do badges that rate other people's web designs (silver, gold, platinum) and give them a badge they can put up.  You can make a page on your site for web design awards.  I realize it's not 100% on topic but it's not that far off.

The template idea usually does ok if you take the time to make a nice, customized WP theme,

I love the idea of separate landing pages.  I do this a lot for local clients.  I have one client that covers 3 counties.  I've optimized the homepage for the bigger counties, but do a unique page for each town that they want to do business in.  It goes back to the principle of one page for one topic.  These pages are usually easier to rank, and should convert better than any broad page.  The higher conversion rate will help compensate for the lower volume.

I think there are several benefits to outbound linking.  Some may not apply to every type of site.  They are:

• Shows you as an authority when you show a collective resource of relevant sites
• Build relationships with other sites
• Potential return links as a thank you
• It looks natural - how many sites do you see that don't ever have outbound links?  It looks like pure SEO at that point, and not a site that shows value to visitors.

One thing I like to do is link to other sites in my niche, but not competitors.  I run a lens comparison site, so instead of linking to 1800 Contacts, I will link to Acuvue.com, or the FDA in regards to safe wearing practices..  They don't actually sell lenses, and it makes sense and benefits my visitors when I link to the manufacturers of the products I list.

If you want to go conservative you can always no-follow the links.  I've seen a few sites in the insurance industry that do this, and rank very well.

Vinnie

Have you set up Google Places?  Since you are a local business that serves local clients, that could be a good route to go.  You can always set it to "do not display address" if you work from home and not an office.  Once you do that, make an effort to hit even more local directories like Manta, US City and others.  It may be easier to rank your places in conjunction with your website.

You could also go the route of designing a widget or WP/Joomla theme, that may have a "designed by so and so" link in it somewhere.  I wouldn't force people to keep it in, but a lot will.

You could consider making a page for each town you want to rank for as well, and then you can optimize the homepage for the bigger, more lucrative phrases.

Vinnie

Hi,

I think you might be able to find an affordable SEO company, but I would suggest changing your goal.  Visits are a nice metric to look at, but leads and sales keep you in business.

You could get 100,000 visitors tomorrow, but if none of them buy a printer what's the point?  At the end of the day there is no difference between 100 visits and 2 sales and 15 visits and 2 sales.  Some of those 100,000 may remember your brand, but there is no guarantee they come back.

A good SEO company will talk to you about that, and help you focus on specific keywords that convert well, and will also help optimize the site and content to generate more sales or whatever your specific goal is.

Good luck finding a company.

Vinnie

Well Nikolaas,

This isn't a book, but a pretty relevant blog post from two days ago: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-future-of-effective-content-marketing-long-term-personas

This could get you on the right track.

I would also see if there is a way to search for EGOL's responses on the Q and A forum.  He lives and breathes content marketing.

Vinnie

Thanks Shane - us Thomas's gotta stick together.  I agree with you that my situation is not ideal, but I'd rather take some course of action rather than just let the pages sit there.  I think it sends a message to Google that I am not intentionally trying to rank duplicate content, and that the pages serve a benefit to visitors regardless of it being duplicate.

Vinnie

SEMRush has some good data.  I think it's more accurate and realistic compared to the Google Keyword tool.

A lot of the other tools with just aggregate data (including SEMRush).  Serpiq.com is another one I like.

Vinnie

I have a series of websites that all feature a library of the same content.  These pages don't make up the majority of the sites content, maybe 10-15% of the total pages.  Most of our clients won't take the time to rewrite the content, but it's valuable to their site.

So I decided to noindex, follow all of the pages.  Outside of convincing them all to write their own versions of the content, is this the best method?  I could also block the pages with robots.txt, but then I couldn't pass any link juice through the pages.

Any thoughts?

Hi,

Yes you can appear twice in the SERPs.  Check out this query:

https://www.google.com/search?q=exterminator+brooklyn&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Brooklyn-Exterminator.net appears at the top and bottom of the rankings.  That's a nice double hit.  A lot of the stuff you do to optimize your places listing can also help your regular SEO efforts.  A lot of local directories that give you citations will also give you links, so they can definitely go hand in hand.

Hope that helps,

Vinnie

If he put the image within the h1, and set the alt text to what he wanted the H1 would that help?  It wouldn't be ideal but it could be a workaround that would yield some results.

I agree the design should encompass the proper tags, especially the H1 and H2.

One of the main reasons they stopped looking at them is because it was easy to spam and stuff the tags.  Any site can easily stuff the meta tags, so it's an unreliable ranking factor.

A few years back it was beneficial for when directories/info sites would scrape your site.  When they list your site they would use those keywords for categories, and possibly even anchor text.  You don't see it as much anymore, especially since that scraped information is just junk content.

The way I see it, it can hurt your site to have the KWs.  Your competitors can easily see what keywords you are going after (which they probably can anyway by looking at a given page).  Giving them one spot to check on every page though will make it much easier for them to benefit from your keyword research.

Some people like to use meta tags as product tags on their site.  So if you search for "black cats" on a cat website, anything with the meta tag black cats would come up first.  It also works for when you want to make a black cat page that features every single black cat related item on your site.  Of course, you can just do internal tagging for this, and don't need to use the meta tags.

Moral of the story: not much use for them.

I came here to mention the importance of fresh content, so I am glad you both brought it up.  I run a comparison site that has about 240 products that don't see a lot of updates, but I run a blog alongside the site.

For a while I got complacent with it and wouldn't post for months on end, and my rankings were disappointing.  The past two months I have been adding at least a page of well written content a week, and put deep links within the content to some of my more popular products.  As soon as I started adding pages the rankings began trickling up across the entire site, but especially the blog and homepage.

That's why I'd say url.com/blog.  You can put a feed on your homepage to show recent updates, so visitors can see you are updating regularly and the search engines will see fresh stuff on the homepage as well.

Does anyone else have anything to add?  I'd love to see a few examples of pages that make use of the tags and how they are doing in the search engines.  I certainly understand if you don't want to share your specific pages though.

Thanks for the input.  I agree with you about the strength of the site, as well as the pages.  I might give it a try on a small sample of pages and see if it helps conversions or impacts SEO at all.

Vinnie

I've been reading about the proper use for block quotes and citations lately, and wanted to see if I was interpreting it the right way.  This is what I read:

http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/blockquote-cite-q-tags-seo

So basically my question is, if I wanted to reference Amazon or another stores product reviews, could I use the block quote and citation tags around their content so it doesn't look like duplicate content?  I think it would be great for my visitors, but also to the source as I am giving them credit.  It would also be a good source to link to on my products pages, as I am not competing with the manufacturer for sales.  I could also do this for product information right from the manufacturer.

I want to do this for a contact lens site.  I'd like to use Acuvue's reviews from their website, as well as some of their product descriptions.  Of course I have my own user reviews and content for each product on my website, but I think some official copy could do well.

Would this be the best method?  Is this how Rottentomatoes.com does it?  On every movie page they have 2-3 sentences from 50 or so reviews, and not much unique content of their own.

Cheers,

Vinnie

Exactly.  **Content is written for the visitors, not the search engines. **

If you are familiar with the subject and are writing naturally, the content will do just fine with all of the search engines, and more importantly your visitors.

For free guest blogging I would suggest:

http://myblogguest.com/

Everyone I know who posts there absolutely loves the community and service, including myself.  It's a good place to get a few high quality links, but also to connect with some other webmasters who also work in your niche.  These contacts can lead to a lot more link opportunities.

Vinnie

I've been doing some local SEO lately and noticed something today.  When I do a search for "State/town name Cat Toys", I see the title tag of the website in the local results as opposed to the business name.

I'm happy they are showing up above the normal results, but I wonder if having the brand name at the end of the site title impacts clicks.  For example:

Site name: New Hampshire Cat Toys and Accessories | Cats R Us

But in the places results the title is cut short because they show the address, so all they see is: New Hampshire Cat Toys and....

Do you think branding is especially important in local results?  Or less important?  I could hear arguments for both sides.  I realize the site URL is shown in green below the title, but it's not the same as having a brand in the title portion.  It also looks like some of the competition has just their name show up as opposed to their website title.  Is this something I can fix in Google Places, or is something Google does on its own?

Cheers,

Vinnie