Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Ahalliday

That is the plan. I was just hoping there would be a solid automated system or process by now. But I guess its back to the trusted manual approach. Thanks

All in One Schema should have it:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-schemaorg-rich-snippets/faq/

Hope this helps

There is an interesting situation with caching mechanisms such as Cloudflare and many others; where the benefit of caching the website for speed only comes in when you have significant traffic and simultaneous traffic to your website.

Some caching plugins take more server resources initially, and actually tend to slow down your site than speed it up, until the user traffic increases and then you see the benefit of the caching for speed.

As for security aspect of Cloudflare much of the security options are available for free. If you don't realize the benefit of the paid subscription you can still enjoy the security benefits of the free option.

Hope this helps

Hi Mark,

The nature of web-page authority usually takes time to grow. Its a significant metric (see ranking factors page, it is the most correlated factor) Its the one that is hardest to influence as part of factors in page authority is TIME.

Therefore the TIME factor takes the most time in SEO

Generally it takes 8 to 20 weeks for local citations to show up in search results. I would not expect MOZ to have a faster approval and listing on that end. But again MOZ can do some spectacular things, it is just that this is on the directories end to list the citations.

Hi Mark,

1. It comes down to substantial editorial discretion/review by the paid directory for it to be legit in Google's eyes. Best of the Web, BBB, and many other paid services that have substantial editorial process to review the business leads to a high quality paid directory and Google is totally okay with that, as Matt Cutts states in the link above. The video explains it well the difference between acceptable paid directories and those that are not.

2. Andy mentioned a great source Whitespark that I use as well.  However, I would start here: http://moz.com/learn/local/citations-by-category its free and Google approved if you will citations, to start out with. Sure enough they have the plumber category: http://moz.com/learn/local/citations-by-category#Plumbers

Also: https://moz.com/local/search and http://moz.com/learn/local/local-search-data-uk

If you take care of these especially all if not most in the last link I sent, you should generally be in good shape, if not you can them get even more with whitespark!

Hope it helps!

Hi Henya,

CDNs do not cause problems with duplicate content, duplicate content issues if they come are usually sourced from something other than CDNs. As result this is possibly why MOZ is not picking it up.

CDNs serve content from different locations TRUE, however it is accessed via the SAME domain/URL. In other words one URL can be coming from different CDN/cloud servers, but since its that same identical URL, no duplicate content issues arise.

Hope this helps!

Hi Mark,

Very very good questions!

1. There is a distinction between general web directories and link farms and local citation directories.  Local citations in relevant directories is still a must method for local seo ranking. As Google Local itself aggregates information from authoritative and relevant web directories such as: Yelp, Yellowpages, Foursquare, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Citysearch, etc. **The distinction is that Google uses this for local results for your local business, and not for organic results, for an online business, as an example. **So for organic results, online businesses, you can still have few solid and relevant directories such as BBB or Best of the Web, but you dont want to over do it here. For local results as much relevant and authoritative directories is the name of the game. Hope that clarifies this, if its still confusing let us know.

2. By if the client has a blog, I was going off your hypothetical example of the plumber. What I mean here is writing **on your own blog **if you have one. Again it does not even have to be a blog, you can create a page, you can even call it a landing page appropriately.  It will be a quality content rich page, that you are trying to rank for organically.  Good you are aware that Guest Blogging is now considered by many an abused tactic that is now crossing over into the spammy category. So you are correct in this.

Hope this clarifies it for ya, again let me know if you have any more questions!

Hi Mark,

If the client has a blog, I also had good success, creating articles on talking about a plumber in [other city you want to focus on] and having this be a solid article at least 750-1500 word article with maybe a contact us or a business info on the sidebar for that location. These articles would rank organically for the the city plus industry that you are interested in.

Being a blog you have the flexibility about being creative in what you write in the article about the certain area you would like to rank for!

Hope this helps, and if you have more questions about this definitely ask!

Glad to help and thankful to be part of such a great community!

Hey Duncan,

There are few good ones. But generally when it comes to using a plugin for redirection, I go with the Redirection plugin (I know clever name ) But its the most popular plugin with 1.5 million downloads and for some good reasons its definitely a feature filled plugin, here are some neat things it does:

• 404 error monitoring - captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• Custom 'pass-through' redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• Redirection methods - redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrers
• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post's URL changes
• Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
• Full regular expression support
• Apache .htaccess is not required - works entirely inside WordPress
• Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL

Those are some great features there.

One thing to Note A plugin with so many features can interfere with some of your other plugins so test accordingly.

Hope this helps!

Hi Christy I believe its 15GB of storage right, probably a typo.

If hosting exists subdomain redirects for clean URLs is great. Also dropbox.com and many other services work, with subdomain redirects, like so.

Hi Brad,

Try photobucket.com. Its been known to give you flexible embed and link options. Here is an example of the permalink structure:

http://i237.photobucket.com/albums/ff255/robynm17/uyergyey1.jpg

Hope it helps

Yea right, with the sharks eating up the smaller guys, and growing bigger and bigger.

The reassuring thing is that Google is generally on your side, and will tell you to play by the rules because it has stated that there is a lot of spam to fight, but it is tackling it one big spam tactic at a time.

Oooo... thats right! Great point Miriam

Hi Stacey,

I am not sure there is _one top provider _in this industry. As some have different methods for acquiring rewards and giving out the rewards. It may be the question of what works better for your customers.

Here is a good article at various types of programs available:

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31990/7-Customer-Loyalty-Programs-That-Actually-Add-Value.aspx

http://mashable.com/2012/04/05/customer-loyalty-program-tips/

Hope this helps!

Hi WMCA,

Google Places can get this data from other citations. However once you claim control of your Google listing it "should" take in your input. However Google still to this day has issues, especially if you recently moved from Google Local to Google+ Page.

What you should do if you do not see new business hours change within a day:

1. Login to your local dashboard

2. Click on the listing in question

3. Click the Report Problems with this Listing link

4. Fill out the form, and send it off to Google

Hope this helps!

Hi Chris,

You are correct that keyword stuffing is no longer a legit SEO practice, and it is not ideal for user readability. Can you still get away with it sure. However, it is not a long term strategy as at any moment Google can pull its plug on you and de rank or penalize these efforts.

A better approach is to rank one keyword per page, you can rank for all the terms and potentially even higher then trying to rank one page for 3 terms. This is a better approach for users and Google alike.

To step into the shoes of the competitors. There was a time when the competition was low and ranking for multiple keywords per page was doable and so you had limited pages, and many words to rank for, so that is what you went after. Back in the day keyword stuffing was the way to go. As a result, companies such as Morton Buildings could easily rank for them. Currently they have built up the authority and the traffic for these terms, and so they are easily ranking top position for short tail (two word) competitive keywords. So in their eyes, they may even have in-house SEOs that understand that keyword stuffing is a no-no; however, they are currently ranking for these terms, and they may not want to touch and change what is not broken in their eyes. As soon as Google or other search engines take action on this, they will have to take appropriate measures to change and fix things up.

Again, for someone starting out in small business, at this point, going for multiple keywords per page is not a realistic approach. You have much better shot going after one keyword per page. Even a long tail keyword such as "small wooden horse barns" vs competitive "horse barns" to try to rank competitively.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ringo,

I haven't used personally but there has been good feedback with: inventorylab.com. Maybe check them out

Also this is not directly related to selling but more of Amazon products, pricing, etc. Maybe something will help as well:

http://mashable.com/2007/08/21/amazon-toolbox/

Hope this Helps

Really great question. MOZ local is definitely most bang for your buck, however Yext offers listings that MOZ local does not include, and so if you have the budget why not use both right!.

According to moz's https://moz.com/local/how they answer a similar question, so this gives us a some-what complete answer of go ahead and use both:

If I already manage my listings on sites in your network, what will happen to those listings if I use Moz Local? Do you override them?

Response:

• In most cases, we will not override your listings. Localeze and Superpages will reject our efforts to publish your listings if you’re already managing them on those platforms. You can still manage listings independently on those platforms—or remove those listings and establish them through Moz Local.