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Yes, a citation is mention of your business on the web. It's usually accompanied by all of your NAP data. The more citations you have (with consistant information) the more Google can trust you with a good ranking. (Because it is an indication that the company which is listed is indeed doing what they say they do and they are located at the place where they say they do.)
Don't try to do it through Google Map Maker. Instead go to Google+ under your personal profile.
After some time a postcard will be send to your companies address with a pin-code. This pin-code can be used to verify you as the owner of this page. Then you will have full access to edit the content of the page.
Hello Rob,
In order to improve your local SEO you would need to claim (or create) your company's 'local listing' pages across platforms. A lot of websites out there list local businesses such as Google Places/Local, Yahoo local, Foursquare, Hotfrog, Yelp and much more.
Many of these platforms allow you to claim the page where they give out your company details so you can fill in the information about your company yourself. Once you've done this you need to make sure the information there is correct.
Enter your company name, address and contact details everywhere in the same way. For a computer it's very difficult to understand that avenue is the same as 'ave' in an address.
Fill in a good description, add photo's/video's if you have any and make sure the listing describes clearly what your company does and what it is all about.
The most important one of these is your listing on Google Places/Local. This page will actually rank in the search results as you described. Make sure you fill this in as good as you can. Google will use this information and compare it to other listings of your company. If they see that the information is consistant this would indicate to Google that the information is correct and they will trust you more and more. This would help you rank better in local SEO for related search queries.
Another good thing to remember is that reviews help you rank too. If you've got loyal and satisfied customers, ask them to write a review for you on your Google Places/Local page.
Note: Don't pay people for reviews or anything. It's against google's guidelines to buy or sell reviews just like links.
Some resources to get you started:
Hope i answered your question. If anything was unclear or if you have any more questions please let me know and i will do my best to answer or explain more.
Think about the user experience when implementing a solution like this.
If your user expects to find a blog post about a certain topic make sure they are redirected to at least something which is connected to that.
On a webshop selling clothing articles it would make sense to redirect a deleted shoe article to the category page for shoes or to show them a custom 404 page which helps them on their way to find more content.
If redirecting them to something relevant is not possible i would suggest creating a custom 404 page which explains that the page has been deleted but that certain pieces of your content may be interesting for them. (Link to those pieces of content.)
Just redirecting users to the homepage or other pages which are not relevant only annoys the user and gives them a negative association with your website.
Going responsive is the way to go if you ask me and most other SEO's out there.
I'm not sure i fully understand your question though.
Responsive design doesn't have any issues with Javascript in most cases. It would depend a lot on what the Javascript would try to do. As Andy has stated above Google can now read and execute AJAX and Javascript which is great.
The only thing you should be careful is when implementing more Javascript is whether the website will still function as expected on devices/browsers that don't (fully) support Javascript. There are simple fallbacks and such so that all of your users get served great content and not just the ones with the most modern devices and browsers.
Excellent book for more information on this is: Designing with Progressive Enhancement.
Must read for any front-end web developer if you ask me.
Especially on Google+ you often see that people write a short enticing description which encourages people to read the post in the description. This is something you could do. A summary of the story however makes people not want to read the full story since they already read all the information in the summary.
Could you provide me with some keywords where you dropped in ranking? (If you don't feel comfortable sharing it here you can send me a private message.)
These links in the footer pass little to no SEO value anymore. I would stop doing this and encourage your client to spread the news about their new website to local media and have them write an article/press release which refers to you as the designer with a link. If the website contains a blog they could also place a blog post about the new site and give you credit themselves.
Well, the link building done in India is probably the reason. Directory links are not the way to go and in most cases the articles in which your brand gets linked from are bad quality articles on bad quality domains.
This form of link building is an old SEO 'trick' which is considered to be black-hat SEO nowadays.
I would assume that you got penalized by Google for having a unnatural link profile. You can read more information on that in this article. I took a really quick look at your site and couldn't find any on-page issues which would trigger such a ranking drop and i'm fairly certain it's in the link profile.
If you could verify that your link-profile is fine and the issue comes from something else i could do a more detailed site audit.
Hope my response will be useful to your. If you have any questions left please let me know.
Hello Anton,
The website looks great! It's good that you're ranking good for those keywords.
This appears to be your brand name though. I suppose to want to rank for terms without your brand query in it.
I can see you have blog posts. I can't find a page with all of your blog posts though. I can only see the last four blog posts at the bottom of the page. Perhaps you could consider adding a link to a blog hub page.
Staying on top would be achieved by creating awesome content for your blog, having a good social presence and getting a lot of links and social signals. Since you have a nice portfolio and good blog posts these links will appear naturally over time. You can however speed up the process by reaching out to people who could link to you. Think about bloggers and journalists in you area who write articles on web design bureaus or local businesses.
Press releases are rather outdated if i'm not mistaking. I am not sure what you mean about the guest blog posts.
Do you mean summerizing several blog posts into one post and posting that on someone else's blog?
I would not recommend this since the content would no longer be unique. Check out this amazing article on guest blogging right here from Moz.
Tips for staying on top - You seem to have good testimonials. Do you have a Google local page? The testimonials could also be inserted here by your clients. You could still place their reviews on your site manually after this.
Hope i was of assistance, if you have anymore questions please let me know. 
Hello Adam,
Blogging in order to help home owners be better informed on how they should care for their homes is a great idea which you could benefit a lot from.
Michael already stated that sponsorships are paid and that the sponsered links should be no-followed to avoid penalties. In the question title you mentioned 'passing PageRank to sponsors'. No-follow links pass (almost) no PageRank. So passing PageRank to them is not going to work.
You mention that you would like to invite your sponsors to guest post on your blog to improve their SEO.
Letting them guest post is a tremendous idea but guest posting for SEO reasons only is not a good approach.
There is an excellent post here on Moz that goes deeper into the subject of guest posting.
Conclusion - Blogging is a good idea
Hope i was of help and if you have any questions, please let me know.
Oke, i see your point.
Perhaps you would find your answer in this article-> http://www.e-nor.com/blog/google-analytics/time-on-site-2-0-tracking-conversion-duration-in-google-analytics
I would also recommend reading the following article -> http://blog.custora.com/2012/10/dont-look-at-average-time-to-conversion/
They have some valid points in there.
I hope my answers have been of assistance
I'm not entirely sure if the time is the most relevant factor to take into account here.
People browse the web in different ways and some people are very fast and some very slow.
My focus would lie more on the amount of actions someone has to take from the entry point of the site till the conversion and try to improve from there.
I do not know if there is a way to track the average time to conversion to be honest.
Ben Morei stated the difference between HTML4 and HTML5 in using heading tags already. His answer is therefor completely correct.
What i would like to add to his answer is that you should look at H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 tags as if the webpage is a book. In a book the chapter-title is a H1 tag. All the subchapters have an H2 tag. If these subchapters have another sub-area then this would be marked up with an H3 tag and so on.
Having a clear hierarchy in your heading tags will make it more user friendly. Search engines might also understand better which parts of the content are connected to each other and which are separate because of this.
Hope i answered your question and if anything is still unclear feel free to ask more details.
We have three answers to your question here now and the question is still on marked as 'unanswered'.
If your question is answered could you please mark the answer which was most helpful as the correct answer so this question is no longer on the bounty page for no reason?
Schema.org is a quite extensive vocabulary for implementing structured date. The data highlighter tool only offers limited options for implementing structured data information about your content to the search engines.
So, yes i would recommend schema.org because it is more specific.
If you think my original response was helpful could you mark it as the correct answer to close this question?
Mark, i tried your website and the redirect is working fine. If any of the answers below was helpful to you you should mark it as the right answer to close this question.
Hello Denis,
To your first question: Schema.org is indeed much more specific than Google's data highlighter tool.
To your second questions: If the client has a footer with their contact details and address location than this would be a good place to use the schema markup and then it would be included on every page.
You're talking about 'manually marking up every page'. If the contact information is in the footer this would only have to be marked up once? Don't really understand that part of the question.
**Conclusion: **It's not necessary to mark up local business information on every page, but if the client has the local business information on every page because it's useful for their users than this is a perfect opportunity to mark it up with schema information.
Hope i was of assistance and if you have any other questions please let me know
Footer links don't provide much SEO benefit anymore. It can even hurt your SEO if you overdo it.
If the links are not useful for the user than i would suggest dropping them altogether.
I do like the suggesting provided by Eric Rubin though. A Javascript based toggle for the footer links would keep the UI pretty and clean while it still gives your users the ability to open the menu and visit any links there.
It all depends on the links though. If they are only there because of SEO reasons and not for helping users find good content then i would recommend just dropping them altogether.
I would recommend going for option 2 -> domain.com/category/images
The keyword you mentioned is "Category images". Both of these words are now in the URL structure. The difference SEO wise is very very very small though.
The structure of option 2 is much simpler and more straightforward. It looks less spammy and is easier to type in. Therefor it's better for the user and for you to use option 2.
If you have any other questions feel free to ask me
I have found the error.
At the bottom of the page at the left side of the screen you have a green link.
This link is pointing to http://www.comptavenir.fr/www.comptavenir.fr
You should change this link from:
To the following:
Hope i helped. If i did please mark this as the correct answer