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I don't know the services you are listing and thus cannot help you any further

Sorry for that.

Option A seems to be the best option as it can pass linkjuice you could get on a deep page (training-course/date/time) to the main course page.

Directories used to be really powerfull for rankings and thus investing time on submissions wasn't a problem.

Now that directories are far less effecitve, you can still do dir submission effectively, but you have to do it manually and carefully to see some restults. This includes writing a unique description for your website for each an every directory!

A solution would be to outsource that job to a foreign SEO company with lower costs, there are plenty, just make sure they do manual work and can rewrite your description properly.

In SEO we have a saying "If it ain't broken, don't fix it!"

As long as everything is fine with your ranking and trafic, you should not worry too much about those long URLs

I think it is not worth the effort

However, you should probably make sure new content is given shorter urls

Best of luck!

Normally, Search Engines cannot use such data directly because they don't have access to it! How would google know what bounce rate your have on your website?

Many marketers say that usage data like bounce rates, number of visists... will influence rankings in some way, but there is still no evidence for that.

Plus, an 80% bounce rate cannot always be a bad thing, imagine a user looking for an info, he finds your website, reads the page that answers his or her question, you have a 100% bounce rate but the user is satisfied, what's wrong with that?

A good way to reduce bounce rates on a website is to:

• link to related content

• have an easy to navigate website

• engage the user by letting him comment

...

Hope that helps!

What you should keep in mind is that your website does not have one unique position, it is always changing depending on the IP that made the search, the google domain used, the time of the search...

I know that sometimes SEOMoz Pro needs more than a week to start seeing your ranking, but a best practice would be to have other tools (some of them being you checking manually) to confirm your position

Also, you should always say my website is AROUND xxth position, that way you won't be too wrong

Hope that helps!

I second Keri, you need to provide more details and background about your site and promotion strategies for us to be able to help you.

If the redirection is made at the server level via a .htaccess file, then the server will never serve the original (old) copy of the page.

This means you can do whatever you want with it, as it will never be shown!

I have taken a quick look at your website.

In terms of SEO, I would say that your vendor didn't do a bad job.

In fact, it would be hard to ask for more than a well structured website, clean URLs, good titles... if you didn't specifically request a Search Engine Optimized website.

Of course, there are many major improvements that could be made like adding a sitemap, a robots.txt file, description to pages...

Here is a tool that will give you a nice broad picture of your website's SEO:

http://www.woorank.com/

Hope that helps!

When google is recalculating/reassessing your credentials (trust, popularity...) typically after a major update/change to your website/page, it is not uncommon that a page drops heavily before recovering to a much better position.

Best thing you can do is wait a few days and see what happens.

When you are doing "well" or "not so bad", you should always keep a backup before making any changes, this way you can go back to the older version much more quickly.

Normally, Search Engines cannot use such data directly because they don't have access to it! How would google know what bounce rate your have on your website?

Many marketers say that usage data like bounce rates, number of visists... will influence rankings in some way, but there is still no evidence for that.

Plus, an 80% bounce rate cannot always be a bad thing, imagine a user looking for an info, he finds your website, reads the page that answers his or her question, you have a 100% bounce rate but the user is satisfied, what's wrong with that?

A good way to reduce bounce rates on a website is to:

• link to related content

• have an easy to navigate website

• engage the user by letting him comment

...

Hope that helps!

Google's algo tends sometimes to adapt the snippet shown on the serps to the user query.

In other words, if a user is seraching for "new orleans" and it occurs in your content but not in your description, Google will automatically show the sentence(s) where it apears so the user can decide to clic or not

Hope that's clear enough

I have taken a quick look at your website.

In terms of SEO, I would say that your vendor didn't do a bad job.

In fact, it would be hard to ask for more than a well structured website, clean URLs, good titles... if you didn't specifically request a Search Engine Optimized website.

Of course, there are many major improvements that could be made like adding a sitemap, a robots.txt file, description to pages...

Here is a tool that will give you a nice broad picture of your website's SEO:

http://www.woorank.com/

Hope that helps!

In addition to what has been said, I think you also need to understand how it all works for you to make the best decision.

It is all about DNS propogation, it is the time taken to update all the servers around the web with the new IP to point to when one looks for your domain name. Now yourdomain.com points to 195.81.76.22 and you want to move it to 156.22.101.85 (examples only)

While the update is propagating, some visitors will get the old IP (website on yahoo) and others will get the updated one (on the other host) so there is no downtime.

The issue is with dynamic sites (forums, blogs...) you might get data (comments, posts...) that will be made to the version on Yahoo and will be lost once everyone goes to the new host.

I your website is static, just go ahead and move your files and update your DNS records and don't worry about anything else.

If your website is dynamic, then you should copy the data at a given time and either :

• block the old website from getting comments/posts/entries...
• copy the data manually from the database once all DNS have been updated (hard to do)
• accept to lose some infos

Hope that helps

You should always try and track the density of your target phrase, not individual words.

That being said, I second Cody in that you shouldn't worry to much about the density itself. Try to apply those rules :

• use exact phrase at least twice in the content (more if you have a lot of content)

• use a variation (plural, adverbial form...) of the phrase

• put it in bold once or twice

For more details about on page optimisation, this old post is still a very good one :

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

Unless you really need the space to type in a long tweet, it is obviously better to include a direct link to your website for at least two reasons:

• help build your brand (people see your domain, not a shortner)

• help get social signals to improve your SEO efforts indirectly

Hope that helps.

The first question you should be asking yourself is "why did our competitor lose his rankings?"

The answer would be something like:

• they acquired too many links too quickly
• anchor text profil isn't natural

If one of the reason was that they got links for site A, B and C that you too have links from, then you would probably have dropped too!

My point is, it is not about the websites you are having links from, it is all about the global link profile and the time taken to acquire those links.

Now, you are also wondering if you should preventively remove those links, my answer would clearly be NO, but it you ever decide to do so, please do it slowly so you don't hurt your rankings too much and try to compensate with other natural links progressively.

And last but not least, we always tell our cutomers to concentrate on getting new links that correct their link profile rather than waste time and effort trying to change things they already have.

Hope that helps!

I think you know the answer, you just need someone else to confirm that there is little you can do!

Obviously, you should start by updating the links you control and build some new ones.

You must alos make certain the content is unique and that the buyer doens't use the original content.

If you had implemented authorship, you could still benefit from it by updating the links.

That's all I can think of.

Of course, the best thing you could get is a nice 301 Redirection for the buyer.

Google luck!

Normally, a good practice is to have no more than 100 links per page, otherwise it might be seen by some search engines (Google) as an overly agressive internal linking strategy.

SEOMoz initial crawl is just "initial", this means a deeper crawl will be performed next week end every week you will get a deeper understanding of the issues on the website.

Hope I am being clear enough

YES, we have a methodology that yields results both on the short and long terms.

Nothing has really changed for us since those updates as we already had very cautious linkbuilding strategies done 100% manually, the hard way!