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Thanks Francisco.  I have tried that but have unfortunately had to give up because my WYSIWYG website making program, for whatever reason, can't accommodate, so have decided to forfeit (it seems to have problems with the widgets that are graphically like PNG files).  It can manage widgets that are contained within a box so I'm limited to the little addthis horizontal bar.  My site and pages from it gets 5 to 7 social shares a day on places like FB, G+ and Pinterest, is this good?

I don't really do much on my FaceBook business page.  Yes social shares.  Like when someone goes through the "addthis" widget on your site and shares your website / webpage.  I'm sure no amount is too little!

As the title says.  What is your idea of a good amount of social shares to be given per day or week or month for a website?

You have my sympathy.  I'd bet that this is a scam in which bad links have been deliberately made in order to manipulate you into paying money to have them removed.  If you do pay to get them removed, then your category in this criminal organizations chart might change to "sucker" and you will see no end to it.

Surely Google must have known that the penalties themselves would be manipulated.  It seems pretty obvious to me this would happen and could be added as the "criminal one" to the new spin-off industries...   http://www.seroundtable.com/link-removals-15349.html

If I was a Search engine and this kind of thing was going on I would like to know about it, especially knowing that prime targets for extortion are going to be those who rank high and have search traffic, in other words the fruits of Google's many years of tweaking their algorithms.  I would tell Google and maybe other engines about this, you may not get a reply but I think they like to know the statistics.

I like your site (and agree about the DSM-5).  Pardon me for not directly answering your question or if you've thought about this already; I notice you have your own Face Book and Twitter pages linked top right, but I can't see any social sharing buttons for people to share your content on places like their own Facebook profile to friends, Google+, Pinterest and the like.

Search engines rank social factors, they are now one of the main pillars of SEO, ergo, when someone shares your content that's like a link.  I use "ShareThis" for my social share buttons, they have a range of styles.  They have a hover button on the left side of their page here http://sharethis.com/   that one might look good on your site without affecting the presentation or useability.

You'd have to have more text on your home page to optimize for all three.  My home page has about 250 words which is the least amount of words for all pages of my site.  As a general summary / introduction without being specific, I think it's harder to get more on home page, especially without making it look contrived or convoluted.  I notice some of your other pages have plenty more text.  I'd say leave it as it is or go for 2 at most perhaps, but not 3 or else you have a real mind-bender to make it look natural.

A competitor of mine is ranking 1 step above me for a my exact match domain keyword they aren't optimized for.  They have a similar amount of linking domains with similar anchor text style proportions (i.e. between exact and partial match etc.)  Their DA is a little lower than mine and their PA is the same.

The main difference I suspect might be that I have only 3 facebook shares compared to their 47, I think that could be why, I have read that search engines are ranking social shares even a little bit higher than links.  I actually have 16 shares but according to addthis not all of them can be crawled due to factors like social sharing privacy settings.

Thanks for your reply. I agree about user experience but for both options it can be made user friendly so I might as well choose one that is best for SEO as well.

The main difference on having 3 levels being that the footer and Navbar would only have a "Tips" link, which might be neat, but then if not then all tips would be individually linked on the footer under a non-linked text title of "Tips" and on navbar (similar to Zappo's Navbar but much smaller, going sideways on dropdown menus doesn't look that uncommon) which would give the same info that you would get by clicking onto a 2nd level Tips page, might that also be preferable to user on a small site like mine (say 10 different tips pages eventually).  I added some more stuff to my original post about spreading internal link equity, which I didn't think to mention originally.

I have a site with 13 pages, 6 are product pages, 5 are free tips pages (the other 2 are the home page and contact form). Currently I have the navbar at top of site with a "products" dropdown menu for the 6 product pages and a "Tips" dropdown menu for the 5 tip pages.  All categories except the contact page are at the bottom as breadcrumbs, the homepage is "home" and the rest are relevant user friendly keyword anchor text.

So I have 2 more pages to ad to "Tips" and am wondering whether to have a new 2nd level tips page that links to a 3rd level of 7 different tips pages, or keep it shallow as it is, with only 2 levels from the homepage to the other (now 13) pages, with a potential of 22 pages in the foreseable few years? (and some graphics work to make it user friendly like how Zappo's has categories to the side on each of its drop down navbar menu's and non-link text categories for its bottom of page breadcrumb links)

Can those aforementioned pages linking to each other in the footer dilute link equity? (I think that's one of the primary reasons I'm curious).

What do you think of this: http://www.dbswebsite.com/blog/2012/08/08/internal-linking-101-5-best-practices/ (I guess I should no follow my contact page), could it be better to have a 2nd level page for "Tips" to get more equity to that page rather than across all 7 tips pages?

I have read around about this on here (hence how I found out about Zappo's) and elsewhere and wanted ask to make sure.

I'd be interested for more details on this, if you have any, as this is what I have been doing.  I can't tell if it has done harm but then I can't tell if I'd have done better if I hadn't done it.

When links where treated less strictly by Google, a decent site with good content, a readership and happy customers, I guess would have had to fight fire with fire in terms of backlinks compared to competitors for the same exposure (I say competitors for the same exposure rather than "competitors" because at one time in the past even "relevance" wasn't as much a factor).

A decent site getting future proof links that were harder to get (and therefore less of them) would perhaps have not appeared on google.  Given the previous lack of discrimination in links, a decent site would have had to work hard to make google's search results decent, and for the same reason when google update's it's algorithms years later, gets the boot.  If that's not Ironic I don't know what is.

I'm looking for places to guest post and keep seeing good relevant sites which have had their rank and traffic go downhill.  It's giving me a head ache.

"Coupon Huntnig" instead of "Coupon Hunting" for no. 7. on the plagiarized version.

How much of webdesigners business is from people seeing them linked on a website they made I don’t know.  If you know then you might be able to decide if my following advice is useful.

Find a website with poor design that has been around since the internet was born, has good backlinks, a load of traffic, and offer to make them a website free of charge and get yourself on their footer.

Maybe a silly idea, if I missed something I wouldn’t know. One site like this I am looking at with really amateur design has 96,724 per month SE traffic for google US according to SEM rush. Often sites like this use ads to make a bit of money, so that might make them more likely to say “yes” if it increases direct and referral traffic, and ad revenue.

Thanks Brent, that is good to know.  I think I'll probably limit it to 2 - 3 guest posts per external site.

I wonder if my idea of using PDF and / or embeding youtube version would at all be relevant to Alan's query here...http://moz.com/community/q/in-2013-is-guest-blogging-a-worthwhile-activity

I think that Google doesn't crawl PDF's and that you can have a certain % of the same text before it is considered duplicate content, ala all of my guest blogs on a webpage of my site as PDF downloads with only contextual keyword subject titles and short descriptions onsite.  I have found free useful stuff on ones own site helps with link building.

Hi Brent thanks for your reply, I agree.  I have to apologize I made the mistake in my first post of not mentioning that the blogs and sites where I put my articles would all be relevant.  If possible I'd like to reiterate the question again, but like that, to anyone.

I’ve decided to do guest blogs. I have written 10 tutorial articles, most are 500 - 600 words and none less than 300 words, there’s no fluff or padding, and I have ideas for 7 more. Is it best to spread your work across various sites and blogs? (assuming they are all good / high PR etc.) or could this make me come across as bit of a content whore?

If one place likes my work and asks for more, are there any more benefits to me other than just ones internal to their site (that being increased exposure on their site)

I’m also thinking about including my guest post tutorials on my own website as downloadable PDF’s with short descriptions so that the content remains original where my guest posts are. I also want to make video versions of the tutorials to put on youtube and embed within the guest posts too, but also my own website. Is all that a sound idea SEO wise?

On other question if that’s OK.  I have seen the following in google’s guidelines…

“The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results: sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

That’s a bit of grey area for me knowing that normally a professional book reviewer receives a free review copy, in this case perhaps a blogger receives a free review copy. This has never been seen as suspicious so long as interests are declared. Do you think those google guidelines include this kind of activity?

Regards,

I try and get as many keywords in one keyword as possible.

"Dog's tasty chews" has "Dog's tasty chews"* and "tasty chews"

"Tasty chews for dogs" has "Tasty chews for dogs", "tasty chews" and "chews for dogs".

The first one only has 1 variant that is "dog specific"* to the product (chews), the second has 2.  I don't put an adjective after a noun, the word "for" keeps cropping up in my keyword research as being useful.

I go for singular (people aren't looking to buy your whole stock just one item from it).

"Piano" 450,000 Global exact match, low competition.

"Pianos" - 27,100 GEM high competition

Awesome!

Some of the editors on Dmoz (and other authority sites) are there explicitly to allow their own sites and mates sites in but not others (anyone can apply to be an editor).  Hopefully search engines will realize this soon enough and prioritize good content over closed shop and kick them to the curb.

Social signals are the nearest thing to crawlers having human eyes.  There's a pie chart somewhere on SEOmoz about this, I think social was about 7% of what search engines take into account.

It's a little wall calendar symbol with thu for thursday to mean the rank will be calculated and on there by thursday.