Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I scanned your site and noticed some problems right away:

(1) You're temporary redirecting (302) ~150 pages. Those should be permanently redirected (301) otherwise you'll lose any built-up SEO equity.

(2) You have some redirect loops going on. For example, http://www.health4mom.org/consider-group-prenatal-care and http://www.health4mom.org/consider_group_prenatal_care, http://www.health4mom.org/how-to-overcome-infertility and http://www.health4mom.org/how_to_overcome_infertility.

(3) You have a bunch of pages redirected to the home page. Not sure if that was intentional or not. e.g. http://www.health4mom.org/testing_your_babys_hearing. If not, you're redirecting the SEO equity from those pages to the home page and diminishing their ranking ability.

(4) You shouldn't be indexing category and tag pages unless they've been customized for uniqueness.

(5) Just about every file on the site resides in the root directory. You're not consolidating your efforts (and SEO equity) onto some key "money" pages.

Perhaps the combination of these items is what's contributing to your traffic loss. I'm wondering if you switched URLs away from using underscores and to using hyphens with this relaunch.

Ah then, that's a bigger question.

You're using an excellent tool, Yoast. Stick with it. It could be it isn't configured properly, you're in a highly competitive market, or there are other issues getting in the way of your advancement.

After a quick look at your site, three things jump out: structure, speed and links.

(1) Your site structure is extremely flat, meaning your link equity is getting disbursed across almost every page on the site. You should aim for a short, fat pyramid structure with top level pages being your most important. You're also inconsistenly using www and non-www links internally to the site. That's contributing to the next problem and diluting your link equity because of unnecessary redirects.

(2) Your site is slow. It ranks very poorly using Google's speed test. Speed is an important ranking factor these days.

(3) You seem to have a lot of questionable incoming links to the site. You might need to do a link cleanup.

I'd recommend a complete SEO audit and suggest you reference this extremely helpful post from Moz in order to understand the types of things you should be looking for.

I just want to chime in on the "most people don't bother to consult sitemaps  - if they need to consult it to find their way on your site you probably have a UX problem" statement.

I agree, but a lot of sites DO have a UX problem, and for that reason I use HTML sitemaps. If you're in a hurry, and let's face it, everyone is, you can go directly to the HTML sitemap and search for whatever it is you're looking for. And yes, a lot of sites still DON'T have search either b/c they think their UX is fine and therefore don't need search. Can't tell you how many times I've had that conversation with site developers....

Hi Mark,

I see your questions have been sitting unaswered for a while now. Let me take a crack at it.

1. Keyword Difficulty -  "...my current thinking is merely to ... make sure the keyword is relevant to the article as the first priority and use the tool to check out search volume." Good strategy. When it comes to blogging, one of the main objectives is to built relevance and trust. Picking the most relevant, most applicable phrases that match your intended content is what counts. Volume should only be a consideration if you have options that are equally relevant.

"Not sure what I should read into a zero for recent Bing searches. Is that really an important factor? **"**You are correct. Google doesn't give Moz access to it's keyword data. I would again use relevance as the deciding criteria and not worry about volume.

2. Titles - I think your question is "should I use the keyword phrase in my title and if so, does it have to be exact match". The answer is yes and no. Yes you should use your chosen keyword phrase in your title tag. It doesn't have be an exact match but understand that if you're in a highly competitive market (and certainly the wedding market is competitive), then the closer you are to an exact match the better. Again here though, your first priority should be in appealing to searchers. So if you think "Involving children in our wedding" will be compelling enough to attract clicks thru to your site then go for it. If you think something like "The pros and cons of involving children in our wedding" (or something else) would be more compelling, I'd go for that.

3. URL - No reason for them not to be the same other than length. Google ignores stop words like "and" and "the". You can shorten your URL by removing them and still achieve your objectives.

4. Meta description - yep. Make it human friendly and use your keyword phrase. Also make it compelling and between 150-160 characters. If you and 9 other articles all contain the same title and description tags, why should I click on yours?

5. "Make sure that the theme (we are moving to WordPress) uses H1 for the page header/title and H2 for sections within the document". Here you just want to make sure when you're publishing your content that you don't end up with multiple H1s. I see that a lot with different Wordpress themes. Some allow you to toggle off and on using the page or post title (at the top) as your H1. You'd have to try it and see.

6. 301 redirects - yes, redirect the old to the new. Any you want to retire, redirect them to their closest relative. If there is nothing similar to redirect retired pages to, consider setting up a custom page-not-found (404) page that explains the URL the visitor is searching for no longer exists and point them to your most popular pages, your blog, a human-readable sitemap, or whatever else makes sense. Don't just let it fall thru, unattended.

"Anything leaping out as missing/problematic?"

If you're new to wordpress, you need to be aware that it creates a lot of duplicate content as a result of how content is stored so as it be easily accessible to readers. The Wordpress for SEO by Yoast plugin is the one I use to manage SEO aspects of the site. I recommend it. It's not completely plug-and-play. You'll need to configure the back end to minimize duplication.

The Yoast plugin also allows you to enter "focus keywords", phrases you think might be good to optimize your page or post for. As I said earlier, I use Keyword Difficulty for main site pages, but just the Yoast plugin and its build-in integration with Google suggest for finding article keywords. You might consider just using it.

Lastly, Moz has best practice guidelines for crafting all these parts and pieces. It would be worth your while to review them if you have not done so already. Sounds like you might already have though.

Good luck!

Hi RC,

No. The business / company does not need to and should not change. The business name should be listed as "Company Name" only. No location.

What you need to do to differentiate your different business locations is to ensure they each have a unique local number and dedicated page on your website.

Here are Google guidelines if you have not seen them already - https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en.

"Multiple links from the same domain, whether to the same or different content, has diminishing returns from an SEO perspective. "

True. But that second link will still help boost your page ranking, especially if it's coming from a different page on the same site, a page with perhaps more authority and using link text that fits with the theme of your own content. If your content is going to be useful to the people that click on the link (as vcj appropriately points out), then it's worthwhile. Visitors might spend more time on the page as a result, visit other pages on your site, bookmark, link to it, or recommend it to others - all good signals to be sending to Google.

All the pages on your site are canonicalized to the home page. So basically you're telling Google to index the entire site as one giant page, all content aggregated onto the home page.

You need to either canonical pages to themselves or rationalize when you want the content of one or more pages to be treated as one.

Here's the Moz page describing what is canonicalization and best practices.

I think this is what you're looking for.

"When you shorten a link with Bitly, you are redirecting a click from Bitly to the destination URL."

Bitly uses 301 redirects, which means no page rank or link juice is lost in the process. Google's Gary Illyes confirmed that 3xx redirects no longer lose PageRank in July 2016.

If that doesn't answer your question, please let us know.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to the calculation of domain authority, many of which are outside our control. A good example of that is the size and composition of the sample Moz uses to update its index each cycle. That varies from update to update.

If you want to be able to predict a numerical change from one update to the next, I'd say the answer is no.

If you want to predict trends over time, I would say that if you are following best practices, actively producing unique, high-value and high-quality content on a regular basis, making efforts to promote it, and that's resulting in high-quality incoming links, then you should expect see a gradual upward trend with bumps and valleys along the way.

Hi Urban33,

If you're new to Moz and SEO start with http://moz.com/learn/seo. SEO is about a whole bunch of things that add up, not one small trick or tactic that skyrockets you to the top of search results quickly. Then I'd plug your own website into a MozPro Campaign. It's a great way to learn about the tools as it's likely the site you know best. Third, I'd monitor this forum. You'll not only learn a lot of the subtleties of SEO, you'll learn about the community and how we help one another.

Welcome!

Rand,

It's very hard to repeatedly explain a 30-40% fluctuation in an exponential metric with savvy clients. I'm finding the metric can't be used, especially with smaller websites or competing sites with large differentials in link or page counts. Will the long term efforts Moz has underway address this concern? Is there a ceiling in terms of website size that you don't recommend using the metric under?

I know you keep getting the same questions over and over. That's perhaps part of the reason.

The Moz SPAM score doesn't directly measure Google penalties. It predicts when a penalty or ban might be assigned to a website by looking for domain, on-page, and backlink warning signals that are typically present in penalized or banned websites.

The snapshot you provided shows Google with a spam score of 2. That means Google itself is exhibiting a few of those warning signals. 2 is a low score, meaning there is a low likelihood Google would penalize itself.

Moz has an excellent post explaining what the SPAM score is, how it was developed, and what it means. It lays out the different warning signals and recommends potential uses for the spam score.

Hope that's clearer. If not, let us know or search Moz for "Spam Score". There is more than one useful explanation.

Hi Uzair,

1. Is my Keyword density too high and will Google look at this as keyword stuffing?

There is no magic number when it comes to keyword density. Rule of thumb is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-6 times per post depending on it's length. Although 41 certainly sounds like a lot,the better question is "does it sound forced or stuffed"? I suggest you ask for a fresh, unbiased opinion. If feedback says it does, the quality of your post will suffer and readers will exit the page more frequently. Lessen the use of those terms if it does sound forced or unnatural. Try using a similar or related term like "fruit" from time-to-time instead.

2. Do I have to target each Singular and Plural keyword individually? Or will targeting 'Apple' will also automatically target 'Apples' for me and vice versa?

You should try to use each term at least once. Google will consider "apple" and "apples" close variations of one another, meaning it will consider them one in the same. A close variation includes misspellings, singular and plural forms, acronyms, stemmings (such as post and posting), abbreviations, and accents. You might gain a slight advantage by using one versus the other so I'd use your primary keyword phrase (containing apple or apples) in the title tag, meta description and headings.

They complement one another. I use both.

Moz Local facilitates quick, consistent and easy creation of all the most important local listings - listings with the data aggregators (Acxiom, Localeze, Infogroup, and Factual) and the ones that require claiming and phone, postcard or legal verification (e.g. Google and Acxiom).

Whitespark states "Any important listings that require claiming with phone or postcard verification should really be handled directly by the business, or at least by the SEO agency who can coordinate the phone verification calls with the business."

Once the essentials are out of the way, Whitespark helps you find hundreds of other sources of local citations and gives you the tips and tools to be successful in acquiring them.

Hope that helps.

What Hutch said. You might have pages with no or a different Google Analytics tracking code in place. This article from Seer Interactive will explain how to use Screaming Frog to find pages with or without your tracking code (b-s.ee/1yNHBpe).

Phil Rozek of Local Visibility Systems has an excellent blog post from April of last year that explains exactly where you can go to list your business without having to disclose an address. Highly recommended.

I'm a big fan of SEO audits. From a customer perspective:

• they tell you what's broken;
• they tell you what's working well;
• you can prioritize the work that needs to be done;
• you can more easily identify the skill sets needed to complete the work; and
• identify inter-dependencies so you acquire what's needed, when it's needed.

Audits also give you a baseline that you can use to draw "a line in the sand" and know where you're starting from. You can then more easily demonstrate measured improvements over time.

Hi Taysir,

Hard to tell without more information or domains and keywords that we could try and observe ourselves. You might want to supply those to us. Are you observing organic or local search rankings? Assuming you're observing local search results:

1. What's the relative proximity to city center, you vs the competition?
2. Who has more or better citations?
3. Have you claimed and completely populated your local listings, most importantly, your Google local listing?
4. Is it properly categorized and is that categorization reflected in the terms you use throughout your site in keywords, headings, body text, geo and schema tags?
5. Have you created and submitted a geo sitemap?
6. Are you using a consistent name, address and phone number on every page of the site?
7. Do you have a Google map embedded onto your contact page?
8. Who has more reviews?

Don't feel a need to respond if any of my questions triggers the answer you're looking for. But if it doesn't, probably supplying us with your keywords and domain would be your next best bet.

Good luck!

The rules for Google local listings are fuzzy and the results can be somewhat unpredictable. Seems clear that the two businesses are separate legal entities. It's not clear, at least not to me, whether they'll share a common phone number, website or whether their clients or business categories overlap.

You could go the route of establishing a separate suite for each of the two businesses, but you're still at risk that the data associated with the two listings will get merged. That's not quick or easy to undo.

If I were you, I'd wait a few months until the other business closes shop and then stake a claim to the address on Google local.

This question has been asked in the past. Miriam Ellis usually chimes in and she knows Local SEO inside and out. Here's the answer she gave to how to handle multiple businesses at the same address a few years ago. It's still relevant.

Your question is "do the terms in a website url drive search hits". The answer is yes, in part.

As John Rooney says, "There are all kinds of reasons why your landing pages may not be ranking for your keywords", more than 200 of them according to Google spokesperson Matt Cutts. (See time stamp 1:08).  Without knowing which page you're referencing it's hard to offer an opinion as to why you might not be able to find your page in Google search results.

I suggest you start with the Moz Beginners Guide to SEO. I apologize if I've incorrectly assumed you're new to SEO. I'm basing that on the nature of your question and the fact that your profile states you just recently joined the community.

If you have more, or more specific questions after that, please come back and ask again. There are lots of experienced folks that participate on this forum that can help you.

Small business owners' frustration will grow as Google continues to add layers and nuances to an already crowded and overly-complex process making it harder for them to allocate the time and resources needed to compete.

geanmitch,

You have two problems:

(1) Your home page (https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com) is canonicalized to http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home. Change the canonical tag so the home page points to itself. In other words, your home page canonical tag should read as rel="canonical" href="https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com"/>.

(2) http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home redirects to https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/home which turns a 404 (page not found error). Create a new 301 redirect that points (A) http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home to (D) https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/. Do NOT point (A) http://jasperartisanjewelry.com/home to (B) http://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/home and then to (C) http://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/ and then to (D) https://www.jasperartisanjewelry.com/. Go directly from (A) to (D). Get rid of any intermediary redirects.

That should take care of it.

I concur with Patrick's excellent suggestions and would add a few more to the list.

1. Make sure your site is mobile ready.
2. Optimize for speed.
3. Use Moz and GWMT to identify and fix site errors.
4. If you don't have reviews on the site already, enable them. Feed that into the schema markup Patrick mentions above.
5. Link building. Identify who's linking to your top competitors and go after the ones you can. As your top suppliers and partners to link to you. Give them something of value in exchange.
6. Use screaming frog to scan your site and check for cannibalization. Don't waste resources competing with yourself.
7. Optimize internal linking structures and anchor text.
8. Vary and test rhe effectiveness of different calls to action.

My go-to resources for ecommerce websites is The Ultimate Guide to SEO for eCommerce Websites from KISSmetrics. You'll see it talks about all the items mentioned by Patrick and myself as well as some more.

Hi liamvansteps,

Switching your domain is equivalent to moving your business from one physical location to another. If you don't tell people you've moved, they'll show up at the old address and not find you. Your SEO equity (like your mail) won't be forwarded.

You need to provide human and robotic site visitors with the equivalent of a "change of address" in the form of 301 redirects and updated sitemaps. And just like you'd probably want to tell your friends and best customers directly about the move (and not just rely on a change of address), you will want to update some accounts like social media, Moz (of course), Google My Business, and others.

What are the repercussions of not doing this? You'll lose credit for any accumulated link equity and domain reputation metrics gathered by search engines. You'll effectively be wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch.

How do you switch domains and maintain the status quo?

Search the Moz site for phrases like "how to switch domains" and you'll find lots of helpful step-by-step information shared by others. I don't want to repeat any of that here.

It looks like you have the homepage canonical set as http (vs https). That's probably the problem.

Hi Brad,

Yes there are a couple. The two that come to mind are Screaming Frog and Xenu. Screaming frog is very popular among SEOs. The free version of will allow you to crawl up to 500 pages. A licensed version will allow you to crawl 10,000 pages or more and costs 99 pounds / year. (It's an Oxfordshire, UK company.)  Highly recommended.

Looks like you took Nigel's excellent advice and have implemented the redirects. That's great.

I did notice however, that you're redirecting vivitecsolutions to www.vivitec and then www.vivitec to vivitec (without the www subdomain). I suggest you get rid of the middle redirect and go directly from vivitecsolutions to vivitec. The redirect "chain" unnecessarily slows your site.

"Are there more advantages in using Moz Local besides the convenience? For those that use it, what else have you found to be beneficial?"

Hi Eric,

In my mind, there are a couple of advantages to using Moz or one of the other high-quality citation building services over doing it manually.

(1) Consistency - you have a way of ensuring your company name, address, and phone number (NAP) data is consistently distributed to a large proportion of local business directories, GPS devices, and local applications in the United State. Consistency is one of the ways you ensure your business is being credited with all the citations you build.

(2) Accuracy - Moz points out errors, inconsistencies, and duplicates which you then have the opportunity to fix. When you build citations manually, it can be difficult to identify and fix these. (3) Completeness - Moz gives you a single point of contact for distribution of your citation data to the four local data aggregators and Foursquare (which feeds Pinterest and other local search apps).

(3) Completeness - Moz gives you a single point of contact for distribution of your citation data to the four local data aggregators and Foursquare (which feeds Pinterest and other local search apps).

(4) Convenience (as you mentioned) - The single point of contact is especially helpful if you plan on updating supplementary data like photos and menus, have a large number of reviews you want to track and respond to, or if you know the business plans on moving or changing its phone number in the near future.

(5) Support - I personally find the tool and process very confusing but Moz has great support and they get back to you quickly. Local search is very confusing in its own right. This is not necessarily a bad reflection on Moz, as there's always room for improvement.

(6) Cost - The fee is fair and reasonable. Not the cheapest. Also not the most expensive.

You don't need to "remove "nofollow" from first custom URL on profile". Erwan is suggesting you make helpful contributions to the Moz community and by doing so, rack up your Moz points. When you earn 200 or more points, Moz will remove the nofollow attribute from the link to the first custom URL in your profile. A nofollow link from Moz is a very valuable incoming link to have. Moz's root domain authority is 92 out of 100.

Erwan's suggestion that you ingest the link building guide from Backlinko is a also a good one. Here are a few other sources of good link building information - http://www.pinterest.com/beseenontop/linkbuilding/.

I took the survey and gave you my feedback. I also want you to know that I appreciate your asking and valuing our feedback and opinions. I also hope you summarize and share what you learn.

I'm with you Rose. The alt tag describes the image. If you want it to include your your keywords, assuming they're some combination of "Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration" (your page title tag content), you could alter it to say "noncustodial parent with his young son". You could do the same with the file name, include "noncustodial-parent-son".

Here are google's guidelines, as conveyed by Matt Cutts, head of Google's Web spam team and defacto SEO spokesperson.

You really should leave the page up with an explanation. How is it TAGFEE to take perks away without any prior notification or explanation until someone asks? I'm surprised. Not like you guys at all!

To reinforce what Dirk has stated, I'm sharing a similar question that was asked a month ago - "Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?" The question was answered by CleverPhD. I like how he talks about how Google interprets the change, impacts you might see in Google's Search Console, and what to do about it.

It's worth the read.

The missing ingredient is promotion.

I did a site command for your site and Google returned 54,100 results.

I then clicked on a couple of the results that caught my eye cause they contained the word "banner":

• www.yellowpages.com.lb/actions/redirectbanner/883
• www.yellowpages.com.lb/actions/redirectbanner/702

Both those pages immediately redirect you to another site.

It looks like you're indexing all images on the site. You should probably only index the page on which the images reside.

You're doing a ton of internal 302 redirects. Are all those needed? Why 302s? 302's don't pass search equity.

Your indexing might be getting cut short b/c Google is being channeled elsewhere or distracted indexing content it doesn't need to.

I love this post by Everett Sizemore from last year and refer to it often. It's a step-by-step how-to for auditing content. Chapter 8 talks about considerations when deciding whether to rewrite / remove / redirect / consolidate content. Give it a read and see if it helps clarify matters for you.

Evoe,

Your plan is a good one assuming: (1) you want searchers to see insurance website A vs insurance partner website B pages in search results; and (2) you're okay with Google Search Console consolidating all search metrics into the canonical URL in performance reports.

.

Hi David,

When you say "we've been 404'ing them for years", does that mean you've created a custom 404 page that explains the situation to site visitors or does it mean you've been letting them naturally error and return the appropriate 404 (page not found) error to Google? It makes a difference. If the pages truly no longer exist and there is no equivalent replacement, you should be letting them naturally error (return a 404 return code) so as not to mislead Google's robots and site visitors.

Have you looked at the value of those incoming links? They may be low value anyway. There may be more valuable things you could be doing with your time and budget.

To answer your specific questions:

_Q1) Is it a problem to have 100,000 URLs pointing to a primary with a rel=canonical tag? (Problem for Google?) _

Yes, if those pages (or valuable replacements) don't actually exist. You'd be wasting valuable crawl budget.  This looks like it might be especially true in your case given the size of your site. Check out this article. I think you might find it very helpful. It's an explanation of soft 404 errors and what you should do about them.

Q2) How long does it take a canonical duplicate page to become unique in the index again if the tag is removed? Will google recrawl it and add it back into the index? Do we need to use WMT to speed this process up?

If the canonical tag is changed or removed, Google will find and reindex it next time it crawls your site (assuming you don't run out of crawl budget). You don't need to use WMT unless you're impatient and want to try to speed the process up.

I'm not aware of a way to do that using the Moz toolset. Try SEMRush. You can plug in the URL of your competitors and see their top keywords.

Given you "can't say" how the old numbers were derived, you might try plugging your key phrases into Google trends to see if there's been an obvious diminishing of search volume over the past few years. That might help you figure out whether there's been less searches or whether your "old" numbers are from exact match searches or something else.

You said "I am trying to decide where to put my offsite SEO efforts". That starts with having high-quality content. EGOL's suggestion is an excellent one.

I'd also consider investing in some high-quality video content to complement and enrich the written. It could potentially appeal to a wider or different audience.

In deciding where to focus your efforts first, in addition to EGOL's screening suggestions above, I'd do some searching for things like "How to choose an office chair", "How to prevent light weight Dolly accidents" and look for venues with no or outdated content you could offer to help out by having them link to your own.

Hello / Bonjour.

It looks like you might have an awful lot of duplicate content (e.g. category pages, date archives) on the site. I'd try getting rid of that before deciding to switch domains.

A single page cannot be optimized for 130 keywords or keyword phrases.

Best practice is to aim for 1, at most 2, keyword phrases per page.

Think about it, if you want to rank in the top 10 on Google for a keyword phrase, best practice suggests you should include that phrase in the page URL, title tag, description, headers, body text, inbound links and so on. It just doesn't make sense to even try to include that many keywords or keyword phrases in all those places.

KempRuge suggests you change tactics and try to spread the wealth (so to speak) across a larger number of  different pages and/or posts. It's good advice.

Hi there CSobus,

According to Matt Cutts, "custom URL shorteners are essentially like any other redirect... and will pass page rank to the final destination".

The negative impact would be the same as with any other redirect, like when you set up a chain of redirects that dilutes your link equity.

Hi Juun,

You're not alone with this problem. The solution is to establish and implement a content marketing and link and citation building strategy around your two other main services. (It sounds like you've architected the site to partition the services in to different parts of the site already.)

If it were me, I wouldn't spend time updating just two citations. I'd focus my energy on determining the information wants and needs of the hotel and restaurant audiences and come up with a content and promotion strategy to satisfy those. Writing blog posts that speak to those needs and cross reference relevant and helpful internal pages of the site will help, as will making an effort to acquire inbound links from external sources. It's a lot of work, so the sooner you start the better.

Here's a very helpful, step-by-step guide for creating and promoting linkable assets from Search Engine Journal. Here an excellent post from the Moz blog on the same topic with lots of inspirational examples.

Although the best links are earned, it would also be well worth your while to research the best, most valuable link sources of your competitors and make an effort to acquire those. Here's a whiteboard Friday with tips and blog post with guidelines, tools and suggestions on that topic.

Hi Andy,

Assuming you mean rankings when you say visibility, having too many meta descriptions won't have any effect because Google doesn't take them into account when ranking web pages.

That said, I've found when there are multiple meta description tags on a page, Google tends to use the first one it encounters. When there are none, it selects when it deems to be relevant from the page and displays that.

Studies have shown that using your primary keyword phrase and being different or helpful in your meta description helps increase click-thru rates. Inclusion of your primary keyword phrase reinforces the relevance of the search result and makes the search result stand out (because search terms are highlighted in bold). Being different or helpful gives the searcher what he or she wants - the solution to a problem or to be entertained.

There are some pretty good resources right here on Moz Christopher:

• http://moz.com/blog/topic-modeling-semantic-connectivity-whiteboard-friday (whiteboard Friday)
• http://moz.com/blog/semantic-seo-questions (blog)
• http://moz.com/webinars/semantic-seo-for-the-people (webinar)
• http://www.slideshare.net/MatthewBrownPDX/strings-to-things-the-move-to-semantic-seo-mozcon-2013 (Mozcon slide presentation)

Don't know the "best" paid tool, but can give you some paid tool suggestions to check out if that helps:

• paid clicks on stumbleupon, twitter, reddit, and Facebook (depending on where you think your audience likes to hang out);
• Google retargeting;
• Outbrain;
• nrelate;
• LinkWithin; and
• Taboola.