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Hi Rick,

We really think what you're doing here is tremendous - thanks for sharing this with the community and letting us try to help out.

After taking a quick look at the terms you're targeting, and reading some of the suggestions here in the responses, I looked at your backlink profile - downloading the data from Open Site Explorer, you get a very quick picture of what your backlink profile looks like.

You have 149 external followed links pointing at your domain. The vast majority of the anchor text is your site's name or some form of it. Very few of the links actually point to your site using the keywords you mentioned you would like to target. That's why building an awesome page all about downs syndrome, with great information, will also help you, so that you can go out and try to acquire some links with targeted anchor text for your terms you want to rank for. I'm attaching a word cloud (created by wordle.net) which gives you a very clear picture of the relative breakdown of your backlink anchor text profile. You can barely make out the word syndrome, and it's very small compared to your brand name. Keyword rich anchor text sends strong signals to Google that your site is relevant and authoritative for the various terms you are targeting and that it should rank for what you are trying to target.

The obvious caveat is that building up your backlink profile with targeted anchor text should go hand in hand with improving the content on your site and providing great resources for people looking for info about downs syndrome, which you already said you and your wife are working on.

I wish you guys the best of luck!

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I would definitely take carparts.com over car-parts.com and I would definitely take the .com over a .net (however a .com does not automatically trump a .net for rankings). If someone with a .net has a better site, better service and better inbound marketing then they will outrank you.

However .com is the most commonly used tld and having that automatically gives you an advantage. If your car parts business becomes popular and is spreading via word of mouth, it is way more likely that people will search or link to you using a .com rather than a .net.

However don't be put off completely by hyphens, then can still work. car-parts.com is still potentially an ok domain name. I think when Rand refers to spammy domain names he is talking about 2 hyphens plus! Like www.cheap-car-parts-boston.com. Again, please remember that people are more likely to search for and link to a domain without the hyphen, another advantage. It is always annoying to tell people about the hyphen when discussing a domain or website, so try and avoid if possible.

Some good information already from Chad, but to answer your question directly, yes the amount of unique links (c-blocks) as well as the anchor text of those links could have a large impact on ranking positions.

Without knowing more about your site, the competitors and the phrases you want to rank for it is hard to know exactly what the issues could be, but other things to consider:

• On page SEO - Are your optimised properly for the terms you think you should rank for and how do you compare to the competition?
  http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

  Above and beyond the general checks the tool above will run, do you have 'great' content in place on-page to match the search queries you want to rank for?

• Penalties and Filters - 2012 was massive for Penguin and Panda, make sure you have not been over-linking or doing anything else Google doesn't like. It could be another reason why you are not doing so well for these terms.
  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

Good Luck!

You can make links unreadable using certain techniques, but hiding those links will probably do you more harm than good.

I would re-consider what you list. Maybe everything does not need to be listed from the main nav on every page? I know it seems useful letting everyone get to where they want to go from one click, but it is not always 100% needed and can sometimes actually scare people off!

On your site, take 'Workers Compensation' under 'Practice Areas' - you don't have to list all the different types of workers compensation there, it could be that this information is displayed once getting to the 'Workers Compensation' page - in fact, I see it is already.

This is obviously a business decision you need to make, but something to think about.

I do not have a definitive answer for you, just some thoughts.

In terms of SEO, having likes for your site and its individual pages probably makes more sense than fan page likes. Although how popular your FB page could tie into how popular Google thinks your brand is. In anycase, how much access Google has to FB is unknown and all these social signals are changing at a very fast pace, just recently Google stopped using Twitter in the same way and with the introduction of Google+ who knows what the future will hold.

Just to throw something else into the mix, Facebook shares is something else which I think is pretty important in all this. So that is potentially 3 things!

Some good reads, but be aware this stuff could have changed already:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/06/yes-virginia-facebook-is-seo-smx-advanced/

This is actually a best practice IMO. If that page for whatever reason is duplicated somewhere else (could happen a year down the line) then you automatically eliminate the issue of dupe content and are already providing a directive to Google on which page is the original and which page to count.

This is actually a good question and there is lots you can do, obviously the higher quality your ebook, the bigger the opportunity.

A few ideas:

1. Give it away for free, but make people share it (tweet it or share on FB) in order to gain access. This will provide you with social mentions and increased exposure which can also lead to links etc. Although to do this well you will need a good plan to seed it and get people talking and sharing intially (hopefully some strong 'gatekeepers').
   This was done successfully at clockworkpirate.com which now uses the service cloudflood.com
2. Offer it to worthwhile sites in your niche or closely related. Provide them with an embed code containing the ebook for download which also contains a link back to your site. Again, this will get you links and exposure as well as an opportunity to make relationships with good people within your industry.
3. Alternatively you could just host it on your site, and go out and tell all in your industry about it. Maybe email it to a few of the top sites telling them their users can download it from your site. If the ebook is good enough and you ask correctly, they will spread the word, link to it, share it etc.

If you already have connections in your industry you can probably just go off and start doing a lot of this stuff. If you don't, it maybe worthwhile holding off a little with the real 'high quality ebook' and go out and build some industry relationships. Get in forums, leave comments on blogs, get on twitter or FB groups and engage and interact, help people out etc.. then go and do the above as you will have the right connections to help you make this a success.

My tools are showing almost 200 links on the page 193 internal and 6 followed external links. It isn't just about 'visible' links to users, but how many links are listed in the code. The majority of your links are from the drop down menus in the main navigation.

Hey Rick,

You should add this tag to your header in the html -

There is more info about this here -

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

They write: og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. We support PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. You may include multiple og:image tags to associate multiple images with your page.

Hope this helps - let me know if you have issues with implementation

Solid advice from Ryan from an on-site (internal linking) perspective.

In terms of off-site (link building) practices this is not a simple question and probably differs per industry and SERP. You should probably go off and do some competitor analysis. View the top 10 results for the keyword you are concerned about and run each result through OSE. Look through the 'anchor text distribution' tab for each result and see how often they use that particular anchor text, how much branded anchor text they use and other keyword variations. This should give you a good idea as to what your link landscape looks like in terms of anchor text usage.

A few things I would think about:

• You already mention using 'branded' anchor text - Do this and do it often. Even mix it with your target keyword anchor text i.e. Keyword + by Brand Name or Keyword + from Brand Name. But definitely be sure to get lots of links with just your brand name or url.
• In my opinion, if you view the anchor text distribution tab in OSE for your site and Branded Anchor Text tops the list then you are in a safe postion. If you open that tab up and all you see is a list of exact match anchor text for money keyterms then you are probably at risk. Be aware that bigger more established brands can get away with more.

Is it possible for a site to be delisted for having to many links from the same keyword ?
Yes, you can definitely receive a penalty or filter via over-opitmization of anchor text and this is something very easy for search engines to spot. So be sure to vary your anchor text and keep it looking natural.

The first answer above should be stage 1 for you. Install Google Analytics and view which keywords are bringing traffic to you site.

However you question sounds like it is geared towards something different, like knowing which keywords clients are using for search before attempting to rank for that term. This is completely legitimate, after all why would you spends lots of time, effort and maybe $ on ranking for keywords that are not searched by the right people and do not convert!?

There is no tool out there that will gaurantee whether your specific user base is searching for a specific keyword or not or which keywords will convert users into paying customers. It sounds like you need to do some proper keyword research. I am not going to write that all out here, but I remember a good piece being here on SEOmoz that maybe worth reading (i think article 2 of 8 is about keyword research, but worth reading all parts):

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-8step-seo-strategy-step-1-define-your-target-audience-and-their-needs

Also always remember, you should know your business better than anyone else. If you don't think your clients will be searching for that kind of term then they are probably not.You maybe drawn to that term because of the large search volume being displayed to you. Be aware that depending on your niche, just sticking that large volume keyword in your title tag does not mean you will rank for it (it may require a lot of additional effort).

However there are ways of checking before optimising..

1. Do some research in your specific niche - ask past or active clients what they would search for! Nothing better than seeing what comes direct from the horses mouth! (you can then expand on their answers via further keyword research)

2. Test keywords via adwords or other ppc options. If you have the budget this can be worthwhile as you can get instant traffic for the trial keyword without having to waste time, effort or money on optimising your website for it.

Hi Dan,

I would definitely recommend doing this. Forget SEO for second, it is great for users! If you are talking about a certain producer on the homepage and you have a full page deeper in your site about that producer then providing your users with a direct link to that makes perfect sense.

For sure, you should listen to some of the advise given above. Vary up your anchor text when linking to that page from different pages or sections of the site, but most importantly keep it natural and provide your users with the best experience possible.

I believe you can find a number of articles here on SEOmoz explaining tests run on how Google only counts the first anchor text it crawls to each specific URL. So if you homepage navigation is crawled first and features anchor text A, then the anchor you use further down you page does not really matter. Make it good for users. Here is an article by Rand from 2008 although I am sure there are newer ones: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts

I would seriously advise staying away from ALL services like this. Some advanced SEOs still use some of this stuff but they know what to pick, where to place it, when to do it and of course, the consequences.

Some SEOs may argue that things like link wheels still work (in fact I know they do) but do not go near the ones that are offered in packages or networks like this. If you want to do a link wheel, read up about them, learn how to do it and go and make a manual one that is unique and specific to what you are trying to achieve. These networks leave footprints and Google is probably all over this already.

If you don't want to do clean, creative link building through good content then at least do these shadier link building practices manually. It's the best advise I can give you.

Making solid SEO changes will only have a positive impact in the long run. However there is no magic i'm afraid, and like everything there is a ying and a yang and unfortunately you may see a dip in rankings whilst Google reconfigures itself based on your changes. If your changes are done correctly this should not take too long though.

I would have to have to clean up a bunch of errors, so is the best way to simply do 301 redirects on the old pages?
This really depends on what the errors are?

A while back I would have just told you to use an article spinner where you can control the % of change (something like Content Boss or The Best Spinner) but with the Panda update I would seriously question their use and also question the need to produce around 100 similar articles. Can I ask what these articles are for or where they would be posted? There is a good chance that you would do far better using your time to create one amazing piece of content than 100 rubbish pieces.

No, as Ryan initially said, Google will only count the first anchor text to a page that it reads in the code of your page. If you link to that page from your main navigation their is a good chance Google will use that, however if you don't link to that page in your nav, then it would probably count the first link within your blog post/article.

This is old, but covers the basics:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts

It definitely sounds like you should consider using HREFLANG as Matt already suggested. This can done via a sitemap and there is a nice tool from The Media Flow to help you with it:

http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/

Based on your example above (using sub-folders for different countries) you should also consider the following if you are not doing it already:

1. Setting Geo-Location correctly in Google Web Master Tools for each country specific sub-folder.
   http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2008/04/where-in-world-is-your-site.html

2. Try and make your content unique and relevant for the different locations and those users. I understand you may have the same products available for these different markets, but if possible make sure country related elements are unique £ / $ etc. Shipping information might be different for example.

   Wherever possible try and make it unique whilst trying to deliver the best experience for users from that country.

Good luck!

This is definitely something that can be pulled off. The answer above correctly states that contacting the right person is going to give you the most chance of making this happen, as well as making it as easy as possible for them to do it.

However, a few things that could improve your chances:

• Pick up the phone, if you can speak to the right person this is better than email.
• If email, make sure your email is super polite and massages their ego. If emailing the webmaster, talk about how you like their site and mention something specific (a new article that you read recently and why it was interesting), no need for this to be long, but show you like and use their site and are not just emailing for a link never to return. If speaking with the article writer, talk about some of their other articles etc.
• State the benefits of making this link active... why should they do it? I presume your site is of value (thus the mention) so say that, say how you believe this article is still of value and how a link to your site would provide their users with a better experience etc.

Anchor text using those variations makes perfect sense.

If you had a page targeting each of those terms I would doubt the quality and need for each of those pages from a user perspective + you would need a lot of link equity to push them all. Combining them makes for a more powerful kick a$$ page which has more anchor text diversity and looks more natural.