Welcome to the Q&A Forum

FIrst off, let me answer your most burning question- is there an easier way to get high quality links without hours of work on the backend? No.  A handful of directories (business, web, local) are still worthwhile to pay/submit to, but thats where the easy part stops.

I am not familiar with linkmarket, but i did take a look at thier website- doesnt look fantastic. Sounds like too much reciprocal linking going on.  May be useful for a handful of links, but i wouldnt use that as your primary link building source.

Although it takes hours on your own, here is a good way to organize your effort to make it a little less sporadic:

1. Get an entire potential link list together before you begin.  I create a spreadsheet for each site, and then start hitting a mixture of tools; SEOmoz link finding tools, i use a product called Web CEO that has an ok link/partner finding tool that spits out a long list of potential websites to get links from.  Then you manually start searching, I really liked this link finding parameter post on Search Engine Land post that gives some good search operators to use.  Take a bunch of these combined tools with your own searching, and compile the list together in excel.  Hopefully you get at least a couple hundred options.
2. Craft a link request email template- but MAKE SURE YOU CUSTOMIZE/PERSONALIZE it!! Ask for specific pages to get a link from, know the website, make sure you sound like a real person.
3. Dedicate 1 afternoon a week (a few hours at least) to start going down your list.  Without dedicating a specific time, it wont happen.  I know from experience.
4. Track contacts/responses.  In your excel sheet, track the date that you requested a link, track any response, and finally the date you got a link.
5. Be willing to reciprocate.  Its only fair to provide a link back.  Not as useful, but you should take them all.
6. Participate in online communities.  Even when some places "no follow" links (blogs, forums, news sites) I have found that those links still play into your recognized "domain authority" in an intagable way.  Dont ignore those.

Hope that gives you a start!

1. File names- always use the hyphen.

2. Alt Text - use spaces and normal word structure.  Ryan is correct on the technical intent behind the alt tag, but it can also be a good SEO tool, and you should treat those as exact phrase keywords.  So nobody is searching for "city-bikes", they are searching for "city bikes".  The alt tag should be what the user will put into google.

Ahh... the ultimate IA question that still doesnt have a clear anwer from the search engines.  A ton of talk about this at the recent SMX Advanced at Seattle (as is with almost every one).  I will try and summarize the common sentiment that i gathered from other pros.  I will not claim that this is the correct way, but for now this is what i heard a bunch of people agree on:

1. No index, follow the pagination links for all except page 1
2. Do not block/hand it with robots.txt (in your case, you realyl cant since you have no identifying parameters in your url)
3. If you had paginated parameters in the url you can also manage those in the Google & Bing  WMT by telling the SE to ignore those certain parameters.
4. Canonical to page 1 was a strategy that some retailers were using, and other want to try.  Google reps tried to say this is not the way to do it, but others claim success from it.
5. If you have a "View All" link that would display all the products in a longer form on a single page, canonical to that page (if its reasonable)

Notes: Depending on how your results/pages are generated, you will need to remember that they probably arent passing "juice".  Any dynamic content is usually not "flow through" links from an SEO perspective (or even crawled sometimes).

The better approach to not orphaning your product pages is finding ways to link to them from other sources besides the results pages.  For larger sites, its a hassle, buts thats a challenge we all face    Here are some SEO tips for attacking the "orphan" issue:

1. If you have product feeds, create a "deal" or "price change" feed.  Create a twitter account that people can sign up for to follow these new deals or price changes on products.  Push in your feed into tweets, and these will link to your product page, hence creating an in-link for search engines to follow.
2. Can do the same with blogs or facebook, but not on a mass scale.  Something a bit more useful for users like "top 10 deals of the week) and link to 10 products, or "Favorites for gifts" or something. over time, you can keep track of which product you recommend, and make sure you eventually hit all your products.  Again, the point is creating at least 1 inbound link for search engines to follow.
3. Create a static internal "product index page" (this is not for your sitemap page FYI) where either by category or some other structure, you make a static link to every product page you have on the site.  Developers can have these links dynamically updated/inserted with some extra effort which will avoid manually needing to be updated.
4. Create a xml sitemap index.  Instead of everything being clumped into 1 xml sitemap for your site, try creating a sitemap index and with your product pages in their own sitemap.  This may help with indexing those pages.

Hope that helps?  Anyone else want to chime in?

The best option for sure is to house everything in one single domain.  Why not have it be "baseball.com/newbaseballproduct"?  Dont go subdomain if you dont need to- and dont go new url if you dont need to either.  Build your domain authority by maintaining everything withing a good IA through your base domain.

These redirect type of links are for tracking purposes on the side of the referring website- which are usually systematically generated by the CMS platforms they have.

In short, no, these are not the high value direct SEO links that you are looking for.  However, search engines are able to follow these links and also follow the redirect to the website (adventuretreks.com in this case), but at that point is of little SEO value and gets tracked as a referral type of link.

If you are paying for these listings (which i assume you would be to a degree) you would need to evaluate the value of that link based on the traffic it would send, and not the SEO value it gives you.

SEOmoz has a decent one.  Its a bit out of date, but its worth going through:  http://www.seomoz.org/directories

There are some specific technology ones in there, plus most of them will have that category.

You wont want to try and target both.  That kind of strategy doesnt really work anymore. The Google keyword tool wont really give you an accurate count with plural vs. non plural (same with misspellings).  They essentially tell the community that they are able to interpret these kinds of things and make adjustments accordingly.

The one thing you could do is add some internal links within your site with the plural keywords to help send the signal to google, but other than that I wouldn't do much.  Trying to get "external anchor link text" for the plural and strategies like that just wont get you far anymore, and could do more harm than good.

Robert-

The million dollar question Here is what has worked the best in my opinion/experience:

• Poaching via linkedin- find people with your requirements in descriptions, browse their experience and shoot them direct emails to try to lure them away (actually how i got one of my positions, i was hit up on linkedin)
• Networking groups locally- At least here in Utah there are like 50 different little networking groups- social marketing, online marketing, AMA, women's councils, tech councils, etc... I have also found that those individuals that are active in attending these types of groups are always looking for opportunities, whether they say so or not.

Hope that helps.

They have become far less valuable (almost none now) for passing PR, but for internal linking its still a little valuable, especially if there arent very many.  But for the most part footers are no longer valuable - Google cracked down on that a while ago.

Not sure why you want to use the canonical tag in this instance.  If http://www.abc.com/spain/Malaga.html is truly a duplicate or replicated page of the new /spain page, then I guess you could do it.   But it sounds to me like you are re-structuring your urls to be more friendly, and if that is the case you will want to permanently 301 redirect the old urls to the new SEO friendly one.  That will pass on the SEO juice in a more effective way then canonical a bunch of the old pages that you dont want anyway.

Is that the case?  It kind of depends on the content of each of the pages, and how that content interacts with the other pages.  Typically canonical is used for paginated instances or duplicated content that is handle in a different matter, not redirecting juice from old urls/pages to new ones.

Set your radius on your local to a wider area when possible, but Google is really making this type of situation difficult because technically he doesn't have a "physical presence" in all of these places.  I would say that you go ahead and create content around these seperate locations, but make sure the content is unique and good.  Don't simply copy the same content and swap out "city1" with  "City2" and call it good.  Google has specifically targeted those type of things and something they do not want in search results.  But having great content and information for each of those locations is an excellent idea.

1. One idea would be to house all of that content under a "service areas" type of page on the site.  Then you list each area/town/city that he provides service in, with deeper links and content to each of those areas with unique content.  Then you make sure to utilize breadcrumbs in the navigation with really good url structure i.e. www.service.com/plumbing/city1 and you could start to have the specialty skills as the topical/category high level pages, and then service areas within each specialty nested underneath.  (hope that makes sense).

Just some ideas that have worked on my end with local.  For sure check out he GetListed stuff and utilize those services as much as possible.

I agree with Gabriel.  Good for both reasons, especially search engines.  They will read those characters much better.  Example? Just look at the url for this forum post.

As Irving said, you will need to test and see if how your audience/demographic responds.   I will say as a general practice people in the picture does a lot better than just product pictures.  I have tested this on a few websites and always had a good uplift in both conversion and CTR from the main call to action with good pictures of people.  You just have to make sure you choose the right type of "people" for your picture.

Not sure what you mean by "always possible"?  If you are just talking about tagging reviews, then the best options is always hreview.  Thats your best shot at getting your review snippets in search results.

Remember that you also have the new schema.org formats that you can use for product/services as well.  I would get both of those going, and you would be in pretty good shape.

Russ is right on.  you need to ping.  I would also do a bit of marketing to get the blog seen in the blogosphere:

1. Manually submit your blog to google blog search.  http://blogsearch.google.com/ping.  Also submit to technorati and other blog directories.

2. Make sure you have an RSS or Atom feed service.

3. Get on a couple of blog rolls.  This doesn have to be "high PR" type of link building, just some incoming links to help google index and identify your blog.

4. Blog Sitemap to Webmaster Tools.  This will also assist in the process.

Go to MarketingExperiments.com.  They are the sister company/research arm of Marketing Sherpa.  I have been in the industry for a long time and they are the best conversion/landing page optimization firm around.

You can browse through their library of webinars (100's of them) where they present case studies, tests and results every month from random conversion optimization projects.  You can learn a ton by watching their webinars.

I also think it needs to be more like the first example.  The SE are trying to move towards a more natural language recognition, and i would write in that manner.  Remember too that you can utilize punctuation to split keywords up.  For example:

"Many buyers prefer plastic widgets or paper widgets. Steel and brass widget are increasingly popular..."  This would still hit all the keywords without seeming too spammy.  Notice that the period here grammatically give a break to your content, but google will see the "widgets. Steel" together sometime, ignore the period and recognize it as "widgets steel", and then interpret that as the same as "steel widgets".

Just another small copy writing trick.

I second all the comments below.  That should give you enough professional consensus in this arena to head in the right direction.   Redirect with teh keywords, and this will have the best long-term results.

As for Google parsing keywords out of urls or anything else...  You will need to remember that for the most part google ignores special characters and parameters in both content and urls.  It doesnt matter if the url is in a link or the actual url bar up top, google will treat it the same.  Google knows its a url string, and applies its "url parsing logic" to it.  So it only makes sense that a full url link would be parsed, just the same way your website url is parsed because it includes the keywords.   Its the same logic.

Agree with Bill.  The link is still valuable.  Google has said (warned) over the last year or so that they are looking hard at link profiles, anchor text and other things to indicate link quality.  I think they are trying to really dig down and get a "natural link profile" together for websites.  A natural profile will have a good variety of keywords, brand name, website domain name and other stuff (like "click here").

The true value there is the domain authority that cosmopolitan is passing through to you.  Dont be too concerned with the anchor text.

Have you also entered params/strings into GWMT to help with the url handling?  I think it would be best to utilizing on-site tagging as well as WMT to make sure you have everything correct.

Canonical tags should do the trick though.  I am not sure that moz takes into account the tagging, and may just see the duplicate entries.  My errors in moz usually seem pretty high sometimes, so I dont think that reflects reality.  The Microsoft Toolkit will essentially be the same thing, but really based on IIS.  Microsoft toolkit may be a bit more accurate, but realize that ultimately its what the search engines see, not what you have in the code or on the server per se.  Sometimes search engines miss certain tags or cues or dont fully follow server settings, etc.. WMT should be your ultimate source for errors and crawling, and I would think the microsoft tool would be next most valuable followed by moz.

You are correct in using a more specific match type other than broad. At an exact match level, your time would be best spent on the After Effects term.

However, with something like "Photoshop Courses" i could see a lot of phrase match type of variants, like "free photoshop courses" "photoshop courses online" and a whole myraid of those type of terms that would be relevant to target for you.  So maybe take it up to a phrase match level and make a  decision based on that.

Do you really want each one to rank or get indexed separately?  In this case it would be good to have a "view all" page that becomes your main page of focus, and then noindex follow the rest of the pages.  I would also use WMT to tell good that the urls of the extra pages are "paginated" and they will treat them accordingly.  Then you dont really have to worry about the duplicated title tags.

Dont really have any context as to the timeline of this, and the other lines in the graph.  Just by looking at the green lines though, it looks like normal ranking fluctuations.  1-2 spots randomly here and there arent that big of a deal.  Sometimes its actually a good sign.  I have seen in the past that when the fluctuations start happening, Google is trying to find out where you will land in the mix again.

With some good link building, new and fresh content, you should be able to get back within a couple months.  But you should do something.... if you dont change anything, dont expect Google to change anything either

Have you verified the impressions served and average position via your Webmaster Tools account?  That would be the most reliable source.  You can see your own organic CTR there for those keyterms, and if its a main keyword, should trigger.

I would say Google either over estimated the search volume (which they do all the time with their stupid tool), or you have a really poor CTR even though you show up high in SERPs.

There isnt a perfect ratio, but for larger sites it is very important to get a large number of backlinks to internal pages.  It helps with the overall "Domain Authority".  If your site is structured well, then the "seo sculpting" internally will help boost the homepage.  You should make sure to utilize internal links back to the homepage or important high-level pages.

For instance, lets say you have 10 backlinks.  If they all go to your homepage, your homepage could have a nice SEO value with a pagerank of 5.  But your interior pages dont have much pagerank or seo value, and therefor the rest of your site doesnt get ranked well.

In contrast, lets say 8 out of the 10 links go to internal pages, and those internal pages all have a small pagerank, and those pages all link back to your homepage with important keywords, it will pass a bunch of that seo value up to your homepage at the same time of increasing the value of your internal pages.  Its a better way to get your whole site ranking, rather than just homepage.

nice tool Luke.  I have never seen that one before.  Takes the whole search query finding one step further.

Welcome to the tough world of link building.  Here are some specific insights from my end:

1. I typically see about 1 response to every 15 - 20 requests.  If its a straight-up one way link request, its much worse.  More like 1 response in 50 requests.

2.  For blogging specifically, I have seen success in two ways: blog rolls and sponsored content.  Social/blogs are a bit different than websites.  Interlinking is viewed a little better, so I love to include the other blog first in my own "blog roll", then reach out to them, let them know "you added them to your blog, you like what they have and are following them.  Would they include your blog too on their roll".  then throw out a useful comment or two on their blog, and usually the combination of those two things gets you a link.

I will also sometime ask relevant blogs to "sponsor a post" for them.  Basically, write a nice article or post, and pay them $50 to post it on their site. You just say you want to get the word out to "their audience", and $50 is not bad for little effort on their end.  Of course your link is in the post

hope that helps.

What time frame are you talking here?

Edit:  I manage about 25 different sites, and I have seen a large fluctuation (increase for the most part) since April/May.I have seen upwards of 50%.  Most of my flucuation i think was due do some good site/url structure and SEO work i did a while ago, and i gather that panda & google have liked some of the changes (about freakin time).  It has not been due to an increased content.

Its not a bad idea in the robots.txt, but unless you are 100% confidant that you wont block something that you really want, i would consider just handling unwanted parameters and pages through the new Google Webmaster url handling toolset.   that way you have more control over which ones do and dont get blocked.

I am starting a Google doc today, and will start populating directory links with information.  Anyone that wants to help put the new list together, shoot me a personal message from my profile here and i will share the doc with you!

I will probably start a new Q&A post specifically for this so we can collaborate and have a dedicated section- so keep your eyes out and join the discussion.

For those of us that operate business in other areas that we technically dont have an "address" in... are there any creative ideas/ways anyone has run across in securing a physical address that you can use for local listing?

I have already tried the virtual office type of companies, and their inventory is limited to major metropolitan areas.

Should have been more clear- usually for straight link building its 1 successful link response in 50 requests.  For bloggers its much better, usually about 1 successul link response in every 15 - 20 requests.

Another great secret for link building on regular websites (sometimes blogs as well) is to pay for a "text ad" on their site if i see that they have stuff like that on their site already.  They will come back with some sort of advertising rate (should be pretty cheap for small websites) and you should agree to "try it out".  Pay the advertising rate, they put your link up, and half the time they forget about renewing.  The other half try to renew, and usually at that point i tell them that they arent sending me enough traffic to justify paying an advertising rate, but i will give them $100 to just leave my link up on their site.  Works well.

You would treat your sub category page the same as any other content page in this case.  SO with schema you would combine a couple of their example schemas.  I havent done it yet for sub-categories, but i was planning on using elements from both:

http://schema.org/SearchResultsPage  and http://schema.org/CollectionPage

The nice part about schema it that you dont need to lock yourself into one of their pre-defined categories, moreso than it is the combination of tags together that interpret the page.

Technically this just creates a link farm, of which the search engines can easily draw the connections.  They know that you, linking to them, and them linking to these other sites are all connected.  Give them 6 months and they will have all the lines drawn between your dots

Not the best long term strategy.... but I also know that this still works in the real world (so I've heard.....:)  Short term you can get some valuable link juice there, and will probably see some benefits.  But know that you could get smacked down one day.

Miriam-

I think you are assuming that I want to game the system, which is not the case.  There are plenty of scenarios where securing a local address in a partnership with someone would be a great idea.  i liked your post by the way, but in my case it actually strengthens the purpose:

I will have a local listing that does not accept customers at the location- hide the address and partner with a trusted source in areas that I do service.  This is a perfectly legit plan, but need help executing.

Yes, the best way is to handle via webmaster tools, and not try to handle via code on the sites.  In your Google webmaster tools account, go to "Site Cinfiguration" and "URL Parameters".  It will show you a handful of dynamic urls it has detected, how it is handling them currently.  Then you can manually add a dynamic parameter that exists on your site and tell google how to handle it.  They have a bunch of new options/features with this tool that makes it really useful now.

Domain authority can have a big influence on page authority.  Its not a direct correlation, because page authority depends on a lot of different inputs on a page level (internal links, external links, information architecture, perceived value).  But just because a site have good DA doesn't mean that all internal pages get a nice PA.

Depending on the value of those three backlinks, three could be all you need to boost a PA.

Good question.  You are in a unique position of starting from scratch and expanding, but the SEO and branding principles would remain the same in my opinion:

1. Do not 301 or rel=canonical anything.  Your homepage is your brand identity not only to consumers but to search engines as well. If you start doing funky things like redirects or other markup to "point" google in a direction to maintain some sort of rankings, you will regret it moving forward as your company grows.  Its harder to go back and fix those type of permanent decisions.
2. Don't worry about the homepage rankings for product 1 vs. product page.  Just make sure your site is flat enough that your main product pages live off of the homepage/root from and information architecture standpoint, the homepage will carry enough authority to carry the product 1 page and maintain its rankings. Google is smart enough now that putting that product one level deep will not change much.  Internally link to it properly, mark it up, utilize breadcrumbs and eventually the homepage ranking for those specific keywords will move over to the product page and your rankings shouldn't see a dip.  I have done this a handful of times without negative consequences.

The sooner you move it, the better and let it start sitting with the search engines.  You will be fine.

These sites are good for a quick scan of the contextual formatting of a website, but not for really telling how Google (or any specific search engine) sees your site. That specific one you linked to is horrible.

Google does see title, H1, other headers, meta description and most elements of your site.  A more accurate way to see how google sees your site would be to:

1. See how the page looks in the index.  Type  "site:myspecificurl.com" into google for the page you want to see and google will just return the results of what it has in its index.  That is how google sees your site. If your site/pages are not in the index, get them in (#2 below).
2. Verify through Google Webmaster Tools.  In the webmaster tools you can see what pages of your site are being indexed/crawled through google, and you can also request specific pages to be crawled again if you need.  This combined with an xml sitemap will usually get pages indexed pretty quick, and then you can verify with the same methodology as i mentioned above.
3. Use the SEOmoz pro toolset here and set up a campaign and the tool will tell you if you are missing any title tags or other important on-page elements.  the seomoz "bot" crawls similar to google, so that should give you a feel for how it works.

I agree that is is a great opportunity.  A directory of sorts would be a great resource to have.  Many professional industries have their own directories (not just a general web directory).  Then you can solicit others to create listings, etc..

Linkscape and the Juicy Link Finder.  I actually wish that some of these tools were combined, since JuicyLink Finder, Linkscape and Competitive Link Finder tools are all similar in nature.  I guess i just really wish someone would put all these tools into one single place so i could find and analyze all from one UI.

I think you may be getting xml sitemaps confused with sitemap pages.  Your xml sitemap should live at /sitemap.xml as Alan pointed out.   The seomoz and other sites that have a /sitemap page is for different purposes.  Its not your xml file, its a "topical guide" to your website and all the major sections of your site.

Remember that you can also create a xml sitemap index if you need to have different sitemaps (video, news, content) that houses all the different xml sitemaps underneath it.

Brent is right on the "directly not passing juice".  however, I think that Google is starting to look at link profiles in a holistic sense now, and having a good mix of nofollow links helps keep a profile natural looking, and I would argue that they do take it into account.

Dont go out and grab tons of them, but for sure sprinkle them in as part of your effort.

Can you redirect those pages to some relevant category pages on the site?  The 301 may help in this situation.   Ideally you need to find out where the internal links are a eliminate them.

The 4xx errors arent the worst, and those pages should get de-indexed eventually.  Also make sure the xml sitemap it updated with the proper urls and those old ones arent in there anymore.

lol.  Hey Derek!

Ya, I would assume that page ranks well since its a single url and doesnt change based on the ajax/java functionality.  Getting into multiple urls in search results based on categories, filters and groupings gets real hairy real fast.  I would recommend thinking through this before you do it.  Google will start to index all the page variations (even with canonicalization in place) and then you start getting duplicate content, or unwanted indexed pages.

i would still use the "view all" or make sure that you have a good internal linking structure along with the canonical tagging to get the information architecture pointing to the right spots still.

Hit me up at our next event and lets chat a bit about it.

I second this opinion.  folders are the best way to go here.

Joe is right.  Its a volume/popularity game at that point.  If its a hot topic, with lots of different views going on, Youtube and Google will do different things with the content.  I have also noticed that these videos will get on the first 3 results in google (they get promoted above other content).

All you can do (as far as I know) is set up your own custom page on youtube.

Yep. Depends on exactly when you set up your campaigns.  You will get an email when your site has been crawled by the seomoz bot.  Then shortly after that you will get a ranking update email.

You cant control the crawl rate.