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

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

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

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

• link to related content

• have an easy to navigate website

• engage the user by letting him comment

...

Hope that helps!

I have taken a quick look at your website.

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

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

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

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

http://www.woorank.com/

Hope that helps!

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

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

Hope that's clear enough

In AdWords, you get a sens of the competition between advertisers willing to pay for clics on ads for this keywords whereas in SEOMoz, you get an evaluation of how competitive it would be to try and rank organically (without paying) for that keyword.

Hope that helps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope that helps

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

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

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

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

• put it in bold once or twice

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

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

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

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

• help get social signals to improve your SEO efforts indirectly

Hope that helps.

The easy answer is: try removing the links and see what happens, if nothing changes, put them back up!

The more pro approach would be to try and understand what makes a spammy link in google's algo eyes. Take a look at this very nice article:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-types-of-link-spam-to-avoid

Hope that helps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it is not worth the effort

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

Best of luck!

As long as you are doing well in the serps and you really don't have other options, I don't see why you would change anything just to please others in an upcoming, uncertain... outreach campaign

You could change the titre temporarily (for a few days) just long enough to do your outreach, but I am not fond of changes when it comes to Google...

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

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

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

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

That's all I can think of.

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

Google luck!

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

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

Hope I am being clear enough

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

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

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

Hope that helps!

If you can get the buyer to put redirects in place, here are your three options:

1. Redirect ANYTHING to the new domain's homepage: olddom.com/* => newdom.com

This is very easy to do technically, can even be done in the domain registrar's control panel. However, that's a bad option from an SEO point of view as you would be redirection anything (pages, contact info, product...) to your a single page, your homepage.

Should be used as a last option.

2. Redirect pages individually. You would end up with an .htaccess like that (I am assuming you didn't change anything to the site's structure):

redirect 301 /dir1/page32.php http://www.newdom.com/dir1/page32.php

redirect 301 /dir1/page33.php http://www.newdom.com/dir1/page33.php

redirect 301 /dir1/page34.php http://www.newdom.com/dir1/page34.php

...

This option is obviously time consuming but will give you the most control and the best SEO results as you will direct every single page (old one) to the new one (updated URL) passing its link juice and everything.

3. A generic redirect that will automatically redirect each and every page to its corresponding one on the new domain:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^oldsite.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is very similar to option 2 but it is not as time consuming.

Hope that helps.