Welcome to the Q&A Forum

NEVER go on whats in the SERPs. Get recommendations - so MOz is a good place to start.

Why not look for the really technical SEO posts on moz and then approach those companies? I can recommend Distilled

You could look at the http://moz.com/community/users users board and pick someone from London that has a ton of points - this indicates they have been helpful to the SEO community over a number of years. I'm at 21 and I am based in London. Marcus Miller is at 12 and he is based in Birmingham

There is also a MOZ recommended list http://moz.com/community/recommended

Stephen

have a german language page on the .co.uk?

You could also use IP redirection

S

A few years ago I did the worlds first MA in Social Media in Birmingham, UK. I know they went through a lot of effort to get something so new accepted and as the first batch we were really test subjects

http://www.bcu.ac.uk/courses/social-media You might get hold of Dave Harte if you want some input.

I generally do a 2 hour lecture on SEO to students of the University's media school each year - they do a lot of web based stuff and accept they need to have a marketing compenent

It should be a combination of all of the above, in a ratio that normal citations would give you - just like the Nike one is

There is no perfect or correct answer. Look at what natural looks like and model that

Stephen

Don't worry about what they are now, get the ones that make you money to Grade A asap

Stephen

I thought of recommending that Oleg, but often the people in a niche may also be ranking on the basis of spam, or may not yet have been caught.

If you have well known brands in a niche, then I think that is OK, otherwise I think the megabrands that have no need for linkbuilding are better signals to follow

Go to open site explorer and put in the worlds top brands Nike, Amazon etc

That is how Google will expect a natural backlink profile to be

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?page=1&site=www.nike.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0

Stephen

I do a lot of advertising across Bing, Google, Facebook and others so have anice view across platforms

Bing has the same quality traffic as Google but at a lower volume. I tend to copy across the campaigns that have significant volume and they work well. I suggest you try it with a few of your best campaigns

A word of warning though, the interface is some way behind Google's and I find it quite frustrating. The Bing guys are quite helpful on Twitter though ~~@~~BingAds

Stephen

Have a look at http://vanillaforums.com/ I quite like the way they add gamification and badges etc You can see it in action on Penny Arcade http://forums.penny-arcade.com/categories/artists-corner

S

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html

Location and language ->  www.example.com/se/en/

S

Nothing bad and turns good when people scrape your content (it gets scraped with the canonical to your page) or you make a mistake with your information architecture (as things tend to point to the correct place)

Well, if the answers are wildly off they would be taken to account by the other posters or the SEOmoz staff, and you can always drill further down into the problem once you get a reply

The biggest challenge on this forum is that the questions are very generic, leading to very generic answers. Be as specific as possible and you will get great advice

BTW Looking at my personal site would give you no indication of what I do, as I work in an Agency and my time is spent on client sites. Some great SEOs have pretty mediocre personal websites

remove from sitemap, noindex asap. he has no longtail from those pages, its not going to suddenly appear out of nowhere

An alternate view:

Specific comments like fixing spelling mistakes, get better anchor text or redirects, is doing more damage than good here

It leads to false hope that this will help rank for the term "web design" and that Kieran will rank for this if he "just tries hard enough"

If you have been here 3 months and think that trying to rank for "web design" is a good business move, then yes, let the SEOmoz contract lapse if the money is an important factor. Read the blog, read everything on this site in the last year

The problems you face are not analytics or SEO or anything OSE measures - its understanding how the web works, understanding how customers are going to react when they see your website.

Seeing your website, Id say your best bet is personal recommendations. Knock the site into shape to convert people you send their personally, and don't waste time or energy on SEO

S

There is no ratio. Put the links that your users need to navigate your site

Have you checked against (not provided)? That may well have swallowed a large chunk of branded

BTW, the big (not provided) switch was early March for the UK and it makes a heck of an impact on reporting

Other things to check:

have you stopped any marketing activities in other channels that would have driven brand traffic?

Are your segments correct? Double check, maybe someone changed whats in them. How are you handling (not provided) with respect to assigning brand or non brand?

Very unlikely: tracking code misfiring on your homepage i.e. affects brand count but not longtail

Stephen

I would say 301. Although theoretically it may be technically correct to use a 302, if you want the value of the link juice and you are not sure when you may get back to this site (if ever) a 301 seems a better bet

S

I wouldn't bother with nofollow, I would put all 3 on the same page & consolidate that way. If you wanted, you could leave your navigation as is, by just using anchors to get to specific parts of the page

I don't like to noindex or block the legal pages, as they are a signal for trust

Go to open site explorer and put in the worlds top brands Nike, Amazon etc

That is how Google will expect a natural backlink profile to be

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?page=1&site=www.nike.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0

Stephen

1. Not really a need to change location. Google is aware that sites are often hosted outside of their country, there are a lot of other stronger signals that he can easily give

I assume he has a .co.uk or a .com?

1. Set his location in webmaster tools to be UK
2. Make sure he has a UK address on the site - footers or contact us page etc
3. Set the lang in the html to en-gb
4. Make sure there is UK related content on the page

2. If those links are not showing up, they are likely from very weak domains that wouldn't help him even if they did show up. Go and get decent quality links!