jasondexter

Shacklton PR sent a 25k diamond into the sky and received 100+ editorial links for their client. Thats pretty innovative. But I presume you mean whats the best way to grab sneaky links? Well, I have list of editors on websites that I can pay a £200 to for a link. If it's quality, it'll cost. Whether thats in PR time, content production of placements.

I've not read the article but love this debate. I know, and have worked with, some absolutely appalling designers where bespoke work has absolutely ravaged any results of hope to get. Like wise, anyone who has work with a beautifully crafted design and developed site will know the results as astronomical. Themes have their place, and they work. Local marketing/SEO/strategy doesn't need something bespoke, but it helps. Will a 50 quid theme generate better results or gain a better ROI then a 3k website? Does their break even come quicker? I see a lot of designers do something bespoke, charge a fortune and its toss. The danger being an egotistical designer/developer. I'd better read that article now!

1) Both is fine. I assume both pages are on G+? Even so, thats fine. 2) Don't remove any markup structure at all from any website. Just because Google has removed the images and any associated rich snippet from the SERPs, it doesn't mean they have removed authorship completely. To be honest, you should be using as much structured data as possible, that includes highlighting the authors, contributors and publishers of a website. If your clients were posting their for just SEO benefit, then they should just stop (I know you don't say they do, I just wanted to point that out). Likewise with social media channels in general. However, I strongly suggest a social campaign that focuses on each individual social network. G+ is an extremely powerful community and active community beyond US-based SEOs. Even beyond that, there is nothing wrong with community building across seas. but I suspect they were just posting for postings sake, instead of using the network to their full advantage, as many clients do.

You have 5 referring domains, 4 of which are sending you nofollow links. The problem is that SEO isn't just an overnight activity, nor is ranking something you can just expect to happen. Why don't you change the content on http://www.air2b.com/destinations/location/envia-golf-spain to something thats targeting a keyword? Maybe something like Envia Golf Airport Transfer, then add a ton of awesome content. Do this for all your other landing pages, too. Reach out to holiday rental websites and ask if you can be featured as a supplier/provider of airport transfer services. Maybe get a little website widget, where third party websites could easily add a quick quote calculator, that has a branded-anchor link back to your website. You could some awesome links here. Your website is well designed and certainly user friendly, you just need to work with other companies to promote it.

It's a classic squeeze and optin page, more akin to MLM than SEO and certainly something your client wants to avoid. Whilst I agree he should be doing landing pages, this approach is more offputting than anything.

I want to point out that I'm not saying they're right to guarantee etc, they can't, but an SEO agency has the knowledge and ability to atleast drive more traffic to your website targeting different keywords. There's no promises that can be made and the guarantees I made were only on websites I'm sure I could rank. Many verticals need just a couple of links

An SEO company cannot guarentee even a listing for several reasons, Firstly there is no guarantee that the site would be listed on that search engine in the first place, algorithms can change at any time. You're right, they can. But I'd be a pretty **** SEO if I couldn't at least analysis a website and determine what can be done. If I can't spot website that wouldn't be indexed, then I'd be out of a job. Second, how can you be sure that the site, for whatever reason has not already be banned and the owner unaware. Again, I'd be wank at my job if I couldn't spot a penalised website. It's not difficult; check they're indexed. If they are, check using branded keywords and submit a poor recon request to see if there has been a manual penalty (clients might delete the message or given me restricted access). then pattern map their traffic and visibility to key update dates and determine where and when drops in traffic happened. It's easy to spot a "banned" website. Lastly, although you can choose keywords that you want to use, there is always that chance that term could be suddenly inundated with other sites better established than the one you are working on. It wouldn't happen. I use a some powerful bits of kit that monitor verticals and have been able to show me updates prior to them happening (fluctuations that you can't monitor unless you track 100+websites). Add in the fact that you need 10 websites to completely spam the crap out the market, it wouldn't happen. I know it's highly unlikely, but what happens to your guarantee should google for example shut down? A guarantee unless backed up by something within your control is worthless I had various clauses that would ensure things like that just weren't my fault. There are no guarantees, unless you own the search engine and you control it. This is why I don't provide that sort of promise anymore. But I have the knowledge and I know the holes and the flaws in the search engine that have allowed me to repeatedly rank websites across different verticals. I've seen "whitehat" websites plummet due to changes and I've had my own BH websites profit. So yes, I agree with you there 100000% that I can't promise things now. The fact you have websites on page one is not because you can guarantee it, it's because you have satisfied the requirements currently needed for that position, obviously SEO is about experimentation too so in a way there are no 'guidelines' but there is a foundation of truth in order to get those positions, white hat techniques for example over black hat. Blackhat SEO works, Not in the way you know it (you probably assume link spam and poor, ****ty link wheels etc) but I have a number of websites as part of a loose blog network and around 75 domains. All operating by themselves, updated by myself and a team of users on there. Everyone once in a while I seed content on there that links back top my money website. Thats blackhat.

Yup. Whilst there would have to be a charge of a few hours, It wouldn't come anywhere near £500. Likewise, the work does is actually really ****ing ****ty. Although this is an issue when it comes to SEO work; clients want tangible work so they can see where their money has gone. I've worked with people that wanted me to document everything and send it to them. They'd then kick up a stick because one month, it would look like less work. The reason being that I charge for the time spent on the project. I doubt it's happened here, but lets say this client came to me because she wanted to rank for a range of keywords and I charged her £500. I could've spent 8 hours shifting through server logs, reverse engineer her link profile and visibility, map out fluctuations to key updates, shift through landing page fluxes and look at whats happened there, run a couple of crawls on her website and provide a full audit of her website. It might just be that those changes needed doing (lets say robots.txt management, footer tweaks and disavow file (I know thats not what they did)). An external review and a lesser knowledge SEO company/agency/freelancer would scoff and play down the work I did. So should I not charge for the full 10 hours? This leads me into the idea that smaller agencies and freelancers scoff and laugh at the idea of charging more then £1000 a month for "SEO"; but it's just a few tweaks here and there and a blog post...But this is a conversation for another time! I used to provide page one guarantees when I first started. It worked extremely well and websites are still there today, but I changed after the link spam update, although my PBN is holding out extremely well. A good search agency can do more than just follow the guidelines, there are certainly no way to promise first page rankings now (link spam updates), but I wouldn't be on the first page for some huge keywords by just following the guidelines and hoping for the best. The problem is, the moment you build one link, you're breaking the ToS. Good quality search marketing doesn't focus on rankings, but on organic, non branded traffic and conversions.

Re Facebook; That has nothing to do with "awesome content" or lack of, just lack of any page direction. They don't need it. Plus Facebook is a social network. Social media is the content posted on a social network. My point is; two websites that are identical, the one with better links with get more traffic from Organic searches. Pretty much, ha

^ that's not true at all. Whilst there's a freshness algo in place, that gives new content a boost for a period of time, it doesn't mean your website as a whole will rank higher. If the 7 year old domain has more high quality links and structured well, it'll outrank the newer domain. What it boils down to is links.... Content doesn't rank on it's own, and it irks me when people go on about content is king. In it's very rawest form, it boils down to who has the better links

Don't bother with page rank numbers. Don't focus on page rank to increase traffic. Look at ways of increasing traffic, to increase traffic. How's your internal linking structure? 33,000 pages and I have a feeling there will be a lot of pages competing for relevancy. I've just checked your website for "what is clearing" and there are multiple pages all targeting that keyword. Why not move that to it's own landing page and was the question there? Point internal links at. What about duplicated content? How are you managing those issues? Targeted landing pages for big-hitting keywords? Personally, there's a lot that can be done with your content approach. You have a great chance to answer questions here. I know you have landing pages already but make sure they're the focus, not a ton of articles

The issue is you'd be putting a metric on something that is completely subjective. A page with 3 paragraphs and ten products might mention the keyword 20 times. Now, that could very well be over the a keyword density optimum. But if it's just a way of telling the client they're at risk of over optimisation and triggering the algo, I'd look at definitive numbers. Don't educate a client using a metric that hasn't been a thing for many years. Educate them to use common sense and write naturally. Use a "rule of thumb approach" and say that it needs to read naturally but try and include a couple of mentions of the keywords. With large scale websites, it's more difficult. In order to determine if a page is over-optimised for a keyword, you need to know the keyword. If you know the keyword you'll know the landing page. Or use the site operator footprint to find the page thats the strongest for that keyword and figure it from there. Once you get over a certain level of budget/website size you concentrate more on traffic than keywords. I'm sure amazon don't care about over optimisation on a few pages.

http://teamtreehouse.com/library/social-media-strategy http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media Only ones I can really find that have substance. Beyond those, contact a decent social media management company and see if they offer tutorships, mentoring or training. Our social media guy has a few training customers. Some are basic 8 hour training courses on site to people whilst others are on a training-to-mentorship courses that last 3 months. Once the basics are nailed on, the understanding is there and competence levels have hit a benchmark then I think it's just down to integration into your internal team, aligning the social stuff nicely with the other marketing channels.

It was in response to your original post. I'm not sure why you'd spend time looking for anything related to keyword density. It's not a metric or something that Google follows nor is there an ideal amount of times the content should appear on the page. Back in the day, Google would process keywords as a whole i.e if you mention "Small T Shirt" like that, you would rank for it. Break that phrase up and you wouldn't. Thats changed a hell of a lot, and now you can't just measure how many times you mentioned "Brick layers in Northampton". As a general rule of thumb, I make sure the keyword is mentioned in the title, H1, H2 and 3-4 times in the body content. Beyond that, is wasted.

Keyword density isn't a *thing*.