Posts by PixelatedKarma

If you are not visible on google after alot of SEO effort; make sure that the page is not/has not been penalized by Google (you can see this by logging onto your google webmaster account).

Make sure your robots.txt aren't hiding your website from crawlers.

Make sure there aren't major errors on your website (does it validate with w3c? for both css and html?)

Verify that the keywords you were targeting aren't high competition keywords - those are going to take you working your butt off for hours everyday to rank for especially when there are domains and websites that probably have more historical value then you.

Theres alot more things you can do; infact with SEO you will never truly be finished. However the biggest thing you need is time and patience. For every action you do today, don't expect noticeable results for atleast 3-6 months.

Exactly Kelly. The keyword meta tag barely holds weight anymore. Such little weight that I'd be surprised if sites who arent putting keywords in at all are even being penalized. Now this might change if you are using something like Dublin Core for your meta tags which might still carry a bit more weight then your average keyword meta tag. So if you create a page called web-design.html. Use a signular keyword like Website Design, but don't go overboard putting 25+ keyword variants of Website Design in the keyword meta tag - focus those keywords in other higher impact areas. However you should still have that single broad keyword because if a new engine or new algorithim comes into play then you won't lose any points for not having anything there.

Keywords should really be focused in site title, description, heading tags, content, em/b/i/strong text, links, and the content that that page is linked to.

@Kelly the question is why his site's meta description isn't updating with the one you found.

No problem and I feel your pain. For us its pretty bittersweet because its generally companies like yours which keep diving down this path of hard to correct mistakes before they need to hire in a third party to make it right. By that time they are generally so frustrated because they've thrown every ounce of SEO away that they could have utilized to come back from the ropes swinging that they dont want to wait the 6-12 months to get back to where they should be. Anyways if you do need any more assistance, come back to the forums and the community around here is here to help the best we can. Hopefully things come together for you and the best of luck in your Company's endevour!

The funny thing is although Mr. Snowden made privacy a huge concern for internet users where he publicly called for users using private browsing sessions and webmasters to provide encrypted websites, it really was the heartbleed bug that helped raise awareness of the need for securing the internet.

The ironic thing about the heartbleed bug is that it was a series of vulnerabilities found in OpenSSL; a method to secure websites to begin with. To now force websites to go to SSL to gain better search rankings when vulnerabilities with OpenSSL aren't completely fixed seems a bit irrational. Especially since most privately owned blogs and websites will probably need to rely on OpenSSL or an equivilent to comply with the new Google Standard.

You my friend are unfortunately stuck in the chicken or the egg conundrum that many people get stuck in when they are first starting out. You need to do work to get and show your experience, you need experience to get work.

Freelancer.com, odesk, and a few others are great options as mentioned above at getting started. Unfortunately even the good paying jobs on there are going to require that you have a portfolio of work to show off. You can do your best to try and get jobs on these and in may require quite a few attempts but eventually you may make headway.

Inbetween trying to get those jobs you can also search online classifieds like ebay, kijiji, etc. for people looking for SEO services.

If none of that is working and you need to build a portfolio, I would create a few blogs/websites yourself. Get those to the top of search engine results, carry an excellent alexa rank - this will help to show potential clients that you know what you are doing with SEO because you can actually show your results. This will also make it easier to score freelance work.

Hmmm I guess its time I go back and re-read the fine print haha. Thanks Dani

Looking at your website I think it has to do with the Google cache and the way you've done your redirects. I assume this is the description you want:
"Take 30 years of innovation in catamaran design, 40 years of the finest, most advanced research and development in American yacht manufacturing, passion, customer feedback, and craftsmanship, and the result is stunning: Introducing the Gemini Legacy 35."

Doing a site:geminicatamarans.com search on Google I see that this is the description that is showing up for me:
"Manufactures the Gemini 105Mc Cruising Catamaran and the Telstar 28 Trimaran. Includes company history, forums, and specifications."

Now please correct me if I am wrong, but was this your old site description? If it was then what has appeared to have happened is that Google crawled your website before you guys redirected, they cached the site as it was including the description. Now that you have put in the redirect it is still showing the cached description because the page that was supposed to be there hasn't technically been updated to show the new description (isn't accessible by the crawlers) to give it the proper updated description, instead you have redirected the crawlers so they are now caching the new page but they aren't linking both as the same pages in the SERPs if that makes sense.

I'd be interesting to see your google webmaster account to see if you are getting any crawl errors. I can think of four possible solutions, all of which …

Great detective work and actually Dani to be honest I wouldn't write off forum links that much. Some of the strongest inbound links we've used are from forums. Actually inbound links from this site have always seemed to be weighted really well; so your doing something right over here and Google seems to like you guys in 2014.

Haha whoops - thats what happens when I'm messing around in Adwords and my coffee hasn't kicked in. Yes Adsense was what I meant.

Anyways back to the topic; with BuySellAds.com isn't that a violation of Adsense's terms of service? I could be wrong but I thought I read somewhere in the Adsense stuff that if you use the program you aren't supposed to use other ad revenue programs?

@Kelly Burby to be quite honest the meta keywords tag is pretty much useless nowadays. All it really does is give your competitors your keywords on a silver platter so they know what to compete with you on.

@driazi. Here are some easy steps:
1)First thing you should do is head over to Google Adwords.
2)Look for the keyword planner.
3)Begin searching up your niche - your profile says you are into Software Development - so based off of that the tool should return to you a bunch of keyword suggestions
4)Filter down the keywords; since google will probably return to you more then you ever want to actually read. You want to filter down to keywords that are searched alot but have LOW competition.
5)Pick out three or four keywords/keyword combos/etc.
6)Write content which is specific for those keywords. Include the keywords in your all the ways mentioned by hericles. Do not exceed 4% keyword density.
7)Wait a few days to rank
8)Tweak your content and watch your content go viral; thus increasing your inbound links and increasing your SERPs
9)Win at the internets

Adwords is the easiest, fastest, safest, and in my opinion best route to go. The advantages is because Google is so great at tracking users the advertising will be more geared towards that individual's browsing habits thus increating the chance of ad conversions = more money for you.

I have tried a few different networks in the past but nothing that didn't make my websites look spammy. Which is why I don't deviate from Adwords anymore.

As for trying to figure out what you should be charging for ad space. That is a billion dollar question in itself. Without knowing your website, what you have to offer, the site's niche, the quality of your content, your site's metrics, the advertising space you have available, etc. it would be impossible to attach a dollar figure to it unless you give us more information. Have any of these potential advertisers given you any sort of indication of what they are willing to pay? Is it Pay per view (ie. pay per mills)? pay per click? Pay for performance? Site referals/affiliates?

Well put Dani, I hadn't even thought about the disadvantage of losing referral information. This will definitely be interesting to watch!

You wont get a firm answer on the amount you can expect to spend as mentioned above. However what I can tell you from experience is you need to do some serious keyword research before investing any money. Find high search volume keywords with very little competition. Also remember that the more you can target your advertising, the more effective it'll be. Using both of these will help you save quite a bit of money.

If you are in the startup phase I'd also look more towards homegrown alternatives before jumping straight to PPC. Stuff like offline marketing, viral marketing, social media marketing, etc. But I dont know your product or service so I can't promise you that that is the right solution either.

I've never heard of any sort of SEO game to learn about SEO beyond what happygeek mentioned. However if your thought is to try to train people through gamification on SEO you'd find yourself having a very inefficient business model. This is only due to the fact that internet marketing (including SEO) changes at such a rapid pace. What everyone suggests as working methods right now, probably won't be very applicable in two years. Some months I think you'd be hard pressed to even keep pace with the SE changes to actually keep your game relevant.

@topic starter; I would strongly advise you to google nofollow links. By understanding the multiple types of links that a webmaster can use you'll get part of the answer to your question.

If you were to run the mozbar (on FF); there is a great little tool which Highlights links and text. By activating this tool you can see: Followed links, NoFollowed links, Internal links, External links, and keyword highlights. Why is this important? Well I'd suggest you head back to google and study link building and specifically link structures.

Spoiler Alert
What you should learn is that every webmaster wants to obtain followed inbound links (the holy grail of inbound links). This is because when SE crawlers know of a page and they begin recrawling it they look for updates to the page including new links. When they see that a new link is added they follow that link (unless its nofollowed); they keep following those links until they in theory crawl your page and ultimately the whole internet.

The more links to a website the more it tells the SE crawlers that the website is more popular (hence the importance of inbound link building). So what happens when they hit nofollowed links? Well they still record that link they just wont follow it to its destination and it will barely take that link into account in scoring the quality of a webpage/website. However enough nofollowed links and those too begin to add up to your website's overall …

Optimizing single pages take alot of time and are honestly getting to become next to impossible. You will still probably need to set up a blog (making it not a single page) so that you can provide ongoing fresh content (either through blog format or resource documents). This will be timeless in maintaining and even gaining Search Engine Rank. On your "single page" you would then include a widget to show the latest blog/resource posts.

As for what you need to do on those single pages in order to effectively rank:
1. You better better develop your page to be one of the best semantically correct pages on the web, build it securely, build it so its quick as possible (minimize css, js, and http requests)
2. You need to do alot of keyword research, find high search volume keywords with low competition (pretty hard to do for high competition niches such as web development)
3. You need to become the master of writing copy - it will probably take you a few revisions to figure out what actually works
4. You need to build extremely effective inbound links (think of the top 5 best inbound links you've ever built in the past; now get 20 of those per month)
5. You need to guest blog, social bookmark, etc. like crazy
6. You are going to need to age your domain
7. Utilize social media to its full potential - abuse it like …

The above posters have added some great tips for you to help with SEO of your website (creating good content, exposing your content as much as possible through creating quality inbound links, and some of the methods you mentioned in your original post, etc.).

These are all important parts of your marketing plan, what you need to do is analyze your product/service. I'm sure you think you know your product/service, but you really need to critically review it and look at it from a unbiased position - this is why people usually just hire consultants or marketing agencies. After you have done this CORRECTLY you can then decide who your product or service best caters too. Once you can truly define your audience you can build a relevant marketing plan to try to capture that audience's attention.

Don't think for one second that a 1500 word blog post three times a week is going to work for the 18-21 male demographic, on the same note don't expect clever Company endorsed memes to work on 45-60 year old business women, don't expect that adding a heavy metal backtune to your youtube promotional ad is going to gain traction with that many mothers to be (personal experience, metal and hormones dont mix).

If you want to sell product you NEED to identify that your target consumer base is X-Y years old, their gender, and their region - once you can figure that out you can spend your time on things that will …

No matter what context you are talking in; pre is always before, post is always after.

As mentioned in a few posts above all it refers to is when the ad gets paid for, do you pay for it before (pre) or do you pay for it after (post)?

Unless you have bottomless pockets, I always advise clients to do pre-pay ads because post pay can sometimes leave you with bills far greater then what you wanted to or were willing to pay.

@vaidhegipatel - Alexa is actually updated daily, however that doesn't mean that your site will necessarily change rank daily.

Google didn't ban relevant directory submissions (dmoz, yahoo directory, etc. are just acouple that come to mind). What they did ban were the directory submissions where people were submitting to spammy sites or in irrelevant portions of the directory itself (ie. posting your website about dogs under the directory's computer software section).

Now back to the topic of social bookmarking. First and foremost; search engines love anything thats "social" because they can better analyze the popularity of a website. Over time they probably won't ban social bookmarketing they will just turn it into a low ranking factor (ie. <1%) if it does become spammy. However again, if they are a reputable website with a large community (ie. stumbleupon) the community will weed out the rift raft relatively quickly and only good quality websites will continue to gain advantages through this SEO tactic.

Everything you need to know about Alexa has already been posted about recently in this topic:

http://www.daniweb.com/internet-marketing/search-engine-optimization/threads/482514/alexa-rank

Not to re-hash and add confusion because you have some pretty good answers already Siberian. However one weighting factor the search engines take into account is the age of domains. Your website may actually be at an advantage over that other domain for the simple fact that your domain is older and should in theory be a better resource according to the SE algorithms.

Ahhh Davey you beat me to it! I think this is really great news overall for the internet, its users, and most importantly user privacy.

Unfortunately I do fear that this will be the beginning of the end of websites built "just because" - ie. fan sites, hobby sites, etc. Not many of these people are going to want to pony up an additional $100+ a year for an SSL certificate plus the money for a dedicated IP to work with that SSL cert.

On the bright side it may help boost web site design and development companies sales because the average user probably won't want to spend the time buying an SSL certificate or making a self signed certificate.

@Rogerandre - all those Companies will be able to help you get an https site and walk you through the process if not do it themselves for you.

Depends on the forum software being used. If you study up on inbound marketing you will realize that all links (followed and nofollowed) both add weight in a search engine's eyes. A site like daniweb for example where you can get a followed link in your profile has large weight. But how does a search engine find your profile thus making the link count? It finds it by following other links within DaniWeb (ie. each time you post your username contains a followed link to your profile). The more daniweb for example, gets crawled by Google or Bing; the more links that get built to your website's followed link in your profile. Thats one of many reasons it actually pays for people to be active in online communities.

One should not aim to build forum profiles to get banned to get a no followed link; especially in larger online communities where member profiles dont get crawled very often.

If you need the traffic now; then I'd suggest doing a PPC campaign through adwords. A well targetted PPC program may get you the results now until the SEO results begin to show up.

Also be cautious of anyone who calls themselves an SEO professional. Those are few and far between.

Hi Ketul,

The average DA for a website is 30-40 while the average PA for an index page is 45-55. So you really aren't doing that bad in the overall scheme of things. Depending on the type of website and if you are concerned about ranking then I would highly recommend watching your entire website's mozRank (mR). That scales between 1 and 10 and takes into account your individual PA and overall DA.

Also take note that PA really only matters when you are focusing on improving a single page. If you focus all of your pages on optimizing for PA then your DA will also increase over time.

No problem Ketul, glad we could help.

Dani is correct. Marketing needs to be well rounded. What many many people fail to realize is that PPC is nothing short of renting traffic to a website. Sure if you have a huge budget then quality PPC will get you a ton of traffic and some might even return to your website long after your PPC campaign expires (if the content is worth visiting again).

However email marketing when done in a non-spammy way which promotes user interaction is far more effective for building return traffic. If you form a mailing list and can provide quality content which keeps people visiting your website then you will keep them coming back.

All we know of is a small update to Adwords in the last couple of months. All they did was update dynamic site links on PPC ads. So underneath the Ad Copy there is was originally a link to your website, instead of being "ABC travel agency" it might say something like "Book a trip to New York using ABC travel agency" as it puts it into the context of the search. Some of these dynamic site links may be Call to Action but that won't always be the case depending on the context of the search.

Hello mommek,

Welcome to DaniWeb. I think you have a small yet painful underlying problem. First it is good that they removed the old pages very quickly - thats good because it means that they (Google) are crawling your website on a frequent basis.

Now as of for why you are no longer ranked. By changing your directory structure (which you did) you basically did the equivilent of creating brand new pages. These will take some time to rank. In order to help you get back on track my first suggestions would be:
1. Make sure your sitemap is updated and submitted to Google. This will tell them the location of the pages, the importance and when they were last updated.
2. Do a site:www.yoururl.com search of your domain to see what has actually been indexed by Google (Google webmaster and analytics is 3 days+ behind on reporting)
3. Check your web host's logs to find out where your traffic is landing, use 301 redirects to your new pages
4. Make sure that your robots.txt isn't blocking anything important or anything you don't want blocked
5. Update all your backlinks to point to the new URL pages of your website
6. Make sure your pages/urls are search engine friendly.

Welcome to Daniweb,

If you want to create an online reputation for selling internet marketing services you first need to understand what internet marketing is. Once you can effectively do the marketing on your own websites it will go to show other Clients how effective you truly are. Think of it as providing a statisical portfolio.

If you got penalized by any google update you have a long long journey ahead of you. Read as much as you can about SEO best practices and begin implementing them on your website(s). It will take time and patience and you probably won't see results for 6+ months. Keep in mind most people that got hit by Panda were generally victims of creating spammy content and spammy links. You are going to need to disavow those links and focus on creating quality content to reverse the damage that has been done. Depending on how bad you got hit, it may be worth your while to scrap the website(s) hit by Panda and start over fresh.

Here are my easy steps to hardcore SEO success

1. Google Search SEO...lots
2. Spend the next 6-12 months implementing what you have learned from step 1
3. Measure effectiveness using tools like Alexa, MozRank, etc.
4. Rinse and Repeat to Win.

To be eligible for adsense you need to have a certain amount of content per page, have a domain a certain age, etc. See the requirements Here

If they sent you a notification or you are seeing a notification about content then you need to focus on providing more quality for your visitors.

Is your website hosted on US servers and is it targetting local areas of the US? If not then you won't notice a difference until they release the next Pigeon update. Basically from what we are seeing over here is if a website used any sort of old white hat seo tactics - it either stayed the same or improved locally.

If however they kind of ignored link building through local websites/niches/etc. then we have noticed a slight drop. Nothing to make our Clients go crazy but enough that now some sites need some additional local SEO work.

Also we have read but can't confirm that this update also effected rankings in local Google directories; so for example if someone searched Chinese Food in Houston Texas - you would get a Google Knowledge Graph in the SERP with Business Names, Phone Numbers and Reviews some people are actually reporting that that website listing is moving some sites around depending on how focused they were on local markets.

Alexa is just another way to measure your website. It can be found at alexa.com. Some say its pointless but others swear by it. Personnally I like Alexa only because it goes to show how effective the content on your website is. Alexa takes into account five main metrics of your website:
-# of visits on your website (new and returning visitors)
-# of pages visited on your website
-# of inbound links
-Quality and diversity of visits (this includes bounce rate and where your visitors come from)
-Time on site

I didn't include alexa reviews because they don't have the same weighting to your Alexa score that they did back pre-2013

By scoring higher in Alexa it helps as positive reinforcement that your website is producing content that is either keeping people coming back or engaging new audiences (or if you are renting traffic through PPC then atleast you know your ads are drawing people in). This is pretty valuable to know and by knowing which region they are coming from it acts also to help make sure that you are getting the traffic you want instead of just relying on Google.

The big downside to Alexa is although they are freemium; to get the actual Alexa widget on your website to work how you want it, it will cost you a subscription fee. Also without all of your visitors having the Alexa toolbar the results aren't as accurate as they could be.

Because …

Hello everybody,

For those of you who don't know, on July 24th Google released it's Pigeon update. According to Search Engine Land (see the article here), on July 24th US webmasters began to witness considerable changes in their local rankings. As of right now we are monitoring our Client's sites and have noticed small incremental changes for our US clients but nothing yet for our Canadian or European Clients. I'm sure that will begin to change over the next month or so.

As of right now this update does not appear to be penalizing any sites however it does appear to be a core change to the local search engine ranking algorithms. This does appear to put more importance on more traditional ranking methods (synonoms, correct spelling, etc.) for websites targeting local niches but that is so far these methods are relatively untested. As of right now though it is nearly impossible for anybody to tell exactly what has changed and what will work to increase local serps. According to search engine land one thing that does appear to be happening is that directory services are beginning to rank alot better (Yelp, YP, etc.). This may make it more valuable for anybody doing local SEO to make sure that you are infact submitting to high PR, do follow and high reputation directories relevant to the categories of your website(s). Still be cautious though because spammy links may still get you in trouble with Google Penguin on some of …

What that is is a Google Knowledge Panel. You can do it through signing up for Google Places and using structured data with Rich Snippets in your website itself. Googling "Google Knowledge Panel" should provide you a few bits and pieces of information on how to get started. Your Google webmaster tools also have a few resources on how to get your information in the knowledge panel.

I am not 100% sure what you are asking. From what i have gathered you have created two landing pages. I am going to assume that on both pages they are titled: Web Development Company in XYZ and Website Development Company in XYZ with only the one word changing.

If I understand correctly basically both of those pages are the exact same minus the difference between the keywords Web and Website. Google has cracked down on this significantly and it might still work in odd occurences however this tactic has fallen into the grey hat SEO tactics list. Especially with the value SEs are putting on unique content. So you probably wont notice any advantage if any of having these two landing pages in the SERPs especially if everything is similarly worded. Big SEs have become smart enough to recognize the changing of one word per sentence and could actually penalize you for re-using content.

Second to that SEs can also detect keyword derivatives. So if it sees a word like development it will count the words develop, dev, etc. as derivatives and subsequently boosting your keyword density based off of that.

Don't forget to write content!! Search engines love continuous fresh new content. 1 - 1500 word relevant blog post a week will definitely help; 3 - 1500 word relevant blog posts will help you rock the SERPs.

Although it isn't generally a great practice to use display:none; and absolute positioning is the preferred method for hidding something for screen readers, it does happen where we need to use display:none (see list a part, css tricks, etc.).

Now in terms of SEO - Google wants to see a Title tag matching the content of the Page, an H1 tag that explains what the page is about and 1+ H2 tags which explain what each section of the page is about. Search engines weight these three attributes fairly heavily so its important as a web designer/developer/marketer to make sure that you are using these three elements to their highest potential (which shouldn't include hidding any of them using display:none or display:hidden).

However in instances where you have more then one H1 (which typically you shouldnt have because there should only be 1 H1 per page) like having a front page scroller/slideshow in jQuery you may end up having multiple H1s. Using display:none to hide those additional H1s until the next slide might be a good solution HOWEVER your page probably will not get weighted against the content of those H1s.

Now to take it one step further, if you have used robots.txt to block out your asset folder that contains your css file you may have an additional issue where google and bing won't actually be able to tell if an element is hidden or not. If it reads 4+ H1 tags in a row, but can't tell that …

Effective newsletters keep your Company/Product/Service in your lead's minds. By producing ongoing content and creating effective calls to action on your news letters you will also help to try and get people to return to your website.

What Dani said. However if you are asking whether there is a market for flipping websites and doing it yourself.....The answer is yes, heck the lazy man's approach is just domain flipping itself so yes it is possible but you need to do alot of research on how to increase the value of a domain (there are ALOT of factors). With a good inbound link network and a solid understanding of SEO you should be able to pull it off in a relatively decent amount of time. I'm sure google will be able to help you get started with a few good tutorials and notes on others that have spent the last decade+ doing it.

@Lax - one popular metrics that larger search engines (especially google) loves is the popularity of a website and its bounce rates. If a video is effective enough to draw people to a website; you gain the popularity aspect of that algorithm (see Alexa top 100 - none of those sites have less than a few million unique visits a day).

That brings us to bounce rates; if you have created one video that has capitvated enough people that they actually want to engage your website (not just visit the main page and decide they've been decieved) OR if your website has more videos like the one they just watched; they are likely to stick around longer. If they stick around longer = lower bounce rate.

So thats from the search engine/viewer prespective. Ontop of that if your video references your site's content in context then when people are searching for that content you'll also have your video ranking in the SERPs for hopefully the same or similar keywords to your website. Additionally the search engine may also look at that video as an additional resource to prove you belong in that content category thus adding more authority to your domain/page. The more authority your webpage / domain has; the higher you rank.

End of the day you need to remember that Search Engines nowadays are putting very strong value on new and original content and its weighted more towards video and images then it is written content. So in …

Good morning bhavna,

First and foremost you should research the Countries you plan on promoting your product in. If you are offering products or services you may need permits, licenses, etc. to conduct business (online or otherwise) within those Countries. Although North America and Australia are fairly open to allowing you to engage their consumer bases there can be some legalities behind it. This isn't advice anyone here can or should consult you on. However I do know within the last three months I've read two articles about small business which were charged $1mil + fines for importing / exporting products on the banned list. One of those Companies sold a box of $0.50/per rubber gaskets to give you an idea of how serious trade legislation is.

Next after you clearly understand if you can legally do what you want; you should actually identify a clear marketing plan. This is your roadmap; if its well written you should actually be able to develop measureable KPIs to track which will tell you if what you are doing is actually working. The marketing plan should go into detail about both online and offline marketing strategies. For online it should cover Copy & Ongoing Copy Generation, Landing Pages, Conversion Pages, SEO, SEM, SMM, SMO, email marketing, viral advertising, and anything else that fits your business and what it has to offer.

If any of this has lost you, you should consult with a professional (and not the type that spams your inbox garaunting …

Although wikipedia gives them both very similar definitions they are slightly different and as trends and strategies change those definitions will continue to change. In way they are both just buzz words being used by alot of Companies to show that they are knowledgeable in the social media niche of online marketing.

Social Media Optimization for me is more about optimizing a social media page about a website, brand, company, etc. to maximize their exposure both organically through followers, shared content, and in the eyes of search engines. The latter being sometimes a concern if my Company isn't involved in the marketing strategies of the website itself as we have had Clients Social Media sites outrank their own website in the SERPs. The goal with SMO is really to drive as much traffic to the conversion point as possible.

Social Media Marketing for me is two fold; the first is working with Clients to develop and effectively manage PPC advertising programs on the social media channel(s) that are most likely to have the highest ROI for that Client. The second part of SMM for me is actually convincing social media users that the product, service, Company, etc. is actually being presented to them through a reliable/trustworthy source and not directly from the Company. Basically taking a bandwagon approach to try and generate new leads, or in layman terms: if all my friends are doing this, then maybe I should be too! Which then equals more leads = more conversions.

Davey …

No no no; keywords in title tags need to be organically placed. For example, you have an article about "World's Worst SEO Companies"; your objective is to get visitors for this article. To put the name of the article in the title is fine because its organic - thats what the page is about and its unique to your website. To put for example: SEO, SEO Companies, World's Worst SEO Companies - Not a good practice.

And @couponsgrid; when you build a link you put an alt tag and the name of the link instead of the full url correct? I hope you do because it isn't 1995 and users kind of expect links to be somewhat short and pretty nowadays. As long as you aren't building "Seattle Based Web Design" followed by a link that says "Washington Web Design", etc etc internally on your website you're fine. Nothing wrong with having a link with keywords (as long as they are organic to the language the page is written in as almostbob mentioned) but best practices will tell you not to make the title or alt spammy in nature - it can be a fine line. Search Engine Crawlers scan links when they do their crawls by having 50 followed inbound links titled "Puppies for Sale" on various C-Blocks and Domains won't help you rank well for a completely unrelated set of keywords (ie. mexican restaraunt), because puppies for sale have nothing to do with restaraunts or mexican restaraunts. Most …

Visit this topic here and it should explain how to find them

Honestly looking after the update it was a slight increase in traffic but nothing considerable on any of the websites we own, have built for others or maintain.

You are asking a pretty broad question without enough details.

Are your urls search engine friendly?
What are you doing right now to build links?
What is your social media strategy?
Is your website scrapping its content from other news sites?

I think without more detail the only advice I can really give you is to make sure all of your content is able to be shared; that is probably going to be the most effective way to build organic traffic for this large of a site. By ensuring people can share your content the links will begin building themselves as more people begin linking to your content. Also ensure that every page is following semantic and standardized markup.

Submitting to the search engines your website, yahoo directory, moz, etc. that should help a fair bit. Also try to guest blog a bit to achieve acouple extra follow links from reputable websites.