Thank you for your replies. Is there anything else besides internal linking, 50 first links, and on-site SEO that I need to keep in mind that's out of the normal ballpark?

Thank you.

Hello,

I've got a high traffic site I'm building. Is 20 articles enough to start or should I start with 40 or 60 to not flop? I've got good internal linking. I've got:

3 10X articles
17 cornerstones

so far.

Worked hard so far. Do I launch? or wait for 40? 60? I know thousands is best. Competitors have much more.

Thank you,

Bob

It completely depends on your niche, your goals, your competition, the amount of time you have, and the expertise level of the person writing the description.

Your Niche and Competition:

Google the top 5-10 product descriptions from a high traffic, important keyword in your industry. For best results, track at least 10 keywords. Each keyword can be different, so you may have to be careful there. Look at the top 5-10 results for a product-related term. Are they long descriptions? Are they short. Are there none? What's the content of them? What features and topics do they have? How's the UX and mobile? I could go on and on.

Your Goals:

Are you looking to do a 10X product description or just throw a little something together. I always recommend re-writing the manufacturer's information in your own words at the very least. See Rands Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die for more

This brings in the writer's Experience Level

Are you a beginner or an expert in the niche? You may not be able to write 10X content if you know nothing. Try rewriting the manufacturer's info for starters. You will learn a lot. Never copy and paste from another website into your own!

Which ends with time and scalability

Do you have all the time in the world or 5 minutes per description. Most medium difficulty level niches require a store with lots of content and at least 200 products just to get started, but it can vary widely and it really depends. Try balancing between not spending enough time and spending all day on one 10X product. Try making your top 10 hitters (by profit) 10X. or make your top 30 or 50 10X. 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your products. Sometimes it's more extreme.

I hope I have helped.

Thanks Rand, really appreciate it!

So am I correct that logging out and adding &pws=0 is not enough?

Hello,

Moz hasn't written anything about depersonalization for years. This article has methods, but I don't know if they are valid anymore.

What's an easy, effective way to depersonalize Google search these days? I would just log out of Google, but that shows different ranking results than Moz's rank tracker for one of our main keywords, so I don't know if that method is correct.

Thanks

Got rid of the pervy quest.

How do you recommend we organize the site? And what do you mean by URLs are all over the place? We have one blog because some people are going to want a wide range of topics - the theory of everything - but maybe I can feature each separate blog at the top of the single blog and tie them together.

I'll tie together the home page and get rid of the stock images. What would you recommend for the design of the home page?

After you answer and I adjust, will you take a second look? Appreciate it if you would

Thanks, good response,

Bob

Hello,

How would you recommend marketing this site? We write all sorts of intelligent articles, healing articles, have a Shaman who sells healing services, are on the forefront of product development in our field, sell products, and will eventually make money through ads as well. We are about to add a few products such as orgonite, see here, t-shirts, and we want to promote the services of this person whose writings are on this page. We're adding a thorough local and distance healing page (soon to come) for that person (Earth Thunder). Our donate page is here. We give away 30% of our products as gifts.

Our Facebook page is here.

We are barely getting started. How would you recommend doing on-site SEO, marketing, and content for this site? Any other suggestions you have would be very welcome. I'm finding it challenging since we're so unique.

Thanks.

Tom,

I appreciate the responses and they make sense. I don't see a solution. I don't see our current site ever pulling out of penalty no matter what I do and we've got an income off of it.

Any ideas?

Hello,

As much as we would like, there's a possibility that our site will never recover from it's Google penalties.

Our team has decided to launch a new site in the same niche.

What do we need to do so that Google will not mind us having 2 sites in the same niche? (Menu differences, coding differences, content differences, etc.)

We won't have duplicate content, but it's hard to make the sites not similar.

Thanks

Hello,

For both ecommerce and sites that sell services, I've seen a lot of people recommending a blog for SEO.

Should this blog be inside or separate from the main website for the most results?

I can see how adding one to a site would create more unique content and an opportunity for link bait, but perhaps there is a reason to have a blog separate from the main site

Thank you.

Hello,

I like the concept that a directory is good only if you would still want the link if it passed no link juice.

DMOZ and Best of the Web fall into that category.

And so do some niche directories.

How do you determine whether to go with a niche directory or not?

Also, what's the ratio of how many niche directory links you'd want compared to other types of links (being very safe) 3:1? 4:1? 5:1? Does it matter what your other links are?

Thanks.

I went with bobhealthcoach.com

Thanks everyone.

Bob

My client has about 300 products in 20 categories with a lot of overlap. How many clicks from the home page should we keep the products? We're not doing pagination. I'd been told several years ago that all products should be 2 clicks or less from the home page. Is this true today?

Thanks.

It completely depends on your niche, your goals, your competition, the amount of time you have, and the expertise level of the person writing the description.

Your Niche and Competition:

Google the top 5-10 product descriptions from a high traffic, important keyword in your industry. For best results, track at least 10 keywords. Each keyword can be different, so you may have to be careful there. Look at the top 5-10 results for a product-related term. Are they long descriptions? Are they short. Are there none? What's the content of them? What features and topics do they have? How's the UX and mobile? I could go on and on.

Your Goals:

Are you looking to do a 10X product description or just throw a little something together. I always recommend re-writing the manufacturer's information in your own words at the very least. See Rands Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die for more

This brings in the writer's Experience Level

Are you a beginner or an expert in the niche? You may not be able to write 10X content if you know nothing. Try rewriting the manufacturer's info for starters. You will learn a lot. Never copy and paste from another website into your own!

Which ends with time and scalability

Do you have all the time in the world or 5 minutes per description. Most medium difficulty level niches require a store with lots of content and at least 200 products just to get started, but it can vary widely and it really depends. Try balancing between not spending enough time and spending all day on one 10X product. Try making your top 10 hitters (by profit) 10X. or make your top 30 or 50 10X. 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your products. Sometimes it's more extreme.

I hope I have helped.