Authority back links are what you need. I took a look and the few you have are not what I’d call quality links. None have PageRank, most are “Links” pages and one is a restricted site requiring a login. Yahoo sees eight back links, but Google only sees two. You need to start on a link building campaign. See my Link Building tutorial to get you started.

A lot of the free directories these days use either no-follow links or javascript links. Some directories have actually fallen out of Google for not using no-follow - all a part of the paid link controversy. There was a time when all of these free directories would help in your SEO efforts with backlink juice, but that’s just not the case these days. In fact, there are few directories that give you any SEO benefits anymore. The ones that do include DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and Business.com. Of the three, only DMOZ is free, but it’s next to impossible to get into it.

For a better look at your backlinks, I’d suggest using Yahoo Site Explorer at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ . It does a really good job of scoping them out. While you’re at it, you can check out the backlinks on the sites you have designed as well as your competition to see who is linking to them.

Lauren -

If you are really serious about a career in SEO, consider joining SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization and taking their certification courses. Other good programs include Search Engine Workshops and Search Engine College.

Good luck!

Affiliate pages are very difficult because, as a rule, content is pretty much the same. I took a quick look at your site and the first thing I notice is that your index page title has nothing to do with “fuel freedom” but instead has “My Road to FFI Success” for a title. You rank near the top for that. That’s where I would start. Read my previous suggestions on beginner SEO. Your site needs unique, keyword rich page titles. All of your pages start out with “My Road to FFI Success” and, frankly, very few if anyone will be searching for that phrase. Unless you are Coca Cola, IBM or your company name is made up of your primary keywords, leave it out of the page titles.

For your first question, see my tutorial SEO 101 - Link Building . There really aren’t shortcuts. Start out with good directories, request links from non-competitive sites related to yours, provide good content, start a blog, etc.

I’m guessing that your e-commerce setup has absolutely no flexibility as far as altering titles and meta tags. If that is the case, you have a couple of options. One would be to create HTML landing pages for your different catalogs and products. These would link back to your e-commerce pages. The HTML pages, or landing pages, could have unique, expanded content as well as descriptive title and meta tag information. Hopefully, you can do this on the same domain. You’d need to get these spidered by way of a sitemap or links within the e-commerce site. These pages would be indexed easily. With the same title and description meta tags on every page of your site now, I suspect only your home page is getting indexed.

Another option is a blog where you can write about your different products, news and announcements and link back to your e-commerce catalogs and product pages. The blog posts will be spidered with unique titles, meta tags and content. For a good example, see The Eye Zone, the blog of FramesDirect.com.

If you have the ability to actually do some programming on your e-commerce platform, then, of course, it would be better to pull unique content for the title and meta tags for each page. For instance, if you take a look at the catalog and product pages for the site mentioned above, the meta tag information and title are pulled dynamically from a database so that each page has the appropriate product information. This is done through an include. Every page comes together on the site, but none are physical pages.

You could force the use of cookies and not allow session IDs at all, but that would chase away spiders (who don’t read cookies) and any paranoid visitors who have cookies disabled. A better option is to implement a rewriting filter like mod_Rewrite (Apache) or ISAPI_Rewrite for IIs.

Here’s an excerpt on implementing URL Rewriting Using ISAPI_Rewrite .

I’m not an expert at implementing server level rewrite filters, but I do know that many e-commerce sites, like FramesDirect.com, utilize rewrite filters with great results - shorter, spider and human friendly URLs that help promote good rankings. The idea is to do all of the work at the server level and very little on the client (spider) end.

See my post Beginner SEO Training - Palm Springs & Online. Search Engine Workshops and Search Engine College are both great places to get online training that offer a form of certification. You might also want to pick up a copy of the book Search Engine Visibility by Shari Thurow. It’s a clearly written guide to SEO.

See the very first question in this section (very bottom of page) and my previous response to your question. One other suggestion I can make is to take a look at SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. They also offer educational programs that offer certification as well as job listings in the field.

The idea is to present the content to the spiders without the baggage. You’ll find a good tutorial on Robots Exclusion Protocol at http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=140&page=46. What you’ll want to look at is:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*sessionID=

I never thought of blocking spiders as a solution for load balancing. I suppose it might be worth testing, though your best bet is to find a way to not depend on load balancing. It could get very complicated getting the spiders to the correct server. The whole purpose of load balancing is to move traffic off of a high traffic server to one with less traffic. What if the one you want spidered is overloaded? I just don’t know that excluding spiders from the others would do the trick.

Based on the research that I have done on phpFox, that forum software has a single template that reproduces the same Title and meta description tag throughout the forums. Without hiring a programmer to rewrite that part of the software, I don’t think there is a way to do what you would like to do. Others have asked at the phpFox forums and gotten the same answer, though you might want to browse through the posts and see what you can find.

I did find one post that *might* help some, but you would need a programmer or at least someone comfortable working with code to implement it for you. Go to this link and have someone evaluate it for you. I’m not endorsing it, but it might be something you would want to at least test. All this will do is clean up your meta tags, though. It won’t make them unique on each page.

My recommendation is that you concentrate on optimizing your static pages until either phpFox comes up with a work-around or you hire a programmer who can figure this out or you change to more SEO-friendly social software. Utilize all of the techniques in my SEO 101 post - unique Title, description tags and content, text links instead of javascript, etc.

I wish there was an easy answer, but if there is one, I haven’t been able to find it.

I don’t know that it is really a matter of frequency, but more a matter of what works. My suggestion is that you try small changes, wait a few days to see what the results are and go from there. And, I would make a single change at a time. If you change your title and some other keywords on the page at the same time, how will you know which is causing the rise or fall of the page in the results?

I doubt seriously that making daily changes would set off any red flags with the search engines. It’s more about you being able to track results. It can take a few days to get spidered and for your results to show up in all of the engines, so tweak, study, then tweak some more if you need to.

You might want to take a look at my S E O 101 post for some pointers.

Good luck!

In a word - content. The more keyword-rich text and anchor links on your pages, the more for the search engine spiders to ingest. That doesn’t mean you should fill your pages with keyword spam and links. Everything should be logical and useful for the page visitor. There is such a thing as too much in SEO!

Wow, that’s a BIG question. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of making web sites friendly to search engine spiders. There’s a lot in the process - on page optimization like content and anchor links, off page factors such as link building, social networking, etc. It’s a never ending process as the industry changes every day. There is also SEM, which is search engine marketing. Until recently this was considered to be more pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, but SEO and SEM are rapidly merging. It’s getting to the point where you pretty much need to know both organic SEO and paid SEM to stay competitive. So, it wouldn’t surprise me if we all become covered by a single SEM label in the future.