So, I don’t know, about 4 months ago a site the I help out with SEO from time to time changed domains. The site’s original domain was old and had a ton of links pointing to it. I should point out that the domain move was not an SEO decision but one SEO was going to have to deal with.

So as best practices will tell you, and anyone worth their weight in SEO, when you move a page (www.pageA.com becomes www.pageB.com) you should use the 301 redirect. We did that and for the most part rankings and traffic stayed constant, but there was one thing that made me nervous. According to Google’s toolbar PR the home page went from a 5+ before the move to no rank after the move.

My suspicion was that Google hadn’t created a toolbar PageRank for this page yet, but it would come the next time they update their toolbar PageRank.

Sure enough, Matt Cutt’s just posted on his blog that Google had pushed out a toolbar update. After reading that I checked the PR for the recently migrated site and I’m happy to report that in addition to traffic and rankings the PageRank is back to normal.

So not much news here.  Other than if you’ve recently moved domains and traffic from search and rankings have stayed fairly level but you have no PageRank chances are that everything is fine and you will get your PageRank back when the next update is pushed out. And really if everything stays level or goes up everything is fine since you’re doing SEO for traffic, not PageRanks or even rankings.

One final note on using the 301 redirect during a site migration. 1. Yahoo takes a while to pick up and index all the 301 redirects. If you look at Yahoo Site Explorer to count your inbound links you will likely not see all of them for some time. Even if you’re new URLs are indexed and ranking. Don’t worry, your links are still there and your probably getting credit for them. Your rankings haven’t changed so it’s safe to assume the search engines are still correctly attributing links to your old URLs links to your new URLs.  Thanks 301.

The guys from ComScore and Nielsen had some great stats/data on mobile usage and trends. They also had some great tips. Keep it simple and make sure it works. At this point you have one chance to impress users and if you blow it they won’t be back from some time.

Now on to local. This is where the biggest strides are being made. Web search SEO has stayed relatviely stagnant for the past couple of years. Yeah, there’s the social stuff now, which can be leveraged for SEO, but really is a whole different beast. So back to local.

If I never hear the word One box, three pack or ten pack again for another 6 months that will be OK. A lot of the talk focused around getting your business to appear on the Google 10 pack maps listings.

Unless I missed somethin, which is entirely possible given the vast amounts of info, there are two big pieces to getting the most out of locally targeted SEO.

1. Adhere to normal SEO best practices.
I’ll assume you all have number one covered, but if not you can read about SEO best practices here, here or anywhere.

2. Make sure all the data aggregators have the same info, and it is correct. 
So that leaves us at point #2. Make sure the data aggregators have your data correct. How do you do this? Time. Claim your business in the big Local Business Center (LBCs if you’re in the know).       You can find Google’s here, Yahoo’s here and MSN here.  While you’re at it grab your SuperPages listing too.

3. Long-tail is your best friend in local search.
All local search is arguably targeting the long tail. Many cities are two words add to that a product and your quickly into four or five word phrases. The good news is, that it’s typically easier to drive traffic from long-tail queries because they are less competitive. The bad news, for most site owners, there has to be content to support these terms. Google won’t know you should rank for Seattle auto repair if your site only talks about Seattle tires. Back to the good news. You’re an expert on your business. You have tons of great info in your head, get it on your web site. Give away a couple great little nuggest of info. The more content/pages you have on your site the greater the chance of you driving traffic from long-tail terms.

Here is a great post by David Mihm who surveyed local search pros to get their take on local ranking factors and signals for local SEO.  The format was inspired by the SEOmoz SEO ranking factors survey published in 2007.

Read part one of my series on optimizing [keyword 2] blogs

If I were targeting a keyword I might use the [keyword] here.

Dogs allowed: No

Bikes: Apparently yes, but I didn’t see any.

Would I go back?: Absolutely.

More info on this and other bay area hikes

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This has been my favorite hike so far in California. It’s located about 20 minutes south of San Francisco and the drive there is a bit windy. The drive also have views of the ocean, I didn’t drive there so I sat back and enjoyed the scenery.

We only had an hour or two to hike so we kept it brief but in that short time we were treated to (small) waterfall and a beautiful view of the pennisula and the Bay Bridge. I wish I would have had my camera to take pictures. I’m sure we’ll go back and I’ll take pictures next time.

When you start the hike there are several trails. We took the Brooke trail which heads up the mountain. This trail heads up the mountain and takes hikers to a waterfull view and the aforementioned city view. The trail starts out steep and if you’re out of shape like I am it’s a pretty good work out. Don’t worry though because the incline levels out and the hike becomes less intense. The water fall was rather unimpressive. In fact calling it a waterfall is a bit of a stretch, but it was fun to see none the less. You’ll encounter the “waterfall” about 20 minutes into your hike.

Continuing up the trail you come to a bench and the view of the Bay Bridge, San Francisco and South San Francisco.

The trails were easy to follow, but very narrow. The narrow trails weren’t a problem until you encounter hikers heading in the opposite direction. Passing each other on the trail was tricky in spots and made trickier by the poison oak that you don’t want to mess with on the edge of the trail.

We did see some wildlife including soaring hawks and a tiny snake on the way down. And there were some flowers in bloom. I’m not a flower guy so I can’t tell you what they were. There is a ranger station when you pull in that has information on the flora and fauna that you will encounter. The trees are huge and for a guy from Arizona it was pretty impressive.

All in all this was a great hike. Reasonably easy to get, good scenery, not a lot of people and where else can you entertain a group of people for an entire afternoon on a $5 budget.

So I’d like to say welcome back to me and here are a couple other great blogs to check out while I get some more posts up.