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Thank you for your help Robert, I'll ask the help desk and see what they come back with. All the best Dave

Wow! For all its worth, I strongly suggest that you use some external js scripts. Your site took 535.15 seconds to load on my high speed connection. Therefore since yahoo is more along the meta side of SEO thing and since your site continues to load forever, well... i dunno if they will ever list your site. I don't know how old your site is, however since Google has indeed indexed it, usually Yahoo follows suit. But for the love of the Internet i would certainly work on removing some links and silo your content. You can easily download a FireFox addon called Web Developer which will help you determine a better site structure. i hope this helps

I went with bobhealthcoach.com Thanks everyone. Bob

We have never had any negative SEO effects from this. Just make sure you handle it the correct way - its a bit more than just uploading a ttf file. Use either Google fonts or a create your own "kit" with font squirrel which converts your font to all of the necessary files and gives you the sample css and html codes to implement it correctly. Here are a few resources: @font-face generator: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator Google Fonts: http://www.google.com/webfonts

Hi Heather, Thanks for the reply. The site uses FCK Editor + Smarty + PHP. It's super easy to use when you are uploading content, but I think it might be very poorly set up for SEO. On the FCK Editor there is a SOURCE button that shows the HTML. I'm not sure, but that MAY be the only place to put in the meta descriptions and ALT Attributes. It's unfortunately very confusing!

Selfishly, this was a great thread to get involved with. Our domain can't handle a blog so we have to do it similar to how Mike does - and ours hasn't launched yet, so I got some good confirmations to work with so we maximize the opportunity as best possible given our limitations. So, thanks for asking, Mike. And, thanks for answering, Dr. Pete!

Go to Google Keyword Suggestion Tool (first result: http://www.google.com/search?q=google+keyword+suggestion+tool) Type into the keyword list your options. For example, if the service is "electrician" then try... chicago electrician electrician chicago chicago il electrician electrician chicago il Then choose "Only show ideas closely related to my search term" and "exact match" on the left hand side. Run the report. Do this for several cities and, in a spread sheet, determine which ordering gets the most exact match traffic. Use that directory structure for your whole site. I am not sure what "url enforce writer" means.

Thanks for the detailed info, I'm going to check it all out and then post and update.

The links on our left navigation are not category links, they are refinement links within the same category. Here's an example page from our website: http://www.safetyvests.com/color/orange/

Are you saying even though they are just rewriting the urls, she still needs to do a 301 redirect?

I think Istvan is absolutely right. You need to canonicalize somehow - it could either be the canonical tag, or you could capture the tracking ID into a cookie and then 301-redirect to the canonical version. This looks even worse than a typical tracking parameter situation, where it would just be tacked on at the end. It looks like the entire URL structure is changing. Honestly, any CMS that requires this is pretty outdated, IMO. As a former developer, I don't completely buy your developers' story. Doing it the right way may be a lot harder - it may not even be cost-effective - but it's far from impossible. If this structure is weird enough, the canonical or 301 could end up being band-aids.

There are numerous approaches to the best SEO site structure. Some sites use a silo structure while others use a pyramid structure. A few basics: user's should ideally be able to reach any page on your site within a maximum of 4 clicks from the home page. The fewer clicks the better. your top content should ideally be available within 1 click of your home page. You can define your top content as your money page, the most popular pages, the newest pages, or as you deem fit. internal linking is highly recommended. It allows users to drill down and locate relevant information when desired. Internal linking also provides more links to your most popular topics. Global navigation is fine, but you do not want to overdo it. If you have a 100 page site, you don't want to provide navigation with 100 links. Some pages are more important, while other pages are less important. The most important pages should be easily reachable.

Ryan nails all of the basic issues, so I will just add something: When I went to the site, having never heard of GetSatisfaction.com, for whatever reason my eyes went to kiddiecare and Pampers logos first. I immediately thought it was some type of aggregator of children's items for moms. Then, I was drawn to Start A Community today. Soooo, what Ryan says is correct regarding "no clear message." Given your client list and your DA and PA, you seem to have something to sell, but I don't think many people would know what that is from visiting the site. Ignoring the slider, the three buttons below are: Get Satisfaction for Facebook, The Age of the Customer, and Sometimes Size Does Matter. With everything on the page, you may be trying to give too many messages. I would clean it up to one or two coherent ideas and then use menu tabs and internal links to bring in the rest. Hope this helps,

Not sure what you meant by " wont be wasting any content," A 301 redirect will only redirect incomming links to the new page, the content value of the old page or any inherent authority it had will not be passed. It will no lnger exist, only the incomming links will exist and can be redirected

If we decided not to optimize would it be better to 301 or canonical link. I've read arguments for both?