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Pleasure, hope it helps & shout if you have any questions.

The mountain bike examples were just for illustration, the actual keywords are different than described but the principle is the same. Actually I did use PPC research, and they pretty much bring up the same content (slight, very slight variations but in general they could be considered the exact same market segment ) So I guess other than splitting the results I will just grab the top performer that I think I have the best chance at getting good results with and maybe PPC the others if it makes economic sense. Thanks for the answers.

Thankfully, I am smart enough to make sure I am not getting local or personalized results but because of your comment I took a closer look and noticed as you did they do not seem to rank but for whatever reason SEO Moz when using the Keyword Difficulty took ranks them at #4, obviously a glich with the system. Thanks for looking into this and I will send SEOmoz a note but they likely already are working on it.

I did that. I changed all my pages to php but my site is indexed in Google for HTML which when they land is not showing anymore because I deleted the .html files. I need to know the right way to make google index my php pages in replace of the html. I do not want to get penalized for dup content being that there is a about.php and about.html. They both have the same content. I also do not want google to think the pages are gone and penalize me for missing or uncrawlable pages.

My opinion: mountainbiking.com/adventures/mountain-biking-adventures-in-utah/ Why like this? Because when you put less than 3 or more than 5 words in the URL google gives less importance for the keywords in the URL based in what mattcutts said. And for user point of view, If I see a sub-folder with MOUNTAIN BIKING too( assume the domain already have the keywords ) will look spammy for me.

My site gets penalties as well for the same WP issue. You can click on Categories to edit descriptions.

I think Mike has it right. The short answer is that you want both branded and non-branded signals. You should prioritize branded vs. unbranded based upon your brand, the marketplace for the products or services you offer, and how people research and shop for what you're offering. As for on-page title conventions, I like: unbranded term | call to action | brand or unbranded term | brand | unbranded/call to action Just some general guidelines.

I'm glad to hear you located the root cause and the issue is resolved.

hmm that's very interesting, i've had another look at the stats to give more insight. 150,000 visitors hit the forums from search engines every month, of these only 10 landing pages get over 1000 visitors and 168 get over 100. This amounts to 76,000 visits or roughly half. The other half comes from visits to a whopping 16,222 different landing pages. So whilst manually redirecting those 168 may be a manageable task it would mean the loss of half of the visitors the forums pull in. It also doesn't deal with the problem with letting users still browse the old content whilst transferring the link juice to newer areas, since Search Engines would not take kindly to being treated differently to an actual user.

First, It is a bit difficult to understand the concern without knowing the type of site at least: is it a retail site keeping the single website and just including the new location? A service business? A restaurant? What is size of the site? Assuming that you already have set up the Places, Bing Business Portal, and Yahoo Local in NY, and that you understand you are going to maximize those listings as you did in Miami: pictures, videos, city mentions, reviews pertinent to NY as opposed to Miami, etc., the next thing is how to market your search terms within New York. You mention optimizing New York terms without compromising Miami, is there a way to have other content pages that use New York but are not duplicate to Miami? Again, a bit more info would help.

Hi Marcus: Thanks for your reply. Actually, I do have other pages already employed with keywords I'm trying for - but those pages all stay at a PR of 3 for some reason: http://www.indierockcafe.com/new-releases/ - "best new releases" or "best new albums" or "popular new albums" - You'll see I rank for these words - but it's almost always the homepage - I do realize that it has to do with links and anchor text going to the homepage rather than the other pages. Maybe link building for these pages will help change this? http://www.indierockcafe.com/artists-and-bands/ - "hot new bands" "best rock bands" - you'll probably see I have #1,2,3 for all these rich keywords, but Google is almost always choosing the homepage. (PS - I'm not trying to rank for variants that include "indie" because the site is saturated for that term and http://www.indierockcafe.com/top-ten-songs/   - "best new songs" "hot new songs" "popular rock songs", etc. Regards Phil

Thanks, That's the tool I've been using and it is very handy. I can now show the company that I know exactly what's going on. After reading this SEOmoz post though - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/weed-out-your-lowest-performing-pages - I am considering removing the old news articles from 4/5/6 years ago. They have no page authority, and they receive no traffic. My developer thinks it's a bad idea. Any thoughts on doing so?

Yes, not forgetting the quotes around the URL. I would still add one, but there are others who wouldn't. More information here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not (note it's a year old) http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday

Yes, once you have done your redirects make sure all internal links point to the new URLs Leave the old page to exist so that link juice is allowed to flow from backlinks. Leave for at least a year. Probably longer in the case of bookmarks.