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You can modify the title how often you whant but be carefull that it is relevant to the content of the page and the most important keywords in title are in your content. You can read the begginer guide from seomoz on page optimisation, or google webmaster help

My concern with this video is that he says to make sure it is not pages and pages of content. Granted, not all of these guides are going to be super long and this will probably be one of the longest, but the first complete guide is just over 1000 words.

Hey Guillaume, Thanks for pointing out the alt tags, can't believe I forgot to mention that (doh!). Good points with how to address the speed issues. Cheers, Josh

In addition to Dan's answer remember just because Google has seen the changes and taken them into consideration there is no guarantee that your rankings will improve. It can take months of optimising and tweaking to get improvements. One of my old sites took 6 months tweaking and steadily climbing the rankings until it got to number 1 for its main keyphrases - it has been there for a few years now though

If you have pages optimised for each of your products that you are happy with then I would consider whether there is a term that might be used to describe the group of products that people might use when searching less specifically. Is there a term that a competitor site uses? Many searchers start quite generic and get more specific when there initial search doesn't throw up any suitable results. As you have done for the product pages see which collective phrase has the best search volume/lowest competition.

All good advice.  No difference between pages and posts.  It's all about how they're linked to. For #1, if your pages are linked to in the nav bar, from every page on your site, that would explain them ranking higher than posts that aren't as well linked-to. If you're relying on category links, your posts will be 3 levels down, at http://yoursite/category/yourcategory/yourpost.  You can improve this with a plugin or some code to strip out the /category base, to get http://yoursite/yourcategory/yourpost -- but that's still 2 levels down.  Best to link directly to important posts -- from the home page, or a well-targeted page, as in #2. Thesis has a sidebar widget to show the latest posts from a category.  These are direct links.  If the widget doesn't fit your design, you can do it with a line or two of PHP. If you want to link from a targeted page, as in #2, Thesis has a field to add text/html to a category page, turning it into a regular page with a list of posts.  But you'll still have that pesky /category base, unless you strip it out with a plugin or some code. You can also add posts or a category page directly to the Thesis nav bar, which lets you link to whatever you want. Unless there's a compelling reason not to, always set your Wordpress permalink structure to just %postname%

Yes, this is correct, the anchor text for the links question "home care blog" and "in home locator" link to my agency locator page and home care blog which are targeting those terms.

Hey, I don't think there is any SEO benefits and the video your are referring to is somehow outdated and ironic as Matt Cutts doesn't display any file extension on his blog neither. On a usability stand point, it is better for users if the URL doesn't have any extension so they doesn't have to remember if the URL was ending with either .htm, .html, .php, .aspx, .asp, .jsp, etc. The shorter, the better. A shorter URL will be easier to share (ex: on twitter), tell on the phone, quicker to type, look better in SERPs, etc. Best regards, Guillaume Voyer.

How many pages are on your site? I'm seeing over 500 indexed on Google. Trying to get a feel for how many pages aren't indexed. Do you use a sitemap file at all? If you have one in place, and submit it via Google Webmaster Tools, it will show you how many pages are in your sitemap and how many of those pages Google has indexed. A secondary note though that some of those pages are Ajax File Manager pages, which you probably want to exclude from being crawled via robots.txt.

It doesn't matter at all.. in my opinion and would be shocked to find im wrong... easy test... add ALT element to any picture.. .before and after SRC... if it works properly in both situation, the same should be with rel canonical... if you are still wondering about proper use.. always you can validate your document on W3C.org... it would point it out I guess.

Many reasons. You don't want the admin pages of your site indexed, for example. You may not want all of the search queries that people perform on your site search to be indexed. You don't want or need your cart checkout being indexed for an ecommerce site. You don't want a print version and a web version of the same document indexed, so you exclude the print version from being indexed. Your site is in development, and you don't want it being indexed before it is ready. For robots.txt in particular, some search engines now respect wildcards and you can exclude some session IDs via robots.txt. OSCommerce is real bad about creating session IDs and getting those indexed, then you have tons of different URLs indexed for the same page. http://www.cogentos.com/bloggers-guide-to-using-robotstxt-and-robots-meta-tags-to-optimise-indexing/ is a post that explains some of the reasons to use robots and no-index on a Wordpress site.

Yes you should block these pages. This is a quote from Matt Cutts concerning this issue Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines Disallow: /search

Thanks, David. I thought I had read that meta keywords were still used by Yahoo or Bing (definitely not Google). Is that not true? Does it harm anything to have the meta keywords if I just leave them as-is (since I already have them), or should I pro-actively go remove them?

Wow, that was quick. Thanks David! Reckon we'll go with blog/postname as it makes it easier to restructure categories later too.

Do not waste your time using the meta title, we've run experiments and found no boost whatsoever using meta title, just focus on regular title tag, links, and fresh high-quality content. It does NOT matter where in the tag your title tag is, but personally we put it right after the opening head tag for a good practice and to have a cleaner code layout. But, it matters NOTHING. Good luck!