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If you have offices in each country, make sure you have the contact details on the site, and add them to Google Places if appropriate. Build links from each of your targeted countries. Is it possible to add the fr (for French) language meta tag to the translated content? Obviously UK English and American English vary too, so your site content will tell Google etc. it's for a US audience, but such sites can rank well worldwide There are a couple of older posts worth reading here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/targetting-multiple-countries http://www.seomoz.org/q/multilingual-site-separate-domain-or-all-under-the-same-umbrella http://www.seomoz.org/q/targeting-specific-geographic-areas-use-1-large-com-or-several-smaller-country-specific-tlds

Great answer from RDK which covers most of it and it's hard to give more details without specifics of the store itself but in simple terms. The only real problem with registering at the point of purchase is that it may put some people off so it should be optional. If you are making a sale you have all the data already so you don't need to take them through some painful process and you can sell the benefits of a highly simplified checkout process next time they make a purchase. Never force it unless it is absolutely necessary but make it a positive for your customers and in return you may be able to slowly gather more information about the customers to better meet their future requirements (cross sell basically).

First I would share that while URLs can affect ranking, their effect is quite low. I try to keep them short and clear not only for ranking, but for user readability. I would suggest offering the flattest URL structure possible. Is having the term "blog" or "resources" actually helpful for anything? It really depends on your site. For some sites it makes a lot of sense to add a /blog layer to the URL, but for others it does not.

Hi again, A 301 redirect is an instruction given to the server which tells it which page to send the request to. If you were using an Apache server, you would create a .htaccess file with the lines of code in it to create the redirect. With a Windows server you should have access to what is effectively a server management console that you can log into. In this console, within the Internet Services Manager, you basically choose the options which create the redirect within the server for you. It does not matter whether your pages are .html or .php ...the process is the same according to which server setup you are dealing with. I think perhaps you are confusing a 301 redirect with a redirect script which can be placed in the head of a document. This latter is not a great option for a number of reasons ...most notably that it does not allow link value to flow to the new page and also will not tell the search engine to de-index the old page and replace it with the new. Hope that helps, Sha

Should have been more clear- usually for straight link building its 1 successful link response in 50 requests.  For bloggers its much better, usually about 1 successul link response in every 15 - 20 requests. Another great secret for link building on regular websites (sometimes blogs as well) is to pay for a "text ad" on their site if i see that they have stuff like that on their site already.  They will come back with some sort of advertising rate (should be pretty cheap for small websites) and you should agree to "try it out".  Pay the advertising rate, they put your link up, and half the time they forget about renewing.  The other half try to renew, and usually at that point i tell them that they arent sending me enough traffic to justify paying an advertising rate, but i will give them $100 to just leave my link up on their site.  Works well.

I have set robots.txt file for HTTP and HTTPS versions. You can find out both file above your response. Thanks for your answer.

Steve...  "P" for Pope too!

Google views the canonical tag as a hint, and reserves the right to ignore it if the pages don't look to be virtually identical in content, so it would depend in part on how much of the content is duplicate. If it's your own site, you can always give it a try and see. If it's a client site and they're depending on both pages ranking for conversions, I'd warn them first that you might lose the rankings from Page B.

Sorry for the late reply. It doesn't look like too many people here use that technique. If you want a deeper evaluation of if that would be helpful in your situation, you can consider making this a private question and asking SEOmoz staff for an opinion.

Another way to get authentic mentions of other areas without being spammy is to have testimonials from clients that include their city names. "I had a wonderful experience using Joe Smith as my real estate lawyer. Blah blah blah Jane Doe, Nearby City, New Jersey" You could also talk about how you are members of the greater Newark Chamber of Commerce or Newark Area Real Estate Lawyers who Lunch or how you support the Nearby Town Little League.

Sha, I wanted to send a quick update & see if we're on the right track? After implementing this 301 redirect, I'm seeing a few negatives, but also a few positives & would appreciate your feedback: Concerns: Google Organic Traffic has dropped by 26.65% since we implemented the redirect (12 Days). Top Content Pages From Search Traffic has dropped from a weekly average of 1,500 pages to 998. I've segmented the Analytics to see if I had more or less pages that were driving traffic to my site (Organic Only). Positives: Bing Organic Traffic is up 32.15% although not substantial for our overall traffic, but it has increased. Yahoo Organic Traffic is up 26.53% less traffic than Bing, so not substantial. Webmaster Tools Pages crawled per day: http://screencast.com/t/krkD69bj3mG we've had a huge spike, which I'm assuming is a good thing & a direct correlation to the 301 redirect. All this being said, are we on the right track? The initial traffic loss had me worried, but after seeing the crawl stats it gave me hope? Do i just need to be more patient to see this through? Are we missing anything, or is this what you would expect? Thanks, BJ

How long does the actual data usually take to catch up with what WMT says is current? I have not experienced any delay before. There should only be one sitemap record for your site at any time. That record could be composed of multiple files, but it is one collection of records. When Google identifies crawl errors, those errors should be generated from the sitemap on file at the time of the error. There is a view sitemap option in Google WMT you can use to see the sitemap they have on file. This step would be next. If you can confirm the bad URL does not appear in the sitemap, I would then wait to see if the issue re-appears after today, October 11th. I know this is frustrating but the system is very straight forward. I cannot explain why a URL not included in your sitemap would appear on your sitemap crawl errors tab. The only two possibilities I can come with is either you have made an error when sharing some information, or there is an unusual glitch on Google's end. With all the above noted, working with sitemaps is not a good investment of your time. If your site navigation is properly designed, your sitemap offers no benefit whatsoever.

Yes, your link back to the other site is in good faith and good for readers.  If you don't do it too much, you shouldn't get dinged for recip linking. About 4 or 5 years ago I used to see sites do this, usually using the robots.txt file to exclude spidering ot their links page.  i don't know if it;'s the "best practice" but it seems robots,txt was used more often than noindex on the page. It's a sleazy thing to do and yes, it can cause bad blood with your link partners.  I know because on more than one occasion I informed sites about that practice being used on them, and they removed their outbound links and thanked me for pointing out how they were being played for chumps.

Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Be sure that you don't save ten bucks on hosting but toss away thousand in content and the value of a redirect. I would sniff the entire site for gems of content.  Anything that is better than what you currently have or supplemental to it.  If you can get new pages on your site that target keywords that have been off of your radar that could be a huge win. Now... just saying what I do rather than disagree with others....  I keep an .htaccess file on that old domain for a long time - meaning forever....  you can do that inexpensively by getting a hosting service that will allow you to place multiple domains in different folders of a single account and redirect them.  Since I don't know exactly how long it will take for search engines to permanently remember I make it impossible for them to miss.