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I remember talking with an SEO copywriter who gave an example of a loan company that wasn't allowed to use "bad credit" as part of their advertising, yet it still drew a lot of keywords. The copywriter would write text like "Have other companies told you that you have bad credit?" I also like the idea about writing articles. You could do something about the history of the term, or myths associated with that term. Another idea might be any quotes from patients or families that could include "I didn't want to go to a nursing home when I got old, I'm so glad my family found Blue Hair Acres for me instead." Remember you can try to work your phrase in across two sentences. "So and so has a degree in nursing. Home-like care is a goal" (cheesy, but it shows what I'm talking about).

Is this a package you're buying from someone, or something you're doing internally? It could be great, or a great failure, IMHO. If you have 12 awesome articles produced each month, and you find 200 blog posts each month that are high-quality and relevant and you craft relevant, unique comments on each one, that's a real good start. If you get someone else to write 12 blog articles, run those through a content spinner so they get to be 24 different articles, and then put that on article directories and auto-submit spam to a list of do follow blogs that make the bloggers consider turning off comments on their blog, you're better having done nothing.

In the long run, changing the registration from a "person" to a "company" will give you added credibility. Especially if your trying to utilize the search engines places/local listings. They will send you a postcard to your company address. Once you validate the postcard you'll be considered a real player. Keep in mind, that all goes out the door if you have a brandable personal name like Eddie Van Halen.

Yea, that's on the list to do. The site is about halfway finished so there is still a lot of errands to take care of such as that. Sitemapping is something I haven't done a lot of in the past so I'm not fully aware of all of it's benefits. So to be clear using that method I can generate a sitemap that will create every possible page that can be generated from those parameters, then they'll be crawled? Is there anything additional I can do to ensure they are crawled? I suppose I could do a writeup of each product over time in our blog and link to them that way.

Rewrite has been up for a few hours now by the way, I'm going to look through the file because I use a branch of Oscommerce and there are a lot of URL appending things and such so there may be something negating the 301 code I was given to do the redirects

I do!  If you log into Bing Webmaster Tools, and go to the Crawl Settings, you'll see a new checkbox at the bottom, with the option "Configure your site to have bingbot crawl escaped fragmented URLs containing #!."  According to the Search Engine Land post here, "It appears as though this means Bing will crawl #! URLs according to the Google standard. The help information hasn’t been updated, so it’s hard to say for sure." It sounds like this is the option you're looking for?

You can have a page canonical to itself, so if you just add the canonical tags to all the pages, they'll appear on all of masked domains as well. Thomas is right; if your goal is to get any of the vanity domains on search result pages, the canonical tags will prevent that.  A better set up might be to have the home pages be different (with the reps name and information), and then have the rest of the pages on the site be duplicate content with canonical tags.  To say the sites do not exist isn't really accurate... it just means you haven't set them up yet.

Hey Andy, Thanks a ton - now all my URL's are appearing as the http version - one problem remains, however, and that is that I can still access the WWW version. Trying to 301 all URL's to the http version but now part of the problem is fixed. Thanks a ton!

Any redirect causes an estimated 1 - 10% loss of link juice. If all your links use the non www version, then from a pure SEO link value perspective you should redirect the www version to the non www version of your URL. If you are on good terms with the sites who are providing those links, you could also ask them to update their links to your new structure. It's a decision you will need to make. Your htaccess code seems ok. Once again, that is not my area of expertise. I created the code I used with the Redirect app in cPanel and have copied it.

Thank you for that response.  I wanted to follow up a little on it. The article you link to sounds good.  My concern, however, is that if I were to have a "view all" page then we could be talking about 1,000+ nodes on a single page.  This page would take much longer to load, which itself would become an SEO hit.  Though I do get why that's a suggestion, I have to wonder if that's the best solution for sites with large directories. The other article/post seems to mention both the "view all" method and the "noindex, follow" method which gives a little more validity to that option in my opinion.  I'm still trying to discern what the "best" method is, and it's starting to become clear that maybe there isn't exactly one industry standard for this.

Your mix of HTML and JS should be fine. Please confirm by using the test I suggested above on a page. With respect to your text navigation links, it really depends on how you position them to users. How many brands of rackets do you offer? If you only have three brands, then I would prefer three lines of full text, "Wilson tennis rackets", etc. The header of "Tennis Rackets" would seem unnecessary to me. If you offered a dozen links, then I can understand your position a bit more. Another tip to keep in mind is Google will use the anchor text from the first link discovered on the page with respect to link weight and anchor text association. Google crawls a page's HTML from the top down. For that reason I present my HTML in the following order: body, sidebar, navigation, footer. With HTML5 Google can better differentiate page sections but I would still arrange the code in this manner until I had confirmation that content was given priority in this regard.

I have a similar problem, 5-10 pages of static content that I need to make look more 'alive' to Google. Sadly I cannot add too much content as it is scientific specific content and I am a mere SEOer! I use the keyword tool on SEOMoz. Find out the keywords for your products, put them into the tool, find out who ranks highest for the words and link to them from the product's 'useful links' page. After a month or so politely email these sites and ask them to link back to you. Simple and effective.

Thanks Keri, though it still shows as answered to me. We've submitted a reconsideration request and still waiting for any reaction. The situation hasn't changed yet - still same positions, same wrong pages.

Ostensibly it's a good way to find out which are the strongest pages on your site for a particular keyword.  It won't be indicative of the strength of the page when compared to anything else on the web, but if any page from your site is going to rank for that keyword, it will probably be the first one that Google shows on that query. It's not going to tell you exactly what factors are causing it (whether it be the on-page optimization, or the links), so any analysis you would want to do would be the same as you would have to do when looking at a regular SERP.  Google thinks that first page is the most relevant page on your site for that keyword.  Why?  You can get some ideas by comparing them, but it's never going to be 100% obvious. It's a great idea - I actually never thought of doing that to check for keyword cannibalization within a site, make sure the page I want ranking to actually the first - thanks!.

It's important to stick with one or the other. We changed from www to non www and saw a drop in our SERPS that lasted about 3 weeks. Google was still showing www on our home page only, the rest were non www. We found that all of our pages linked back to www.page/index. We just fixed that a few days ago and I'm guessing google will figure it out in a week or two.

I would stick with the old URL structure.  If you redirect there could be some loss of anchor text on inbound links and perhaps in linkjuice.  If you are making nice money and these pages have external links don't walk the tightrope just to get  tidy file names.

I have found Danny Dovers SEO Secrets very useful as a beginners as its not just secrets. I believe the Art of SEO is another worthy reference.

Thanks for your answer. Want to further clarify that if we have cross linking between these two sub domains, will there be any change in the Google's view?

The page views and time on site information will be of limited benefit since most of the pages involved wont be viewable to Google since they are behind a login filter. While many people believe that Google considers the factors you mention in their algorithms, I am not aware of any solid evidence or statements from Google confirming this information. In fact, Matt Cutts has specifically stated that no Google Analytics data is used in rankings at all. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU It makes perfect sense to me the factors you mention can be considered as part of the ranking process. I am sure many other SEOs believe they are as well. I would love to see any evidence to this effect. I think most people make this assumption. With the above understood, if you felt the move was a low level of effort, I would probably go ahead with the change. It sounds like it can be a bit nicer for employees to stay on the same site. If this was considered a big project, I would not make the move without solid evidence you will achieve the benefits you desire.

Consistent anchor text can help you resolve the issue. If you have several pages which cover very similar topics, that's great! You can rank for multiple pages in SERPs. You can even land several of your links at the top of the first page. "Los Angeles tour", "Los Angeles tours", "LA tour", "LA tours", etc. can all be used. If you have 4 strong pages that cover that topic, split up your keywords and if your pages are great quality you can dominate the SERPs. Do you have more the 4 pages for that topic? "Two day LA tours", "2 day LA tours", "LA tours 2 days", etc. You can expand or contract to meet your needs. The key is generated GREAT content, and consistently using proper anchor text throughout your site.