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Thanks Oleg, I thought of "forced IP" but felt it might be more of an annoyance to the user. I need to sit down and do a pro vs con of the overlay and IP options to finalise my decision.

Thanks, Dr. Peter!

No I've never heard of DNS affecting SEO. International or domestic, DNS shouldn't impact SEO.

Thanks Andy. We don't really get enough "images.google" traffic to justify the effort needed to rejig everything for that reason alone. However, that does raise a secondary question of whether we should be improving our image search SEO. Do image search rankings contribute to regular search rankings? Does anyone think it would be worth redirecting the old image file paths to the new ones instead? I can't think of many cases (if any) where it would be necessary to have these redirects but I know that in the process of past migrations my predecessors have done this.

I'll do you one better. Here's a handy code generator that should get you going. http://www.htaccessredirect.net/ Once you've made the .htaccess file, put it in the root of your site and it should begin to 301 the old page to the new.

_However, it makes sense to try to increase average time users spent on website. If a user spends more time on a page that simply means that the visitor is finding the page interesting. Catchy headlines, well written content, use of high quality images, videos etc can go a long way to make visitors spend a few more seconds on the page. On the other hand, if you make the body content appear meaningless by stuffing too many keywords, add cheesy stock images or boring images, add thin content and  make the page heavy with loads of images, visitors will bounce back for certain. Hope that helps. _

Thank you for your thorough response.  After reading your response it really does make perfect sense. What is your perspective on Local SEO and strategies to reach a prominent position.

I'm trying to make a case at work to bring it in-house so we can have fresh content on the site.  We're also paying the company $100 to host & don't have high traffic so I know we can pay much less -- and get a nonprofit rate in some cases. I'm hoping to collect comments like these and take them back to work.

You can't go wrong with CSS. Endless styling possibilities. Also, I'd stay away from javascript because it's executed in order on the page. Meaning, if the JS doesn't load properly in the menu, the remaining JS below it wont load either.

We have sites built in Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and also custom built CMS's. All of these are search engine friendly.  Wordpress in particular has a number of excellent SEO guidance tools to put you on the right track. The consensus of opinion from the comments given is that you need to question your web developer's opinions.  Making the wrong choices now will only land you in hot water in the future. Good luck with your project

Glad to hear you got it fixed.  I had a similar issue last week on one of my client's sites which was to do with Widget Logic plugin update not working correctly.  I discovered it in the middle of the night and had to spend 2 hours going to the forums to fix the site - so I know how you feel ;). Still, it all adds to our learnings.

There's nothing wrong with upgrading your site.  In general, I would recommend to update your site, if you have the time to do it right.  Things to watch out for are: will every page still have a unique URL?  There are a number of HTML5 based systems which run the entire site on a single URL (look at how Gmail runs for example).  It can be great for an end user experience since the pages appear to load very quickly.  However, such a system would probably make it difficult for all of your pages to be properly indexed. assuming you'll have unique URLs - make sure that the new site will use the same URLs as the original site.  If not, plan to put in 301 redirects for all of the existing pages. just because you're going HTML5, don't forget the basics.  Use your title tag, H1, H2, etc on the new template. after you launch the new site, make sure spiders can still crawl the site properly.  If yes, then you should be all set with your new site.

The person asking the question asked about studies, stats, or measurable impact. Do you have any of these you could share? You might otherwise risk getting thumbs down and appearing to be answering questions just for MozPoints, when you're responding to questions that are several months old and giving fairly general answers when specific details are requested.

Hello, Content sliders are nice to have but most allow you to slide through a series of images (with the text embedded in the image). I've recently been using AnythingSlider (http://css-tricks.com/anythingslider-jquery-plugin). This allows you to construct a slide using HTML, that can be crawled by search engines. The method I use is I set an ID for each slide (eg: id="slide1") and use CSS to apply a background image to each slide. I then set position:relative for each slide in the CSS and add in any HTML I want into the markup for the slide. If I want to absoutely position elements on a per slide basis I can do (this is because position: relative is applied to each slide in the CSS). EG: Welcome to my first slide This is the contents of the slide The CSS could then be applied as follows: ul#slider li { position: relative; } ul#slider li#slide1 { width: 960px; height: 300px; background: url('/images/slider/slide1.jpg') no-repeat; } ul#slider li#slide1 h2 { position: absolute; top: 125px; left: 50px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 1.8em; } ul#slider li#slide1 p { position: absolute; top: 135px; left: 50px; line-height: 1.5em; font-size: 1.2em; } More information can be found here: https://github.com/CSS-Tricks/AnythingSlider/wiki/Usage

I’m a fan of how apple organizes their products.  80 products in a category, shouldn't give you a problem with too many on page links. If you have subcategory overlap, make sure you have canonicalization to avoid duplicate content. If you need to paginate put the most important products first Here's an article about optimizing your page speed

Good answer here from Irving. You want to make sure your server is set up correctly, and then also specify your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

There shouldn't be any coding issue. Glad that you're enjoying the Mozinars!

Hi Bob, Personally love the style adopted by The New Yorker . Lots of "white" space on the pages , the font used is very readable, nice combination of images and text.

There are lots of themes that if you want a big site limited you in the way the it is very difficult to make your site grow. So the problem is that in the beginning when you select a theme actually you dont know the limitations it has. I agree with the page ranking but a think that the structure of a complex theme helps to get higher page rank, maybe indirectly has you say... or maybe not So in this community experience which themes are the ones with best admin page and with more additional features.