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By far the best site availability monitoring tool I can recommend is Pingdom. Signing up for an account is free to monitor one website. You can have it email you or send a text message/tweet when your site goes down. You can also configure how long your site must be out before you get alerted, and how often to be alerted while your site is still down. Indispensable for understanding what's actually going on with your site. Paul P.S. Use the customizations when setting up the monitor so it's actually checking for the existence of a particular word on your page - that way you're testing whether your site is actually rendering, as opposed to just responding to a ping.

I agree with everyone else, that wordpress has a great CMS(content management system) and is fairly easy to operate for people who want a website but are afraid of it being too technical. Benefits of wordpress include: Multiple Plug-ins for a variety of purposes Easy to post and publish content Easy to SEO title tags and meta descriptions. Variety of free and paid templates to use.

Mat, There was a massive production of pages in the mid October 2011 and there was a drop in traffic around November - there was a panda update then. The problem is that for that the certain niche there is always a small drop for the site concerning Oct, Nov and Dec so it is not so clear to judge!

Hi Noah's Dad, Great site, I'd not seen it before but I'm very impressed and take my hat off to you. See what you mean about the top most item in the main menus, and I imagine a large percentage of people wouldn't know to click on "Down Syndrome Resources". There's two ways to tackle it. The first option would be to have another link in the drop down menu with either the same name or "All Down Syndrome Resources". From a usability point of view I'd lean towards that. The other option would be to try and highlight the fact that the top menu text is a link. By convention most people associate underlined text with a link, so my suggestion would be that when someone hovers over it (or the submenu) to underline the top menu text. With having sub-categories for Therapy I think that's a great idea. If you had a smaller site with less content it may not be worth worrying about, but both for SEO and simply to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for I think that's the best thing to do. For category index landing pages I wouldn't change the structure that you have, just spice it up a bit. Having a blurb at the top followed by posts is a good way to do it, but the introductory text that you have at the moment is a bit hard to notice. On http://noahsdad.com/therapy/ for example the headline is a plain 'Archives For Therapy' and then the text colour is medium-grey on a grey background so it's easy for the eye to skim past it straight to the first post. If for that introductory section you have the text on a white background with a catchy headline and maybe a picture, I think that'll make a world of difference. That's about all I can think of for now but if I come up with anything else I'll let you know. In the meantime if you have any questions please let me know and I'll do my best to help. Cheers, Bruce

The whole site is wrapped in a form, styled with tables (probably just coded straight from PSD slices), has tons of inline javascript, lack analytics code, no images have alt tags, the footer text is printed after the closing html tag... pretty much everything haha.

Check out Joomla.org. It’s a great CMS and they have tons of extensions. Look under their multimedia category in the extensions and I am sure you can find what you’re looking for. Lots of them are free and the paid ones don’t cost much at all.

Thanks for responding guys.... After some back and forth and research from the Web Dev team, turns out our hosts messed up when upgrading RAM to our host server.....site was down for 3 hours overnight. All appears to be fine now but will keep my eyes peeled. Thanks

www, simply because it gets the link love by default.

I would canonicalise the index.php and non index.php versions to avoid duplicate content here and ensure that the weight is combined into one version. You may find that your rankings have changes as a result of this redirect process based on IP. As far as I can see, any links that point to your homepage go through this process: link -> www.mysite.com --301--> www.mysite.net/index.php?country=usa/uk --301--> www.mysite.net/index.php This is going to send the links on a chain of 301's eventually ending up with duplicate content, which isn't best practise. Hopefully someone else can chip in on this one and advise if this is the case and potential solutions.

Changing the content to show a bot something different than regular user is always considered black hat and is frowned upon. That being said, if you're trying to create different messages based on where the user came from, you may want to consider something like a bright box to provide direction and interaction to the visitor.  Some general text in the page like that could be dynamic without being considered deceitful to Google. I would have to recommend not trying to show Google something completely different than what users see in any regard.

Submit to The GOLDEN " G " and be patient...

These links are not editorial earned but I have mixed feelings about them, here's why: I don't have a problem when a designer ads one text or image link with their brand name in the footer, as long as the client is happy with it. If you've designed an awesome site that link may act as lead gen. However, I have noticed designers getting a bit crazy with this and adding multiple (2,3,4 more) keyword rich text links (web design, web development, web deigners location etc etc) in footers which I really do have a problem with as they are only there for one reason. It looks spammy on the client's site and may actually get their site penalised.

Tina- Couple of things. Lets make sure you understand what "canonicalization" is......when the search engines determine the best version of a single page that can be pulled up using more than one URL. In the process different URL's would be able to display the same identical content. This could be happening for a number of reasons and might not make a big difference in your SEO or it could be hurting your SERP values. Essentially you want to make sure that your rel=canonical issues are simple redirects that are necessary so that you aren't being penalized for duplicate content. To make sure this is correct work through the errors and make sure that your sitemap is set up correctly and you are effectively using your url descriptions to tell the search engines what the various pages contain. It does make sense to make sure that your URL is as descriptive as possible. If you want to get the simplest and easiest explanation of rel=canonical issues, read Matt Cutts blog posting from a few years back. We use it in our SEO playbook.    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/ I would recommend 2 plugins for you with wordpress (I have done over 30 wordpress sites in the last 6 months and we havetested a bunch of them). Wordpress SEO by Yoast. This is an all in one SEO plugin which will solve your "description tag" issue and will give you much more flexibility for basic and advanced SEO. Here is the link:  http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#utm_source=wpadmin&utm_medium=plugin&utm_campaign=wpseoplugin There is another plugin called redirection by John Godly.  It manages your 301 redirects and keeps track of your 404 errors (rel+canonicals) and helps you clean up your site. It is solid and easy to use. Another issue you might be having with your duplicate content can be avoided by creating original content., if you have  one page with a widget and another with a blue widget and another with a pink widget and all the verbiage is the same, except for the color, then you have duplicate content. Use the rel=canonical to make sure you don't get penalized for duplicate content. Another solution is if on the widget pages you can provide several different descriptions of the widgets that go beyond colors, then you start to create unique content and you get SEO value for each separate widget page without having to do a rel=canonical. We have several ecommerce clients that have 10-15 variations of the same product and we have helped them develop unique content for each one, (hundreds of extra pages of content), which has dramatically increased their relevancy and quality score for their specific keywords....but it has to be unique. Your last issue is related to Canada and search results. This really relates back to your internal sitemap structure. Remember, Google and other search engines send spiders to your site to crawl. They only know what they can see and what you tell them. if you dont do a good job of sitemap/url structure and definition, they are going to try and figure it out themselves. If I was you, I would create a separate url structure for your canadian group that would be something like....www.dropshippingsupplies.com/specifickeywords_canada_locations   Then all of the SEO value stays with your core site but you designate that those pages and keyword content are related to Canada.  You should also make sure that you have geotargeted keywords in the core content of the page....so that you mention canada or the cities and towns where you aretargeting, within that core content. Hope this helps.. Mark

Thanks for the response. Users had tested in IE, Chrome and Firefox and it caused an issue on each one. I have tested the site in every version of IE on a 32 bit OS with no problems. I'm getting rather stumped. My latest user stated that he's running the professional version of XP, but "on an old laptop with a home version of XP 64-bit, it works fine". So I guess the 64-bit isn't the issue. I really can't imagine that there's any difference between the home OS and professional OS. Oh well... I'll keep looking! Thanks for the responses.

Here's a great post about migrating a website that you might find useful. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

For me I would use the .com vs .me.uk. As to the hyphen, if 100 people respond, it will be roughly 50/50. I use both and never have seen a problem. If I were doing a domain like englishroserestaurant, I would use hyphens. Yes, I would. Its just easier to read and remember, IMO. As to EMD's unless someone is searching for this exact restaurant, its not an EMD (at least one that anyone is looking for). Best