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Jonathan, It looks like you've got a good start to your site.  If you were to focus on just 2 things I'd recommend your blog and link building.  SEOMoz has a great guide here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011 Since you don't have a lot of money you can use your time to do the link building.  You'll get the most bang for your buck (clock?) in those two areas.

You're welcome Matt.  That sounds like the best plan, a homepage, even a simple one, is usually much better for the user experience and search rather than not having one. Good luck with your blog, keep the content unique, fresh and shareable

If you visit your Google Webmaster account, you can instruct Google not to display your links like that on your search result page. The content="noodp,noydir" syntax is to prevent other Directories from displaying (or cache) different meta descriptions about your site.

Point taken on the multiple H1s on the home page. Good call. Digging deeper into the matter, it appears a backup version of the site was up over the weekend and on monday. It is possible that a different robots.txt file was up. Looking at crawl results for 1/16/2012, Google is showing some really strange things. Thousands of allowed/regularly crawled/.indexed pages are listed as 'URL restricted by robots.txt' for 1/16/2012. We immediately made sure the latest robots.txt file (the one that should be up) had these pages as allowed, and it does, so we made sure that is the one in use. It may or may not have been over the weekend. I resubmitted both regular and mobile sitemaps last night and both are showing with a checkbox today. Hopefully this all sorts itself out in a few days. We certainly can't afford any meaningful long term issues with our natural search visibility. Thank you. Of course, I welcome additional feedback. DMG

Thanks a lot Robert ! Indeed I use a CMS, Wordpress. But you know, what? I have not even considered using a Wordpress plugin for that!!! So thanks to you ! I have just look on wordpress web site and there are many plugins that could allow me to add a gallery to my web site. Since I need to add the plugin inside my custom template, I will try to see which one will fit my need the best. 'insure they are geo tagged and consider a way of using Schema as this will put you in the forefront.' I am not sure of what you mean about the geo tagged ... could you give me more information? Thanks again !!

Second goal would be to improve conversions. I would begin here as this is the bottom line.  You want the best you can afford on this job. Ryan recommends SiteTuners.  I have used them and they are very good.  They will take one of your pages and give you back a proposed new design (for that page)  that you can test.... and tweak as they provide guidance.  Then when you have a kickass conversion rate then build the rest of your site design around it. Their work will probably include input on aesthetics... so I would not have someone expensive design a new site and then hear SiteTuners tell you it sucks.

I don't think there's a standard, but I definitely agree that you don't want too many words as scrolling can get a bit much. 328 is the limit of words allowed in a text message that you email someone. That would be a good guideline to start with.

Hi Samantha, Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Google's custom mapping tools are free and are probably going to be among the easiest to use and embed in your website. As an alternative, this might be interesting: http://www.esri.com/mapping-for-everyone/index.html However, I'm not certain what their handling of South Africa might be. I see a lot of US-centric mapping tools. Why don't you check that out and see if it would work for you, or if Google Maps would be a superior application?

That's a great help. Thanks Doug for being so thorough.

Jared, In my experience (and I cannot think of a site we have done with Drupal and WP) I do not see where it would cause you a problem from an SEO pov to do both. If it is for you, you should be able to work around any issues with more esoteric differences between the two. On the other hand, if you were doing for a client, I just had a client we switched to all WP whom a previous dev had on a CMS for site and WP for blog on site. (Was cumbersome for client). As to subdomain or directory, I would use directory. Best

google adwords seperates them <label for="gwt-uid-911">Desktop and laptop computers</label><label for="gwt-uid-913">Mobile devices with full browsers</label><label for="gwt-uid-915">Tablets with full browsers</label>

As SEO's working for clients we can only advise on best practises and encourage the client to do what is best for SEO. However, the move to Joomla shouldn't be too bad? There are a number of plug ins for Joomla to make your life easier (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef). Not quite sure why they would 'delete' the site then build the new one. Makes more sense to build the newsite in a test environment then when its ready roll it out in a nice orderly fashion, thus avoiding any errors or foul ups!

Are there any hard stats anywhere regarding sIFR, Cufon or @Font-Face or even Google-Fonts now? I would have expected that sIFR does have a negative impact on a website due to a number of factors: Page speed, sIFR does load slower than the other font replacement techniques User engagement, sIFR therefore h1/h2 tags etc will not be shown on mobile (iPhone/iPad) devices, if a user comes to a page and cannot see any primary headings, then surely you would see higher bounce/exit rates. Similar to point 2, as you can't hyper link using sIFR, then potential primary CTA's might not work for users, again creating rubbish user engagement. I'd be really interested in seeing others responses to this. Hopefully I'm pitching to a new client within the next few weeks, and I will be advising that we change from sIFR to a more (what I believe to be) SEO friendly font replacement technique. If i do win them, I'll see what I can track and repost!

I don't see a problem with that. Before you change it, I'd compare CTR & bounce rate before and after the change. For example, if your traffic for that keyword went down 20% from 1000 visits to 800, but your bounce rate dropped from 60% to 40% at the same time, then you'd have 480 visitors with 2+ pageviews instead of the 400 that you had before, which suggest higher quality traffic is now visiting the site. Also, compare the goal completions in your Analytics software before and after. If the bounce rate & goals are similar, then you might as well go back to the old method.

I highly recommend NOT using GoDaddy, their service is okay if your lucky. The problem is that they max out all of their servers with as much clients as they can which can effect your performance if your on one of these. At least thats my experience with their shared options. I would check out Site5 or Host Rocket if you want to get rid of Host Gator

I would not do this, either the blog won’t get indexed, or if somehow it does, when people click on the link, they will go to the blog page, not the master page containing the blog page. My guess is that the developers are expecting you to work around their limitations. How far have you gone down the WordPress road? I would make a simple UI with a html editor, save blog post to a database, then pull them as pages in your .net app.

If i went to such a page, i would be out of there. The idea is spammy, and in your face. My advice, dont do it