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I highly suggest reading our URL best practices. I've particularly found the URL cheat sheet really helpful when deciding my URL structure. When I worked in an e-commerce shop (selling clothing), we built our URL as: http://www.mysite.com/category/subcategory/productname or http://www.mysite.com/mens/shirts/bob-vines-long-sleeve-shirt Categories in URLs are really helpful for association with groupings of products in search. (I wouldn't go more than 2 levels here.) You also want to put relevant details to the product in the product name that the customer might be searching. Things you want to think of: what will a customer call this product, special parameters, year made, color, brand (if you sell more than one brand), etc.

I'm not sure there would be a problem, but why would you NOT want your prices in the Google results? The customer is going to eventually find out what your price is aren't they?

Many questions need to be asked to understand the best method of rankings.  Generally, these begin with (but are not necessarily limited to): Is there a common higher level product grouping they all belong to that is highly searched at that higher (broader) level Would you have enough resources, focus, content, inbound links, social signals to develop each site individually as if it were the most important focus? Would enough users visiting any one of the highly focused sites otherwise expect to find other products on that site that you've split out to other sites, to potentially lose valuable cross-selling opportunities if you split them apart? What does the competitive landscape look like as relates to that broader common topic (if any exists), and what does it look like for each unique product type?  (Meaning is there more competition that also groups their similar products, or do most split them apart as well?) Just answering these questions can take you far enough along in the considerations process that you could very well have a clear enough answer to make a sound decision, though they could, themselves, lead to even more questions that would be necessary to answer just these....

I have used Umbraco and Sitecore lately. Umbraco is the easiest to install and use, but there's also a free version of Sitecore available. You might need some support to install a CMS, but once you get used to using the tool you'll see that you have new opportunities to design the user experience, work on your SEO, and enjoy creating great content for your readers.

Good article, but I like to think of myself as an exception, I have been a developer since the beginning of the internet. About 5 years ago I was working for a firm that wanted a developer to liaise with a SEO firm they had hired. I quickly found that the SEO’s had little knowledge of development and visa versa the developers had little knowledge of SEO. Since that time I have thought about building sites to rank from the ground up.  The natural path of this pursuit led me to make fast lightweight sites, well organized with clear semantic clean coded html. I think you hit the nail on the head with the, what comes first argument. One really must do a lot of picking the brains of the site owners head, and find out just what they want the site to do. Often they really don’t know yet, but its not worth starting until they and you know what the final out come should be

On top of what everyone else has touched on, dont forget to look at the competition and see what they are doing. You should be able to pick up some ideas there.

Thank you for a well thought out answer. I look forward to repaying the favor. We are researching the options you presented and I will post the results here once we know which software we choose.

Using media selectors you do not need to have a separate mobile site on a different domain, nor do you have to use a redirect. Instead it resizes your corporate site based on the users screen resolution. For example, here is my portfolio site (not anywhere close to being done). However, it uses HTML5 and CSS3 to resize based on the size of the browser screen. So try slowly resizing your browser when viewing it and you will see what i am talking about. The SEO benefits of this are: No duplicate content since it uses the same page You link splitting since there are not multiple domains or subdomains of content So instead of creating a new mobile site, you would make updates to your current corporate site. edit: It is also important to mention that only current browsers can render CSS3 so anything before IE9 or early versions of Chrome or Firefox will simply display the website in its full version. Any newer browsers (especially smartphones) will render CSS3 hence giving the graceful degradation to the users!

The use of the template by other bloggers will not affect either of those things.

There are a lot of levels here, but I will address only the URL format. It is accepted practice and generally considered more effective to: http://www.blahblahblah.com/blah as opposed to a subdomain(blah.blah.com). the part that will be up for debate is the sitetowndirectory.com questions. I feel its a great idea for you to build a brand around whatever name you choose. This takes a lot of good old fashioned SEO but with the help of the community here you will be just fine. At the end of the day its up to you to make your domain work for you. There is some benefit to keyword rich domains, but these days we see a real trend towards brand, brand recognition and brand trust. Feel free to shoot me a message if you need more specific information.

You'll want to 301 on them to a new page or the most appropriate page.

Short answer - it can. The best thing to do is audit the new website in a dev environment to be sure that the new website code is correct, error free, pages do not have duplicate or canonical issues, and all on-page factor have been copied over correctly.

Hey, I had immense trouble with GWT because it wouldn't accept my domain name (.vic.edu.au) and kept coming up with the error 'not a root level domain) even though it was the correct domain. I checked with their bug tracker and several people with obscure domain names had the same problem. It will let me submit the site and use most GWT tools but not the change of address tool and a couple of others - any thoughts on how to make GWT re-index my site faster anyway? Thanks, Anthony

In which case go for it if that's all that matters. User experience may be affected, depends on the designs, though as SEO is your only concern here, you're all set to press ahead

It's not something I've looked into much, but importantly, will search engines still be able to crawl all your content as easily as before? If so, there's the argument that it makes the user experience easier as they don't have to click through pages. It could make it more difficult for those who click through pages and might remember and want to go back to something on an earlier page number they remembered. Is it important that the user knows how far through the content they are? If so I wouldn't recommend infinite scrolling unless you have a message informing them e.g. "viewing 58 of 240" . If you haven't considered it you might want to keep your header and/or footer visible at all times so for one reason at least, the user has an easy way out. Make sure it doesn't significantly slow the page load speed down too.

We have different websites for our different brands. It's a lot more work, but gives each brand its own separate internet presence. From a search viewpoint each website can be tailored to different groups of customers, and links between our sites are well travelled with good conversion rates. While it is a lot more hassle to run multiple websites, remember that trying to address multiple markets from one domain presents its own set of challenges. You have to think about the impression you make on both suppliers and customers (are you a kitchen specialist, or a furniture retailer dabbling in kitchens?), as well as whether your brand is easy for customers to remember. People expect different levels of retailer expertise for different products, and I think your customers would need more help with kitchens than with furniture. While you could demonstrate your kitchen expertise in a sub-folder of a single domain through great content, a separate domain more specific to the kitchen market would send a powerful message that you are a kitchen specialist (thereby implying that you are a kitchen expert before they even click your link). I think the answer is to do what's best for the brand. It seems to me that you have a great name already with Love Furniture, and developing a separate Love Kitchens brand could work very well. Just for the record, my personal preference is for single domains where possible.

Within 36 hours it is definitely a timing issue at this point, but cannot say for sure that in the long term it will sort itself out. There are many other things to take into consideration other than just META and onpage optimized content. You would also want to do a high quality informational link building campaign that uses (gracefully) the anchor text "yoga bolster" to this newly optimized page. There is also internal linking you can do that would help re-inforce this directive to Google. w00t!

There is no evidence i have seen that shows a subdomain acts any different to a subfolder. Rather the opppersite http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/01/feeling-lucky-at-pubcon.html by the way, a TDL, referes to the .com in your example, root domain is example.com and subdomain store.example.com