Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think a lot of people fear making changes to Meta descriptions and page titles especially once they have established rankings for fear of rocking the boat! Whilst with PPC you're able to continually adjust and monitor, doing the same with organic listings is probably seen as a bit of a risk to many? Having said that, I think it's probably a very under utilized method of conversion rate optimisation at a very early stage, so if you can effectively track it & get the mix of good CTR whilst holding/improving on rankings, then you're on to a very good thing IMO

Hiya hfranz...did this advice help at all? If it did could you please close and mark this answered

Well, if you don't want it to rank, I would at least follow accessiblilty best practices. And those would be: Make the images very clear to read Provide "Alt Attribute" text for each button that clearly says what each button is for Provide "Title" tags that identify the menu button (this is for screen readers that speak the content of a site to blind internet users). Make sure that you "map" the area of the button so that when a person hovers over the entire button, they get the little hand that indicates there is a link there. Having an image menu is definitely not my first choice. I'd really look at the possibility of using Google Fonts, and something like the CSS gradient generator to get dynamic fonts and gradients if that is what you are trying to do before using images. But, it's not the end of the world, I have done them in the past (years ago). You just want to make sure that it is very clear and readily readable for people that visit the site.

Resslers tip here about varying the anchor text is one of the most over-looked factors. This is extremely important, as is the entire link profile being given consideration. You never want just one type of link vs another.

This is a great thread. I've also tried the foreign outsource thing. It's been hit or miss. I guess my question would be what's cheap?

This is the template that we are going to use. http://demo.pure-joomla.com/pj_velocity_15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=74&Itemid=110 I don't want to put too much content in the slides, it will cover the pictures.

Hey thanks Dan! That's good advice about the keyword research. We did that and every page of the site is optimized for one or two strong keyword phrases - we chose both high KEI phrases from Wordtracker, and high volume Google search phrases. We have H tags and image tags on every page as well, and have kept the content at at least 500 words of quality original content on every page we can. I haven't tested the on page optimization tool at SEO Moz, but will check it out. I think we employed most best practices for our on page SEO. Our linking is just getting off the ground, though. Steve

No, I am also in the process of enquiring, I program in ASP.Net MVC, and the new MVC4 comes with a few starter templates (with Visual Studio 2010), this is where i got the info i suggested. I can send you a starter template if you like, you can have a look though if you like. Actualy you will need VS2010 to run it, you can down load a trial but then you may as well download MVC4 as well.

Yes i spend most of my time logged out, but every now again I am suprised to see my rankings skyrocket, then disapointment sets in when i realize I am loged in with web history on. what has not been made clear is if the missing stats will be in Premium Analytics? And is it true that Premium will cost 150K a year? And will SeoMoz decide they too can charge more?

I believe IIS servers have an Application Request Routing plugin which can handle this need. Please refer to the following article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo

more like this: http://www.vat19.com/dvds/giant-gummy-bear-on-a-stick.cfm

Great answer, I would just like to add that it may be best SEO practice to use: baseball.com/new-baseball-product instead of baseball.com/newbaseballproduct Also a direct keyword match on the URL is very powerful. If the product merits the effort I would consider obtaining the URL and making a micro site in addition to creating a landing page on your main website. 2 (or even more) listing results on the first page is better then 1.

Drop down menus do not typically effect SEO negatively. In fact a properly optimized drop down menu can be beneficial for letting Google know what your site and pages are for. Just a few things to check for: 1. Avoid Java script drop down menus - Use standard HTML or CSS driven drop downs instead. 2. Use live linked text and not images. 3. Use descriptive keyword in your drop down - For example a drop down for shirts use: Red shirt, Blue shirt, etc instead of just Red, Blue..... 4. Keep in mind the First Anchored text rule. Give seniority to your first anchored text link. 5. Make sure your links are absolute link. e.g.http://www.yourdomainname.com/services.htm 6. Use title attribute to describe the page the visitor will be taken to.

EGOL says it well regarding a designer. Unfortunately, whether its websites or interiors of homes there is something about the monicker that brings out the worst in functionality. This is strictly an opinion, but most people want convenience when shopping. Whether for a product, a service, or information they do not want to have to walk around your art work to get to the peanut butter. They also do not want to have to find the mute button or skip intro button in order to proceed past your design distraction. My suggestion is skip the click to enter unless the designer can show some A-B testing where they have made miraculous strides in bounce rates. I am not sure that from a search engine pov there is an issue, from a customer usability pov there is.

The only question I have then, is if I use they canonical link to our headquarters, wont the other sites not rank well in there given country?

Thanks I had the same question

First, I have not dealt with a client utilizing a subdomain from a paper, etc. Second, it sounds as if the only change you are making in Places is to the domain name, is that correct?  If your address, phone, etc are staying the same and you are only changing the domain name there are a couple of things you can do and we have done before as well. I do not see how a change in domain name would affect traffic coming from Google Places. Assuming there is no issue with the paper, you can do a 301 redirect of the current to the new domain. (make sure you 301 from like url to like url for every url that will be utilized on the new site. So, YourSite.Newspaper.com/T-shirts to YourSite.com/T-shirts. Now, if there is a problem with the paper and doing this and you are starting from scratch, you will have a domain that is at a DA of 1 and pages at PA of 1. You will edit your places to change the web address. This should not affect your Google Places listing. (We have done this for clients and they are still in same spot). Would love to know how you work it out.

Thank you all for your answers !!