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Hi Chris, It all depends on your budget - you're likely to find resources on oDesk that will give you far lower quotes than you'll receive from the higher profile members of the SEOMoz community. Having said that, I've yet to find anyone over there who really knows what they're doing with SEO (although I'm sure there are people, just not in the usual $3/hr price bracket). If you're looking for help from a Mozzer I'd advise contacting a few people who post on the QA forum or comment on blogs and asking them to spend a few minutes doing a high level review of your site. If you like what you hear start to explore the option of putting them on a monthly retainer / day rate and work out some outline costs. (Self promotion alert): I'd be more than happy to help out - just drop me an email / tweet / contact form from my site. Matt

That was awesome.

EGOLS video has a good idea at its heart buts it fails for me because its about 10x too long - 15 seconds is all you need to show that concept I bet it lost a ton of its potential reach due to its length before payoff - the client lost out due to the agency's ego

This still isn't Yahoo/Bing vs. Google but at least it's some factors that matter more to Bing, which can then be compared to how they affect rankings in Google. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/bing-rankings-cheat-sheet/29847/

Have I heard of this? Yes. Is it a legitimate concern? Yes, but the impact of the links being removed depends on whether those links are "being counted by Google." If these "rented links" aren't being counted (or contributing very little), then their removal won't really matter. Are the links indexed? Are they on domains that rank? What are the PA's & DA's for these links?

Hi Brent - Thanks very much for the resource!

Sorry, you were looking for ranking factors - I misread the question.

And this is what I see on the oldest domain in the world: http://symbolics.com/ ??? I hate what internet has become.

It sounds like your best bet is going to be digging up some analytics from your old site, finding common URL patterns, and redirecting them more thoroughly via rewrite rules.  A clever use of sorting in a spreadsheet can make this task go by much quicker, and if you have some key pages on the new site where you feel entire clusters of old pages can redirect that will help too as you're not redirecting one to one.  It would also help to tag the new site's applicable pages with rel=canonical. Lastly, you can apply a nocache tag to the pages on your old site, althugh they should be flushing out fairly soon. Those are the general recs.  There is a certain amount of time involved in the process, and it's not a strict number of days/hours/minutes. Oh, for your 404 page (http://www.structural.net/;flkajhsdlfg) I'd recommend making it a lot more functional, especially since you're expecting a lot of 404 traffic in this current process.  Check out Apple's for an example (http://www.apple.com/lkjsfdawe) and this blog post for more ideas: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages (an oldie, but goodie.)

Interesting read, lets hope people see that before handing money over.

I'm not sure how I feel about the +1 thing that they are trying to do to help influence search results. Kind of a ripoff of Facebook's "like" button. Seems like its not widespread enough, so they are probably just up to their usual testing.

Hehe, well spotted!

There was a really good Whiteboard Friday on this topic. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday Rand discusses the tradeoff of the approaches you mention above.  Be sure to also read the comments.  Some commenters mentioned they had really good results using  geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools.

Kickass content that is aligned with the new mission and that is highly linkable.

Jim Boykin

Hi Keri, and thank you. All is going really well. I had a mail from Rand on this subject which has been a big, big help. We're focussing all our energy on building relationships primarily.I find that you can get a good feel for the partners knowledge and skill sets through the conversations you have rather than shooting questions at them, which feels a little stiff and interview like, which we don't want. Our partners {so far} are passionate about the industry Keri, and I can talk SEO till the cows come home, so you get a good feel for their experience, whilst building solid relationships, which I'm sure will stand the test of time. You may well see my first YOUmoz post very soon! Best Regards Sean

Thanks for the Responses everyone!

90% client work, 10% personal side projects mostly for running my own SEO experiments which may end up helping me with my clients.

It does and it doesn't (great answer I know!). Let me expand a bit on that Onpage optimization is definitely scalable. Site architecture really only becomes important as content scales. The more content, the more structure is needed. BUT as we all know onpage is only one part of SEO - and a fairly small one at that if you look at technical onpage optimization. Perhaps 20-25%. The other 75-80% is content generation and offpage activites (link generation, social engagement etc.) and I think these are much much harder to scale unless you have a wicked unique product that just drives insane amounts of diverse links and mentions to not just a home page but to individual content pages deep within the site structure. I have only seen a handful or so sites ever achieving this.