Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ryan, thx for the considered response

You have covered the most important items. 1. If possible, keep the same URL structure. If that is not possible, be certain all the URLs are properly redirected (301) to the equivalent pages on the new site. 2. Ensure the new site's navigation is solid. Perform a crawl of the old and new site, or generate a sitemap for both sites. Compare the URLs and investigate any discrepancies. 3. You should investigate all the normal SEO factors to ensure they are in tact between sites. Header tags, meta descriptions, meta tags such as index and follow, robots.txt, alt tags, etc. should all be inspected. 4. You should check to ensure the new site uses valid HTML/CSS. While not directly SEO related, invalid code often causes issues where your site does not appear properly in various browser versions. Your pages can easily be checked with the W3C validation tool. 5. Minimize flash on the new site or, if you do use flash, ensure you have the proper HTML support. You can disable flash on your browser then view your site to verify. 6. You should check your site security after moving to the new CMS. 7. Ensure your daily backups are created on an automated process. TEST IT! Perform a site restore to a test site after your first day of being live. 8. Ensure you have a "friendly" 404 page. Offer a search box and your normal site's navigation so users are more likely to stay on your site. 9. Check your site's page load speed with PageSpeed or YSlow. 10. Make sure your client has a solid process in place to handle maintenance. A current client had an issue where after his software was originally installed he never updated. His site was hit by malware as a direct result. A plan should be established as to how software updates will occur.

I would pick a different angle to the same topic and completely re-write the article.  It's a lot of work but guest posts on other sites/blogs need to be completely unique in my opinion - not just for SEO reasons but also to ensure your readers and the readers of the sites you post on are getting quality content each time.

Well, your first issue is having a blog only for SEO, search engines aren't that bothered if you have a blog, users might be and if users like it and link to it then search engines might care. Anyway, you're almost certainly better to focus on developing one good blog than five okay ones. If you're talking about developing a content syndication strategy, then there's a lot more to think about.

Hi Sally, This isn't ideal for SEO, and the immediate answer is: It's not OK, and you have to reduce this to one. Each time you use a 301 redirect, you lose some "link juice" - the less you redirect Googlebot, the more value your pages will retain. Can I ask why you're having to redirect twice? Cheers, Dave

Have you tried running your target keywords through the SEOMoz 'Juicy Link Finder' tool? This will most likely drum up some prospects for you to approach about guest blogging spots. For more advanced searches have a look at the Competitive Link Research Tool and Link Acquisition Assistant. Good luck!

If they are very technical, just write down the specs or steps that you are discussing at the side, kind of like a guide you can follow while seeing the video.

Thanks for your help in tracking this down!

@Isaac,  agreed!

Barry at Search Engine Roundtable has written about Google choosing their own page titles for your site, and I've seen reports of it here as well, so you're certainly not alone. Here's what Barry has written: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-tag-13704.html

Again, not totally clear cut. Depends if the links are within the content, site wide, above or below an affiliate link, withing one or several pages. I would err on the side of assuming that if there's affiliate and non-affiliate links then the clean links won't count for as much.