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Nope, you are not targeting that region and you don't care about localised results in south america so don't worry about it. The search engine would never know as long as you don't block one of their crawlers anyhow so... block away.

Is it possible for me to get this site high in google with good links and quality content? I can't speak for the .nu domain specifically, but you should certainly be able to rank well in google if you build solid links and quality content. When you mention any random company name like "McDonald's", "Toyota", etc. you can add a .com after and arrive to the company website. The .nu domain does not have that kind of name recognition, but you can certainly build it. Your challenge will be not only building up your brand / site, but also ensuring everyone recognizes that your extension is .nu. There will always be a percentage of your visitors who will enter your website name followed by .com and end up on the wrong site. You should definitely take a look at the .com version of your URL before making a final decision.

Good Answer and a great article on your site too! Kudos!

Ryan's point about localized search being drastically different.  So the real question is whether you offer products or services that require localized identification.  If so, having your initial local area in the domain will definitely not help your effort. As for the example of the New York times, they can get away with showing up when not searching for local specifics because they're one of the biggest sites with some of the highest SEO authority from 3rd party sites on earth.  So of course they can get away with it.  If you want to achieve the same (for non-local search phrases), you'll need to go to extreme lengths to build your site's SEO authority as well. Personally I'd say that if your site depends on local related search, you'd be better off with a domain that doesn't have the local aspect in the name.  Build out content in a locations funnel - starting with the geographic areas you determine to be a mix of the most important and some that are semi-important (and thus easier to rank for over time). That way, you can create individual pages (or ideally sections) that have each geographic location in the URLs.  This is much less challenging to get ranking for over time than the root domain being about just one location, because the root domain placement of a keyword is much stronger than a sub-folder. High quality SEO will be key in the geographic funnel.  Citations from other sites in each of those locations will be really helpful as well.

Hey William, By "looks better", I have been taught that when people (especially marketers) hover over a link, they check out where it takes them by looking at the bottom left of the browser before clicking it. The redirect makes the URL more friendly to click.

Hey Steve, As Ryan mentioned the keyword meta tag is no longer used for ranking purposes. Here's a great Google Webmaster Post and video with Mat Cutts that covers this topic. As for your keywords I would stick to 2 or 3 per page so that the page is targeted and tightly themed. If you try to optimize your pages for too many keywords the content will likely start to become diluted and less valuable from a search engines perspective. To answer your second question more directly it would be ideal to have individual pages that target a single keyword, however I would only recommend this if you have quality content to support each of the keywords. Otherwise, your pages will have a difficult time ranking. Something to note is that a few of your keywords are multi-purpose. In other words, if you optimize one of your pages for "digital aerials stockport" you will naturally be optimizing for "aerials stockport" as this keyword is contained within "digital aerials stockport." Just something to think about If you're looking for some tips on keyword research check out this section of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO. Hopefully this helps - good luck!

Out of respect to fellow programmers suspecting a bug is always my last resort, but I will sure let them know. Thanks again

Panda was supposedly rolled out about a month after the US into at the end of February, European debut was mid-April

We had a similar situation on our website, and it ended up being a very simple solution. We had in the code some places where it formated URLs in in the opposite case for instance, both: http://www.racquetsource.com/photogallery.asp?productcode=001.KA601 and http://www.racquetsource.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=001.KA601 work, and the search engines and SEOmoz see them as different pages. We combed our site and looked for links that pointed to the opposite, and were able to reduce the number of errors our our site tremendously. Good luck!

Thank you, The 301's are only being used for content that has been moved. I hope the developer takes care of this ASAP.

by going with either of these (/xxx/pr-123.php vs /xxx/www-pr-123.php) you are signaling to the search engines that "xxx" is the common factor and each page within that "virtual" folder would then be seen as a sub-set.  So the question then is whether "www-pr-123.php" or "pr-123.php" is more appropriate for SEO purposes. I'd say that it all depends on the importance of the "www" portion.  If "www" is in fact a relevant word/phrase, either from a general search value or from a brand identity value, then it's best practices to include them in the URL.  If they're neither valued for search by people who are not familiar with your specific products, or alternately, not important to people looking up your products who already know them, you can leave them out. Another take on this would be - what's the chances someone would search for the products by part number without the www portion?  And what's the chances of someone searching for the products by the "www" portion only? While it's not necessarily critical to include every single aspect of a part's known naming convention in the URL (if you have optimized page Titles, h1, content, image names, etc), I'm guessing you want to cover the bases in how people search based on different situations, so in that case, don't leave them out. As far as the concept of having too many URLs saturated with any aspect of category, product name or whatever, there's no need to be concerned with that if they're valid products grouped properly.  It's more important to provide unique quality content on every single page.  And if you're talking about many very similar products, that itself should be your biggest worry. Just having the same descriptions repeated over and over page to page, with just a single word or part number being the difference is what would be the problem.  Coming up with 100 or 150 or 200 words that are uniquely written for every product - now that's the bigger goal and far outweighs the URL repetition. Then there's the fact that if you have all those repeated URLs, you're actually telling search engines "we've got a lot of relevant products for that topical focus".  But only if you get those unique descriptions done right.

Been there. Done that. No easy answers. Pursue all available remedies. Resign yourself to the fact that nothing may work, and you may have to start over.

Trust is a reasonable factor.  Consider this - Google uses trust when they determine how accurate a company's Place page is.  They go out and look to see whether the phone, address, other info are listed on other, known, trusted sites. So yes, EGOL's got a good point as well.

Have you seen the 'business case' template files that Econsultancy have? They have one for SEO specifically... Maybe a help? (Although it is from 2010 it seems! So maybe update any stats!) http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/sem-search-engine-optimisation-seo-business-case It does cost though, unless you or anyone in your company has a membership there? Personally, I find that working out some basic figures on traffic increases with existing, and forecast conversion rates can help. In addition, do you track what the leading competing brand is doing? I sometimes find that whilst some folks further up the food chain will be convinced by the figures and stats, others will be convinced by seeing that their leading competitor is spending on SEO (this can be proved by measuring various metrics, checking out their social profiles, etc). I guess nobody wants to be the last kid in the playground chosen for the team? <-- Even with this though, having some stats on projected ROI is a very good idea, and yup, as Promoteam said above... presentation matters!

I suppose that is true, e-commerce and editorial sites will organize information differently. With e-commerce the last thing you want is to clutter a page with tons of products to make it difficult for users to find exactly what they are looking for. But with editorial sites like wikipedia it would make more sense to have the most comprehensive page you can create.