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Image maps present links in a very standardized way that the search engines definitely index so it's more of a question of how you want your information presented in results. If I'm presenting a cluster of results for a barbershop search in a local area with an image map, I wouldn't want that broken up until it got to the individual page for a specific location, as one example. As for the alternate text tag, it's the same "alt" so it'll be read the same way.  A good practice for usability, regardless.

Simply, yes that just about covers it. The things to bear in mind are that there is often a delay in recognising the new domain so there may be a short amount of time where your domain is not apearing on the SERPS. My personal advice is as follows: Pre-move: Buy the new domain as early as possible and put some simple content on it. Submit/register your domain with the major search engines and get a few links to ensure it is listed and the search engines recognise it (this helps to reduce or avoid sandboxing). 1. Create all necessary 301 Redirects. 2. Use analytics and site explorer to find the top 200 or so domains sending traffic to your old domain and contact their webmasters to change the links. 3. Make sure both the old and new sites have been verified and have site maps submitted. 4. Launch your new site with a media and online marketing campaign. The goal is to get as many new inbound links as possible as quickly as possible and to attract a large number of branded searches for the new site. 5. Monitor your Webmaster Central account for 404 errors and to check how Google is dealing with your 301's. Whenever a 404 is produced, place a 301 in place. 6. Monitor the spiders on your new domain. Search engines spend more time crawling sites they trust so when your crawl level is close to your old sites level you are probably close to that trust level (this is a crude measurement). 7. Monitor your search engine traffic referrals to help determine how your new site is developing on the internet. 8. You can also check your server logs for 404 and 500 errors. For more information Matt Cutts published the following: http://blog.milestoneinternet.com/web-development/faq-on-duplicate-content-and-moving-your-site-by-matt-cutts-at-pubcon-2009/

Well you can, theoretically, but it can get very technical or be a bit imprecise. You are correct that you can't really guarantee a set number of leads (what if everybody's plumbing is working perfectly in London this month) but you should be able to track your contributions. If you use a second phone number on Google Local and the meta description, then anybody coming through that is a SEO lead. Also, while a bit wishy washy, you should be able to see in your analytics what percentage of people are coming through on unbranded search and then attribute a percentage of web completions to that. You get more precise by setting up a tracking system, but it'd be a very bespoke set up.

Stephen has hit the nail on the head. In order to take advantage of a site's DA, you have to build up the PA and you do that by building links to it. The beauty of it is that you only need a handful of links, then the PA really soars.

They don't use nofollow, so this would be all regular links. If we have a huge partnership, we would suddenly have links from more than 70 sites all using the same anchortext.

Thanks, i will see what I can come up with, in the meantime I'll make sure any links to press releases or squidoo, and the like will be clean....

email frank@orchidbox.com and ask about his optimised seo template and cms

Hey James, don't forget the Wild, Wild, West is not a static lab environment. How old is your site? What has changed with your competitors - look specifically at any new entries into the top ten and try and determine why they might have moved up to replace you. Any server/page load speed issues? It is supposed to be an algorithm, but I doubt there is a single person (probably by design) that has any clue what it really is doing and barely what is supposed to be doing It could be a million different things - is your dev sub-directory blocked from crawling, did some high quality comment links get archived, did some of your quality links go away, did someone you are linking to get whacked or go away, etc, etc Are the pages that dropped still ranking for other terms - i.e. was it a "surgical drop" that I have experienced on another site of mine that I'm still trying to figure out. Just do an audit of everything and keep doing quality things... and theoretically, as we tell ourselves, your rankings should come back. Finally, were your ranking drops in the 10-50, 200+, or 950 range?  The smaller ones are supposedly algorithmic and "easier" to correct while the higher ones are manually and "time out" once the offense has been corrected - all kind of witch craft Good luck.

We found 5pm a bit unfriendly to use, ended up with cohuman which is much easier and integrates with gdocs. It isn't as good as 5pm at the high level for project overview. None of the team likes base camp though we have to use it for one of our clients.

As far as the search engines are concerned, the URLs are nice and clean with relevant keywords, but if a user browses the site in IE then the URLs do not maintain their double byte structure and instead convert to ugly URLs like this: mydomain.com/hk/hotels/asia-pacific/-中國-重慶-579-重慶-Sofitel-2-1-晚優惠-連早餐-1025557/

Being a fulltime web developer with over 500+ sites in the past 12+ years, I can tell you from experience that we've used/seen/fixed/tried all these options that people have discussed and we've come back to the oldie & goldie each time in Wordpress. Here's a couple quick reasons: 1. It has a TON of man hours into developing a platform that isn't perfect, but works better than 99.99% of all people/companies could put together. 2. It is proven and it WORKS solid. 3. There are tons of plugins that make your site do what you'd like it to do. Don't have one with a function that you are wanting? Either code the functionality directly into the site or build your own plugin and have it do exactly what you'd like. 4. It's extremely flexible to work with to get it to do/integrate with whatever you'd like. 5. It's easy to find developers to work on it since there are a lot of WP developers out there that can help you out. Some of these other platforms, if your developer leaves you, then you're sunk. Those are just 5 quick reasons why we recommend WP and keep coming back to it. I can't even begin to tell you the number of clients that we've gotten because their developer recommended a solution or custom built them a platform, then the developer went out of business, got lost on a boat in the middle of the sea, or just completely quit returning phone calls and they left the customer out to die. Then the client calls us and has to make another decent investment for us to build them something brand new from scratch on WP. The most recent, was with a client who had their custom built platform for 3 months and the developer disappeared. Sorry to say but these stories happen all the time. That's why we're not cheap, but we take amazing care of our clients day & night (including sending them $100 of cookies like we did for a client yesterday. LOL!) Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

I just noticed that some of your pages are indexed under www.dentistinlittlerock.com and some with out the www's at dentistinlittlerock.com. This could be why you are not seeing them all indexed in your webmaster tools.  Webmaster tools see these as two different sites. You should set up a 301 redirect to have them all go to one domain(either www.dentistinlittlerock.com or dentistinlittlerock.com).  This should fix it.