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You should not be overly worried about your rankings, especially in the short term. Just write great content which users will love and you will see the website come up on searches again. All said, keep an eye on your Google webmaster tools. If your website has been penalized for some reason, Google execs maybe kind enough to let you know about that. SEOmoz tools should give you a good idea on crawl errors and on page metrics so that you can keep a close look at them.

In my experience, the only accurate tool is goole analytics (or other analytics software, of course). Webmaster tools is helpful for sitemap and crawling related issues, but I wouldn't trust the keywords section too much. This is even more the case for insights for search, these numbers are mostly usable to see trends, but not detailled analytics. You might want to use the google adwords tool instead, probably more reliable than the latter two: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Hope this helps!

If I transfer my blog to my website will that mean all my link juice for my main website will be given to all the links i have on my blog.I link to heaps of people from my blog Also many of my links from my blog point to domains that point to my main website - given this info would you still advise to move my blog from wordpress to my own domain?

Obvious questions maybe but could it be something to do with a change on your site rather than SEO reasons? E.g. navigation, checkout process or loss of a payment option

The data is there but not presented as nicely and requires some manual sorting. Traffic Sources --> Search Engines --> Add Metric "Landing Page" or "Keyword" There may be duplicates you need to account for if multiple search engines are sending traffic via the same keyword or to the same landing page. If you only want to see it for a specific search engine and therefore not have to remove the duplicates do this. Traffic Sources --> Search Engines --> Pick Search Engine --> Change Main Metric to "Landing Page" or "Keyword" Hope that help. I really like the way they format it though. It is a nice report. I wish they allowed for more custom reporting on those metrics though like adding custom dates and export to PDF, etc.

The speed load of the entire is site is much more important. That, in correlation with the IP location can help you in some extent with your ranking but overall it's a small signal. My opinion is to focus on the site speed (related with your question) and I strongly believe that since both Vancouver and Montreal are in Canada there won't be a difference as far as geo location of your host. More then that if your site is fast, even if you host using a US host your ranking won't be affected. Since you have those options within Canada It's best, in my opinion, to go with the Montreal option as there is no difference as far as SEO benefit between the two options you've mention. Hope it helps !

I totally agree with the notion that User Experience dictates keeping it in a regular site template. And an html page devoted to being a sitemap is supposed to be for users, not search engines.  The days of having one page with nothing but links should be over in everyone's mind anyhow.  If all a page does is provide links, with no content around them, the SEO value of all those links is minor now. Then we can talk about how much value those sitemap on-page links have anyhow -  if you've got fifty or five hundred links on that page, they're not passing very much value for SEO, regardless of whether there's top navigation, or anything else on the page.

Whether you include the sub-nav in the site-wide navigation as drop-downs or not, make sure that you also have that sub-nav as on-page links (such as in a side-bar) specific to each section.  So that only that sections page links will then be on all of the pages just within that section, without the drop-down needing to be used. This ensures proper attribution and relationship queues for SEO. Having said that, this issue is widely debated in the industry.  I've seen arguments on both sides claiming they have proof that one or the other of your choices was better.  Personally, I've always taken the approach that SEO should always be balanced with usability.  So when this question comes up I don't tell clients to kill the site-wide drop-downs.  Instead, I focus on other refinement (like the section by section dedicated side-bar links, and proper breadcrumbs, and in-content links, and so forth).  And that has always gotten my clients solid results.

Have you submitted a news sitemap? It should only include links to your news articles. http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=74288 Also it looks like they want to know more about your editorial review process. Here is the standard message from google about being included in News results. We typically include sites in Google News that: have news content reporting on recent events - please note that we don't include informational and how-to articles, classified ads, job postings, fictitious content, event announcements, advice columns or adult content; have content that is original to the site; are written and maintained by a clear organization, one that has multiple writers and editors with accessible contact information; don't solely promote their own activities or products; don't violate Google's quality guidelines available at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3.

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.

SEO Moz only gives out 20 Moz points per month for responding for asking or answering questions or leaving replies.  After that I you can still thumbs up your own question, response, etc.

That isn't always a bad idea. I would just say to make sure you are dealing with trusted sites before trading for links. All links are not created equal. Too many untrusted links reflect poorly on your site, regardless of how they are built!

If you have a site that has been matched with a brand then Google will rarely remove your site entirely from the index. Take JC Penny for example. They didn't suffer any rankings for the term JC Penny. They suffered rankings for other terms that they had been building bad links for. Monitoring your keyword rankings and noticing large drops in positions on a per keyword base might give you a better idea if you have been hit with a penalty.

Making such radical changes is always something that shouldn't be taken lightly, that's for sure.  And if it's done, you'll need to have a spreadsheet where you can enter a column with all the page names, a column with their current URLs, and one with the new URLs, because implementing 301 Redirects is critical but can be a nightmare otherwise. What it comes down to is evaluating the value of other SEO (on-site, link-building, and social) that can be done to improve things as compared with architectural changes.  Judgment calls.  Not always fun.