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Cons: May lose some of the link juice from the 301 redirect from the old URL's (between 1 and 10% is the usual quoted figure) Initial (usually short term) drop in rankings and potentially traffic of weaker site pages www.weakersite.com is a "nicer" looking URL for offline marketing than www.strongersite.com/weakersite Pro's:- If on Subfolder rather than sub directory pages will benefit from domain authority and links to domain of stronger site. Can focus future link building and on-page SEO efforts on one site rather than 2, potentially doubling the amount you can get done If building from scratch and choice of 2 sites or 1 I would say go for one. As two already exist there is more of a call to be made.

The ways to leverage paid advertising is to buy links that are follow link, but also can drive traffic. Think of link building as advertising. Try to get good links that will also drive traffic. I would have a good content for edits to link to. Also writing a guest post is a good idea. Also if you are sending traffic to your site, then those visitors may want to link to you.

Good point, I didn't think of that. Thanks Tyler!

Yes, watch Rand's White Board Friday on 2011 Ranking Factors. I just put it on my site yesterday. It's at the bottom: http://www.shipoverseas.com/us/ship-car/europe/shipping-car-to-germany.html

I think you pretty much have to be engaging with people on social media - otherwise in what sense is it "social"?  You're missing out on a lot of opportunity not only to win your users' hearts and minds, but also to learn how they interact with and think about what you do.  That's how a lot of companies right now are using social media - to figure out what their customers really like and want so they can make a great product.  The conversation will happen whether you participate or not - don't you want to be part of it?  If you're not, you have no control over the message. So who to hire to do it?  I've had a great time working with the good people at Social Creatures Media.  That's who we use when we need some social magic.  I don't know what you'd consider a "reasonable" cost but I find their pricing more than fair for the quality work they do.  And no, I don't work for them

Hi Yudhis, With every update of our metrics, which is almost monthly, we adjust them to try and match what we are seeing in the SERPs.  As always there are other factors that we might not be aware of that could effect things in the SERP you are looking at but we do readjust things with every update. Casey

Thank you Keri,  I had read about speed issues with Magento before, but I thought they had been mostly resolved. I think I am going to stick to my asp.net solution.....  it's a decision, anyway.

Hi David, I'm updating older, unanswered threads. I'm really curious to hear what you decided to do in this situation and what the effect has been. Can you give us an update and any lessons you learned? Thanks!

Anything change in the past week?

I would set your post title as the H1. That is my personal preference and what i do for my clients. H1 gets a little more weight than an H2, though it is not much simply because it's too easy to stuff.

What they're using is rich snippets. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html You can read about it there. I would recommend using it if possible, they do make it nice for the end-user and result in higher CTR's in my experience.

If you have the resources, ideally you want to be running them as independent microsites that eventually redirect through to your main site (ie when the user decides he wants to buy whatever your selling)