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I think backlinks is the biggest issue here....

I would not use the location as a keyword. I would: As Semil says, get a local listing such as Google Places Get reviews on this listing Have the address on the site (contact page) Phil

To my knowledge, Bing does not officially support Google's ajax crawler implementation at this time, there is still question over whether or not Bing correctly handles cross-site canonical tags as well. That being said, Bing's long-tail traffic, especially in the UK, will represent such a small percentage of the traffic available to your site that I am led to believe that Google's implementation would be sufficient for NetMovers. Google handles these URL's just fine (as long as your implementation is correct).

The problem that I have with CMS side sitemap generators is that it often pulls content from pages that are existing and adds entries based off that information.  If you have pages linked to that are no longer there, as is the case with dynamic content, then you'll be imposing 404's on yourself like crazy. Just something to watch out for but it's probably your best solution.

I bet Roger was created by Oatmeal (http://theoatmeal.com/) who used to be part of the SEOmoz team.  I imagine SEOmoz has an in-house designer that uses Adobe Illustrator to create it's icons and such.  Just guessing though.

See potential users don't see your homepage yet. You're bidding for their click among 9 other organic results on that page

Also, just to complete this, you can now use the rel=hreflang tag to tell Google when you have duplicate content that is directed at different countries.  If the content is truly duplicate, you can use the rel=canonical (but be careful about using both at the same time).  Check this post for mor details: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232347/A-Simple-Guide-to-Using-relalternate-hreflangx

No probs

Hi Boson, Google does automate this process and does use refrences to your site from around the Web. it also takes into consideration any DMOZ listings (by default). This is confirmed here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35264. I would recommend that you check your DMOZ listing (if you have one) and if that is wrong, attempt to get that changed, or use the NOODP meta tag described in the article. If that has no impact you should double confirm that everything is OK in your title and meta title tags on your page (e.g. there aren't any duplicate tags). If that doesn't bare any fruit, then your next step would probably be to try and contact some of the people that are linking toy ou with a typo and ask them to update their links - this si far from ideal though, so only do it as a last resort.

I can provide you with a little anecdote but I think internal linking is a reasonably large factor, especially from the home page. So I have a page, 3 levels deep, absolute tail end of my site and exists exclusively to catch the keyword it's targeting; doesn't provide any information you can't get elsewhere on the site, doesn't have any exclusive offers, just another page on the site. So I build a few links into this page, nothing exciting; articles, links from my blog posts, manage to find a couple of websites about the topic, but after 3 months, nothing, top 50 ranking (from 120 or so) but not that great. However one day I get a conversion from it, so I decide I'm going to give it a little push and link to it with the main keyword from the homepage. Boom! Next day, 7th. The homepage itself isn't that powerful, very low page rank, very few links coming in and there's already about 100 links on it between the nav and the other editorial style links. It's not that the page I linked to wasn't being crawled or indexed but putting a link in from the homepage instantly boosted it. 2 months later the page still fluctuates within the top 10, but I have been building more links into it. So, flush with this new success I decide to test it on another, very similar, site. Same sort of page, same sort of keyword, same sort of site structure. Difference this time is that I'm not building links to the page in question. Keyword isn't top hundred so I put the link in from the home page. Boom! Top 80. Alright, not as good but a definite twitch. I figure that it's not quite the magic bullet I thought it was (and realistically I can't link to every page from my home page anyway) and haven't really revisited what would happen if I did build links to that page (and a few more to the homepage). So, anecdotally, internal linking from recent pages and small time link building doesn't do much. Linking from the homepage is a big signal that a page is important. Without external links your internal linking (on a small / low DA website) isn't going to rank you. I'm going to say it's closer to 20/80 though.

So using this method I don't need to include noindex, nofollow on the subdomain page?

I would love to be able to organise the tools I use the most at the top - or have them in a favourites link or something like that

I think I would create a new page with the new product name but have the rest of the content exactly the same. I woudl then set a rel=canonical on the new page pointing to the old page. I would then wait until traffic for the new page out ranks that of the old page, and then eventually 301 redirect the old page to the new page.

Thank you