Welcome to the Q&A Forum

To the best of my knowledge this has no impact on SEO. Googlebot doesn't like it when you hide content, but that only applies to overflow:hidden and display:none as far as I know.

Its a matter of preference and your sites demographics. If your visitors are young and/or tech savvy, you can go without the www and gain the advantage of having a url 4 characters shorter. If your visitors tend to be less tech savvy or generally older, you should probably keep the www because its a convention that helps identify it as a website to that demographic.

I must sound like a total fanboy at this point, but Drupal can do that pretty easily. I built adoptionexperts.org in a few days with it. Basically create a question content type, theme comments into answers, and then add flags for votes and you're pretty much done.

No, to count as duplicate content the text on the page needs to be largely the same. Googlebot is really good at parsing out navigation and thematic elements of the page separately from the content.

It is a great idea to block the development portion of your site. You can do that with your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /dev

But you're right, it doesn't sound like the culprit in your case. Its more likely that your competition is slowly gaining the edge on you. Make sure your on-page SEO is optimized and then try to get some more inbound links to your pages.

I would question whether building external links really falls into the work of building their blog, or whether you want to bill that separately as an SEO service.

That being said, you should definitely optimize the blog to the best of your abililty as it pertains to the scope of the project. I would include these in your checklist:

• Make sure the theme you're using is optimized (proper use of on page SEO like h1 tags)
• Use an SEO plugin like All-In-One-SEO, and configure it properly (turn off indexing for supporting pages like author, tags, categories)
• Use plugins that can link their social media accounts with their blogs, for example Socialite, which can publish your blog posts automatically to a facebook account and more.
• Make sure comments are properly set up, this is most easily done with a tool like Disqus.

The other stuff involved with making a blog successful takes a lot of time and effort. You need to build relationships with similar sites, create well written content that can go viral. This stuff typically falls on the shoulders of the site owners or their employees.

Every section of your robots.txt file consists of declaring the agents the rules will apply to, and then the rules themselves.

In your file the User-Agent: * is the first part, where you are saying the following rules apply to every type of visitor. But if you only have that, and no actual rules, then you don't really need a robots.txt file. The "normal" file Jordan refers to in his answer is probably a good best practice, but isn't technically necessary.

Trevor, I just found this site the other day and I thought of this question. Perhaps this service can help you?

http://faqme.com

I'm sorry to say I don't know anything about that script. My point was that from the code point of view, a question is like any other content and so a CMS should be able to handle what you're after.

Unfortunately I don't know of any out of the box FAQ scripts. Best of luck, and if you find the killer solution be sure to let us know

It depends on how your site is structured.

For example if you have a page at

http://www.yourdomain.com/products.php

and this shows different things based on the parameter, like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/products.php?type=widgets

You will want to get rid of this line in your robots.txt

However if the parameter(s) doesn't change the content on the page, you can leave it in.

If you want lots of flexibility I would recommend Drupal and either Ubercart or Drupal Commerce, depending on the version you go with.

I had a distinctly unpleasant experience with CREloaded, so I would stay away from that project wherever possible.

Also, I second everything Ryan Hutchings said. Keep it on one site to minimize your SEO workload, and always have an interactive call to action even if its not "add to cart".

Its preventing spiders from crawling pages with parameters in the URL. For example when you search on google you'll see a URL like so:

http://www.google.com/search?q=seo

This passes the parameter of q with a value of 'seo' to the page at google.com for it to work its magic with. This is almost definitely a good thing, unless the only way to access some content on your site is via URL parameters.

It sounds like you want a way to add content to your site where you use a web based form to input the title (question) and body (answer) and then have them linked together in a sort of index. Possibly with extra things like "related questions".

If all that is true, then what you're asking for is a CMS.

The quick and dirty non-cms way is to create a template for your FAQ questions and use it whenever you want to add a new question to your list. If that's too hands-on with html, a modified WP installation in a folder named /faq may be what you need.

In wordpress a post provides extra tools for organizing the content: by category, author, date, tag.

A page is meant for content that doesn't need those classifications, and typically pages are used to create the main navigation links.

It all boils down to how you want to structure your site, but like the others mentioned using the blog post format provides certain benefits: the user understands they can follow feeds and comment on blog posts. Also, if you're using add-ons the categories and tags can be very helpful for things like Related posts.

Everyone is going to place different value in different parts of their marketing strategy, so only you can ultimately decide if its worth it or not.

That being said I would not pursue this service. They have a decent traffic ranking in Canada, but not enough to warrant what they're asking for, in my view. And with the nofollow and php redirects, you're getting no SEO benefit from the service, only whatever traffic they send directly from their site.

My guess is this has to do with potentially two factors: (1) The reported target audience is an imprecise number and (2) the number was recently revised based on newer data.

This is only my guess, I have no hard data to back this up.

Well I know you can use Drupal with Oracle since version 7 now supports PDO, and there are even some modules out there to do the heavy lifting for you.

However, for a blog Drupal is probably overkill. I would question your IT depts decision about not wanting to use MySQL/Wordpress before looking at using Drupal for just a blog.

I've never used these lesser known CMS's, but you can try them out, they all work with Oracle db: ez publish, Mysource Matrix, Silverstripe, Typo3

The three I use are the SEOmoz tool, Spyfu, and the google adwords tool. I'm looking forward to see what everyone else uses!

Edit: To clarify I'm talking about the term extractor specifically, but all the keyword tools can help steer your keyword strategy.

Like Mr. Barth says, 301 redirects occur on the server level, before a page is even served up to the end user, and so presenting an alternate isn't possible this way.

You could use the meta refresh tag, or another server side technology like php or asp to accomplish this. Do this and the link juice is gone, though. To address that issue, you should use a rel canonical tag to tell robots that the buyers site is the canonical version of your domain, and assign all value there.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm recommending you both forward the request AND use rel canonical.

This feature is a little confusing. Alt text is an attribute of the img tag in HTML, so this would normally be outside the realm of photoshop. To use the photoshop alt text feature, you need to export the HTML for the image when you're saving it.

See http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/photoshop/images.html under the heading "Exporting HTML from photoshop".

Once you've exported the html, you can paste it into your html document. To me, its all much more complicated than simply typing out < img src="myimage.jpg" alt="My alt text" / > but that may be due to my technical background.