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If [hats in chicago] clicks are converting into sales you should be careful about playing with this in case you lose the ranking altogether. Saying that, individual product pages usually convert better than anything else so it may be best to concentrate on those instead of category pages. To rank a category page that lists the hats you have available there are a number of things you can do if you haven't already:

• If you don't want the homepage to rank, make sure you're not committing keyword cannibilisation
• Ensure your onpage SEO is spot-on for the hat page e.g. title tag with your keyword (and maybe a price/offer/incentive to encourage clicks, meta description to encourage clicks, descriptive image filenames and alt attributes, useful URL structure
• Onpage too - add some unique introductory text
• Show review data (such as AggregateRating) by each product and consider adding a small number of reviews to category pages - user generated content is good for getting unique content. I say a small number of reviews to avoid duplicate content issues
• Link to your most important category pages from every page on your website via a main menu
• Add breadcrumbs
• Make sure you have an HTML sitemap, and an XML sitemap submitted to the search engines - both listen all your pages

Ah, I thought it seemed slightly unusual for SEOmoz to go with a UK-based company; so they have an office in Seattle as well as London (and now New York too, I see). Seattle is a good place to be if you want to hire a local company. Bear in mind that if you've been unhappy with some of the services you've hired before, you might be paying more than you have from now on - but that's because who we've recommended are amongst THE BEST!

Make sure the language you use is natural. You might be able to rule out one or the other if it wouldn't be natural in your content.

Advice I've read in the past has recommended to optimise for both, though it depends on the term of course; some might be better as plural, some might not. Compare the search results for each and if one is more competitive than the other. Each might bring up completely different results, I think one example I read was that the singular showed e-commerce sites whereas the plural showed descriptive sites - I can't remember the example that was used.

Optimising for the plural is more likely to help with the singular than the other way around, but I think Google can usually tell they're related e.g. www.google.co.uk/search?q=red+bull+sticker - in more cases a longer tail keyphrase will probably show for both plural and singular, even if you just optimise for one of them.

You can add canonical HTTP headers to the PDFs to avoid any duplicate content problems: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

If you think these PDFs are really valuable, and e-mail addresses will be useful to you, then yes - you should ask for an e-mail address to download them. If you don't take that route and they're indexed as part of your website, make sure you have a few links to your websites within the PDFs so you get some value if people rehost them.

Make sure your branding and website is obvious on the PDFs whatever you do.

I agree that it's better to add it to your own site. What if people like your blog and link to it, but it's not on your site? You've lost some link juice there. You can submit it to blog directories too - more direct links to your site. For ecommerce sites there's a lot of content duplication with other sites when the same products are sold, so like you say in your last sentence, a blog adds regular unique content.

The extra 70 characters can help - Google DOES index them: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday

If you can, make sure the first 70 characters are most relevant to the page content, and readable for the user - if they don't like what they see or it doesn't make sense without the other 70 characters they're unlikely to click through.

You don't mention whether your brand name is included in the tag; unless you're really well known in your niche it usually makes sense to have the brand at the end of the title tag (if at all). I'm an SEO for a couple of news websites where the titles are often well over 70 characters (with the brand names at the end). It doesn't seem to cause any serious problems and we have had high traffic from SERPs with longer titled articles. I advise the editors to put the main keywords near the beginning of the title if possible, with readability (for the human!) being the most important thing.

I've just had a very quick look and my first thoughts are you're committing a lot of keyword cannibalisation - basically you have the same phrase competing against itself over multiple pages (useful link:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization). These two pages for example:

http://www.healthchoices.ca/article/yoga-for-osteoporosis

http://www.healthchoices.ca/video/yoga-studios/yoga-for-osteoporosis

As you know, they have exactly the same video - why don't you put the article on the same page as the video? The video pages themselves aren't unique content from a crawler's point of view - they look like a search results/archive page. It makes more sense from a usability point of view (important for SEO) to do this too, and I wouldn't have the videos play automatically either. The navigation around the site seems slightly confusing as a whole.

You seem to have loads of superfluous code in your HTML, and far too many HTTP requests; can some of those script files be combined?

That is interesting - perhaps just a coding issue as the other links are all nofollow.

The link should still pass juice - Google counts the anchor text of the first occurrence of a particular link on a page (often called "first link priority") but as far as we know ignores the anchor text of repeated links - so that's probably what you're referring to. Subsequent followed links will still pass juice.

My moz profile link does show in my Google WMT account.

If the websites are geo-targeted towards their relevant country then duplicated content isn't an issue. Country-specific domains like .pl and .co.uk will automatically target to Poland and the UK respectively, but you may want to make sure the .com is targeted towards the US, if the US is its main focus - this is so it doesn't compete with the other English versions of the site in the search engines in the UK, Australia etc. Also make sure all content is localised (ideally written/re-written by a native). There are some subtle and some big differences between British, Australian and American versions of English.

These are two links I always mention as must-views in relation to international SEO:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html 
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Have you checked www.imageworkscreative.com on Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any important site messages?

You have a lot of links to your homepage with the exact same anchor text - I notice it's in the footers of your client's websites, which isn't a good idea when it's done to excess. 'custom web design' is one of the phrases and that's a term you mention, so it's possible you've fallen foul of the Penguin update, especially if you had a sudden drop in traffic/rankings.

I haven't used it myself, but this Google Penalty Checker has been recommended by some of my favourite SEOs who work/contribute here at Moz: http://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/

If you have suffered a penalty there are plenty of online guides on recovering, let me know if you need pointing in the right direction.

1 - the absolute path. It's less error-prone. For example, if the rest of the URL was sometimes partly upper case, and other times completely lower case.

It isn't wrong to use question marks in URLs.

However - as Thomas says, short and descriptive URLs describe what is on the page, whereas the query parameters you use currently don't. "Keyword present in the page's URL" was also believed to be an important ranking factor by the participants in Moz's Ranking Factors survey earlier this year: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/survey

By mirroring URLs, will each product then exist at 2 URLs? E.g.:

example.com/product.php?id=3624
and
example.com/category/product

If so, you don't want to do that as it creates duplicate content. Using canonical tags to fix the duplication doesn't solve the problem completely.

If you change URLs, you should 301 redirect the old to the new, so

example.com/product.php?id=3624
would 301 redirect to
example.com/category/product

Just in case you aren't aware - a "301" is a permanent redirect, so when using a permanent redirect, even if other websites have linked to example.com/product.php?id=3624 - the browser will automatically redirect to the new URL, passing most of the authority built up from the links you mentioned.

Whether I'd advise you to change the URLs of existing products depends on whether you can implement the redirects. In the short-term you'll lose a slight bit of link authority through the redirect, but in the longer-term, the frendlier URLs should benefit your website.

Also, there's always a risk when making large scale changes to URL structure - you need to make sure customers can still navigate the site without issues, and search engine crawlers understand the changes you've made - 301 redirects are best-practice to ensure this.

Ideally, when URLs are changed, all internal links should be updated.

You could look somewhere like elance.com, peopleperhour.com (UK-based) or odesk.com. Check for good feedback and employ someone who is preferably a native speaker of the language. Alternatively there are probably loads of good copywriters and copywriting companies who will have samples of their writing online - there are quite a few when I search for [copywriting london].

Are they showing as duplicate content within Moz Analytics? As long as the search engines don't see it as duplicate content you shouldn't have a problem. Here are some things to check for:

• The content should be localised as best as possible (e.g. the differences between US, Canadian and British English).
• I'm not sure it's possible with your sites, but things like contact details and local currency can help send the right signals to Google etc. - so the address and phone number if you have a HQ in each country.
• Each site should be registered separately with Bing and Google Webmaster Tools and geotargeted to the relevant location.
• Use the hreflang attribute if you're not already (triple-check to make sure it is set up properly): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en - you can set Canadian English (en-ca) and Canadian French (fr-ca) - the language always comes before the country.

As you mentioned your terms and conditions, I noticed a lot of companies are using very similar wording to yours, so that could be an issue of duplicate content that features on completely different websites. You could rewrite the t's and c's, though I wouldn't see any harm in noindexing those particular pages.

You could have something about the success of past events? Maybe you could encourage the businesses to write something themselves as good promotion.

How about some permanent text about the business and/or events they run on the page? If there are no events - perhaps a brief explanation that there are none yet, along with some suggestions of other local businesses running events and/or a call-to-action to sign up for notifications?

I wouldn't noindex the page when there is no content.

I'd say it's only time to buy it if $100+ isn't much money to you. This list gives a good indication of which directories are worth being on: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

It doesn't matter which you choose too much, as long as you're consistent across the website.

I'd go without a stroke; people are more likely to link to you without typing the stroke (as you say), so I think you'll retain slightly more link juice to the chosen URL if you don't include it (saving a 301 redirect from the '/' version). And personally I think a URL looks neater minus the '/'. The speeds "Optimize and Monetize" quotes are minuscule.

" Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that." - it's not necessarily a bad idea now - I'd question why you feel the need to change them? Shorter is often better though.

If you do go ahead, 301 would be the best practice. Canonicals pass link juice too but they're not always honoured.

A couple of extra things - make sure to update all of your internal links to the new URLs as millions of 301s could negatively impact the speed of your server. And check a sample of the old URLs just to make sure everything is working as expected.

Google rolled out Panda and Exact-Match Domain (EMD) updates on September 27th. As one of your keywords almost exactly matches your domain the EMD penalty could be a possibility. I don't know enough about the EMD update to be certain, but your link profile still doesn't look perfect either - it'd look more natural if more of your links had your URL as the anchor text, but be careful about where you get links from.

I Googled some of your text and it was duplicated on other sites (e.g. experts123), so Panda could be a possibility too.

The homepage doesn't look too bad; perhaps the title tag looks a bit spammy and you use "doctor loan" an awful lot in alt text; including the alt text there are 17 occurences of "doctor loan" on your homepage, so I would definitely reduce that. I'm not sure if that sort of keyword usage ties in with EMD, so have a look if some trusted resources have advice on it. I haven't read through it but this looks useful: http://searchengineland.com/google-emd-update-research-and-thoughts-137340

Does the link benefit the users of the websites? If not does it need to be there at all? You could link to them on another page on your website, a contact us/about us for example, alongside an explanation of the international nature of the business - the link is then within context rather than stuck in a header.

I wouldn't bother nofollowing or blocking bots as I doubt you'd get penalised for the links - if you haven't already just do your best to make sure that the .com is not competing with the .com.au in Australia, I'd be wary of duplicate content on two English versions of a website.