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As dotslash says - you have 'oak flooring' absolutely everywhere. Does the text on your homepage read naturally? Not at all! Make sure it reads naturally. You can mention 'oak' and 'flooring' separately and it will still help your keyword optimisation. At the moment you're keyword spamming, and it's obvious to the human eye - you should get it sorted as quickly as possible in case it becomes obvious to the crawlers.

I agree that ideally SEO should be a continuous process, but certain issues can be rectified or improvements made to websites that will have a positive impact long after the initial time it takes to make any changes.

My advice would be to ask a couple of questions here on the Moz forum to see if we can help you out.

If you do decide to hire an SEO, Google has some advice here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en

This is something a lot of websites do and something the crawlers can recognise. If you have say, a 150 word block that's the same on every page, and 400+ words of unique content elsewhere, you won't have any problems at all. There's no particular science to those numbers by the way, I'm just pulling them out of the air - but there's a helpful quote below from here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beat-google-panda

Here at SEOmoz, our PRO platform uses a 95% threshold to judge duplicate content. This means if 95% of all the code on your page matches another page, then it’s flagged as a duplicate. To check your own ratios, try this nifty duplicate content tool.

What you suggest in the last paragraph is cloaking. You need to be very careful when you're serving different versions of the same page to crawlers and users.

It shows up at the top for me on Google UK and Google Italy. Are you searching without personalisation?

Have you checked your Analytics to make sure there hasn't been a drop in traffic for the homepage? You could also see if you have any messages in Google WMT that might point to potential problems.

In normal paginated results it makes sense to have the page number first for pages 2+ as page one has the highest SEO value - you want to show Google that that is the most important page for the topic term. Adding the page number at the start of the title tag for pages 2+ gives an indication to the search engines that they're not quite as important as the first page. I imagine this will more often than not be the case for forum postings too, though there's always a chance the best content will be posted pages along the thread.

It can happen, based on your past searches and clicks.

I always search in Google Chrome Incognito mode while not logged into anything. You can also turn off personalisation: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/54048?hl=en

Have a look at this and the link in the description:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k

I haven't had any problems when following that advice.

Google have been adding brand names with a colon to the start of some title tags for a while now (2+ years I think), along with other title changes.

They don't always show your chosen meta description either, especially if it's not considered to match the searcher's intent. However, I've just looked at the source code of your homepage and there's no meta description there.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en "...we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through."

P.S. While looking at your site I noticed a 404 error resulted in a page full of adverts with no relation to your content, so that might be something you want to check out.

Rand does a great job with this issue here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

This is worth a read too: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

Every situation is different but it can be more beneficial to host everything on a .com with subfolders for each language - e.g. www.somewebsite.com/es, www.somewebsite.com/fr etc. Each subfolder URL can be geotargeted in Google Webmaster Tools. This would be much easier than maintaining 5 separate websites.

I don't agree with Zsolt - if you have a .fr you wouldn't need to host in France as the .fr covers it, the same with .de, .it or any extension. Some people prefer to click on a website with their native domain extension in the URL, probably more so with e-commerce sites (something to do with trust, easy shipping and so on) - so that's something to take into consideration.  I can't remember if Rand mentions this in the above video.

If you 301 redirect everything correctly to its new URL you should be okay.

Which article was it?

There's some good advice here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

I remember reading a really useful article about hiring an SEO company, I thought it was here on SEOmoz, but I can't find it. This looks helpful though: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066873/Selecting-an-SEO-Firm-The-What-How-and-Who

This isn't usually a big problem, especially if you use rel="next" and rel="prev".

If you wanted to remove the duplicate content warning in Webmaster Tools you could add the page number at the start of each title tag from page 2 onwards. I like having the page number in the title tag as a signal to website visitors.

In the majority of cases, each individual page on a website should be targeting unique keywords. If I was you (if it's not too late) and you're getting traffic and conversions from it, I'd keep the homepage optimised for "business coaching" and target the other pages with another term (for your example page, maybe something closely related to "business coaching"). Read up on keyword cannibilisation.

The search engines will rank whatever page they think is most appropriate for a particular term. So if you have been committing keyword cannibilisation that could explain why. The homepage probably has a higher Page Authority than the subpage so this will naturally give it a boost over other pages targeted to the same phrase.

If you don't want the homepage to rank for that term, replace the term on the homepage with something else and hope for the best that the other page will permanently replace it. Also keep the Penguin update in mind with regards to any link building and over optimised onpage tactics.

Does he benefit from the images ranking so highly? I haven't seen many studies where image clicks result in good traffic, especially in terms of revenue if it's an e-commerce site.

It seems a strange way of doing things. Are you saying the images don't match the text content of the page? The context an image is placed in can help it rank, so it seems strange that these images are ranking based on their historical context. Google reads CSS so should see that the images are hidden. Unless you're blocking Google from seeing the CSS which is now against Google's Webmaster Guidelines: https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/TLeHSDRwjhB

If you're not blocking Google from the CSS, all other things being equal, then 301 redirects of the page and images could be enough, though I wouldn't be surprised if the rankings drop as from the information you've given (and assuming they're relatively competitive keywords) I'm surprised the rankings have remained for so long! The best way to preserve the image rankings would be to have the images on a page with relevant content.

I'll add these links to EGOL's post:

To get a quick overview, read Google's guide on hiring an SEO: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291 
And the SEO Basics section here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.co.uk/en/uk/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

If you want to get into more detail SEOmoz's Beginners Guide to SEO is great.

I would go with responsive. From experience, a separate mobile site might be easier to setup in the short-term but will cause more issues in the long-term (I haven't ever worked on anything like a video editing website, but I would imagine it wouldn't create many other issues).

Have you looked into why no one has purchased from a mobile device? I've seen conversion issues on mobile that don't impact the desktop version of websites - sometimes checkouts that don't work at all on mobile. But as you said, most of the traffic comes from desktop browsers so it could just be that.

Although separate mobile sites will still benefit from Google's mobile update (if they're mobile friendly), Google do recommend responsive over a separate site e.g. here in their starter guide: "Google recommends using RWD over other design patterns." https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/

There's also a useful white paper from Google here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//intl/ALL_uk/think/multiscreen/pdf/multi-screen-consumer-whitepaper_research-studies.pdf

It can depend on numerous factors - does the site have lots of pages or not many? Does it have many backlinks? Is it updated often? Does it have content worth crawling (i.e. not 'thin')? If these other sites that were linking to you don't have many pages, don't have many backlinks, are not updated more often and/or have poor content, Google might not have crawled them to see the link has been removed yet.

I am assuming you're talking about backlinks though, and not errors within your own site, but the same still applies. If you are talking internally, have you looked at Health > Crawl Stats? You can see how many pages Google crawls on your site per day, so if you know roughly how many pages you have it might give you an idea. Also if you mean internal links, have you marked them as fixed?

I have seen sites that have an average crawl rate of around 10000 pages per day take a while (a few weeks) for WMT to update, but then again - there is more to crawl so more to be missed!

Last year Google said bad links to 404 pages wouldn't hurt your site. Could that still be the case in light of recent Google updates to try and combat spammy links and negative SEO?

Can links to 404 pages benefit a website and pass link juice? I'd assume at the very least that any link juice will pass through links FROM the 404 page?

Many websites have great 404 pages that get linked to: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fretardzone.com%2F404 - that was the first of four I checked from the "60 Really Cool...404 Pages" that actually returned the 404 HTTP Status! So apologies if you find the word 'retard' offensive. According to Open Site Explorer it has a decent Page Authority and number of backlinks - but it doesn't show in Google's SERPs.

I'd never do it, but if you have a particularly well-linked to 404 page, is there an argument for giving it 200 OK Status?

Finally, what are the best practices regarding 404s and address bar links?

For example, if
www.examplesite.com/3rwdfs returns a 404 error, should I make that redirect to
www.examplesite.com/404 or leave it as is?

Redirecting to www.examplesite.com/404 might not be user-friendly as people won't be able to correct the URL in the address bar. But if I have a great  404 page that people link to, I don't want links going to loads of random pages do I? Is either way considered best practice?

If I did a 301 redirect I guess it would send the wrong signal to the crawlers? Should I use a 302 redirect, or even a 304 Not Modified redirect?

I think you should add hreflang - you should do everything you can to indicate what country your content is targeted to. Do you have local addresses/phone numbers/currency on each website? These are all signals that can help.

How long has each domain been geotargeted in GWT? Are the sites all the same age? Do they have links from the relevant countries? Maybe Google is taking some time to catch up, or maybe there are reasons why it thinks the FR homepage is more relevant in Germany.