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On the home page I would suggest having a menu so search engines know other pages exists within the site, maybe something like:

Home | About Us | Home Products | Commercial Products | Contact Us

Maybe have a footer menu on all sites with: Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions etc.

In the grand scheme of things, not having a navigation menu on the homepage shouldn't be a deal breaker as long as you have an xml sitemap listing all pages on the site.

You could always use a plugin like Chrome's check my links on some higher authority sites and if they have a broken link (always verify manually just to be sure), get in contact with them. Say that you've written an article and in exchange for helping them find the broken link would they mind adding a link to your article or website. Its worked for me a few times.

Sadly even though there are good sites offering free or paid templates I find myself spending hours going through the template code and re-writing most of it because it lacks any real quality.

I'd just like to say that I don't buy themes a very often; I think in my whole web development career I've only bought 1 or 2 themes and that was simply to get used to how themes work using a new framework like Zend or Joomla 1.6.

Where possible I would always advocate writing your own themes, but I fully understand that not everyone can do this, that's why us website developers exist.

I would also say that comments or feedback from others who have used a theme can be misleading. If you don't understand code and you use the theme purely from a "what you see is what you get" perspective then chances are the theme will have a lot of good reviews but the code itself might be a dogs dinner.

I'd like to see more theme websites showing the structure of the theme files and maybe a sneak preview into 2 or 3 files that make up the theme so we get a feel for how well coded the template is, but the chances of that happening are pretty slim.

From my experience I don't think you can really 'hide' the megamenu links from a crawler if they are generated using a content management system (code server side). If the link is on the page in the HTML then it will be crawled by a bot etc.

The general method of getting a mega menu to work is through the use of CSS and JavaScript, so you might want to have a look at using AJAX to get the relevant links from the database and then use JavaScript to put the links into the page.

This isn't a great solution, but bots cannot load JavaScript, so what they will see is only the links that are served up from the content management system.

The php-compiler.net blog article about running php on a .net platform is interesting, but wherever possible its always better to run applications in their native environment.

Hi Jon,

Thank you for your feedback, its much appreciated  and I'm glad I could assist. To answer your question, a blog can be written in any server-side language (PHP, .net, Clasic ASP, Ruby etc).

You will often find that .net hosting will be more expensive as opposed to php.

Ahh apologies, I think I might have linked to the wrong URL. Have you tried these?

http://www.xml-sitemaps-generator.com/make-video-sitemaps-for-google

http://www.microsystools.com/products/sitemap-generator/help/video-xml-sitemaps

Hi Digirank, you could try this: http://www.videositemappro.com [site now not related to site maps -Keri]

To help measure results one way or another you could use http://loads.in to test how long it takes your page to load from different geographical locations. I think Chrome's developer tools has a similar thing as well.

If you're trying to speed up your site then I would recommend grouping images (icons etc) into an image sprite and use css background positioning to show the respective image. I found that implementing this into a theme resulted in great speed increases as you make a single HTTP request for a single image, as opposed to loading up several images on page load.

If you're not savvy enough with css image sprites I would recommend using www.spritecow.com to produce the correct background-positions for the images so you can add them into your css file.

Like SEO Moz has Roger, Bulloogle.com could have this as their mascot http://bit.ly/HUIovX

I think advertising is so overkill and its only getting worse. I really don't like route search engines are taking when showing their SERPs and other content, personally I use google with JavaScript disabled the "page preview" on hover of the link/arrow is useless and really naff.

FYI: The twocents html tag is depreciated and won't help your SERP rankings on bulloogle.com

.htaccess is always the better approach when doing redirects, its easier and gives you a bit more flexibility. Good answer Kevin.

Hi Brendan,

Are you still having difficulties with this thread or have we managed to solve the issue you've been having?

If you moved the site into a subdomain then all the links that used to point to the old blog (that wasn't on a subdomain) won't work.

You need to add a .htaccess file to the root of your website and put in redirects for broken links. Something like the following should work:

<code>Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ http://blog.example.com/$1</code>

This will basically redirect the old links for your blog to the subdomain, which will help Google know that the pages have moved. The whole point of 301 redirects (if you don't already know) is to ensure your pages retain their page rank if you change your site structure. Now its been said that you lose some page rank using a 301 redirect from the old location to the new location, but that's better than Google assuming the page has been removed from your site as this would mean Google will remove the site from its index and you can wave goodbye to that page's good search position.

I hope this helps, if you need me to clarify anything let me know.

Ben

Thank you for the link Thomas, I agree I'm always dubious when looking at posts saying "X% increase in ..." because its hard to know if the testing / statistics are accurate.

I have a few websites so I might try this on one of them and see what effect it has on rankings and incoming visors, seems like an interesting concept.

4. How long people are staying on the page

This is a good post, which covers the basics of Google Analytics goal setup, but you basically want to set "duration" as the goal metric to track and then specify a minimum time you want to track.

http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/how-to-setup-goals-in-google-analytics.html

If you have any further questions let me know.

Hello Noah's Dad,

Great question by the way and I hope this answer will assist you.

1.  I'd like to know how many people click play on a video when they are on a page that has a video.

You can use Event Tracking to do this (see below), but you need to make sure you have set up tracking for your website. More information can be seen here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html

[Play](#)

I believe you can wrap the link around your video embed code and it will do the desired action of tracking people who played the video.

_2. I'd like to know how many people are clicking "like" " google plus, etc.) _

This one is a bit trickier. Most of the social media "like" or "+1" buttons are loaded / served up using iframes (for Facebook) or JavaScript for the others. Google provides its own markup tags to load their social media buttons in, and its all a bit of a dogs dinner quite frankly. There should really be a standard for the implementation of these buttons but anyway! You could try using a similar onClick function as shown above, but you would need some additional code in the footer of your site to attach the onClick event to each button after the page has been loaded. I'm not sure if there is an easier way to do this but if you need help with coding this up let me know. Equally if someone else here has a better method I would like to know too!

3. I'd like to know the path people are taking on our site. For instance, if they click a link from Facebook, and go to a landing page, what page are they visiting next

This is possible in Google Analytics. If your on your Google Dashboard for the domain, click Audience then click Visitors Flow, this provides a nice interface to view this information.

Hi all,

I recently watched this webinar http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/microformats-real-life-use-cases and it was very good, but I'm not entirely certain if this is a worthwhile thing to be doing?

I have a couple of websites I'm improving the SEO on, and things are slowly picking up but I'm not sure if I should be spending time working on improving my landing pages (once these have been identified) or working on the code side of improving my SEO position.

When improving my landing pages I'm asking myself the following questions:

1. What is this page about? (Is it clear through headings or introduction text / imagery
2. Does the page sell the benefits of the product / service in a clear manor?
3. Does the page explain what the product is all about?
4. Is the information easy to read, well positioned on-screen and is the content optimised for 1, maybe 2 distinct keywords.
5. Is there an easy method of communication to the site owner if the visitor is interested in the product or service and wants either a quote or wants to find out more.
6. Are there a few links to other relevant areas of the site

Granted at the moment I'm in the process of teasing the relevant information out of the client but that's like trying to get blood out of a stone, so I'm exploring other avenues, while they get more content.

I am considering going down the route of guest blogging, to possibly get a one-way followed backlink, but again this seems like a lot of effort with no clear guarantee if my efforts in doing this will pay off in being able to generate more leads / enquiries from the websites.

Would anyone like to share their thoughts on this?

Hi Andrea,

No I didn't need a dedicated IP address when setting up MultiSite. That being said I 've not installed MultiSite on shared hosting before. I would try installing it and setting it up first on the shared hosting first.

A dedicated IP isn't necessary.

I have used WooThemes in the past and personally I think some of their code and their modifications are a bit overkill, sure it makes things easier for users but its not really following the way WordPress does things (Creating folders in WP-Content to put file uploads from their admin panel for example).

In general terms I think its better to hard code references to public resources (CSS Links, JavaScript links etc in header.php). For better speed increases I would suggest having links to JQuery or MooTools in header.php and any other JavaScript files should be put in footer.php just above the closing body tag.

The benefit to this is that the core JavaScript framework (JQuery or MooTools) is loaded first, the page can then render on the screen whilst the last few JS files are downloaded and put to use.

It maty be worth using WP SuperCache or similar to cache your pages and allow browser gzip compression for quicker page loading.

I think WordPress in general makes too many database calls anyway, so where possible I think its acceptable to hard code links.

Yeah I found that same issue, that's why I went down the route of setting up a MultiSite installation. Hope you can get everything sorted out