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You could also look into using the new HTML5

<nav>tag. This tells the crawlers that it is specifically a navigation block so it can distinguish the more valuable content from an SEO perspective from the crawler important nav sections. Basically it seems like then the order wouldn't matter as much because you are telling the SEO side of the search engine that it is just navigation.</nav>

I have implemented sites with the brand name first, the brand name at the end of the page title and without the page title. I don't have any study results but my impressions are the following:

• When multiple tabs are open having the brand name first is a nuisance because you can't see the page title you just see the repeating brand name.
• If it is the home page the brand name should probably be first but there are some exceptions.
• Having the brand name at the end in the title might have some SEO benefit but can also make for very looooong page titles.

My general pattern today would be to use the brand name on the home page and all subsequent pages just use the characters for good page titles.

The robots.txt file just tells the bots you would "prefer" they don't index but there is nothing to prevent them from indexing.The only sure way to do this is to restrict access to the sub-domain for everyone and require some sort of authentication. If they don't have access they can't index.

I personally use GoDaddy for purchasing domains but I do not use any of their add-ons. I would not recommend paying for their SEO tools. Submitting to any search engine is a free process and one that is easy to do.

For Bing go to: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/

For Google go to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Setting up an account and doing so will also allow you to become familiar with their tools and reports that they provide. It is a great way to learn how and when they are indexing your site.

One additional thing to consider is to create a sitemap that dynamically gets updated as your site does. Submit this sitemap to the search engines and then it will improve the crawling efficiency and accuracy of the search engines. The individual responsible for your web development should be able to set this up for you.

If your question is around the SSL part it really only adds value in places where you don't want the communication between the end user and yours servers to be sent in clear text (easily readable). The clear choices for this are where a username / password combination is passed, or credit card information such as the checkout pages.

Personally I would not set up all pages of an ecommerce store to use SSL. I would leave all catalog pages as non-SSL.

Use an .htaccess file to only allow from certain ip addresses or ranges.

Here is an article describing how: http://www.kirupa.com/html5/htaccess_tricks.htm

There is probably an "it depends" here. For example clothes and many other items come in different sizes and usually they are all listed on one page without any detriment to SEO. My opinion is the single page would allow that single page to rank higher than many different pages. I can only imagine the confusion that would occur in search engine result lists if you had a page for each size of a particular shoe model being sold.

I think the rule would be is the size more important than what the item is. For example with shoes it is usually the shoe model that is most important (not the size) so one page with the size as key content on that page. But there are times where users are more likely to search for the size. Maybe it is wall mount ovens where the attributes of width and single and double are more important than the actual model then you might want to have separate pages for each size of the model.

You might also consider having a single page for a widget with the different options and then landing pages that would aggregate all the different widgets of a particular size and then link to the corresponding product detail page.

.htaccess files can be placed at any directory level of a site so you can do it for just the subdomain or even just a directory of a domain.