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Take a look at the SEOMoz recommended list, that is always a good place to start! http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended

no i dont think it can, It certainly wont affect PageRank, page rank has nothing to do with on-page see http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank As i stated before, the over optimization penalties, are for un-natural links, keyword stuffing, not for having a well optimized page. SEOMoz on-page, advises you not to keyword stuff. the over optimization penalties would be better named, spam penalties.

Hi Bucky, Have you seen Rand's post on several things to do if the wrong page is ranking at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions?

Bucky Apologize, misread your first question. I do not know for a fact, but the original webmaster tools article says "site speed" in several places (not "page" speed) so I would assume the average speed of the entire site. -Dan

(1) How many 301s are you talking about? As Highland said, you could lose link-juice (especially over time), since the new home-page for the blog won't seem as relevant to the redirected pages. I've heard of issues with 301'ing 1000s of pages, but those wer eusually temporary. (2) Sometimes, post-Caffeine, Google crawls so fast that a 24-hour outage can cause some problems, but they're almost always temporary. You won't be penalized, per se - you could just see some rankings bounce while Google sorts things out.

Subdomains are treated slightly differently by Google. Essentially they are seen as less connected to the rest of your content than a subfolder. Take wordpress.com as an example: surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to www.wordpress.com surferdude.wordpress.com has little relation to skaterguy.wordpress.com surferdude.wordpress.com has lots in common with surferdude.wordpress.com/surfboards/*** In the same regard, www.yourdomain.com/blog is more correlated with www.yourdomain.com than blog.yourdomain.com would be. By using www.yourdomain.com/blog instead of a subdomain, you build more value to your www subdomain, everytime you post blog content or get links to your blog. This has more value to the rest of the www content on your site.

OK, a template is essentially a design architecture so I am assuming you are in the same vertical, different local markets? Then, it is going to be an issue of competition, your on page, your ranking, etc. versus others IMHO.

I am almost positive, that using a 301 to the main page would be considered a soft 404 error

Hi Sharon, The On-page reports shouldn't distinguish between case - upper or lower. In both cases it should give you credit. Unfortunately, I am unable to replicate the error you described. If you are seeing results different from this, feel free to share the URL and keyword combo so we can test it, or if you feel the tool is in error, feel free to write the help team (help@seomoz.org) As for variations of keywords, Adam hit the nail on the head. Here's a couple of blog posts that might help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/advanced-onpage-optimization-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!