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Hi Brad

You should be able to look at the metrics provided by the SEO tools to see the authority of the page the link is from. If it is still a highly relevant site, with high domain authority then there would be no reason to suspect that the value would be lessened by the passing of time.

If the site or page that the link was from was devalued then this reduction of value may occur but this would be because of this rather than because time has passed.

This is a common issue for CMS's and one I have faced too.

If whatever you put in the heading is used as the title then you will want to make sure that the heading is unique, relevant as both a heading and a title, ensure it is targeted at your key words or phrases BUT also as the heading will be spotted on the page by the user it must make sense for them too.

No point having a heading which confuses the user and sends them in the wrong direction.

Hope this helps.

By the sounds of it the existing site is doing well and may have built up some domain authority which wouldn't be present with new micro sites. This may help the new landing pages rank higher than the microsites/

If the campaigns for the microsites go well and you achieve a number of inbound links although you can 301 redirect them to the existing site after the microsites have served their purpose their is no guarantee that 100% of 'link juice' will be passed on.

I think that your instinct to keep everything onsite is the correct one in this instance but that rather than adding more content to the existing landing pages you use the experience you have gianed and the lessons you have learned to develop new landing pages for these niches.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ash

This weeks whiteboard Friday covered Negative rankign features and Adsense was featured.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-negative-ranking-factors-whiteboard-friday

At the link you can either watch the video or scroll through the transcript to the Adsense headign to see what was said.

SEOMoz's data suggests a negative correlation between Adsense and rankings.

Hope this helps.

There wouldn't usually be an issue about using the same H1 tag on multiple pages but if with the CMS you are using  H1 tag = Title tag then you will end up with lots of duplicate titled pages. This reduces th opportunity for targeting multiple keywords and phrases across multiple pages.

As most pages will focus on a different subject or product, then most titles will be different and most H1's will be different.

The correlation between the existence of H1 tags and rankings has been shown in testing by guys at SEO Moz to be a low positive if I remember rightly so I wouldn't get too hung up about the H1, focus more on the Title.

Hope this helps.

Assuming everything else being equal it is often the case that when a site is moved to a new URL and 301 redirected (which I see you have done) that there is a short term dip in rankings and traffic.

If you have access to the Campaign tools here I would set up a campaign for that site and the crawl diagnostics may point you in the right direction of any problems you may have introduced during the switch.

Just because a site is doing something that goes against Google's Webmaster Guidelines doesn't mean that Google is automatically going to pick it up. However they are always working on ways to improve the quality of their results so it may only be a matter of time for some sites.

Rather than following the competitor site down a murky path it would be better for you to consider other ways to outperform them whether it is via enhanced content or a (non-paid, non-reciprocal) link building campaign

Hi Wazza

The best practice listed on SEO Moz is....

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword

.....personally I usually go for Primary Keyword (or phrase) | Brand name

Rankings may have changed not just because of what you did but may have changed due to the Google Farmer/Panda update or because of the actions of competitor sites.

If you use an external domain you can potentially choose a keyword match domain which may be beneficial (if it hasn't already been taken by someone else).

However I would recommend hosting your blog on your main site at www.example.com/blog. Any links achieved by the blog will also benefit the rest of the pages on the main site domain whereas any links to a separate blog will only benefit the ranking of the blog.

If you have pages optimised for each of your products that you are happy with then I would consider whether there is a term that might be used to describe the group of products that people might use when searching less specifically. Is there a term that a competitor site uses?

Many searchers start quite generic and get more specific when there initial search doesn't throw up any suitable results.

As you have done for the product pages see which collective phrase has the best search volume/lowest competition.

You could perfectly optimise your site on-page and still rank below competitiors due to them having a stronger link profile.

As mentioned in the other responses I would hope to see results inside of a month BUT it may be that you have to work for a number of months to catch up to where competitors are depending on how string their link profile is.

In addition to Dan's answer remember just because Google has seen the changes and taken them into consideration there is no guarantee that your rankings will improve.

It can take months of optimising and tweaking to get improvements. One of my old sites took 6 months tweaking and steadily climbing the rankings until it got to number 1 for its main keyphrases - it has been there for a few years now though

Any links gained to the sites in strategy 2 will be shared and only benefit those sites

Any links gained in strategy 1 will benefit the whole domain.

A brand new site can take a while to gain decent rankings although it may have the advantage of a keyword matched domain name.

Hope this helps.

I would aim to have the page name with the full phrase (for example www.example.com/office-recycling-bins.html) and also have the full phrase in the title tags however in the navigation I would go for Office Bins, Kitchen Bins, Outdoor Bins etc.The user is aware that site is about recycling so doesn't need to be told on each navigation label.

Currently they are well correlated however following recent comments by Matt Cutts keyword matched domain names are likely to reduce in power so any strategy shouldn't just be based on the domain name.

Hi guys

Here is a video of Matt Cutts talking about this matter.

Hope it helps.

As to when this happens - who knows could be a month, 6 months, a year but for one of my clients whose company name is the same as the domain which is the same as the primary keyphrase I am working on improving the link profile so that if any hit somes along it is minimised as the site ranks top on all metrics.

If Google did consider the class or id names as part of the text then people would be making sure they were full of keywords for their sites and it would be listed on SEOMoz as a spammy tactic.

As that's not the case I would say that Google doesn't include it.

Also you shouldn't be worrying too much about Keyword density - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-myths-that-scare-seos-but-shouldnt-whiteboard-friday

Here is an article from Danny Dover, formerly of SEO Moz which although a couple of years old I believe is still relevant as if my memory serves me correct he mentions the same process in his book which was only published a month or two ago.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-how-to-properly-move-domains

Hope this helps.

I would always carry out analysis of the site I was working on before I look at competitor analysis.Keyword analysis would form part of this to ensure that I knew what relevant words and phrases should be targeted.

Next I would look at the content of the site to see if it contains the phrases in all the relevant places (title tag, alt text etc). A key task would then be to make sure there are no technical issues reducing the chances of your site ranking highly.

I would look to get the on-page elements sorted before focusing on link building as the site may not deserve a link until on-page issues are sorted out.

With regards to the benefits of article submissions and social networking I would advise you to research these areas a little more as low quality articles strewn across the web may not be the best course of action and social media aspects may or may not be worth chasing depending on whether there will be ongoing resource available to support the initial efforts.