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I'm really surprised no one has mentioned Big Commerce. I searched high and low for a ecommerce solution that has the robust feature set that Big Commerce provides and nothing comes close.

In the beginning of my search I was trying so darn hard to find something that integrates with Wordpress because I love it so much. But the top choices Shopp, WP Ecommerce and etc. did not have the robustness that I found in Big Commerce.

While Alan is right in that you need to follow the pre-design development process and figure out what fits your need, I took a really long view on my vision for my ecommerce website and wanted to pick a service that I could "grow" into. Big Commerce fits that need. Their platform has the balance of everything I was looking for.

Will echo Alan's sentiments on Magento. Not only is it just a pain from an SEO perspective, I think it's terrible from the user-end perspective compared to other solutions. I think a good CMS balances the needs of all users (or departments) and is respected by all groups: developers, marketers, designers, and end users. Magento does not.

I'd rather see the solution involve some hard core user experience upgrades with some minor moderation for duplicates.

To start, the Pro Q&A could borrow some of the UX principles implemented by the User Voice app. Some things that would significantly prevent duplicate questions from being asked again include:

• combining the Search and Ask fields into one box to require all users to search for similar questions before asking.
• Implement an instant on search/filter for all questions.
• Allow administrators to merge 2 similar discussion questions.

Perhaps a bit of investigation of some of other modern forum apps would uncover some other tactics to showcase the most common questions, and prevent duplicate questions.

Yes there are variations within the country too. Depending on your service, and your location it can vary every 10 miles or less too! Like try "plumber Miami" in 33129 or 33186. Completely different results.

Also just in case: when you're checking your own rankings, are you logged in to a Google account? Google search results are not only localized they are also personalized. So this will greatly affect what YOU see vs. what someone else will see.

That would make it the TAGFEEC criteria. Or if you add the C, then my favorite would be GETFACE! criteria.

In theory most sites can only be listed once according to dmoz guidelines. However, there are some exceptions according to dmoz site specific guidleines: http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/site-specific.html#multiple

If you feel the multiple links you are seeing isn't an occasion where an exception should be made, you could send a message to dmoz about it. I've seen the same type of thing before, and I think it is also because of editor bias/opinion.

If the emails and followup are unsolicited then yes its spam, and my reaction is the same: to ignore, report as spam and delete.

Gyi is spot on about the overall tactic. Personally I very rarely send unsolicited sales or link requests. I agree those are a waste of time. But if there's already an established connection, then yes absolutely I am tenacious and will pursue the lead for a minimum of 5 times.

Can you tell me more about your experience with Yoast? What does it replace? I've heard it replaces the need for Google XML Sitemap Generator. What else?

And what about speed? Last I tried it I felt like it overwhelmed my page with tons of extra code and increase both the size and load time which i didn't like. Any opinion on that?

Sounds like I'll have to give Yoast a try. The last time I tried it I felt like it really affected my site speed negatively.

Yes, I agree. Some plugins have great functionality, but are just stupidly coded to where they add more technical issues, or have a terrible or annoying Admin UI, and so I cut them out. The efficiency and design of the plugins really matter too.

WP Super Cache or W3C Cache really helps to bring down the file size and load time regardless.

I think the same principle that applies to sales applies here. This stunning fact is something I've never forgotten once I learned it: 80% of closes happen after FIVE or MORE points of contact.

Most people fail to follow up that many times. Let's say one email, then maybe 1 or 2 reminders via phone/email? Up it to at least five and you'll have a better success rate. Personally for sales, I don't ever stop following up. I must either get a clear YES or a clear NO. (This could be as simple as "Unsubscribe.")

Already using noindex, follows for the tag & archive pages. Guess SEOMoz crawls them no matter what, and I have those lame yellow warnings about the lack of descriptions for those pages. Wish SEOMoz would also respecrt those tags and stop showing me those warnings.

Currently I use All-In-One SEO and I quite like how simple it is to setup and it's stable. Is that still one of the best ones? What are you using these days?

Is it worth stripping out the superfluous meta tags that Wordpress now puts in?

Is there any value to adding meta descriptions to all my Tag pages and if so, is there a good plugin that will auto magically create unique descriptions for these pages? Same goes for my paginated archives. Thanks!

I still use them too, but not for the benefit of SEO, just for the sake of organization since I've been using them for years. So Amazon may have similar procedure by which they use the meta keywords for their own work habits internally.

Meta keywords are not being used by search engines anymore. They have no value in search or for SEO.

The search algorithms have become sophisticated enough to deal with many variations of words such as plural or misspelt words. So let Google and Bing handle that. You don't need to worry about it so much.

Corte if your CMS is as clunky as imagine that it prevents you from installing Wordpress in a subfolder, then changing your CMS may be the single best thing you do for your SEO.

Two weeks isn't a real test and not enough time to determine results. That was my immediate thought. What's the average buy cycle of your consumers? Two weeks? Or more? For PPC campaigns it's usually 90 days before the results start to show success.

Of that 7% referring traffic, how's the bounce rate? Time on site? And what are you selling?

If the price point or profit margin is high enough, and the ROI makes sense, then an extra 2% is an extra 2%.

I would use more than the above two factors for selecting keywords. I think of the various research tools and metrics I pull from them as varying sieves to filter and boil down a list.

I'll start with hundreds, if not thousands of words and then narrow my list by adjusting the thresholds for each factor until I get a nice list. Along with monthly searches and competition, I'd immediately add the total number of search results for that keyword. For example maybe you start with a threshold of less than 5,000 monthly, 80% competition and less than 600K total results. And if you still have too many keywords you adjust your thresholds and tweak according to what makes sense for your market/audience and goals.

And go deeper and add more factor, like estimated CPC, SEO Moz difficulty score, or # of competitors and factors you can pull from other keyword research tools.

Roger is spot on. "Targeting" long tail keywords is somewhat funny to me too. You inevitably miss out on those "invisible" long tail keywords. Target your content to your topic and head match keywords that have have the potential to generate lots of hits from surprise long keyword searches. But then, also use a span of Google Analytics data on your organic keyword hits to figure out which long tail keywords are actually worth targeting.