Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Petra, I wish I could give you 3 thumbs up for being tri-lingual. Between you and Gianluca,most of Europe could ask a question in their native language and get an answer.nMuy excellente yt très magnifique and well done!

Forgot to answer your beta question limit. No limit dude! Keep 'em coming. Yo'll know when it's too many when you run out of people to answer them

Hey Steven: Rather than try to tackle this by myself, I'm going to bring in some heavy hitters. Since you are a Pro member, you have free access to the Pro guides, but unfortunately I can't seem to find the Pro Guide to Link Building on the SEOmoz site at the moment to be able to give you a link.

I can however share an absolutely awesme YOUmoz post from by Scott.MClay that got promoted to the main blog:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide 

Hey Daniel:

Is there a Google benefit by having links from microsites come in to the main site?  Here are some of the drawbacks to the approach.

#1) I think that Google is really good at finding groups of related nepotistic sites. So while they won't penalize you for the links, they will dilute the amount of juice they pass. Which kinda negates the purpose of setting it up in the first place, eh?

#2 The more important (IMHO) reason to avoid this scenario is that when you create multiple sites, you have to build authority for each of them to have anything to pass along in a link. It's much easier to concentrate your efforts on getting linksfor a single site than for multiple sites.

Hi Jeff: The following is half at, half science, but try pulling two separate but contiguous phrasesfrom the site which don't include the company name (even if Google smacks a site,  the site will almost always still rank for it's own name/brand unless it's JC Penney :). If it doesn't come in at the top of the SERP's (top 10) then it's a good bet it's been smacked.

How is it doing in Bing?

PS - Richard's got some great suggestions.

Hello Francisco: My answer would be "it totally depends.I would compare the results to prior results.  If you have no historical data for the account, then I'd say that it was an excellentonversion rate for a an RFQ page. I'd be interested to see the statistics of what the close ration is on the quotes.

But regardless, as far as tooting your own horn, definitely. Letting the client know that the results are 1 for 3 would make them feel great about hiring you.

Hi Rishad:

My answer to your question is soley based on SEO. The more concentrated your focus on the one site and the incoming links, the higher an authority the site will gain.

But I hadn't thought about the marketing angle until I read Gianluca's response. He makes a strong case for letting your marketing/brand requirements drive the decision.

Hey Thomas:

When I first started learning SEO, I had dozens of tools bookmarked. But like others have said below, too much time spent in tools, removes the benefit of the time savings of tools.

My top4 tools:

1. the SEOmoz web app (wish they'd come up with a better name than that!)

2. Raven Tools

3. Wordtracker (I think it's a more English based tool though)

4. Richards keyword tool

I also echo Gianluca's desire to have historical backlink data in the web app sooner than later.

Given the nature of Spencer's site, I wouldn't imagine that the incoming links to current job offers would have that long a life. So I wouldn't think that there'd be a mazzive pile up of incoming links getting 301'd.

Hey Sean: The only thing about 301'a and Google that I'm aware of is that 301's do lose a little "link juice" But this would be from any link, external or internal. I've not heard of a difference in ranking between the two.

Ask them to show you what that "latest intelligence" is and have them explain their rationale. If it's the real deal, they should be able to back it up with something.

Hi again Petra: My answer is strictly based on usability. If you've got a deep site,  the breadcrumbs are highly useful for the user that comes into your site from a SERP. Top placement is the standard but for long pages, they could be added elsewhere.

Hi Petra: I'm hoping someone with mobile experience jumps in, but I remembbered reading a post from Cindy Krum (suzzicks) about mobile sites that might address your question. I'll have to just give you the URL as the Q&A text box is a bit wonky for my browser:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mobile-search-engine-transcoding

Hey Jos: I use a vector based drawing program (CorelDraw) and draw boxes with lines like you. I can highlight main pages by border thickness and colors.

It's probably not nearly as elegant as  Sameer's suggestions, but I've used it for so many years, it's as comfortable as a pair of old jeans

I use them mostly for my own study ofclient sites and competitors sites Casey. My current stable of clients tend to still dwell on  SERP rankings and numbers of visitors, while the metric I'm trying to train them in is conversions.

But if I had to explain mozRank, mozTrust, Domain Authority,and  Page Authority, I would tell them that the numbers are an approximation of what the Google algorithm assigns to pages, sites, etc. and since Google isn't sharing, it's the best method od ascertaining Google's values.

Changed my profile pick a month or so ago. I miss seeing my old dog Boozie though.

I switched from WP to Joomla because at the time, WP wasn't as ecommerce friendly. And I picked Joomla over Drupal because the general consensus was that while Drupal was more flexible, Joomla had an easier learning curve.

Good luck with whatever new CMS you choose.

Hey Donnie: While I'm only a former Wordpress user and current Joomla hack, I would guess that the MVC frameworks give them more flexibility. Though that flexibility vomes at a price of having to be more proficient at PHP.

Hi Spencer:

I use an open source product calledKeePass. It's a tiny program that resides on my flash drive. Very easy to use, and access can be password protected or you can use a physical "key" that resides on the flash drive itself (my choice as the drive never leaves my desk.

I can't imagine going back to the piece of paper method and having to manually type the characters in now. I just copy and paste and in seconds I'm in.

Hah hah. I agree with Richard. The mo community. And I'm also sympatico with Gianluca. Llong walks outside in the fresh air does wonders for my creativity. Ideas come easier.

Hi Byron. I agree with Spencer re: the rel canonical. Personally I would want to maintain access to the old sites front end during the transition as well as the admin portion. If you 301 it, all you'll see is your new site pages.

But this is purely personal preference. Both the rel acanonical and the 301 are good choices.

Hansj, you look remarkably like Petra!

As a former designer wannabe, I would always shoot for validation if possible. But since concentrating more on SEO issues these days,  like you, I personally don't think it affects rankings.