Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks!

Navigation elements are indeed very important. Quite simply make the most important pages accessible from the front page.

I get this, but if the main important pages are accessible under a products tab from the home page, is this still good for SEO. Instead of listing each product page link on the left navigation ? For Ex: If I remove our left navigation and just have links on the top like,

Home | Products | About | Blog | Contact

If the products tab was a drop down menu with all the catagories listed, will that code to the drop down links still be seen by seo, or is the actual button link they see?

Thanks! I am a bit confused. So, your saying when you put the entire site to online purchasing, you saw a decrease in 10 - 20%, but when you just put the purchasing option on the lead pages, ( your most popular ?) your site was better than ever ? So basically a trial and error project ?

I am trying to find the best WP Theme for our company. I noticed most of them do not offer a left hand side navigation on the home pages, and usually are on the right side on the inside pages.

I always thought that Home Page links were very important for SEO. Currenly we have a left drop down navigation with all of our product catagories, keyword optimized. The structure follows for all the pages.

Is this not as important to Search Engines anymore? Is it better to have a products link, to all the products and then the inside pages, have just a navigation bar, for that particular catagory?

This seems to be very common on all the templates i am seeing.

I also noticed, and really like the JQueary Tabs. I would use this for displaying, PDFs and Specifications Charts.

Also, some home page images are using a jquery slider with some text, linking to a page.

Is Jquery the new javascript and do search engines see what is in the code?

I also noticed they all have footers that have links and some other information. Is this a SEO must have?

We have 300 plus products. Half of our products are Industrial Grade and Half are Consumer Grade.

Ex: Some products are less than $5,000 and others are $20,000.

With a new CMS in the thought process, I need to know if Half of our site can offer a shopping cart and the other half, displayed the same, but cannot purchase online, but need to call us. Maybe when they try purchasing  $10,000 product they get a message saying, please contact our Customer Service Department to process your order.

If we were to do this, is there a plugin for this?

I am thinking, of having two different sections on our website, but I do not want to cause confusion to customers. Shoud this maybe be set up on a different subdomain? Or same domain, but different section.

Can shopping cart plugins allow you to set a purchase limit?

I am worried that if someone wants to purchase a consumer product, say costing $1,500 and then a larger item costing $10,000, and they are shopping online, that they will be upset if the order cannot be processed online, as that is what they intended to do.

We currently have two websites. Our headquarters in the US and our other in the UK. We currently rank very well for both websites in both countries. Currently, US is hosted in the states and the UK is hosted in the UK. I would like to keep it this way.

However, I am going to be converting them to a CMS and redsign both of them. We need our main website to have a feature that they can choose which location they prefer. We also offer other locations through the US. Which we would like our customers to know that we have a few different locations. Also, we will be expanding to Austraillia and maybe others as well.

We need to make the websites to look almost identical, yet, different in a way that they can tell one is US, one is UK and so on. Some will only have some of our products, so they will be smaller websites.  What is the best way to go about doing this?

I know some CMS offer a copy feature that allows you to make the same website. However, how can you do this if they need to be hosted in the different countries? Do I need to do them all individually on each of there servers, or can this be done differently? Also, if they are hosted in there own countries, can the content be the same, or is that still considered duplicate content?

Which facebook like button code is better for seo.

iframe or XFBML

Currently we have 300+ products. We do not have a CMS or Ecommerce site at the time being for certain reasons. Currently our site is set up with content on almost every single page. The main catagory page, explains everything on the main page, then our products page has a lot of text too. But right now, it seems as if our main pages are only ranking.

In the near future I will be using a cms and purchasing a template. I noticed most Ecommerce style websites have just the product with the name and price, then when they click on the product it brings you to that page with a brief product description and some photos.

My question is, does each page need content? Or can just the product page itself have content?

For example, say we have a link to SHOES. Then the shoes page displays dress, casual and athletic. Then the athletic page brings you to a page with, running, tennis, cross training shoes, and so forth. Is it best to write content on this main catagory page? If so, how much?

Or should we focus on putting content on the actual page of the individual product? Along with pictures and specifications?

I know Content is Key and we are doing pretty well at that, however, I am starting to wondering if we have to much content or too similar content.

What is the best structure to try and recieve GREAT organic rankings?

Correct. The broken link checker in wordpress is not finding broken links. but since i have the blog on our website in the blog folder, i ran the link sleuth on my domain and the broken links are appearing there. It says, empty url then has all of the urls for each blog. ex: 2010/catagory/name/, then 2010/10/20/20,. I dont get why it is displaying a empty url. in the link checker.

I just redid our blog and I am using permalinks. I have the custom structure set to

/%year%/%postname%/ and catagory - blank.

When I run the XENU Link Slueth, it shows all my blog urls as broken, but the links work fine. However the url structure is www.example.com/2010/10/20/ and so on.

I am worried about duplicate content too. Do you know how I can fix the url structure so only 1 or 2 urls are used?

Thanks! How do you name a file without an extention then? Is this done with a CMS ? I did not realize that extentions were bad. Do you think if I would redo our website soon using Wordpress or expression engine, do you think this may help our rankings too ?

none of the .htm pages exist. I just noticed a bunch of forums that link to us use the .htm extention. I am assuming these are very old pages. I noticed these links were broken in Google Webmaster Tools. So I want to redirect these old links to our home page. I just want them redirected, because I cant stand seeing these in Google Webmaster Tools. This code redirects every single page on my website now to the root domain.

that code actually breaks all my links. Currently all of our links are .php. I just want to redirect old links that have .htm to our home page.

when i try that, the website does not load quick. It and when I click on a link it takes forever. But once I remove it, then it is fine.

i tried adding this alone (removing the other code) and i also tried it with the other code.

Any idea why?

I have been trying to figure this out with different redirects but cannot seem to get this correct. Some of our forums link to pages that do not exist or are very old. They have (.htm) extension. I do not want to redirect the .htm to .php because the actual names of the link have changed too. What is the best code to redirect any link that has a .htm extention to the root domain? right now I have this code to redirect index.htm to the root, but that is all it works for. I think.

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.htm

RewriteRule ^(.*)index.htm$ http://www.example.com$1 [R=301,L]

I am working on trying to get backlinks. We are currently redirecting a few Domains to our current domain name. One of the Domains that is redirecting is the main Domain, we will be advertising in the near future. Can I send backlinks to the redirected URL or does it only carry link juice if it is to the main Domain?

I know that the url structure is very important for seo preferably using the keyword. But is it okay to have the same url with the product number at the end ?  Each of our products have a name with a product number. Or will this cause to many similar urls? or if the folder is the name of the product that needs to be optimized, can the page just be called the product number?

Example:

Say you have a 20 different product lines and they are all catagorized in the appropriate folders, and need to be optimized for the actual product name.

XXX (folder name )

• WWW-PR-123
• WWW-PR-1234
• WWW-PR-12345
• WWW-PR-123456

what would be the best url structure? Can they have the same begining? The product name?

something like:

• www.example.com/xxx/www-pr-123.php
• www.example.com/xxx/www-pr-1234.php

or

• www.example.com/xxx/pr-123.php
• www.example.com/xxx/pr-1234.php

Our website seems to be well optimized. However I need to find more quality backlinks. I am having a hard time with this. Do backlinks have to related to the company? The reason I ask is because I can receive some links, but they do not relate to our company.  BUT sometimes we have customers come to our facility and we book them a local hotel room and send them to near by restaurants.  Is it ok to have local restaurants and local hotels links on our website and have them link to ours, on a page for customer visits.

OR any other tips on receiving quality backlinks?