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Since you're doing redirects already, I'd get rid of the .html.  They're not user friendly, and you're already doing a redirect anyways so why not.  Seeing them on URLs looks old to me, most sites don't have them anymore.

Trailing slashes I don't have a strong opinion on.  If these pages will never have pages after them, then I'd opt for no trailing slash, just because I think most sites do that now.

Wish I could help you out more here, but I don't have much experience in this realm.  All of my work has only ever been on .coms.  Sorry!

.io gets used a lot around the world as a general TLD, so Google no longer assumes that it's a site targeted to the British Indian Ocean Territory (here is their help center file on this).  Your site will be treated similarly as any other gTLD.  This is probably true for Bing as well, but I couldn't find any documentation about it.

If you're not US-specific, I'd leave the country targeting blank in Google/Bing webmaster tools.  Either way I wouldn't expect it to make a huge difference.  Just know that Google doesn't think you're trying to target the British Indian Ocean Territory based on your TLD choice.  As CleverPhD pointed out, they use a bunch of other factors to help determine this as well.

That's great!  As you come across more questions about Adwords or Analytics, post more questions!  I'm always on the lookout for the PPC questions on the Q&A forum here.

Google Adsense is for publishers to place Google display ads on their pages.  Google Adwords is about buying ad placements on Google searches, and Adsense publisher websites.  It sounds like you're looking for Google Adwords if you're looking to put your own ads out there.

Ads are not cheating!  Here, we bid on some keywords for things that we don't even have on our site, because the people doing those searches haven't realized yet what they should be looking for is our product.  Since those keywords aren't even on the site, we don't have the opportunity to rank for them organically.

We switched to using it right after it came out, and we haven't had any issues. The only thing I can think of is possibly some users could have an ad blocker that blocks all requests from doubleclick.net, but doesn't block requests from google-analytics.com?  Those people would be lost.

If you're going to use your GA goals and events for remarketing segments you don't currently have set up, I think you'll see a nice return on switching, even if you lose tracking for a rare person here and there.

You cannot do this yourself through Facebook's self service platform.  You have to have a 3rd party FBX partner do it for you.

Facebook recently began their in-news-feed retargeting ads, which for us are showing much higher CTRs, and better CPAs than the right hand side ads.  If ever there was a time to start, it's now!

I'll throw another plug in for Adroll.  The account reps over there are amazing, and they do a great job of listening to my feedback and optimizing my account.  If you need a contact over there, let me know.

Your whois privacy settings shouldn't do much in terms of rankings.  Beyond submitting your sitemap, you can also submit URLs of actual pages through Google and Bing with their Fetch as Googlebot and Fetch as Bingbot tools.  I'd do that for Bing, as it might help you get into their index faster.

Make sure you let Google and Bing know that your site exists!  Set up Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.  Also, you can submit URLs in both to try and get your pages indexed faster.

You're not alone.  Check the thread here: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-email-is-freezing-microsoft-outlook.  It looks like they're working on the problem.  peterli of the help team wrote:

Hi guys!

Thanks for all the heads up we have so far regarding this.  It looks like the Q&A emails has an image on their outlook tries to pull from our servers, that process can cause outlook to appear frozen/crash if your version of the outlook is queueing the the server (AWS) for the image.  Currently you could work around that by turning off images in your settings in outlook.  You can check out this thread on MS' support hub about blocking pictures on outlook: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/turn-off-blocking-automatic-picture-downloads-HP007310739.aspx

Hope that helps, I have created a ticket for you on our end, so I look forward to talking to you!

Best,

Peter 
Moz Help Team.

If you don't use the word "Calgary" on the page, how would Google know your website is related to Calgary for it's location-based results?  They have a location option in the keyword tool so you can see how much traffic that term has in Calgary, as well as the average CPC in Calgary, if you're planning on running an advertising campaign in Adwords.

As an aside, for Adwords you no longer have to include "Calgary" in your keywords if your campaign targets the location Calgary.  For your "best shoe repair" example, Adwords default location setting would show ads for "best show repair" for people searching that in Calgary, but also people searching for "Calgary best show repair" around the world.  There is a sub-setting to make it target only people physically in Calgary if you only want locals seeing the ad.

Just my 2 cents, but if you're not going to tune the ad text by location, this is precisely why Google has spent so much time creating these new enhanced campaigns.  As the campaign runs, you can still see geographic-based reporting if your campaign targets different countries.  But instead of creating different campaigns, you'd set bid adjustments for different locations to adjust the CPCs by region.

This makes the reporting marginally harder (you can still see this data in the dimensions tab), but if you're not going to take advantage of ad text by region, I think this is easier.  Mainly because when you make changes to these campaigns (add/remove ad groups, keywords, ad text), you're going to have to remember to duplicate these changes across all the campaigns you've spawned.  Also, when you want to start adding demographic and remarketing lists to your search campaigns (coming soon - currently in beta), you'll have to set that up and manage those bid adjustments for each of these campaigns as well.

You can include or exclude locations in the campaign settings within Adwords.  If there's a significant lead volume from India, and want to tune ads directly to them, you could duplicate your campaign(s) and geotarget them to India specifically, to get higher CTRs from those ads.  If you've upgraded to enhanced campaigns, you can do bid adjustments by location too, to easily adjust your CPCs by location.

The Adwords help article is here.  We usually refer to it location targeting or geotargeting if you want to search for it.

Have you tried any paid search traffic?  That could have you ranking #1 by the end of the day.  If you know of some niche keywords you think would work well for you, you might try some paid search out first and see if the traffic converts well before embarking on an SEO campaign to rank for those terms.

Take a look at the Moz recommended companies here.  I'm sure you can find someone that'll help you out!

If the new name is more than 5 characters, I think you can just go to https://www.facebook.com/username and submit the request.

if that doesn't work or it's less than 5 characters, I recently had success through the following channel, and believe me I've tried everything to get an email for a real person or a real person on the phone.  When you log into your Facebook account, there should be an "Email support" link in the left nav.  I picked "Other" and send in information for the request, and someone actually contacted me and they processed our request!  Note that we have ~35K likes, and do spend a bit on advertising ($1-5$K/mo).

I would suspect they'd redirect the old URL to the new URL so it shouldn't be a problem to change it, but you'll want to confirm that with Facebook.  https://www.facebook.com/seomoz goes to their new moz page URL, so that's one case confirming my suspicions.

These guys hit the nail on the head, but I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in here and recommend Google Analytics Remarketing.  We've seen an even better ROI on our retargeting users through Adwords using custom events and goals we set up in Google Analytics (also using it to exclude users has been valuable).

Right now, there are three ways to set up remarketing in Adwords:

1. Set an individual pixel on a page you want to retarget to users who have seen (the original way, still useful to include in emails)
2. Set an Adwords script on all your pages and then retarget based on pages they've hit.
3. Google Analytics Remarketing (no need to install additional scripts on your page, just a small tweak to your GA script)

Do you know which way you set it up?  That would make it easier to troubleshoot your issues.  I take it you've set up an ad group to target that audience?

Thanks for the answer!  I guess it depends on what a ton of money is... do you think $5K/mo is enough to qualify?  I'll submit the form and find out!

edit: If you've spent >$500 through their self-service platform in the last 30 days, you don't qualify for their 30-day starter program, where you'll get Facebook reps for 30 days.  The guy on the phone also explained to me that the shorter vanity URL process is above his pay grade, and there's nothing he can do to help me and no one he could get me in touch with.  Oh well!

Does anyone know how to go about getting a page name on Facebook of less than 5 characters?  I saw Moz was able to claim facebook.com/moz (BTW, congrats on the redesign!), and many other brands also have claimed page names under 5 characters.  Has anyone else had success claiming a short page name?  Do you have to know the right person at Facebook, or are there other requirements?  We have around 35K likes on our page, and our site gets a pretty good amount of traffic.  My boss doesn't like any of my ideas that are 5+ characters... she really wants the short URL.

If anyone has any insights on what I need to do (or who I need to talk to at Facebook), I'd really appreciate it!

I think it's very unlikely Google would index a test variant.  Although the test variations do use JavaScript to render, I think they also rely on setting cookies to be included in a test.  As bots don't accept cookies, I don't think they can receive test variant pages.

Also, the guys at Optimizely are awesome, if you want you can ask them this question and they'll get back to you ASAP with a response.  We've been a very happy customer of theirs for over a year now, and I've never had any problems with test variants getting indexed.