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A further question is if I limit my area to say my state if it was in the US would the word flowers include flowers statename or statename flowers? It didn't look like anyone else answered this part so I'll jump in.  If you target a specific state with the keyword "flowers" (and you're using anything other than exact match), Adwords default campaign settings will target people within that state that search for your keyword, as well as people around the world that search for that state with the keyword.  For example, if your targeted location is California, if people in New Jersey search for "California flowers", they may see your ad.  This option is in the campaign settings under location options (advanced)> Target.  The default is "People in, searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location (recommended)", but you can change it to "People in my targeted location" or "People searching for or viewing pages about my targeted location".  Here's the Google help article talking more about these options.

Adding no follow link is great to make sure that your website does not get penalized, how if you are too worried about it, you can create a separate landing page for it and get it blocked via robots.txt file. Here is what google says - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 Note that PPC (pay-per-click) advertising links that don’t pass PageRank to the buyer of the ad do not violate our guidelines. You can prevent PageRank from passing in several ways, such as: Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a></a><a> tag</a> <a>* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file</a> <a></a>

From a programmer's perspective I would assume a basic algorithm exists where your search is partially matched, then shown in reverse order (most recent first). If they're clever they might match other factors from your profile against the job requirements - e.g. if you have a required qualification, or previous experience. As it's been a while since I applied for a job and the last job site we built was over a year ago, I can't speak for 'most job boards'. If I were you I'd give a few a spin and see if you can work out what's going on when you search. Try some non-logged in searches, then set up a profile and try again, see if the results are different. Martin

Thanks for the replies. I will look at both resources and let you know how it goes. I'm guessing that most optimization and knowledge comes from trial and error?. As far as analytics goes, dotmailer tracks everything from who opens, forwards, reports as spam, doesn't open, how many times opened, links clicked, popular links, email clients used and % / numbers, bounces, unsub requests, social network views and a massive variety of other analytics. It also allows you to view a copy of the email with hotspots showing click through areas and % statistics etc. In regards to actually learning how to lay the emails out and improve click rates I will read the guides provided. Thanks all.

This is an old question but I'll share my experiences. I majored in marketing myself and landed in an SEO position right after graduation. I think the marketing background has improved my writing and sales tactics, and I've seen advertising/PR majors who get into SEO/PPC and are very successful. I do wish I had some more experience with programming and coding when I started which is something I've had to teach myself on the fly. If you have a thorough understanding of HTML, CSS, PHP and are able to master the technical side of it then you're already a step ahead. It'll make your life so much easier, especially if you're dealing with a large ecommerce site that is going to need changes somewhat regularly. You'll be spending 15 minutes making a change instead of an hour and have more time for content and UX.

Hi Paul, Will do. I forgot to mention but I actually found the flaw with the 404 when I was looking at the SEOmoz crawler statistics. It said that my sub categories were duplicate content as the pages it was referring to were assigned to multiple categories. An example roughly based on my structure that it detected as duplicate content is the posts existing in: /category/seo/no1 and  /category/seo/no2 so as a result it was duplicate content. I deleted the sub categories and assigned them all to just the SEO category and realised that the sub categories were still resolving so to troubleshoot this I decided to add a random prefix to the end e.g. /seo/asdnas and the address still resolved to the root category. My theory was that if someone generated for example 100 urls and built links that google would see it as 100 duplicate pages due to the fact it was not 404ing or changing url when as you said 301ing. I will close the thread and mark your question as good answer. Cheers.

Hi Dan The Yoast Seo plug in for Wordpress allows you to select what you want included on sitemaps. Mine currently includes posts, pages, categories, and video Are you suggesting to only include pages in the sitemap? Why wouldn't we want to include the others?

Hello, The authority of the domain is not huge and sits at 23 as we have not yet bothered with the main website due to  a variety of reasons. The domain was registered in 1998 and has not been dropped since. We currently rank in the top 5 for all keywords without any SEO at all. Basically the web dev has access to the site and needs to make the appropriate changes as me doing it would push him out of the work he would get doing it. There is some personal issues with the web dev meaning that we can't get him to sort it for another couple of months and I've only been at the company a couple of months so far. The issues at the moment are fairly serious and I'm talking no title tags and no www to none www and the other common onpage SEO dramas. I know that optimizing the website would give us a massive boost. The authority of the cocitations would be on extremely popular job websites with authorities of 60+ the sort that are known by everyone and rank for pretty much every job related keyword. Thanks.

Thanks for the reply. The WWW has the most links and the http has very few. I was mainly worried about the vulnerability of this structure and the risk the website faces from negative seo. It should be sorted in the coming weeks but for now I'm stuck with it on both. Thanks

Hi, Thanks for the reply and sorry for mine being as late as it is. I understand what you are saying about .im ranking which is why I was nervous about using a .im domain. I have seen .me rank before and was mainly wondering if .im would be on par with .me. Thanks