Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think you may find this post interesting - http://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-alt-text-vs-image-title-whats-the-difference/

Note the following:

"Include your main keywords in both, but change them up. Keyword stuffing in alt text and title is still keyword stuffing, so keep them relevant and meaningful"

If possible I would populate both title and alt tags for images but make them different variations rather than having them as the same. I know this is a challenge and as Dirk mentioned as you may be limited go for identical but try and be as relevant as possible. Depending how your site is setup you could potentially custom code your template to populate the two elements from slightly different but relevant data on the page.

Again I think you might find this on-page SEO post by Rand interesting -

"For search engines, the image's title, filename, surrounding text, and alt attribute all matter from a ranking perspective. In particular, those doing SEO should know that when an image is linked, the alt attribute is treated similarly to anchor text in a text link."

http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization

Well I haven't had an issue with duplicate page titles and if you include your brand name in the format I mention and the rest is unique then there won't be an issue with Google and duplicate titles, in my opinion. Also if you are still unsure start looking at major well ranked sites and how they have most pages branded without this problem. Take SEOMoz's titles for instance, they use this format effectively without issue...

Hi Stacey,

how well optimised is your clients site in terms of on page for the term they are trying to rank?  I would stay away from the keyword domains and focus your efforts on further enhancing the content on your clients site. Don't forget there is less benefit to exact match domains especially since google  had an update that targeted lower quality exact match domains.

Hi Iain

You don't need to create your old pages again just create 301 redirects in your .htaccess file which can be done using Yoast plugin - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#files

Here is SEOMoz's guide to redirection - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Here is a redirection plugin for Wordpress just enter old url and new one you want it to point to and it will do the work for you - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

Hi - for a guide on video SEO I think this is an excellent place to start and it helped me a lot with my approach to it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

Big credit to the author - Phil Nottingham from Distilled

Matt gives you some good advice below - I thought I would just throw http://www.brightlocal.com/ into the mix for you to consider...

Hope that helps!

No problem Iain - firstly I would still create the redirects from your old html pages to their new locations as you rightly say there will be other sites with old links. You wouldn't want potential visitors/customers thinking your site is no longer there or down because they found it via a redundant link..

Secondly I wouldn't worry about doing anything regarding the current redirects - if you type any of your pages without a trailing slash you will see you are redirected to one with a trailing slash essentially reducing duplicate content for you.

Have a look at this article as to why it is something you don't need to worry about changing - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Have a look at this - it might give you some ideas in regard to Bing and optimisation

- http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/uk/archive/2012/04/13/optimising-website-content-for-higher-rankings-on-bing.aspx

Yes in terms of a redirect the target URL is the new page that you are redirecting the original one to, so just add the URL of page you are redirecting to.

Hi Alex,

This is a good question - if I were you I would look at this whiteboard friday as it gives you insights into all your options for this scenario.

Also don't miss the next to last paragraph on redirection, which I personally avoided when I was in a similar situation to you, due to potential mix-ups. I chose the ccTLD path at the time, though I would heavily consider the subfolder option if presented with this challenge again...

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Hope this helps...

Have you glanced at SEOMoz's best practices for title tags? - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

In my opinion you should have the title as natural as possible and that should be the a clear label as to what your article is about. Have you looked at examples such as how SEOMoz has titles on their blog - article title | brand

In my experience you will also pick up more long tail traffic with more natural titles such as using the full title rather than just a specific keyword. It also looks less spammy and over-optimized which is something to take into consideration after recent Google updates.

As long as the code produced is readable in a web browser then it being bloated shouldn't have much of an impact in terms of SEO. The code bloats only downside is that it might slow the page load which will have impact on SEO. Remember crawlers like Google bot essentially look at the page content in terms of textual content, what labels (alt tags etc), images and links are on there not how neatly it is presented or whether it is valid markup or not. I would take a look at your page speed otherwise I would worry as long as it is able to fulfil all the basic on page requirements such as headers, page titles etc.

Just to reiterate this - I have worked with CMS driven sites that aren't W3C compliant and don't produce the nicest html, but have loaded fast and ranked in the top 3 for competitive terms.

Try the following in your .htaccess:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/stuff-1/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/stuff/$1

Well I would not go down the route of sub-domains if you were bringing all your sites under one for SEO purposes. I personally would consider putting each of the sites in a sub-folder on your corporate site and then 301 each domain to that folder. You need to remember that sub-domains are often viewed by Google as separate domains, which means any links pointing to the sub-domains pass little benefit onto the root domain (in this case the corporate site). This in my opinion defeats the object of raising the domain authority!!

I agree with Anthony on this one - make sure you 301 redirect the pages you are loosing to the most relevant pages in your new structure.

Well when I was in the same situation as you and had loads of pages that were part of an archive that were all indexed in Google - numerous with low PR - I used a 301 redirect on all of them to tell search engines of their new home. I did this in 2009 and they are all still indexed and bringing traffic into the site today - I am leaving the redirects there forever.

If I was in your situation and it makes sense to put a 301 redirect on a page as it still exists just under a new URL then I would do it. 301 redirects don't cause issues with search engines when they are used properly to move a whole site from one location to another - content relocation this is their purpose.

Hope this helps Gary and answers your question..

Have you setup your https version of the site in webmaster tools as a separate site, if not I would and then I would submit a https sitemap on this profile.

I would also 301 redirect the http to https across the site - you may find this previous question useful - http://moz.com/community/q/best-method-of-redirecting-http-to-https-on-homepage

If you have used a canonical tag to point to the best version of your page then there shouldn't be an issue in terms of SEO and search engines as you are actually telling the search engine that you have two pages that contain the same information and you would like them to take the one mentioned in the canonical tag as the original. You are actually practising good optimisation and that is the whole reason the canonical tag was introduced to help optimise website structure for search engines.

A quick question - when you create this new page that will have a different URL and Title are you going to be keeping the rest of the content the same? If so I would personally use a 301 redirect to the new URL and make sure that you have changed any internal links such as navigation to the new URL and not the old one. When I have had a situation such as this that is what I have done and it has worked well. It is important when changing your site structure and URLs that you make sure your navigation reflects your new URLs and not the old redirected ones, so you don't give mixed messages to the search engines.

In terms of rel=canonical that will pass value the same as a 301 redirect - for evidence have a look here:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

"Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to utilize the rel=canonical tag. The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and often takes much less development time to implement."

See DR Pete's response in this Moz Q&A:

http://moz.com/community/q/do-canonical-tags-pass-all-of-the-link-juice-onto-the-url-they-point-to

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?rd=1

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical

Matts Cutts stated there is not a whole lot of difference between the 301 and the canonical - they will both lose "just a tiny little amount bit, not very much at all" of credit from the referring page.

That is why for peace of mind I would go for a 301 redirect which will pass the majority of link juice in terms of SEO and it will eliminate the old page pointing straight at the new one and telling search engines that your old page has permanently moved to the new URL.

Once search engines catch up they will only index your new page URL and Title which you have optimised eliminating the old unfriendly ones but passing any link juice they have gained at the same time.

Does this make sense?