Boxed navigation is becoming pretty common navigation style these days. Many large corporations such as Rackspace, IBM, and Cisco use this format.

Best practice is to have on average not more than 150 outbound links on the page so try to maintain your on page links around this number.

I would not be too concerned on where you put the content on the site as long as the content can be crawled by the search spider. Blog is the best place on a website to provide good quality content to your users where they can subscribe to RSS and follow your work. It can also increase chances of generating User Generated Content on your website which will ultimately benefit your rankings.

Jared,

I would think more about the user experience and less about the search spider when changing the site / url architecture. If your users are able to find the information they need faster and easier with your new architecture then I would go with that.

Using "services" page does sounds appropriate and you can always use right keywords in the URL while 301 redirecting your older URLs to the new ones.

Not sure if I understand your point correctly. Are you saying you will be dynamically feeding keywords on the pages with tabs?

I would suggest to go for yourwebsite.com/location since it will be better experience for your local visitors and will save an extra click.

Your most recent Google cache is showing the target as Toronto,Ontario confirming your concerns.

The challenge you are facing is similar to sites like Yellowpages.com, superpages.com and any other location targeted sites may face. The way these sites have worked around is by adding relevant static content to the website.

By adding relevant content to your home page your will be able to minimize the location targeting effect. Plus, search spiders already know that you are not limited to the location of IP because they have indexed multiple pages from your website.

I also noticed that your home page outbound link to content ratio is upside down. You have too many links on the homepage and extremely limited content. Additionally, the text blurb on the top is not user friendly and stuffed with too many keywords. You can easily replace this text with user friendly static content such as your website USP.

Font size impacts user experience and may impact SEO in certain cases. Providing users multiple font size options to choose from i.e small, medium, large helps user experience. Search spiders do look for usage of bold, italics and H1 tags on a web page. Better user experience generally lead to better SEO.

I checked the header for both URLs are they are indeed giving me a 200 ok header code which means this is a page canonicalization issue.

Page canonicalization happens in cases where www or non www, .php or non .php , .asp or non .asp pages exist.

The solution to this is to do a 301 redirect of http;//search-engine-upgrade.com/default.asp to

http;//search-engine-upgrade.com using htaccess file.

Please this line of code in your htaccess file

redirect 301 /default.asp http://search-engine-upgrade.com

or you can the following rewrite code

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /default.asp\  HTTP/

RewriteRule ^default.asp$ http://www.search-engine-upgrade.com/ [R=301,L]

Ryan answered this question pretty well and I would like to add few points to it

1. As long as your site architecture is organic and designed for the user you should not be too concerned about page -keyword targeting.

2. Avoid have too many links on the page. Typically, there should not be more than 150 links on a page.

3. Make sure to have equal balance of content and images on the site.

4. Backlinks with good distribution of anchor text.

Password protected content in most cases is not indexed in the search engines. Having all the content behind the signup wall can be a barrier for you to rank for keywords in your niche. However, that does not limits you to rank since modern SEO is not just based on the on page content. There are multiple factors that influence rankings in 2011 such as site accessibility, content, backlinks, social media, online reputation, local seo, LDA, search protocol usage and more.

Rank recently wrote a blog post on the responsibilities of SEO in 2011 and it is worth reading.

Directory submissions are a total waste of time. Personally, I would not use any software solutions that offer mass directory / article / comment submissions because these fall under grey area and search engines don't value these anymore like they use to years ago.

Local directory submission to websites like angielist, superpages, citysearch, yelp is certainly useful for local rankings.

Local ranking factors has a lot in common to regular search ranking factors including quality and quantity of links, content LDA score, and several other metrics.

However, there are lot of other metrics that Google generally looks at to rank a site locally.

• local place page with correct information ( address, correct category, phone # , map icon)

• Profiles on local directories ( superpages, citysearch.com, angielists ..)

• Local citations (links from local directories and sites like chamber of commerce, BBB, local small business groups)

• reviews (Google and other local websites like Yelp, citysearch, judysbook)

Here is a link to a website that provides extensive research work on local ranking factors.

Here is another links to awesome SMX Seattle 2011 breakaway session on local ranking factors.

Search engines are placing more importance to usability than ever before and longer URLs are usually not considered user friendly. The popularity of URL shortening service is another proof that having shorter url is better.

The idea is to maintain the right balance between keyword usage in the URL and the length of URL.

Sure. Thank you

Paid directories are not beneficial the way it used to be long time ago. Any paid links is a serious no no even though the case that directory services provides is that they don't charge for links but for resource required for manual inclusion.

There are some exceptions to high quality directory such as Yahoo. One should always ask the question if this directory provides a benefit to the user and if the answer is no then a backlink from this site is worthless for both traffic and seo.

Best practice is to add new content and create new title and meta for these pages instead of changing title for the same page constantly.

Changing title too many times in short span can confuse the search spider as title is the first piece of content crawled by spiders. By changing the title too many times you may cause the search spider to think that there is something unnatural about the website.

Cache tags are associated with caching of the page for faster downloads .

instructs the browser to download the information from the local cache instead of getting information from the network server allowing decreased load time.

The exact opposite is  where the browser will not use the local cache and download the information from the server.

As a best practice, cache should be controlled through HTTP headers ("Expires", "Cache-Control: max-age" and "Last-Modified") instead of using Meta.

The other option is to use .htaccess code for caching of images and other content to speed up load time.

There are several ways to measure the success of the content and these can be divided into two categories - quality and quantity metrics

Quantity metrics

• visitor engagement metrics (time spent on page, bounce rate, page view per visit)

• conversion metrics (orders / conversion driven by the content)

• social metrics (facebook likes/shares, tweets and other share metrics)

• of subscribers to rss feed (if the content is a part of blog)

• of comments

• Rank of keywords driving organic traffic to the page

Quality metrics

• quality of comments

• quality of social shares

• Feedback received from users

• LDA score (although LDA is a quantity metric it fits the quality criteria because the LDA algorithm essentially is a mathematical indication of how relevant the content is to a keyword)

Best

Sameer

Traditional online directories are losing its value in the eyes of search engines and a good example is DMOZ. Even though DMOZ was one of the most popular directory before 2009 (it still has some value) it is not the best link source.

Local search prominence has allowed local directories to become stronger than a regular web link directory.

The question a user should ask before investing in directory link building is

• are users going to appreciate the availability of this directory? Is this going to provide benefits to the end user?

• Is this a vertical directory within high authority website or is this just a collection of links?

• Is the directory locally targeted (think yellowpages.com , cityguide.com) (applies to local ranking)

If the answer to these questions is no then clearly this is not a good source for getting links.

I did a quick search for Facade and Façade and Google is able to understand the difference and display the correct results and it didn't asked me to correct the word. Google's language detection technology is pretty good. If you use Google translation then there might be some instances where you may not get 1x1 translation of the sentence but it is better than other tools available.