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Some good suggestions here. I'd add a few more. First and foremost, make sure it's very clear who is expected to do what. Some designers are great at coming up with a concept and creating the basic layout of the interior pages. But they fall down at the detailed execution level. Some designers think it's the job of the client or consultant to actually populate the pages, position the images, and futz around with fonts. One designer said to me: "You know WordPress. Just go ahead and insert the content." Umm, no. I do know WordPress, but I'm not a designer. That's why I hire designers. My understanding of the scope of work is not "some assembly required." I want to buy a furnished and decorated house, not plans and a pretty picture of what the finished product MIGHT look like. But: my bad for not making this clear. The designer in this case was an honest and competent guy. He just had a different idea about the scope of work. You should also try to get a feel for whether the designer will be doing the coding himself or subcontracting to others. Sometimes the subcontractors do shoddy work. Many are offshore and are paid a pittance. Finally, I would never hire a designer until I had detailed  telephone conversation with two or three previous clients (who are NOT friends or relatives.)

This in no way endorses or not any one cdn but I will share what has happened to me over the last few months. My hosting company gave me the option of using a well known cdn free with my hosting package. Now as my site is hosted in the US and most of my visitors are from the UK I thought that would be a good idea. So end of August I enable the cdn for my site. From mid sept the time it took googlebot to crawl an individual page on my site went up from average 150ms to over 4000ms.  The number of pages crawled per day remain the same. However looking at the index status the number of pages not selected has increase by some 30% when I have not been adding any content to the site. At end of Sept for most of my page my ranking fell by about 950 places.  There were no messages in WMT and a reconderation request came back saying no manual penalty. At the end of Oct I disable the CDN and immeadiately the time googlebot took on each page fell back down to the 150ms mark.  Rankings are yet to improve so I am not saying this was the only cause of the drop in rankings. I am now getting a lot of 404 not found appearing in my wmt crawl errors for pages that have never exisited on my site but have no mention of the cdn in them either. I am talking with the cdn provider at the moment so have not named them here.

1.) Looks like great input from the two above 2.) I have used Liquid Web for the last few years and would recommend them. They are a bit expensive, but the incredible support and stable/fast servers makes up for the price.

Did you get it to where you wanted it?  I see it has moved to the social share bar.

Thanks. I guess what's confusing for me is that the images are still getting indexed with that option on or off.

Paul, Thank you very much for all the feedback. Such great info. I've been working on improving many of these items over the weekend. I'm only using total cache, I set up a CDN, i took off on of the tabs on the activity widget and just let the popular posts. I'm trying to figure out how to resize the images better on the sidebar tab as you're right they are using css to rescale the images. I'm actually saving up to have the site designed by a designer instad of my non-design self. But that's down the road as having something designed professionally isn't cheap (although it is worth it.) I'm going to be working on your suggestions for the rest of the site. Thanks again for the feedback and for the kind words about our site. I'm really trying to help people through this site, and from the feedback we are getting it looks like it's been doing that. Now I'm on the journey to make it an even better experience for people.

I think brand is always important. I did some research into this last year and came away with this: If your brand is strong lead with the brand and then follow with the primary keyword phrase and if your brand is weak, do it the other way around. Use a pipe or dash to separate them. If you search on oatmeal cookies you will see both examples. Keep an eye out on your searches and you'll see lots of results using this style. I think this is a best practice.

Thanks!

Nope, I don't think it is applicable, the content is the picture, that is the content, so that is not thin content and they are duplicated or similar to other pages on the site. It may be worth making sure you have all your taxonomies sorted and are not showing the same pages in various locations but beyond that, you are good to go (I can show you how to do that in like 5 minutes if it helps).

Totally agree with Ryan, you should redirect https to http Trivial maybe, but can see no reason not to do it as it takes no effort and makes your site even more accessible to users who mis-type, key your address directly into the url bar while on a https site etc *This was in response to Ryans post which started "Perhaps i am being too picky..." I accidentally clicked the wrong reply button!!

Are you using the Facebook  plugin for WP? You'll have to pay attention when you activate different sections in the settings.

Thanks a lot Keri, These days with the online competition being so strong we should pay more attention to the website architecture, usability, visual impact, speed and technical problems. SEO it's so complex that you'll find yourself overwhelmed by the number of critical issues that needs to be addressed and fixed. Don't focus just on the content try to enhance every aspect of your page from to . Optimizing pictures takes only a few moments and you can use automated functions in Photoshop.

Hi Rick Hootsuite is good, but I would recommend sprout social been using this for a while now and its fantastic. http://sproutsocial.com/ Matthew

Before I start, I see that some of the changes you suggested are already going into practice.  First thing though, check cross browser compatibility.  I can't read most of that text on your site with firefox.  Adobe has their browser labs and it is handy for cross browser compatibility. All that said, you weren't clear what your intent of the site is so... i'm going to guess and say that you want bookings for event speaking.  In that case,  I'd design the site to sell yourself.  Tell the visitor what you do, who hires you and why THEY should hire you.  I searched through several public speakers (46 sites in total) and this one caught my eye: http://www.lindaedgecombe.com/ Now this isn't a perfect example by any means (poor site title, unclear header text: "Your Re - Set Expert for Crazy Times" - could be clearer on what she does, and no call to action above the fold to name a few).  But as an example, shows a great deal of what does and really sells herself. Not sure if this is the intent of your site, but I hope it helps!

Hey, guys, this is a very old post but because it might be useful to people in the future I thought I would update the URL that Ryan did a. great job posting but no longer goes to the correct place. No one can control what I third-party site changes there URL structure to rite? you can use this plug-in called https://infolific.com/technology/software-worth-using/real-time-find-and-replace-for-wordpress/#pro-version ?replytocom= replaced with #replytocom=

Hmmm.I'm not sure I'm following what you are doing (or vis versa) You can check out my site if you'd like, and you can see I have big buckets for things (like therapy.) But I have so many posts under that, I need to make them into child categories. But if I do I can't use the url for the main 'landing' page. (If that makes sense.) I checked out the link you posted and it looks like when I click on one of your category names I'm taken to a page that has a different url. Is there a reason for that? From what I understand it's best to let users know where they are going when they click on a link. Was there a reason you didn't have the url the same as the catagory they clicked on in your menu? (I'm still learning so forgive me in advance if I'm missing something.)

Ha,ha..Oh sorry! I didn't catch that. And yah, he is one happy little panda.

I did the fetch as google and everything looks normal. I also do not have any erros that have anything to do with this page. It's very strange. It seems to have happen all of a sudden.

I agree with you saying : as easy as possible! that's the key and in this instance,I wouldn't bother with external commenting systems.Keep it simple and let them comment directly on your site. This will bring you many advantages in the long term.

4. How long people are staying on the page This is a good post, which covers the basics of Google Analytics goal setup, but you basically want to set "duration" as the goal metric to track and then specify a minimum time you want to track. http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/how-to-setup-goals-in-google-analytics.html If you have any further questions let me know.