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Are you essentially asking if you have Boots, Dress Shoes and Flip-Flops, and on each you link to the other, e.g. "you may be interested in these awesome leather boots" or in the side nav everything is linking.

If so, yes - a good idea. It helps the search engines find other content. I would make sure there is content to the link, e.g. not just a random link in the middle of nowhere, but within navigation, related products, "other categories" "suggested products" etc etc, this is fine.

There are some white-board Fridays to check out about exact match anchor text that may help too.

Agreed. And focus on best practices for local or regional optimization. If your business is only really focused in Charlotte, for instance, there are many other things you can do to help with this geo optimization.

Should be fine. If there were 10 blogs that had the exact same links and structure it may raise some suspicion. Also, if this blog has hundreds of 'thank you' links, it may be a bit fishy.

But it sounds like it could be natural for the user experience, especially if they mention a bit about why they are thanking each.

You should be fine. I think Google is going to get smarter and smarter at recognizing the same video, but if it's relevant to the page and there is other supporting content, it is adding to the user experience and you'll be ok.

Another option to consider on certain videos is to create a 2nd video (in Wistia). Essentially it's the same upload, but a new file with unique title/description etc. YouTube doesn't let you do this, but you'll be fine in Wistia. This could come into play if there is the same video with a sightly different context that needs to be on 2 pages.

One question I'm pondering is the situation where a 'how to' video get's the attention of prominent bloggers. Let's say 15 big blogs in your industry all use the embed code (if you make it available) to post the video in a post of their own. This A) should benefit with by receiving a backlink, but B) does this complicate the waters from the Search Engine's perspective? I guess it's still on your video sitemap, and Google should know that you're the original source.

We just started on Wistia, after a few years on BrightCove and experience with a bunch of others. Pretty cool platform, plus I hear a new (and much more flexible) player is coming out in December. Exciting!

That is strange. I have not seen that before in BC. One things that may screw it up is if in your category.html template file there is something wrong. But then you would be seeing issues on all cat pages.

BC is pretty quick on support -- live chat and email -- so hopefully they can find a quick explanation.

Great idea -- and the link Scot posted is perfect. However our platform doesn't give us access to mod_proxy or htaccess, so we are unable to setup the reverse proxy. unfortunately. Sigh.

Agreed with CafePress.

You can still focus on long-tail, but on your own domain. So www.familysite.com/long-tale-insurance-page.html etc

I'd definitely focus on long tail and also local modifiers. Insurance is probably one of the top 5 most competitive (from an SEO perspective) businesses. Would recommend not focusing your entire marketing portfolio on SEO. may be some great social opportunities, especially if you're local/regional.

My 2 cents.

I read it as only really applying to on-site links. So if you have the same anchor text link on every page (like the side nav or footer) Google takes that into account (in a better way).

In general, you don't want ALL exact match anchors -- there was a WBF post on it.

Agreed with Vistage. If it's a balance of time (and regardless) I'd definitely try to focus on the stronger blogs your guest posting on. But yes, great to have more links from some strong blogs, and just more exposure to their visitors.

I agree with EGOL -- great way to stand out. That said, bad video can  be detrimental. Using videos from the manufacturer will largely depend on how good they are. I've seen some horrible product videos that probably hurt a product page.

Why not create your own?

Some good posts here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/search?utf8=✓&query=video+seo&x=0&y=0

Why not build engagement and recommend growing a profile?

In 2012 we will be rolling out a directory of local services for our industry. This will ultimately be thousands of additional pages, with city/zip searching, individual provider pages etc.

The main reason is for UX -- providing local resources for our industry to compliment the online experience (we're an online B2C retailer)

My question is if there are pros/cons to putting this on a subdomain, or if having it on the root is ideal.

I don't see a huge influx of backlinks (making a sub fine) but I suppose that could change down the road. I do see some indexing benefits for new terms like 'service x in los angeles' etc, but that would also be fine on a sub.

It feels like it would be cleaner to keep separate and on a sub, but maybe we're missing something. We certainty don't want to hurt anything on our primary site which drives the business.

Thoughts?

Is her business located in Canada (e.g. she has a physical Canadian office address that will be on the site)?

I would recommend that, along with the .ca, plus dozens of other factors to specifically target Canada.

It's a platform issue. BigCommerce. Everything else has been fantastic with them, but our only option for WordPress is to host on a subdomain.

The clear answer is that having it in a directory is better, but doing so means we need to have a very manual setup and lose the efficiencies/functionality of wordpress.

Here is a post from earlier in the year with a similar discussion (didn't see that one before I posted this). Also looks like similar differences of opinion, though some more sources sited. http://www.seomoz.org/q/corporate-blog

Because of the lack of consensus, I'm curious to research more. Just want to make sure I/we didn't miss anything over the past few months.

James: do you have a source for the statement that Google now treats subs as a key site element?

Interesting. I need to research this more. It sounds like it's prone to errors, but maybe not.