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Yeah I wouldn't sacrifice branding but we made the decision that at the moment keyword rich domains are doing very well. I have no doubt that this success will be short lived and the project I worked on did still have a branded domain, our plan was to create a landing page with a keyword rich domain on .co because of the easy at which it could be ranked and within weeks we were ranking 3rd on yahoo for the keywords in the domain. When it is re-evaluated I'm sure that the site will be dropped well beyond the first page however currently the project itself has actually made a sizable revenue steam since the page was created. My strategy is that opportunities come and go every day and that this was just another opportunity to gain business.

I think that it makes a point that the alt tag does in fact hold more weight than was previously thought (many SEO resources stated that the alt tag was only considered for specific searches). The problem is that the alt tag leaves an open window to exploitation and that at the end of the day as far as I am aware content is still king.

I have always been of the impression that a website other than .com/.co.uk is a bit spammy however recently there has been an increasing number of very authoritative websites on other TLD's. I have personally been working on a .co and have found it very useful as I have managed to get a very competitive URL ranked.

No problem at all, in fact I've been doing some digging around because I am rather interested in seeing if I can rank another page for a keyword through the alt tag. I will keep you informed but if I can't find a relevant answer I'll try to test it on my sites.

Provided you don't have an unnatural number of links on the page there should be no reason, the whole page will be crawled - header to footer.

P.S. I like the button idea, trying to think about how I might be able to implement them into one of my projects.

I think that the image alt text will 'work' just that it would not be as strong indicator of content as the text. From my personal experience the alt tag alone might not be authoritative enough to encourage the search engines to list that page for the alt terms. I think that as it stands an alt tag may help reinforce a link but am not sure it is enough on its own.

Just as a shot in the dark, perhaps use the footer but add the links in the same colour so they are not visible?

Your site is still indexed, I would suggest that perhaps Google has devalued some of your links. I would have a look at the top 20 or so sites that link the most traffic to you and check that their authority is still recognised.

For more information on penalties etc have a look at webmaster guidelines

The issue here is a combination of things.

Firstly, if you would like to rank the other pages you could try linking to more internal pages and using a combination of keywords you would like to rank for as well as some long tail keywords to help mix it up a little.

To address the linking issue, there are a few little techniques to 'hide' the links however it is more important to link with the right keywords to address the specific pages you would like to rank for those keywords. An example of this might be that if you were a financial adviser; your home page might rank for mortgage, loans and investments however if someone was to search for 'mortgage products' you might like your specific 'mortgages' page to rank above your homepage. The search engines will look at your links as well as the keywords that are linking them so for example if your home page has a link called 'mortgage services' that links to your page called 'mortgages', the search engines will determine that while your homepage relates to mortgages, the authority for the search term 'mortgage services' is actually another page on your site and so will rank that page above your homepage (in theory).

I personally am not sure how well the search engines rank picture links via alt tags. Personally I would try to sneak some links in there to confirm the structure of your website. Just a tip, for a site I once helped to optimise; we changed the css to declare a class of link were there was no underline and no obvious colour indicator as to the fact that it was a link.

Looks like I can get in from the UK.

Is it not open to sign up from anyone?

1. This is the principle although not a given. A good deal of this depends on your sites trust, trusted sites are crawled into far more detail than low trust sites.

2. You could possibly add each new product's url to the site map or alternatively submit each new url to the search engines (this only takes about 30seconds anyway). It is good practice to have an up-to-date sitemap to include all site pages that you would like indexed.

Sorry, god only knows how I missed that.

Well in that case I think you are doing what is recomended, I generally think of the canonical tag as similar to a 301 redirect. You are telling the search engines that the two pages should be treated as one and then specifying the page that is to be the front-man of the two.

I think the normal proceedure is to have robot.txt for private/personal information, nofollow and noindex for duplicate content however the canonical tag is an easy solution to duplicate content as it is simply one line in the header.

I would personally suggest using the canonical tag to identify the original content. For example place this into the header of the pages with duplicate content:

This will ensure that the search engines know that it is not the original content and that the page in the link is where the original content is found.

It's true that many find success with sidebar contact forms / top of page contact forms etc however what you are asking is for SEO services. May I ask what service you are already providing for your clients (I'm assuming web design)?

One thing to remember is that SEO focuses on traffic. SEO is about making the website as easy for search engines to understand as possible and then to add content that will help the search engines to identify your site as the answer to user queries it receives. From here it is about link building to gain authority and increase the web presence of the website. The majority of this is done with the sole intention of increasing the websites SERP position which will increase the traffic to the website.

Sorry for the rant, all-in-all, yes you can ultimately increase leads however the base initiative is to increase traffic. You can then see that if for example you have high traffic but few leads that you should address your website for capturing the interest.

What you need is the help of a SEO/internet marketing company or to learn the basics of SEO. If you are looking to do the latter you can start with SEOMoz's 'learn SEO' guide.

Simply, yes that just about covers it.

The things to bear in mind are that there is often a delay in recognising the new domain so there may be a short amount of time where your domain is not apearing on the SERPS.

My personal advice is as follows:

Pre-move: Buy the new domain as early as possible and put some simple content on it. Submit/register your domain with the major search engines and get a few links to ensure it is listed and the search engines recognise it (this helps to reduce or avoid sandboxing).

1. Create all necessary 301 Redirects.

2. Use analytics and site explorer to find the top 200 or so domains sending traffic to your old domain and contact their webmasters to change the links.

3. Make sure both the old and new sites have been verified and have site maps submitted.

4. Launch your new site with a media and online marketing campaign. The goal is to get as many new inbound links as possible as quickly as possible and to attract a large number of branded searches for the new site.

5. Monitor your Webmaster Central account for 404 errors and to check how Google is dealing with your 301's. Whenever a 404 is produced, place a 301 in place.

6. Monitor the spiders on your new domain. Search engines spend more time crawling sites they trust so when your crawl level is close to your old sites level you are probably close to that trust level (this is a crude measurement).

7. Monitor your search engine traffic referrals to help determine how your new site is developing on the internet.

8. You can also check your server logs for 404 and 500 errors.

For more information Matt Cutts published the following:
http://blog.milestoneinternet.com/web-development/faq-on-duplicate-content-and-moving-your-site-by-matt-cutts-at-pubcon-2009/

There are circumstances where you are allowed to use 'cloaking' as some very influential websites have done however in your particular situation a nofollow tag and noindex tag would be the 'normal' procedure.

Personally, I think it is a grey area. You are not using the javascript to hide content as such and provided you are clearly not trying to manipulate the system there should be no reason why you would be penalised for it.

I think the long and short of it is that there is no easy way. Establishing a solid web presence is the only way to capture the golden links (other than partaking in punishable activities). If you create useful enough content that people see you as an authority in that field then you will get high ranking natural links.

If you don't have the time to create the content you could consider paying for the articles to be written. A friend of mine has made a business out of paying a small amount of money per article featured on his web development blog and then selling advertising space.

From what I understand hosting in the correct region is beneficial however area is not. So if you are targeting Portugal it would be beneficial to have it hosted in Portugal although where in abouts in Portugal it is hosted is not important.