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Yup, in theory.

I mean that's how it's supposed to be used, so if it was set up correctly that should be right

You can also tell Google to ignore parameters in Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling but only do this if you're confident it won't mess anything up. Canonical should be fine.

Starting to use them how?

You want to build a comparison site?

Actually a pretty neat feature of the Q&A forum is that you can mark answers as helpful (which highlights the post in green and gives the person a shiny 3 MozPoints).

There should be a text link saying something like 'This answered my question' with a tick at the bottom of their posts which you can click (at least I think that's how to mark them, I've not asked a question yet :D)

There are certainly a lot of worse things you could do than follow this guide by Oli Gardner - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928

With Google traffic estimator / keyword Tool you get the data from the SE itself.

Which is all the more reason not to trust it!

if you don't have data for long tail keywords that is probably because the search for those terms is very low as far as volume.

Because Google only now reports on keywords that make them money

There can't / won't be another better source for this kind of data.

Your own analytics are the only thing that will give you a truly accurate data set, however I appreciate that it's not predictive for the most part For future reference as well, once you have top rankings for something always compare it against what you thought you would get and judge for yourself how accurate the tool is.

Anyway, yes, use the tool it's still one of the best resources you have access to.

Not black hat, but on the other hand, perhaps not worth it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake

But if you go for it, then eyepaq has a lot of good advice.

Not Joomla I don't think, but it's a more than unusual way to make a site

Anyway, it works. I've never tested what commas do with regards SEO, so can't say if it will help or hinder.

Was question 7 about internal link structure or gaining external links? (or, as I first thought how to actually code a link?)

is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url.

No. You'll end up with a mess of a site. See - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes?

As stated, no that wouldn't solve it, but this is the sort of thing canonicalization is for. If you can get to product A via site/colour/product-a and site/brand/product-a then the canonical tag is to tell search engines that both of these pages are the same and then you state which is the 'official' one. Same situation if you had site/brand/product-a?affiliate-id=12345.

Is there a better way to handle this?

Must be I assume that each page is it's own entry in your CMS, rather than there being an identical entry for each path into it. As you said each page should reference itself on the desired absolute URL (and not the one displayed), how you determine what that is and impliment it site wide though will depend on your CMS and require a bit of planning.

So how is your site structured?

Are the commas the same a folders/categories?

As in is tutorials-photo,14,replacing-parts.html equivalent to category,id,filename.html?

Is the site built in Joomla?

How similar is the content?

I'm pretty sure you're not going to pass any link juice or authority to the new page using a canonical tag, especially if it has different content; it's just not a great way to fix anything.

Useful if the URL changes depending on how you end up at a destination page, but if you just happen to have 2 different pages about 'widgets' then sharing a canonical tag between them won't do too much.

Can you give me an example of what it is you're actually doing and why you think the pages should be the same? (I'm just not getting the impression they are the same page, sorry if I'm wrong)

How have you managed to get commas in your URLs?

It's not that they won't work but they should be reserved as special characters - http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.html

How are you building your site?

I want to say yes

You seem to have a grasp of the basics, Keyword Research > On Page Optimisation > Link Building but there's no substitute for experience.

There's no single formula for doing SEO, there's some best practises but even if you do everything perfectly there's no guarantees you'll rank for the words you want to (not trying to put you off :D)

You seem to have read a lot of relevant articles and sources so I'm only going to give you one bit of advice.

GO FOR IT!

Even if you don't get it right first time you'll learn so much by doing it and if you love SEO you'll just keep trying to get better. Stop by and ask if you have more specific questions and good luck!

I'm not convinced syndication via other players is the best link building tactic because if anybody links to or embeds them they're linking to the host site and not your site.

If the aim is to let people see and talk about the content (as in, if they're likely to do a blog post or otherwise talk about your site with a link when using these videos) then it's not bad, but there will almost definitely be some leakage.

So, definitely do it for exposure, especially if you think it's the only way people will see your videos in the first place. Not the worst thing in the world if you're selling something or it's the type of content people blog about.

However, if you can host your own player (or something like Brightcove) and have a link back in the player then that's going to be better in terms of link acquisition.

If you've made an entirely new page with the same content and it's in the one location and you can change all your links to look there, then 301 the old page to the new page, don't just use rel=canonical.

If you've added a new category, so the old page was, for example, site/colour/product and you now allowed navigation like site/shape/product, then you may want to change the canonical tag if the 'shape' route into the page is the new "official" page.

http://duckduckgo.com/

Quite often get better results for what I'm searching for.

Did the very same thing a couple of times and went with the 301 option.

If you 404 them and remove them then you're relying on Google fully crawling your new structure in a timely and thorough fashion. It'll take time for them to process these new URLs and I'd imagine that even if the pages never had many or any links into them you don't want what authority they had to be lost entirely.

Users will scarcely notice as long as they get to a page with the info they want.

It took almost a month for all the URLs to be replaced in the SERPs but I think it was definitely the right way to go about it. Otherwise I think we would have taken an even bigger hit to the search traffic (and we already lost about 40% for those 3/4 weeks).

Wait, wait, wait!

First anchor text to the same page is the only one that counts. Two links to the same domain should get both to count unless I'm both reading that wrong and been linking wrong for years

I'd still put what I want to link for most first in the copy but I think the second will still count.

Disagree?

Technically no, Google will only crawl pages that are publically available.

However, you could use their first click free feature - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536 - depends how much you think you would gain from doing that or what sort of non-payment abuse it opens you up to.

2 sides to this, 1. Protecting brand and 2. Just want more results for a keyword.

With regards protecting brand, using other sites worked best for me.

Putting YouTube content on mydomain.tv, putting company info on a .info, creating my own affiliate sites with brand name in the URL. A few of these and you can control the first page for your brand quite easily.

Also with language Googles assigning a folder to a language in WMT and building links from those language sites into it seems to give me an easy 1-2 with /county/ first and plain dot com second.

For getting more results in on a specific keyword, yes pdfs or other media types (either youtube videos or host my own and make a video sitemap). If you can get into Google News (depends what kind of site you have) that's good. Plus getting a few Twitter accounts to tweet about the keyword can get you to show up.

Both ideas kind of overlap but I find the domains provides more stable control where as the other media varies wildy by search.

You got analytics on it? Can you see what the referral pages to it are?

Alternatively if you run Xenu - http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html - you should get a report with what pages link to the broken page.