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Hey Stephen, It depends how your host treats the folders (or URLs) under the main domain when an alias is put in place. If your host has a system that's smart enough to switch out your old domain for your new domain domain (i.e. all variations of olddomain.com/category/product-5 redirect cleanly to newdomain.com/category/product-5) then you should be in good shape. My experience with generic hosting companies been that this often isn't the case. Since you're running an ecomm site and problems translate directly to lost revenue, I'd suggest registering two dummy domains, setting up a test site, and then testing how your host's alias system actually works. Even if that takes 5-10 hours of work, it's probably worth it. I like the following tools for testing redirects and site crawls: https://htaccess.madewithlove.be/ for testing htaccess rules individually. https://www.telerik.com/fiddler for understanding how redirects are working. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html for crawling an entire site to check for errors. Hope this helps!

Thank you--   That's looks like a great resource- still working on this and appreciate your input Stephen

Thanks Adam!

Hi there, You’re fine to have your product description quoting the text around the side of the product, but if you were to change it to something like this without quotes: The words around the edge of the lazy susan read: Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest. …that would have the exact same SEO value as the existing description. Quotes are only counted as exact match keywords when searching in Google (and most other search engines), but don’t actually affect the way the page is seen by Google. The same way that using bold and italics to emphasise your keywords would not directly influence rank (but make your content more easily digestible, earning it more links and indirectly affecting rank), your quotes are also used to enhance human readability – but either would be fine. Take a real world example: I pulled a page from my history which included a quote, “favor composition over inheritance” - (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/65179/where-does-this-concept-of-favor-composition-over-inheritance-come-from) Take a look at the screenshot I took below (from an unclean browser, sorry) – or you can run a search yourself – and we still see Wikipedia at the top, with its DA 100 (and no quotes); we see stackoverflow rising above stackexchange, with a higher DA; one result has more links than the stackexchange page, one has fewer. But they still perform better. The stackexchange page with 5 counts of “favor composition over inheritance" (with quotes) is still outranked by the others. The 3^rd result uses the keyword 6 times, twice in quotes. The 2^nd result uses the keyword once without quotes. The 1^st Wikipedia result uses the term once without quotes and still ranks #1 due to its other (better) metrics. There are a number of factors which could affect the position of these pages for this keyword, such as anchor text for links to those pages, partial match keywords in the text and other ranking factors which I did not look into – but hopefully it will give you a real example of quotation marks not directly affecting the value of a keyword in Google’s eyes. Write the descriptions the way you that sounds best to you – and optimise them for human readability, as quotes versus no quotes doesn’t make much of a difference. Hope that helps, Tom QfVCYKH.png

Hi Stephen, That's part of the syntax used to transfer a site URL-by-URL - what the entire snippet of code means is that a browser or search engine will come across www.oldblog.com/post123.html and immediately be taken to blog.newdomaincom/post123.html. If you are not using the same URLs on the new blog, you won't need to or be able to use this particular function in your .htaccess file. You say that "the new blog has a different wordpress theme & categories than the old blog" which makes me think you'll need to redirect category URLs separately at least (I must have missed that line when I read the question at first; apologies). Once you've redirected everything, you will need to keep the old domain. If you let it lapse or sell it, the redirects will no longer work unfortunately.

The key word is a xyz design measuring spoon.  The only difference is how they are displayed or attached to each other.  Actually, your opinion about the keywords made me see I could improve my keyword phrase "xyz design measuring spoon ."  I'll go with that and the 1 page. Thank you JDP

Thank you Doug- This site sells work by 100s of artisans under a url  like smalltownartisans.com.  The "/brandname" is one of our better know artisans with  a wide range of products. So it is not repeated in the url Do you think the "smalltownartisans.com". brand should be included in the page titles along with the artisan-brandname? And could you expand on the simple ways to ttest what works best? Thanks again for all you your comments Handcrafter

Sure, have a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo Using reverse proxy, there are no technical/security concerns.

I think you have to be careful when leaving out "Stop Words" because there is not a definitive list of what is a stop word.  There are occasions in phrase search where it doesn't make sense for the search engines to leave out what seems like a stop word.  For instance "The Who" (rock band).  If you do a Google search for "and" you get results that refer to businesses and entities with "and" in the title.  I would stick with "and".

Thanks Ben, I'll try that and see if I get any effect on the next crawl. Handcrafter

Definitely have it go to your own site. Having spent 10 years in the newspaper industry (IT/Web) I'd be shocked if they know SEO.

I would attempt to focus on the artist and display a couple of his/her pieces on the landing page. So, for each artist, your ad would be around something specific in the medium used or possibly genre of art, the landing page would potentially be a couple of specific pieces and a short bio w a call to action, etc.  Your question will be: What was the searcher's query? Artists in city X? 3D art by Y, etc. This I think is important for a PPC in such a low volume search area. (I have been collecting for years and my wife does contemporary abstract in oil and acrylics). With art, you might really explore destination advertising on the web as well. You will be the one who can decide which is best/cost effective for you. Now, if your store were more of a furniture/art/design type store, then I would have to look at what drives people there and maybe look at what someone like restoration hardware or their new model does. Best

I don't know how famous your jewelers are.. but if they are not generating a lot of search volume, I would be optimizing product pages for the "uncommon techniques and materials" that you say they are using.  For example "moldovite pendants". For your question on where to place the article content, I would place it on a page of its own and optimize for terms like "what is moldovite"... "how to facet moldovite"....

I use google analytics- Is there something special I should set up to track this?  Or is it something to do with filtering? Or any ideas on where to learn to set it up to track conversions and traffic for this 1 group of terms would be a great help. Thank you for your comments EGOL Handcrafter

Think of URLs are formed in the following pattern: AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD When you see you URL as 100.200.222.050 then your C block is "222". Each domain company usually is assigned 1 C block for all their servers. So yes, you would need to use a different company for your second site.

Thank you for the reminder about http://getlisted.org/  . What a great resource it is.

I don't know if your CMS allows this (which I doubt and why I don't like most of them), but if you can inject your own code into the header, you can test the product page against the database, and if false, do a header redirect to the brand page while including a 301. The question I have is, from what is your Title tag generated? It sounds like the linking text, which is odd. I would think if anything it is either pulled from a database or from a URL parameter.