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When I comment on blogs I try to contribute to the conversation and look at it as an opportunity to make contact with potential customers as well as expanding our link profile. I would feel really uncomfortable entering anything other than a name - depending on circumstances either the brand name or a personal id - in the name field as I think this would be repellent to the people I want to connect with.

In terms of link acquisition, blog comments are a low effort, low value option. I don't see why people would expect using exact match anchor text to give a huge boost to the value of the link - of course the search engines are aware that user generated content is a magnet for spammers and I'm sure they have ways of discounting those links.

I think the best approach to blog commenting is contribute to a community and form real relationships. That way you have the immediate benefits of engaging with your market, with the added bonus that people who trust you and value your contribution are more likely to link to you. I've spent too much time deleting comment spam on our blogs to think much of anyone using that tactic - it's a good way to guarantee I won't check your site out!

The easiest way I can think of is to go into the rankings section in a campaign for which you have already added all the keywords then export the rankings report as a CSV. Once you open the CSV in Excel or similar you can copy the keywords column and paste them in bulk into the "manage keywords" section for your new campaign.

Sadly the total keyword limit is 300 for the Pro account - it is restrictive, but on the other hand you can look at it as an opportunity to prioritise your keywords and make sure you are monitoring the most important ones.

I'm concerned about this issue. I use this data not just when doing keyword research and deciding on strategy but also to measure the effectiveness of my work. I work not just to improve SERP performance but to improve site performance by better serving visitor needs, and to do that effectively I need to know what brought them to us.

I think it would be fair enough to give people the option to protect their search results when they are signed in to a Google account, but also think people should have the option to allow their search data to be available to the sites they visit without having to sign out of their account to do so. It's not an immediate problem for us as we are based in the UK, but I expect it to hit us in due course as Google roll this out to other areas.

I find it hard to believe that the loss of data will be as low as Google are saying. And the explanation they have given for continuing to provide that data to paid advertisers sounds like b*$^#@%£ to me.

There are different viewpoints on outbound links. Reliance on link exchange is outdated, and Google is known to frown on anything resembling a link farm. However, I have seen people cite Matt Cutts (sorry, don't have any links to back this up) as saying it is beneficial to have some outbound links to reputable sites.

To be honest I recommend you focus on site performance rather than PR - are you ranking/getting traffic/converting? PR may slightly increase the likelihood of you ranking but it doesn't guarantee it and it doesn't put money in the bank. I recommend this Whiteboard Friday from August to help you put PR into perspective http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-googles-pagerank-good-for-whiteboard-friday

I think you just have to try to get a feel for what is more or less natural then take a common sense approach. For example

• A link which you don't control looks more natural than a link you do control (such as a directory with a non-refundable review charge vs a directory which charges for inclusion)
• An editorial link from a blog which links to many sites looks more natural than an editorial link from a blog that only links to your site
• A moderate selection of comment links on relevant blogs looks more natural than a huge amount of comment links on random blogs
• A moderate selection of links from quality directories looks more natural than a huge amount of links from spammier directories
• A link from a relevant site looks more natural than a link from an irrelevant site
• A link given in an editorial context looks more natural than a link originating from a links page
• A link from a relevant professional organisation looks more natural than a link from a random club
• A link profile with a broad mixture of link types looks more natural than one heavily skewed towards one link type

I'm fairly new to the SEO industry so I can't give you an authoritative answer, but I can share some of my experience which seems relevant to your situation.

We have multiple retail websites with varying degrees of overlap of products on sale. One of our oldest domains specialises in fireplaces, but a couple of years ago we set up a general home products site which has a fireplace section featuring the same products as the specialist fireplace site. We wrote unique descriptions for all the fireplaces on new site.

When the time came to re-build the specialist fireplace site we ended up using the same Magento back-end as for our more general site. For the last 18 months both sites have been showing the same content for fireplaces, but with some differences in the content hierarchy. Currently the general site has a slightly higher domain authority and more external links, while the fireplaces site has links from a slightly higher number of domains.

The fireplace site took a nosedive in rankings for a couple of weeks after the re-launch, then not only recovered but gradually achieved higher rankings than before. The general home product site has never ranked as successfully for fireplace keywords, even though it was the originator of the content.

The difference in domain age may have a little to do with the difference in rankings, but other factors are pretty equal. From our experience it seems that where two related sites are sharing content Google prefers to show content from the site most relevant to the search rather than the site which originated the content.

I found this really helpful for getting started with link building http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011

For judging site quality I find it helpful to look at domain level metrics such as mozRank, mozTrust and domain authority, and I also use Alexa to check traffic levels. I also physically look at sites to see if they seem professional/trustworthy/usable.

The change in platform required a lot of redirects, partly because we took the opportunity to improve our catalogue structure. We had a couple of good programmers in-house at the time, and they set up a script to do the redirects on all the important pages as well as a catch-all redirect which caught anything which hadn't been specified and redirected it to the new home page. Excuse me if I'm a bit vague about this - I came into SEO dealing with on-page issues and have expanded my skill set into other areas, but I don't play with the code myself! Getting the redirects right is critical to make sure the re-built site can be indexed quickly and that users don't encounter lots of error pages. I know they also did a lot of work on the new new site in a testing environment so they could find and fix as many problems as possible before launch.

As I write blogs for my company I am often in the position of having to come up with ideas on subjects which I don't have a huge interest in. I found it helped to come up with a list of types of post to use, then go further and work out paragraph by paragraph what should be in each type of blog. One of the blogs I manage is about wood burning stoves, so some of the types of post I do are:

• Woodburners which have been featured in the interiors magazines
• Comments on news stories relevant to the stove industry
• Posts built around questions I was asked repeatedly by customers before I moved from sales to SEO
• Buyers guides

Taking it a step further, I can break each of these down paragraph by paragraph so I have a template to follow. For example if I write about a stove I saw in a magazine I follow this format

• Introduction - includes magazine name, issue and page number for the article with the stove; a little bit about the homeowners; either identifies the exact model featured or says I will be talking about similar stoves to the one featured
• Main body - I give my opinion on the way the stove was used in that setting and/or talk about relevant practical issues
• Conclusion - further resources or suggestions for readers thinking about doing something similar

In your position I would look at the other office interior blogs as an ongoing discussion and work out what you can bring to the party. What knowledge or experience do you have which could be of value to a reader? How can you present your views so they get people's attention and invite participation?

There's a big difference between publishing your own picture of a great interior and re-using someone else's without consent , but there are some open source image sites out there which just require credit when you use their pictures. If it's practical you could contact designers and companies with great interiors asking about writing about them or if you can visit to take your own pictures. Once your blog has been going for a while you could even approach other blogs about doing some guest writing for them.

We have different websites for our different brands. It's a lot more work, but gives each brand its own separate internet presence. From a search viewpoint each website can be tailored to different groups of customers, and links between our sites are well travelled with good conversion rates.

While it is a lot more hassle to run multiple websites, remember that trying to address multiple markets from one domain presents its own set of challenges. You have to think about the impression you make on both suppliers and customers (are you a kitchen specialist, or a furniture retailer dabbling in kitchens?), as well as whether your brand is easy for customers to remember.

People expect different levels of retailer expertise for different products, and I think your customers would need more help with kitchens than with furniture. While you could demonstrate your kitchen expertise in a sub-folder of a single domain through great content, a separate domain more specific to the kitchen market would send a powerful message that you are a kitchen specialist (thereby implying that you are a kitchen expert before they even click your link).

I think the answer is to do what's best for the brand. It seems to me that you have a great name already with Love Furniture, and developing a separate Love Kitchens brand could work very well.

Just for the record, my personal preference is for single domains where possible.

For detailed information about how to create this kind of content you are probably better off looking for answers on the various blogging support sites and developing relationships with bloggers who work in this field. SEOMoz users are helpful, but there may not be many of them who blog about office interior design!