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PR is related to your link profile rather than being a direct measurement of site quality (although better site quality makes it easier to get good links). It sounds as though you have either lost links or some of your links have reduced in value (either by linking domains losing links themselves or by their outgoing links being devalued because the domain has been identified as spammy). Try this for an explanation of Page Rank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
I've found some good relevant prospects using this type of search: intext:keyword or intext:"multiple word keyword"
If you don't want to see your own site in the search results use intext:keyword -inurl:mysite
Erm, what do you mean when you say they have no SEO? Open Site Explorer shows over 1400 linking domains and loads of social media likes and shares. A quick glance at their backlink list shows links from some very high profile sites. These factors will help them rank in organic search as well as attracting unpaid traffic through referrers - semrush.com shows most of their traffic coming from organic search and gives a list of the top keywords.
No, but I found this very helpful for getting started http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011
The ideal would be for you to talk with a developer who specialises in Magento who can go through your requirements and help you work out if it's the right platform for you. Send me a PM with your contact details and I'll get someone from our development team to give you a call - they've built Magento sites, they deal with them day-to-day and sometimes take on outside clients.
I hate osCommerce, and I think Magento is a far better e-commerce platform for SEO. Magento has it's faults, but it's a lot more flexible for on-page optimisation.
Mobile browsing and shopping is on the increase, so this will probably be worth doing at some point. It may be easier to judge if now is the time if you go into Analytics and see how many of your visitors are already using mobile devices and whether you are seeing growth in this area. If you haven't already read it, this post is worth a look http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-for-the-ipad
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.
Your URL format is much easier to read and remember than your competitor's, so I wouldn't change it if I were you. In your position I would
If you're feeling a bit confused I recommend you read through http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
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.
Answering this question "to be found in search engines" is not the right way to go with a client who is concerned about their bottom line. The answer they need to hear is "to make more money", so you need to answer in terms of financial benefits such as
SEO doesn't just improve SERP performance - it can also improve website usability and make a better impression on site visitors, thereby having a positive impact on conversions. When our original SEO specialist, who I had been assisting, left the company I had to make a solid financial case for continuing in that role myself. A trawl through Analytics provided an abundance of evidence of financial benefits on all the above points.
Quality content is great so long as people see it. Quality content will attract links effortlessly so long as people see it. People are more likely to see your great content if you rank well in the SERPs. SERP performance improves when you build links. Essentially, spending time link building will make it easier to attract organic links because more people will see your content in the first place.
When asking if link building is worthwhile try looking at the full keyword difficulty reports for any important keywords for which you are outranked, and do a point by point comparison between your site and your competitors for each keyword. If you find you are being outranked by sites whose main advantage over you is stronger link profiles that tells you it is worthwhile to build links.
I was looking at competitors to see why they were outperforming us in some areas. We convert mostly from returning visitors who have either searched for variations of our brand or searched for a specific brand or product we sell. We rank well for those terms, but also need traffic from some high-volume competitive generic terms to bring customers into our conversion funnel. Our sites don't yet rank highly enough for some of these funnel-entry terms due to weaknesses in external link networks. I don't have time to replicate the quantity of links some of our competitors have, so am looking to beat them on quality instead.
I gave this some thought when I looked at our competition for some of our most important keywords - I noticed many of them seemed to have a high ratio of deep backlinks to home page backlinks. Rather than trying to work out the perfect ratio I had a think about the contexts in which home page links and deep links are natural. For example, a home page link from a reputable directory would usually be more natural than a deep link. Conversely, an editorial link coming from a blog about a specific product or product type would look more natural as a deep link to the most relevant page.
Taking this train of thought to the next station, a backlink profile of all directory links would look unnatural, but then again so might nothing but editorial links from blogs. I suspect the optimum "natural" link profile varies according to the field of interest and the function of the website. For example, you might expect the link profile of a reputable retail site to include a lot of relevant directories, consumer review sites and blogs & forums which talk about the products the site sells.
I know you're looking for more of a numbers-based answer, but I think this is an area where it makes sense to stand back and ask what sort of links you should be seeing if the site is any good. Then make it a priority to get those types of links with due consideration for the metrics.
I think what's really important here for SEO is that you've got an on-site blog, and the blog is on a decent platform. And what's the alternative to your Wordpress blog - a Magento blog module?
I've been asking our technical team for ages to change the blogs on our Magento sites from a Magento blog module to a Wordpress platform (should be done in the next few weeks :D). I've found our current blog module such a pain to work with that I would cut off my arm and eat it before I would use it on any site of my own.
When you have to update a blog regularly you need a comfortable and flexible user interface, and Wordpress gives you this. When you need to present articles in a professional and attractive way on a commercial website, Wordpress makes this easy. When you need to make SEO tweaks like global changes to a tag name Wordpress makes this easy.
If you have good content and the blog is accessible you should be fine.
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.
We've had this on a move from osCommerce to Magento. We had a scary drop in rankings and traffic then everything gradually picked up again. I'd say we were back to normal within 2-3 weeks. We made the move at our quietest time of year - this was a good decision as the impact on cash flow was minimised and we had plenty of time to deal with any problems. We'll be going through it again in a few months for one of our other sites, but again we will make the change during our quietest period. Unless there is some urgent reason for them to make the change now I would advise them to hold off until a quieter time - this sort of project can throw up unexpected delays and technical issues, and you want to prevent consequential financial losses as far as possible.
I know that Google will index longer titles, so I suppose you could use extra characters to increase instances of keyword use. If there is little keyword use elsewhere on the page I can see this affecting rankings due to reaching a certain level of keyword use for the page overall. However, I've never heard of there being an advantage to placing your keywords anywhere other than the beginning. Ranking algorithms are well-kept secrets and subject to change, but the commercial interests of the search engines lie with striving to present the best responses to search queries. I think it likely that search engines will strive to present results based on what is visible to site visitors as this is the information which will fulfil visitor needs, and they will strive to avoid presenting pages which appear to use deceptive techniques. If the page text has adequate and appropriate keyword use you wouldn't need to play with extra long titles and descriptions. If the page text doesn't have adequate and appropriate keyword use then excessive length and keyword use in meta titles and descriptions could be interpreted as deceptive.