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Good meta titles and descriptions can help your CTR - they should sell the idea that the site is worth a visit. As far as I'm concerned I want a good ranking, but once I've achieved visibility I want the click. For that reason I write meta titles and descriptions to get the click:

• within limits of what Google will display
• prominent use of main keyword
• written to make sense to a human reader
• mentioning of other important selling points relevant to conversion - as I work on retail sites this is things like free delivery and phone ordering facilities

As far as on-page work is concerned there are plenty of other ways I can support ability to rank, but no other simple on-page measure has quite the same potential to affect click-through for the sites I work on.

It all depends on whether you like your blog being littered with comment spam. I prefer to moderate comments, and I think this is okay so long as you respond to them quickly. You may end up with fewer comments, but at least they are genuine. Blogs are often set up to automatically nofollow links in comments, but I would make sure of this before opting out of moderation.

If you have a very active, high profile blog then I think moderating comments really could impede participation. You would have to make a judgement call on how much of an issue that could be to you. I've seen advice that you shouldn't allow comments at all until you've got 1000+ views a day, based on the idea that sparsity of comments is a clear indicator that your blog is obscure. Again it's a judgement call.

I haven't tried the Facebook plugin so can't comment on that.

I have a mixture of on-site and off-site blogs, which were all set up in the last 9 months. Time and time again I've seen upward SERP movement for keywords recently targeted in on-site blog posts, but I haven't seen comparable shifts for sites which just have an off-site blog.

It really annoys me when off-site blogs attract organic links which I would prefer went to an on-site blog. That said, I can't quantify whether it is more appealing to link to a blog which refers traffic to an eCommerce site rather than to a blog on an eCommerce site - I think it would influence the choice to give a link in some cases, but I can't prove it.

We may find over time that the off-site blogs attract enough links to pass decent link juice. We do know from customer feedback that some people are buying from us rather than competitors specifically because they found the blogs helpful, even when the blogs were off-site only.

Although I lean towards predominantly using on-site blogs, I think there is a place in a marketing campaign for having a presence in other places whether through external blogs or careful article placement.

I would also look at what traffic the other site gets - I like to get links which have a real chance of referring relevant traffic. The websites I work on exist to sell products, so I want links that can attract customers directly as well as indirectly through helping our rankings.

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!

It's annoying when this happens. My first step is to make sure the target page is optimised well and that internal links are signalling that it is the most relevant page to the keyword. Next I reinforce this with blogs linking to the target page and social media signals. If the keyword is on my priority list I will spend additional time on link building to the target page as well. If I've done enough the target page pops up in the SERPs within a few weeks. If it doesn't work I go back to square one and see what more I can do.

Interior designers need to publicise their work to keep getting work. Try making a list of designers then checking their websites & following them on Twitter/Facebook to see what they are/have been working on. You should be able to get names of designers from features in design magazines, reputable directories and professional interior design organisations.

Well written content introduces the main topic within the first few sentences, so should contain the most important keywords anyway. Emboldening those sentences will add a little weighting to their content so this should help your SEO rather than hinder it.

Have a look at http://tweet.grader.com/ - once they have graded your Twitter account they have a button for tweeting the result

The term extractor tool is very useful, and I use semrush.com if I want to check what a competitor ranks highest for.

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.

You might find it helpful to use social media when you move the content. Apparently Google can't reliably identify content origins and takes into account social signals and links - some time spent on social bookmarking and posting links to site b on Twitter, Facebook, etc could help shift Google's attention to where you want it to go.

I would be concerned if the home page didn't appear, but I'm not sure whether it matters that it is getting outranked by blog pages. We have eCommerce sites and added blogs to a couple of them around February. Most of the time the blogs seem to support the rankings of the pages they are written to funnel traffic towards, but sometimes they will outrank them. Google seems to love the fresh content, but when blogs outrank other more relevant pages I find there is usually an issue with on-page optimisation.

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.