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We do use optimizely, which I believe is pretty similar to Google Optimizer. Both are JS based but from what I understand optimizely is a bit simpler to work on.  Thanks for the input!

Hey Mozzers!

We have come up with a new layout design for a category page and would love to have your opinion on it, specifically from an S_E_O perspective

• Here is our current page: http://www.builddirect.com/Laminate-Flooring.aspx

• Our new page (pending approval):  http://www.builddirect.com/testing/laminate-flooring/index.html

Just to brief you in on the key differences b/w old and new layout:

Left text link menu is removed in new layout
New layout looks funny with JS disabled - long vertical line up of products(Perhaps important keywords/ content in new layout appears way down?)
Lot of 'clunk' has been removed (bits of text, links, images, etc)

Thanks for checking this out.

May be I am not seeing properly but where is your sitemap?

Also, do you add fresh content deeper pages frequently? These intelligent little bots crawl a good deal initially but they tend to 'learn' the frequency of your content updates and update their re-visit schedule accordingly. As busy as these little ones are, you have to feed them something worth devouring and do it so frequently, so their frequent visits to your site is worth their time.  If they keep visiting your site and don't find nothing new..they have just spent all their energies for nothing and hence they become lazy for future visits, and this could explain delay to deeper pages. Just my thought... there could be something to else to it too.

Go to online marketing conferences and do the hunting there - Pubcon, SMX, etc. If not all, a lot of the healthy deer go there for fresh water, and hunting becomes really easy.

You will find lot of talent there no doubt; it's just being able to persuade them where its a bit tricky

For informational and educational websites like wikihow.com - links come naturally and easily as compared to other biz/ecom websites.

Wikihow has over 1,800 backlinks from Educational / university sites, and over 200 links from Government sites and that speaks a lot about their content. This is not to say that they can skip link building strategies, but it is just a lot easier to get links for such websites.

Mashable links to them: http://mashable.com/2009/02/18/how-to-guide/ , and so does Google: http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/

In short, the quantity and the quality of their content does the link building for them to a major extent.

Title change and textual content/ description change (target keyword change) happens with many websites naturally and there is nothing suspicious about it.

The only challenge here is to convince SE's the homepage is about the new phrase, not the phrase you have been working on, and that involves throwing lot of signals (social, content, links, etc) that would resonate this change. The signals for new phrases probably would need to overtake the old phrase ones to be effective - but this doesn't have to be if the competition is not very high.

I imagine it has something to do with IIS compatiblity issue with Wordpress/ PHP. Your host might have to spend $10k or so to get the latest IIS to make it compatible with PHP and that's my best guess as to why they won't do it.

Here is a link for the IIS compatbility with PHP, it helps: http://php.iis.net/
My recommendation for an easy to use simple shopping cart is OpenCart. I find it much simpler than Magento and has a host of features that most webmasters would be content with. The script is free but if you want more advanced options/ features, you can get those 'extensions' for $5-99. The script is easy to work on and customize.

Are you rereferring to search engine's ability "count links" or "view clicks"? 
The title says the former and the message is about the latter, hence my confusion

If you are talking about clicks - let's not forget that they have access to a LOT more data from other sources like Chrome, Android, etc. There is no sure way to know (as of now) if they are using that data though.

If you are referring to "view links", then yes they can as their cute little crawlers can sneak in and read website pages whether the site has Analytics installed or not

Adding Nofollow couple of years ago could have saved your SEO juice and passed on to other dofollow pages, but as of now, that nofollow goes into a blackhole so it hardly matters much.

However, if the site your linking to a shady site or a site that is in a shady neighbourhood, you definitely want to use nofollow for that - otherwise you could be part of that shady neighbourhood yourself. In my opinion, a lot of these sites that exchange links leave lot of messy traces behind and do not have a clean profile. If I were you, I would most likely put a nofollow or even more likely, I'd putting my efforts in different strategies like guest blogging.

Yes it could impact display and also the text ad traffic.

Display because your publishers might go up or down in traffic and you might notice a difference if that movement is big enough.

Text PPC traffic could be affected because they made some changes to Local results as well, however it completely depends on your niche, your geo target market and if your organic competition includes local listings at all.

I like it. Looks clean and professional from a users perspective. It does need more 'social proof' with higher FB fans, etc to appear more popular thus convert better.

Personally though, I would just display just the fan count and not that bigger widget you have on the homepage. It takes too long to load and perhaps there are other stuff (testimonials?) that you could display that better helps the conversions.

Also, do you really need +1 buttons on product pages? I think product page is too important to have flashy colorful social buttons that could distract the potential buyer in this critical stage - of course, social buttons at this point are suitable if your product is super-social in nature (Funny Tees, etc). Besides, how much % of your users do you think would use Google+ as of today? I am pretty sure it will be far from significant.

From a SEO standpoint ~ I like the simple/ neat URL structure and the title and meta tags seem be well optimized. It's not too long or too short and seem to be covering the key phrases. I'd suggest using more textual content on the pages though just to reaffirm to bots what the pages are about.

The feeds definitely have impact on SEO as its the main data that helps them organize and list your product on their engine. Make sure the title & description has the important keywords (short + long tail ones). Don't do keyword stuffing though as it could just be discounted. Google doesn't crawl your website to pull the data, so you need update the feeds as frequently as possible - making sure the price and other details are up to date.

Another factor that affect rankings: Reviews (Google checkout reviews & 3rd party reviews). As I keep saying, reviews are the backlinks when it comes to Google Shopping.

Brand strength is an increasingly important factor, and if you put your content in different sub-domains you will be just spreading thin on your brand strength/ domain authority. If its good quality content you expect, my suggestion to have it on the root domain - perhaps, on a sub folder - as opposed to a sub-domain.

Yes it does help but its worth noting that Google is giving less and less weight to the age of the domain, just like they are doing to keyword domains as well, since they realize its something that can be gamed rather easily.

Do guest posting - it's free content for others and nice backlink for you.

Connect with people in your industry on Twitter; once they know you, it's very easy to get links from them

Give it at least another month imo.

2 other suggestions: There is nothing wrong with quality blog comments and you can continue with it as long as yoru nofollow:dofollow ratio is reasonable.  Also, it is only good when your name doesn't become all keywordy.

Another thing ~ don't overdo the Press Release especially if you are not a high authority site. Once a month is more than enough.

Why do you want to use lazy load for text? Text loads super fast and is also critical for SEO. 
I haven't tested this out myself (its under consideration) but if I were you I'd never LL the text - would only do it for the slow loading not-so-SEO important aspects of the page like Facebook widgets, images, etc

It depends on the kind of content you are going to have there. As you mentioned, if you expect good quality inks and a lot juice there, I'd suggest doing it on a sub-directory.

However, if you are going to be creating many pages that could be considered 'thin' (little/no content pages, no backlinks at all, no images, etc), I'd say go with the sub-domain so as to have a buffer of its possible repercussions on the main website.

I believe you are referring to Lazy Load? I'd love to get some opinions on this as well