Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Domain.com/blog is generally preferred, but if you can't do that then a subdomain should be fine.

Hard to say without looking at the actual page, but it looks like http://www.domainname.com/category/thiscategory/page/2/ is probably a paginated category page (when you're in a category, and looking through older posts). There is probably a relative link somewhere on the page ( vs ), that is causing the link to be malformed. So take a look at the category template, and replace any relative paths on those pages.

Yes, try to reduce the number of links you have on all your pages while maintaining a good user experience. Contextual navigation is a great way to achieve this. For example, if someone is exploring the "Energy" section of your site, then they probably don't need 50 links about "Funeral Planning".

Try to keep the links in the nav relevant to the section of the site they are on, while providing access to the top level categories if the user wants to visit a different section. This will reduce the number of links on the page, and also improve the keyword relevance of each of the individual categories.

Yes this is a solid strategy.

Optimize your titles and descriptions for keywords that have good position & low CTR. You can also try adding Google authorship (if it's a content page) and semantic markup for reviews (for product pages) to get rich snippets displaying in the SERPs.

Targeting keywords that are ranking in the 5-15 range is also a good idea. Organize those by search volume, and do some onpage optimization. A few tweaks could boost their rankings and give you more traffic for a little bit of work.

That probably means they just have less html code, since it's a ratio (text/code).

Text to code ratio has no impact on SEO, and I'm surprised some SEOs still obsess over it. If you have an incredibly code heavy page, Google may have trouble crawling it, but that's more about the sheer amount of code vs any kind of ratio.

That being said, you should try to keep your html code to a minimum, as excess code will increase the file size of your page, leading to a longer load time which is a poor user experience and can have a negative impact on rankings.

Yes, what you have is the proper format. The best way to submit sitemaps, of course, is to submit them via Google & Bing Webmaster Tools.

Sitemaps won't have much impact on your site unless you have a really large site, so I wouldn't focus on them too much. The best way to get content crawled & indexed by Google is good internal link structure and authoritative external links.

I gotta say whatever company you were engaging with must have sucked, because you could get anything to rank back in 2000.

I've worked with a number of smallish businesses, and the SEO landscape has gotten tough in recent years, unless you're targeting local. Your competition is every other website in the world that sells the same thing that you do.

It's really difficult to rank a website with thousands and thousands of products without a very high domain authority. So you need to focus. Identify the keywords with the highest SEO potential for you. Here is a quick formula: go into Google Webmaster Tools, and identify all the keywords you rank between position 5-15 for, then sort those by search volume and/or your margin. Then evaluate the competitiveness for those keywords by looking at the sites that rank above you. Focus on the keywords that have the weakest competition, and you should see the greatest amount of return for the least amount of effort.

Product reviews are huge for ecommerce. It provides user generated unique content that helps you stand out from competitors selling the same product, and you can add semantic markup so that you get rich snippets showing in the search results (review stars), which increase CTR. Incentivise reviews by offering coupons to your customers for leaving reviews.

In the long term, think about what you can be the best in the world at, because that is what it will take to stand out in today's competitive landscape. That might be prices, that might be content, that might be customer service. Focus on that and start building a brand. It can take a long time to see results with SEO, so you may want to focus on other lead gen methods until you can build up your business and can afford to spend more time/resources on SEO.

Adding fb:admins will allow you to see Facebook Insights for your domain, which shows you things like how many times your site has been liked & shared on Facebook. The fb:admins tag also serves other functions like allowing the admins to moderate comments (if you're using Facebook comments) and automatically creating pages in Facebook when the admin likes a specific page. So the tag does a lot of things.

You can only use user IDs for the fb:admins markup, not page IDs.

Very hard to say without more details. Does your site have unique, high quality content? If it's just duplicate content, Google may crawl it but won't necessarily show it in the SERPs.

Also, what does your backlink profile look like? Google allocates crawl budget based on your PageRank, so if Google isn't crawling all your pages, then you will want to acquire more external backlinks.

Being a reseller on the web is tough. You're basically competing against Amazon.com and every other reseller out there that sells the same thing.

Definitely write unique product and service descriptions for everything if you can afford it, otherwise Google will just filter you out of the search results and display your more established competitors ahead of you. If you don't have time or resources to re-write everything, then focus on the top 10% of products in terms of traffic & profitability, then expand from there (Rand recently did a good whiteboard Friday on the subject).

Try to add value beyond what the manufacturer provides on their website. Getting user reviews is a great way to have user generated unique content that's useful to users. Incentivise reviews by giving out coupons. Create filters and comparisons and other features that differentiate your shopping experience. Think about what you can be the best in the world at, because that's what it will take to compete on a global scale.

Do your target queries have a lot of Local search results, or are they more general queries?

For general queries, it is definitely possible to rank in multiple countries. You just need to build an incredibly authoritative site with lots of links. Google tends to give preference to local sites, so your site needs to be better than the other available options. Also, use .com or other general TLD instead of a country specific one.

If you're trying to get into Local results, that's pretty much impossible to do unless you have locations or addresses in each of the specific countries. It would also be easier to have country specific websites (in each of the countries native languages) rather than having one massive website that ranks for every country.

The first mention of a link on a page is the most important in the sense that Google looks at the anchor text of the first link, so you want to make the first mention contain relevant anchor text instead of something generic.

That's not to say subsequent mentions of a link are useless. Every link on a page still gets PageRank distributed to it, so the more times you mention a link on the page, the more link value it's going to receive. Also, from a user perspective it can be helpful to have the same link repeated throughout the page in the body and footer, even if it's already in the top nav.

You may find this case study helpful of a blog that decided to exactly that:

http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/

I would guess because it is on the .ca TLD. Google's international search engines favor sites that are on country specific TLDs. Also, the domain is a partial exact match, which still gives sites a small boost when it comes to ranking.

The interactive Flash site may also have positive user metrics (time on site, # of pages visited) which could also help boost its rankings.

Google treats the 3 main TLDs (.com, .org, .net) equally in terms of rankings. As long as you are using any of those, you should be fine (gTLDs like .co.uk can impact your search results, as well as spammy TLDs like .info).

You should not use redirects to switch from a .com domain to .org as 301 redirects result in a small PageRank loss.

Having many links on a page will not reduce the PageRank of the page that it's on.

However, it will reduce the amount of PageRank being passed to the individual links on the page, so you should try to keep the number as low as you can while maintaining a good user experience. A general rule of thumb is to keep the number of links to 100 or less, although many ecommerce sites have many more (the typical Amazon.com page has 400+ links).

Linking to high-quality, relevant external sites is believed to improve the relevancy of your own page. These should not be nofollowed. In general, it should not be necessary to use nofollow for external links unless you are linking to a direct competitor (but then, why would you be linking to them?) or in the case of UGC where people may leave links to low quality sites.

In general, just use your common sense and link to any relevant internal or external pages that you think will enhance the value of your content. Don't use nofollow. It's good to use target="_blank" to have external links open in a new window.

Most of it reads fine to me, but the line "working together to provide San Francisco video production services that are truly inspired. "video production services in San Francisco" would be more natural. Google is getting smarter at understanding the meaning of content, so it's not necessary to constantly repeat your keywords over and over again in an unnatural way in your content.

As a design suggestion, I would recommend adding your contact info as well as your social media icons to the footer as well as the header. Unless people immediately know they want to contact you or follow you, they are going to consume your content first, then look for contact info. It's easier for them if that's conveniently in the footer rather than them having to scroll all the way back up to the top of the page.

First of all, let me just say Moz is great and offers many features that the companies you mentioned don't provide, and at its low price point is a great complementary tool to have

I have used both BrightEdge and Conductor, and both are overpriced for what they provide, IMO. If you're a big brand they might make sense, but for a smaller company I would not recommend them.

One service I would recommend is LinkDex. They offer a lot of features in terms of rank tracking and competitor analysis, as well as tools aimed at identifying authors and influencers in your niche that are great for content marketing and outreach:

http://www.linkdex.com/

BJS1976 makes some good suggestions.

Another option is to create a category type page that lists all the product variations on it, then canonical each of the individual products to the category page. That way, you still have multiple product pages, but as far as Google is concerned you only have 1 page with the content on it.

The Author schema does not do anything in any search engine yet, as far as I know.

In order to take advantage of Google Authorship, you need a Google+ profile. Google+ is Google's identity platform that they are using identify individual authors. Without Google+, your image will not show up in the SERPs. Without Google+, your friends will not see your contact appearing higher in the SERPs. Without Google+, you will not be able to take advantage of any changes that Google makes to their algo with regards to Author Rank.

In short, no you cannot benefit from Google Authorship without a Google+ profile

Bing is also experimenting with a type of authorship which combines Facebook profiles and Klout scores, but again this has nothing to do with the schema.org markup.