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Yes, it matters. It could mean that Google is detecting it that way too, and may view them as two different sites with duplicate content. This could be hurting your rankings. Do you have access to your .htaccess file? You should add this code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domainhere.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domainhere.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This will redirect the non-www version to the www version and tell the crawlers this is how you'd prefer your site to display.

I can answer the first part of your question at least. It is definitely best to have site.com/blog because blog.site.com and site.com are two different sites, and you'd have to do SEO for both. With site.com/blog, you can have pagerank flow right from your homepage to your blog. I don't know how to switch it in Blogger, though, sorry. Once you figure that out, if you do a 301 redirect, your past posts will keep their inbound links, but your social counters will be reset.

I have a few competitors outranking me using black hat SEO. I reported them to Google, and I'm just wondering if Google will even look at it. What has been your experience with this? Has anyone ever gotten results?

SEOmoz's blog had a good post about this today.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-passive-link-building-to-build-links-with-no-budget

I think I'm seeing the results of this in action! We just moved up to number 3 and outranked two of our competitors who we're putting backlinks all over blog networks. These competitors were previously outranking us. It's nice to actually see some payoff for doing things the right way. it's so rare!

I know this isn't exactly what you're saying, but you indirectly gave me a good idea. I could find a good image and hold a contest to have our customers come up with a caption.

It's much better than anything I came up with! I could actually use both on them, since one is from the standpoint of someone who needs them and one is from the opposite stand-point.That helps. Thanks!

It's something that will work great our our site. I'm looking for something for that and then something to spread all over the Internet, so I'm half way there!

About a week ago there was an awesome YouMoz post entitled How To Use Memes to Build EASY Backlinks & Traffic. I was so inspired by this post to come up with something awesome. I have been thinking long and hard about it ever since then, even browsing meme sites, and I'm coming up with NOTHING. Our company, stadriemblems.com designs and supplies custom embroidered patches for uniforms, events, and things of that nature.

I know that I know the niche the best, but I'm not good at funny. So maybe someone who's good at funny can come up with something without having to know all the ins and outs of the niche.

I'd so greatly appreciate some suggestions. I'll give everyone who tries a thumps-up, even if it's not good!

I know this isn't a developer forum but I figure someone will know the answer to this.

My site is http://www.stadriemblems.com and I have a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file to redirect all non-www to www and it works great. But SEOmoz seems to think this doesn't apply to my blog, which is located at http://www.stadriemblems.com/blog

It doesn't seem to make sense that I'd need to place code in every .htaccess file of every sub-folder. If I do, what code can I use?

The weirdest part about this is that the redirecting works just fine; it's just SEOmoz's crawler that doesn't seem to be with the program here. Does this happen to you?

Good! That's what all my competitors are doing to outrank me, and what I refuse to do! And I think I can see some evidence of this, because I was an idiot and used a link-building company for one of my sites and I found that's how they got most of the links, and interestingly enough, that site's rankings have gone down.

I tried many of them. A lot were no longer in existence, changed to nofollow, or made no sense how you could get a link--ie, Huffington Post. I think it needs some updating, but overall it is a good tool.

I just thought of something else. This is slightly less critical but try to keep the file size of your page under 1mb. Some say 50kb but I think that's a little extreme in the age of broadband. The site I market is 1.1mb and loads in only 1.18 seconds. But do try to stay under 1mb because of mobile phones which are slower. (Unless you have a mobile version of your site, like I do)

Also, make sure all of your code validates. http://validator.w3.org/

Well, a couple more simple things you can implement are:

Make sure your target keywords appear on the page a few times, but don't overdo it! I cannot stress that enough. Only use them as much as what would sound natural to a human reading it.

Give your page at least a couple of paragraphs of quality, helpful content. My personal minimum I strive for is 300-400 words--that is just what has worked for me.

Make sure all images have relevant alt tags (your web person will know what that means; If not, you have a bigger issue than being new to SEO)

Don't put too many links on the page. i.e. If you have 200 products, don't link to every single one of them from the homepage; break them into categories and sub -pages.

Use a free service like http://pingdom.com/ to check the load time of your homepage. It will offer suggestions for improvement.

Set up 301 redirects to avoid duplicate content penalties. http://www.ragepank.com/articles/3/preventing-duplicate-content/
(OK, that one's not as easy)

Submit a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools

I hope you succeed in your endeavors!

Your title tag is the most important out of all the things you listed. Make sure it includes you top keyword you're trying to rank for, but don't stuff any more than two keywords or phrases in there. And don't exceed 70 characters. If you find you have a lot of extra room, include your brand name.

If you're linking to internal pages from your homepage, use anchor text you want those pages to rank for--as long as it makes sense to your customers.

Meta description doesn't have much, if any, SEO value. It is what potential customers will see in the search engine results; a good description will increase your click through rate. It's been theorized that Google tracks click through rate and bounce rate and uses this information to determine relevancy of sites to tweak ranking, thus you could say the meta description indirectly affects your ranking--for better or for worse.

As far as your boss not recognizing the value of SEO, just tell him: what good will it do to build the best site the world as ever seen if no one ever sees it?

Oh! A few times per year! I didn't know that. I figured it was once a month or maybe once every other month. So would the same be true of a site like this? http://www.prchecker.info/

Is there no way to check the real PR?

Many months ago, a fellow marketer at my company introduced me to Pintrest, claiming that it would be good for our business. Pintrest was very much unknown by many just a few short months ago. Since then, I have seen it take off like wildfire, with excessive media coverage, registrations, and people putting the button on their sites. It must have thousands more backlinks now than it did six months ago--high quality ones too, as it's had coverage in virtually every major new media outlet.

I want your opinion as to why it has remained a PR6 site this entire time. It was a PR6 site then and it still is now. I know the increase in PR is algorithmic, but come on! Can people share their experiences they've had link building for those higher PR sites? How much harder does it get?

I was using an XML sitemap, but it got all screwed up somehow, and I just deleted it and haven't been using one since. This was about a month ago.

I'll try that website, though. Thanks.

But in Google Webmaster Tools, where you can submit a txt sitemap, I'm just going to assume to leave the blog posts out of it.

This seems like it should be an obvious no, just because of the amount of work that would entail, and then remembering to do it every time I make a post, but since I couldn't find anything on Google about it and have never heard anyone mention it, I figured I'd ask.

I'd say I'm inclined to agree with you guys. I'd just ignore it but now my concern is what if he syndicates my content without my permission? I guess he probably won't since he wants me to place some module on my site.