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What's the anchor text of the over-optimized link used?

I believe it only counts ranking placements from Universal search results. Have a read of this page http://www.seomoz.org/help/rankings

You should also inform Google of your change of address via Google Webmaster Tools.

It's really important that you add a permanent 301 redirect from http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm pointing to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com (as mentioned by Marisa). Otherwise SEO goodness can be split between the two domains making it harder for you to get the sites ranking.

At the moment the homepage is accessible via 4 URL versions:

http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm

ALSO, when you send the request you should also be requesting that a 301 redirect is also placed on the non-www URL version pointing to its respective www URL version - you'd want to have this done for every page e.g. http://cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel should redirect to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel

Note - I often have the same discussion with web developers, from their point of view it is the same page and I understand that but you just need to state that Google treats it as multiple versions (do some research are canonicalization).

Always tricky....

I'd set the client expectations first - let them know that in your professional opinion there needs to be a content strategy and without one they won't reach their desired goals - and then just let it be (for now). Move on to implementing the rest of your SEO strategy. During reporting time where rankings are slow or making no improvements you can just mention that it's due to lack of content and suggest a content strategy again but this time just trial one or two pages and track progress (rankings, conversions, bounce-rates perhaps....etc). After 2-3 months of the content (working alongside your link build and on-page optimization) the results should speak for themselves.

Good luck!

Hey Keith,

I did the same search and the keyword in the URL was not bold. Agreed don't use hyphens in the root domain (I do believe they help in folder paths), but anyway I feel that you and I could go on forever having a fun debate but I think we have made our points and from this Wendy will be able to make an informed decision, or at least our information has helped her to look in certain areas so she can do additional research.

Best regards,
Davinia

The URLs don't have to be keyword heavy, they should be semantically in line with the content of the page and also be relevant, not only will this help as a ranking factor but it also allows for better authored search engine result page snippets (i.e. the keyword's will display in the URL on the SERP snippet), which in turn should help with click through rates.

A search engine isn't going to know that "medicalcallcenter" is "medical call center" so the URL doesn't include the keyword. Therefore adding the keywords to the file paths will get the keyword into the URL.

Agreed, building links to the homepage (and other important pages) would be a good idea.

I'd go for a branded root domain and when creating the file paths use keywords separated by hyphens, example:

www.medicalcallcenter.com
www.medicalcallcenter.com/medical-call-center
www.medicalcallcenter.com/healthcare-advice
www.medicalcallcenter.com/healthcare-advice/colds-flus

Provided the content on your lower level pages is unique by going for option 2 you can widen your reach on search engine result pages; leading to more traffic for your website. Rel=canonical will make lower level pages pretty much redundant for gaining ranking, so if the content is valuable (to a user and search engine) wouldn't you want to optimize that opportunity? I vote option 2

You should also set up Google Webmaster Tools for your old and new domains and then tell Google about your change of address. Log-in then go to Configuration>Change of Address

And here is some other information from Google that is useful to follow https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

Your site is assessable via a www and non-www URL version. Goodness from building links to your site will be split. Easy fix - place a 301 permanent redirect from the non-www version to www version (or visa-versa), do this for all pages within your website (not just your homepage).

Product pages definitely need keyword targeted copy if you want them to rank and yes I agree with Mat, there doesn't appear to be a clear keyword theme throughout the website.

When checking results I use a ranking tool such as the one on SEOMoz, but if I want to do a quick look up for just a couple of terms I use the Ad preview tool in Adwords (you can set by country and it's not personalized).

https://adwords.google.com/d/AdPreview

I wouldn't go jumping into paying people to do lots of the same search. Check out the link Broadbeach Media supplied below, it explains in more detail about search suggest but also check out the Q&A's, some good additional points there about the searches coming from the same IP address as well as location.

You could use something like Tweetdeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/ (or something similar) and be logged into multiple accounts at the same time.

I think there is a lot of grey areas when looking at black hat vs. white hat techniques. But at the end of the day if what you are doing is against Google guidelines and there is a risk that what you are doing can negatively affect your clients rankings then you shouldn't be doing it...

In addition to Oleg's comments I just thought I'd mention that in my experience mom bloggers (mainly based in the USA) are a tight network and communicate amongst each other daily. So my advice is offer the same deal across the majority of blogs and be selective when offering one blogger additional products for review etc.

Hi Celine, How are you checking your rankings?

As long as your content is well structured amongst the sub-domains and root domain I can't see why there would be any issues. When making the change ensure that you:

1. Tell Google that the URL is moving (do this via Google Webmaster Tools)
2. Add permanent  301 redirects from the old URLs and point to their respective URLs on the new domain (this is to ensure that any backlinks the old websites had will pass some link juice through)
3. Don't stop hosting the old domains for say 6 months.
4. Run a backlink check on the old URLs and try get those websites (provided they are of good quality) to update the link to the new sub-domain. For those that don't update the 301 redirect will help.

Have fun!
Davinia

As its a server side change I'd say ask your web host company, they should be able to steer you in the right direction.

As well as adding the 301 redirect to the /index.html page you should also ensure that non www versions of your URLs are 301 redirected to your www versions. So at the moment there are 4 versions of your homepage, these are:

www.spooksevents.co.uk
www.spooksevents.co.uk/index.html spooksevents.co.uk spooksevents.co.uk/index.html