Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Mark,

If I understand correctly, you want to change your menu structure, which in turn will change th subsequent pages?

If the menu changes are going to result in page names changing (im talking filename changes) then yes you may want to 301 redirect the old pages to relevant new ones.

301's are not complex, but can cause MAJOR issues if not done correctly. There are a number of plug ins for Wordpress that ma help manage the 301's check out

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

Also, you may want to read up on HTaccess and 301's, but I would not recommend tackling your HTaccess until you KNOW what you are doing.

http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

Hope that helps a little.

Good Luck!

Aran

Im with Goldilocks on this one. A blog post should not be too long, nor too short. It should be just right.

And as Moosa says, it should contain images and a touch of humour always breaks the monotony too.

Hi,

Personally I see no benefit of having such a indepth HTML site map, its very unlikely that a user is going to scroll through hundreds of almost identical looking lines of products to find what they want. I think a huge sitemap as showin in your examples only serves to confuse people and make it difficult to find what they want (the opposite of what a sitemap is actually for!)

Listing the site structure down to category level/sub category levels is plenty.

Here is an example of a HTML sitemap done well http://www.argos.co.uk/static/StaticDisplay/includeName/sitemap.htm

Hope that helps

Regards

Aran

I use http://www.dreamstime.com/ its cheap and cheerful and does the job.

A well organised natural site structure and navigation system will ensure that page rank 'flows' all the way down to product pages.

No need for including products on sitemap (though you can include them in your XML sitemap).

Hi Ron,

You need to put the Tweet this syle buttons on your website and get people to share the page amongst there pages. There are plenty of ways to encourage people to share th content, but by far the most effective is to have some awesome content...perhaps you have recorded a song or covered a popular song, you could offer it as a free download when people tweet the page?

When Elbow covered beyonce's track Independent Woman the social sphere went crazy!!!

Do you have a youtube channel?

Hi all,

Has anyone noticed any ranking changes over the weekend?

I've noticed an almost uniform drop of a few positions across almost all of my chosen phrases. Nothing major has occurred on our site, no messages in webmaster tools. An analysis of our competitors positions (which we track the top 10) doesn't reveal any clues.

Cheers

Aran

Hi Tom, Im in the same boat, we have glorious feedback on both Ebay and Amazon and would love to show that on our website (without diverting people to our ebay or amazon stores).

Unfortunately ebay user agreement states  "you will not take any action that may undermine the feedback or ratings systems (such as displaying, importing or exporting feedback information off of the sites or using it for purposes unrelated to eBay).

Source: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/user-agreement.html

Agreed with Matt, but surely social signals are going to be in play too. Encourage social sharing of your pages and the links, G+'s, Likes and tweets will follow, then the Page rank will flow.

Get comfortable as its going to be a long process though!

Best of luck.

Hi Simon,

Check ou this thread from January, http://www.seomoz.org/q/best-geotargeting-strategy-subdomains-or-subfolders-or-country-specific-domain

Theres some Good and Endorsed Answers in there.

Also check out Rand Fishkins post from late 2010, a little dated but the essence remains the same. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-for-keyword-cityname-in-multiple-geographies

Hopefully these should set you in the right path.

One additional point to note is to make sure you setup Google places correctly, I feel that will benefit your site greatly.

Cheers

Aran

Infographics are generally created to relay statistical information in a graphical and easy to digest format. Not sure I see a way of creating an infographic to explain a subject.

Perhaps you could gather some stats on the industry and express those with some cool graphics. There are plenty of tools around the web to help you create the graphic, I've always found this post quite useful http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/awesome-free-tools-infographics/

Best of luck and be sure to post a link here when you have finished it.

What is the benefit to the user for an individual sites for North, South and west?

Are you not just creating a lot of work for yourself, especially since as you state ''would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally" which ultimately means each site is competing against the others.

I would rethink my strategy, Your more likely to rank 'generally'  for your chosen terms if you focus your efforts on one site and perhaps use canonical tags on the other two to ensure Google knows who to attribute the content too.

I think your header links will look spammy.

Also, your sharing out our Page Rank to your duplicate sites! I would either remove the links or no follow (are the links of value to your visitors? if not get rid!).

I agree completely with Zach and would like to add one little thing. I prefer to rewrite my URLS to remove the extension altogether. (so does SEOmoz, take this page for example http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-htm-files-stronger-than-aspx-files)

this makes it slightly more user friendly as its one less piece of info the the user to remember/type in and makes for a slightly cleaner looking URI.

I agree with everything inhouseseo says above. Sound advice.

I've recently been looking at the wedding niche with a view to finding guest post opportunities, one thing that came to light is there's a ton of blogs out there that love publishing series of photos from weddings.

I'm not sure where you stand with ownership of the photos and whether you have the right to publish without the consent of the 'models'. Theres a great opportunity to assemble 10-15 shots write some commentary and then create a series of posts using 6/7 different shots from the collection and differing comments and post them around various wedding.

Myblogguest.com is great place to start. I think this could be the cheapest/quickest way to get the links your looking for.

Best of luck and I sincerely hope you get your old positions back.

Regards

Aran

Ps.(oh and in the mean time you might wanna hit facebook/twitter/pinterest and post some photos, connect with your target audience, it could drive some valuable traffic in! and it just might help you rank)

Hi,

On the page (on the test server),  you could use the following code (assuming your using PHP).

**header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");

header("Location: client-site.com/new-page-name.html**");**

?>

Hope that helps**