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.htaccess files can be placed at any directory level of a site so you can do it for just the subdomain or even just a directory of a domain.

Staging URL's are typically only used for testing so rather than do a deny I would recommend using a specific ALLOW for only the IP addresses that should be allowed access.

I would imagine you don't want it indexed because you don't want the rest of the world knowing about it.

You can also use HTACCESS to use username/passwords. It is simple but you can give that to clients if that is a concern/need.

Use an .htaccess file to only allow from certain ip addresses or ranges.

Here is an article describing how: http://www.kirupa.com/html5/htaccess_tricks.htm

You could also look into using the new HTML5

<nav>tag. This tells the crawlers that it is specifically a navigation block so it can distinguish the more valuable content from an SEO perspective from the crawler important nav sections. Basically it seems like then the order wouldn't matter as much because you are telling the SEO side of the search engine that it is just navigation.</nav>

I would focus more on the structure/hierarchy of your pages. Your H1 tags (one and only one per page) should logically be placed above the fold to a user.This is just good page design. The H1 is an important tag to any search engine. Ironically, well designed web pages seem to have many correlating benefits to SEO.

But as Himanshu indicates I don't know that Google actually calculates where the fold is. The first challenge is that they would have to parse the CSS stylesheets and actually calculate approximate position of the page elements relative to an assumed page fold. Another challenge is that for each site the demographics vary as to the fold of its typical users. For example when I look at pages on my iPhone or iPad it is drastically different than when I view them on my 30" screen attach to my laptop. I view certain web sites when I am mobile for entertainment and others at my desk as they are work related.

I have placed the nav code at the bottom of the HTML doc at times. I can't really say that it is a significant difference for SEO. It doesn't take a lot of work to do if you are skilled with HTML/CSS but I can't really say that this methodology will have a long term benefit for SEO.

HTML 5 has new tags that sites should adopt such as

<nav>and other tags to indicate what that chunk of content is. These tags are supported by all major browsers at this point. I don't know all the specific browser versions. I would recommend this moving forward where possible. By using this tags the crawlers likely will not factor in position in the document to understand the importance of chunks of content.</nav>

I had not heard of the competwition site to spread the word. Thank you for the tip and on the the 30 day length.

There is probably an "it depends" here. For example clothes and many other items come in different sizes and usually they are all listed on one page without any detriment to SEO. My opinion is the single page would allow that single page to rank higher than many different pages. I can only imagine the confusion that would occur in search engine result lists if you had a page for each size of a particular shoe model being sold.

I think the rule would be is the size more important than what the item is. For example with shoes it is usually the shoe model that is most important (not the size) so one page with the size as key content on that page. But there are times where users are more likely to search for the size. Maybe it is wall mount ovens where the attributes of width and single and double are more important than the actual model then you might want to have separate pages for each size of the model.

You might also consider having a single page for a widget with the different options and then landing pages that would aggregate all the different widgets of a particular size and then link to the corresponding product detail page.

The robots.txt file just tells the bots you would "prefer" they don't index but there is nothing to prevent them from indexing.The only sure way to do this is to restrict access to the sub-domain for everyone and require some sort of authentication. If they don't have access they can't index.

If your question is around the SSL part it really only adds value in places where you don't want the communication between the end user and yours servers to be sent in clear text (easily readable). The clear choices for this are where a username / password combination is passed, or credit card information such as the checkout pages.

Personally I would not set up all pages of an ecommerce store to use SSL. I would leave all catalog pages as non-SSL.

I use Google Analyticator for my Wordpress Blogs. It handles inserting the code in the write place and all you have to worry about is the options for the plug-in. You still get all the free goodness of Google Analytics and you also get the ease of configuration of a WP plug-in.

I agree with the comments already presented. Many slow sites are that way because of how they are implemented. There are many free tools to help. Two tools that I use regularly when developing a site are YSlow and Firebug. Both are Firefox plug-ins that provide a great deal of information on the performance of a site.

I personally use GoDaddy for purchasing domains but I do not use any of their add-ons. I would not recommend paying for their SEO tools. Submitting to any search engine is a free process and one that is easy to do.

For Bing go to: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/

For Google go to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Setting up an account and doing so will also allow you to become familiar with their tools and reports that they provide. It is a great way to learn how and when they are indexing your site.

One additional thing to consider is to create a sitemap that dynamically gets updated as your site does. Submit this sitemap to the search engines and then it will improve the crawling efficiency and accuracy of the search engines. The individual responsible for your web development should be able to set this up for you.

A different Matt but I have to/still agree that you need to password protect the site. This isn't just for a protection against crawlers but also anyone else who might be snooping around. Unless your client is okay with their work being released early into the wild you should password protect it.

The good news is that many hosting companies have tools that will automagically generate the .htaccess files for your.

I have implemented sites with the brand name first, the brand name at the end of the page title and without the page title. I don't have any study results but my impressions are the following:

• When multiple tabs are open having the brand name first is a nuisance because you can't see the page title you just see the repeating brand name.
• If it is the home page the brand name should probably be first but there are some exceptions.
• Having the brand name at the end in the title might have some SEO benefit but can also make for very looooong page titles.

My general pattern today would be to use the brand name on the home page and all subsequent pages just use the characters for good page titles.

htaccess is a very simple way to protect the site from crawlers. If they can't access the pages they certainly can't index them.

I agree with dignan99 on the content points. More importantly I think you are hitting upon a marketing challenge than an SEO one. Both hyphens and .net's are not always remembered easily when verbally spoken. Another issue is that less experienced users may not think that .net is possible and instead try going to cardealer.net.com. When I have had to choose between the hyphenated or a .net domain name I just keep looking until I can find a domain name that doesn't have either.