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I have a client that has a lot of content in pdf files that are linked to from their website. The content on the site itself is quite thin.

Should I recommend to them that they convert at least some of pdf files to actual pages on their website? That way there could be a title tag, meta-description, header tags, etc associated with the content.

What role do pdf files play in SEO?

Thanks!

Thanks for that link, I wasn't aware of it.

Yes, I'm trying to get the redirect you mention taken care of. If only the client could tell me who maintains their website!

The links were set up long ago. I just started the SEO project a few weeks ago. According to SEOmoz Pro toolbar they all point to the www version.

Thanks for your reply.

I'm working on basic SEO for http://queueassoc.com.

Google has indexed the non-www verions of the pages and these are what the SERPS return

SEOmoz toolbar shows that all of the incoming links juice goes to the www. versions of the pages, none to the non-www version.

Yesterday I set up GWMT for the site, submitted a sitemap with the www version of the pages and set the default address to the www version.

I had to verify both versions of the site in order to do this and in looking at the non-www version I saw that Google had all the incoming links there and none in the www.version, the opposite of what SEOmoz shows.

Is this just because Google only has the non-www versions in its index? Will they show the links to the www version once they get them in the index?

I'm worried about losing Google Page Rank value or SEOmoz DA by making this switch.

Thanks. It looks like an excellent resource!

Bill

Thanks for your response.

In this case I am not changing the domain name, but converting the site from html/css to Wordpress. Many of the url names will stay the same, but they won't be .html files anymore.

Thank you Thomas,

I don't quite understand what you mean by "use a  Wordpress login to do a quick and dirty redirect"

Bill

Most of my work now involves converting older websites to CMS-based sites (in Wordpress) and I'm wondering about best practices here.

If I create a "dev" or "sandbox" directory for my development work how do I keep the pages from being indexed while I am working on the new site? Can I "noindex" a directory?

What do I do with the old html files when the new site goes live? I'm assuming I will do a 301 redirect from domain.com/index.html to the new domain.com/, and also on all of the inner pages that have equivalent pages in the new site. But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them?

Thank you for your response.

Could you explain the reasoning behind the title tag change. Is it to make it more like a complete a real sentence?

Your other suggestions are valuable, too.

I'm working on a site for a small guest house (http://www.tommysonthebeach.com).  I have created a Google Place page (Bing and Yahoo Local) as well and I have the address in the footer on every page.

I have the location (Indian Rocks Beach) at the beginning of most titles tags because that is how people tend to search, e.g. "Indian Rocks Beach vacation rental."

In theory I would think that I don't need location in the title tag because Google knows the location, and I could use the real estate for other keywords suchs as "pet friendly" or "beach hotel," etc. But when I look at the SERPS, those ranking highly all seem to have the location at the beginning of the title tag.

Thanks.

P.S. The site is currently not showing up in Google local search apparently because Google thinks it's a vacation rental agency, which are not allowed in local search. I'm trying to get that fixed.