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with hindsight I should have redesigned the blog pages to convert. The potential spend of the lost traffic was not harnessed

I have just watched the overtake of the number one UK position for garden accessories.

The old 1st place holder held it for the last 2.5 years (min) ....taking a look at the back links of the number one holder it seems they are paid links ...as they are little follow image adverts with anchor text posted on the home page of niche blogs, forums and design related website..

....so is this white hat or black hat?

This is a great question and feel that some type of disclaimer or warning should be placed somewhere quite clearly on the QA.

I strongly recommend paying for advice - and make sure the individual has done what you are trying to do.

try elance, peopleperhour, people from various countries will bid to do your work ....you may want to drop the term 3rd world -

Hey Lara - I had a similar situation whereby I moved a well established blog from wordpress to my main business domain - I have had numerous problems (eg my blog began to outrank my main website for critical search terms). The tags and categories get their own url (at least mine did) which means  you need to optimise each of those tags/categories or you start getting a tonne of warnings from SEOmoz - I have over 200 tags, 6 categories plus around 300 posts - that is a lot of optimising -

I am sure all these points are resolvable but I am just wishing to point out its not that easy if you dont fully understand the implications of what you are doing - I would get help from someone who has done it before-

by the way since moving my blog over I have lost visitors and key search positions on my main website -some of it is now settling but I dont feel out of the woods yet - it has been very bumpy for me

my blog category pages began to rank higher for key converting search terms than my main website  - not good - sales dont happen on my blog.

So I stopped the indexing of my category pages....guess what happened?..my website is back to position 1 BUT my blog traffic reduced by half.....so consider EGOL's warning prior to making a decision

Perhaps your success is to do with less competetion in the aussie  market place - I have noticed that websites in australia can get in the top 3 positions with very poor onsite optimisation and few links - of course it varies from industry to industry but I would analyse the backlinks etc of the other aussie websitesfirst -

would a spend of 500 be better on offsite SEO or social media campaigns via facebook twitter pinterest

My blog  sits on the wordpress domain http://gardenbeet.wordpress.com/ - it has good page rank and has around 300-400 visits per day  - should i move it to my website or Should I start a new blog?

i have a page set up for it on my website but it now has good rank http://www.gardenbeet.com/content/design-blog.html - and now want to keep this URL

am a bit confused - what is the best strategy in terms of SEO?

ah thanks 77% similar !!