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I have a website that is not very pretty but has great rankings. I want to redesign the website and loose as little rankings as possible and still clean up the navigation. What are the best practices? Thanks in advance.

Thanks, That's what I was looking for.

I have a large ecommerce site and several smaller nitche ecommerce sites. All have the same products, but the smaller sites are loosing traffic.

I want to combine all the sites to the larger site so it will be easier to manage, but I don't want to loose any rank on the smaller sites.

Example:

www.yourpromopeople.com - This is the large site I want to use.

www.logocoolies.com

www.fourcolormagnets.com - These are a couple of the smaller sites I want to combine with the larger one.

Questions:

What are the pros and cons in doing this?

What would be the best way to do this?

Would redirecting the URL's to the larger site's product pages do the trick or is there a better option?

Thanks for the help.

1. Be sure your Meta titles and descriptions are unique, add value to the user and the grammar & spelling are correct.

2. Be sure your content flows and the keyword density is under 3% as a guideline. Use synonyms.

3. Remove keyword Meta tags. The only thing it is good for is letting your competitors know what keywords you are targeting.

4. Set up Google Analytics / Web tools.

5. Use Inner linking throughout your pages.

6. Set-up Sitemap & Robots.txt

7. Videos and Alt tags for images.

Follow these steps and you will climb the ranking in no time.

This is kind of a trick question, but if you could only do ONE thing to improve your search ranking what would you do?

Be careful with the "wheelchair" keyword. It shows up in the web copy a lot. You may want to very the keyword with some synonyms to avoid the over optimization penalty. Also, take out the keyword meta tag. It only tells competitors what keywords you are targeting. Keyword stuffed, duplicate titles. I would add Google Analytics for tracking.

Just what I saw from a quick look. I hope it helps.

Bolding is fine and even helps some. Anchor text is good practice also. Just remember to keep your keyword density under 3% to avoid the over optimization penalty and vary your anchor text using different keywords. Plus, the anchor text should flow within your page copy. Don't force the keywords. Most important, think about what is best for the user anytime you create links in content.

SEO is important, but ask yourself these two questions when creating content for pages, because Google is -

What is the user searching for?

Is my page delivering it?

How many started to hum the mission impossible theme as you were reading this post?

We have an e-commerce site with a blog and I agree totally with Thomas and Adam. The only thing I would like to add is be sure to make your content interesting for the user. It is difficult with a e-commerce site to give value to your customer without trying to "sell" in every article. Just keep in mind to post blog articles your readers will want to share along with promoting your products and brand.

Links and page authority. I'm sure that is the main reason.

The website apple.com has 6,028,446 backlinks. It has 23,558 rankings in Google's organic results, a Link Influence Score of 100% to the website. That means that links from apple.com have an extremely high influence on the search engine positions of the linked sites. Plus, having a page rank of 9 doesn't hurt either.

If all the content is the same and the only difference is the domain urls, the pages will be fighting against each other for position. The benefit of having multiple domains with different keywords wouldn't be as effective as concentrating on one primary domain. If you must keep them all, be sure to use a canonical tag for the domains.

Here are some resources I use when I start a link building campaign.

http://www.shoutmeloud.com/best-practices-to-generate-backlinks-website.html

http://www.getelastic.com/guide-to-link-building-for-ecommerce/

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Hope it helps.

Google should recognize the original source and give credit due.

If you go to the reports tab you can create customized reports and SEOmoz will email them to you weekly or monthly depending on your needs. You can go back and review anytime.

I haven't seen many new .net sites. The .com sites are the most sought after and usually have more authority. I read an article that said .org site are being indexed well lately.

Also, be sure to use a long tail keyword if you are a small site just getting started.

This is a site our company finished a couple months ago. We were trying to make it simple and easy to use with easy navigation and good design.

http://www.cooliecube.com

I know after all the Google changes link building is different than it used to be. How do I put a link building strategy together that I can understand and follow?

I have fixed most of the crawl errors and my site is still low on the search for most of my targeted keywords. Is link building the answer? Or are there other options I'm missing?

With all of Google's updates on backlinks, can SEO's still use backlink software like Backlinkx or others?

Is there a better way?

On my campaign for www.fourcolormagnets.com one of my warnings was "too many on-page links". Is there any thing to do for ecommerce sites? and also, my page www.fourcolormagnets.com/rectangle-sizes.php is listed as having 744 links but, I count nowhere near that number. And idea where this comes from?

So I noticed all the leading competitors in our market are using photos of people on their home pages to market products.. While we are using a simple but eye catching design with no photos of people but only produts.

Thanks for the quick response.

Does having a file type on the end of a url affect rankings (example www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards.php VS  www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards)????

Nice to know this.  I have had the same issue arise out of nowehre about week maybe two back.  It took awhile but I found the same htaccess quick fix but it seems as if it was an seomoz alogorithim change up.  Robot Roger works his butt off in the basment or so seomoz tells me he  must have found some free time to switch up the campaign errors alogorithim.

Title tag best practices according to seomoz is the following keyowrd - keyword | brand.com but I have seen some interesting results from using a comma as to a hyphen to seperate keywords as reccomended and wanted to know which method is more crawler friendly.

Agreed

Yes, wise.  Go for it.