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perfectweb

I have gone through this same process recently.

FireBug's NET tab, the page speed plugin and Yahoo YSlow plugins were the way to go.

I had a page load time of about 10 seconds before optimising. I reduced this to about 6 seconds by doing the following:

Using different domain names (e.g. static.mysite.com, static2.mysite.com, static3.mysite.com) to increase parallel downloads of CSS/images etc.
Gzip
Reducing size of all images

I then managed to decrease this further to about 1.5 seconds by changing server hosts.

perfectweb

Given that you've said your ultimate aim is for users to purchase things from your affiliates shop, you are really measuring the wrong thing by measuring page impressions.

Imagine a scenario where all users arrive to your site at an article page. At the end of the article page there is a link to buy a product. This link takes the user to your affiliates shop where he/she then buys a product. The user has visited exactly one page on your site (1 page impression) and earned you £x in revenue.

The above example would be more valuable to your business then say if they landing at the same article page, read 5 other related articles and then purchased nothing.

If the website makes money through selling affiliate products, you probably want to be measuring the number of sale made vs. the total number of unique visitors (conversion rate) or the number of pages a visitor reads before purchasing from you.

Don't measure the wrong statistic. make sure you know what you are trying to achieve and measure that!

perfectweb

Would something liek this work:

RewriteRule ^-c-(.).html(.)$ category/$1.html$2 [R,NC]

I've not tested it, nor do I claim to be an expert, but I think it will work for what you're tryign to acheive - e.g. -c-25.html becomes category/25.html

perfectweb

I agree erl=nofollow would be best in thie situation.

Input buttons would potentially chaneg the design of the site (which may or may not be a good thing)

301 over 302 is still going to ahve a little bit of a negative effect

Use javascript links - urgh!

Block /cart/add with robots.txt would probably work, but I prefer the nofollow route

perfectweb

I think I would create a new page with the new product name but have the rest of the content exactly the same. I woudl then set a rel=canonical on the new page pointing to the old page. I would then wait until traffic for the new page out ranks that of the old page, and then eventually 301 redirect the old page to the new page.

perfectweb

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

Have a look at the reference, it shows that what I was saying about the "-" is true, although whether it is always honoured is another question!

It also suggests about arithmitic operators (-,+,/,*), as these could all be part of your part number,a nd your part number could sometimes look like an equation, google may try to "solve" the equation. Ig uess the way to get around that would be to put your query in speach marks, but you can;t train your user base to do that!

Out of vuriosity, what pro video do you find your answer in. I wouldn't mind taking a look myself.

perfectweb

One of the most important factors on a PPC landing page is message match. You must ensure that your ads message is cleearly repeated on your landing page.

From an SEO perspective, this means making sure that your page title and h1/h2 tags align with the messaeg you are putting across in your ad copy.

Something I have been working on is having my ad headline as the H1 on my landing page, and my ad body as a H2 on my landing page. Then having the title of my page be something like "%Ad heading% | My Site".

It is definitely worth trying this out as part of your A/B testing. some of my landing pages using this technique are getting conversions around the 8% mark.

It is also worth trying to get your message match in your URL title as well. If you are ad heading was "Top 10 SEO Tactics" for example, why not have your landing page URL be something like http://www.mysite.com/top-10-seo-tactics.

On another note, I don't think you would need to create 100 different pages for 100 keywords. you could have just one page that does some text replacement to ensure you keep your message match. I usually create a landing page and then replace some tags within the page depending on what ad users come from. This is pretty simple to do in .net/php and will save you recoding up lots of pages.

perfectweb

My personal thought is that you're doing the right thing as you are. You could possibly have an area on your page that lists possible varients of the part number in a box titled "Also known as" or something similar to increase user experience. I'm nto sure it will have a huge amount of SEo benefit though.

Whilst nto an expert on Google query syntax, I'm pretty sure things like full stops, slashes are more or less ignored. dashes are used by google to remove a part of a qury (e.g. "cars -audi" - find sites with the keyword cars but not the keyword audi) so maybe that is why you're experiencing sme differences in the SERPs when searching for the same part number with different combinations of slashes, dashes and stops.

perfectweb