Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Good question.  You are in a unique position of starting from scratch and expanding, but the SEO and branding principles would remain the same in my opinion:

1. Do not 301 or rel=canonical anything.  Your homepage is your brand identity not only to consumers but to search engines as well. If you start doing funky things like redirects or other markup to "point" google in a direction to maintain some sort of rankings, you will regret it moving forward as your company grows.  Its harder to go back and fix those type of permanent decisions.
2. Don't worry about the homepage rankings for product 1 vs. product page.  Just make sure your site is flat enough that your main product pages live off of the homepage/root from and information architecture standpoint, the homepage will carry enough authority to carry the product 1 page and maintain its rankings. Google is smart enough now that putting that product one level deep will not change much.  Internally link to it properly, mark it up, utilize breadcrumbs and eventually the homepage ranking for those specific keywords will move over to the product page and your rankings shouldn't see a dip.  I have done this a handful of times without negative consequences.

The sooner you move it, the better and let it start sitting with the search engines.  You will be fine.

They have become far less valuable (almost none now) for passing PR, but for internal linking its still a little valuable, especially if there arent very many.  But for the most part footers are no longer valuable - Google cracked down on that a while ago.

Set your radius on your local to a wider area when possible, but Google is really making this type of situation difficult because technically he doesn't have a "physical presence" in all of these places.  I would say that you go ahead and create content around these seperate locations, but make sure the content is unique and good.  Don't simply copy the same content and swap out "city1" with  "City2" and call it good.  Google has specifically targeted those type of things and something they do not want in search results.  But having great content and information for each of those locations is an excellent idea.

1. One idea would be to house all of that content under a "service areas" type of page on the site.  Then you list each area/town/city that he provides service in, with deeper links and content to each of those areas with unique content.  Then you make sure to utilize breadcrumbs in the navigation with really good url structure i.e. www.service.com/plumbing/city1 and you could start to have the specialty skills as the topical/category high level pages, and then service areas within each specialty nested underneath.  (hope that makes sense).

Just some ideas that have worked on my end with local.  For sure check out he GetListed stuff and utilize those services as much as possible.

Best practice for all three cases is to never use the file extensions.  You should never link to the file extension names, and make sure in your htaccess file that you dont use the file extensions for any reason moving forward.  Why?

1. Lets say you decide to re-do your site and it goes from PHP to another language like ASP or something.  You would have to redirect your entire site with file extensions and would shoot yourself in the foot with SEO, traffic and anything else.  By not using file extensions, you give yourself the flexibility down the road and you can maintain a constant url structure.

2. Indexing may or may not use the file extensions depending on your htaccess/server settings.  You would then essentially be running into duplicate content pages and issues, and thereby negatively affecting your site.  Plus, it will dilute your individual page authority.

As a side note, just be consistent with your internal linking.  Whether you use relative links or not - some discussion can be had around that.  But pick a route and go with it, just as long as you dont use the file extensions

Agree with Lynn.  Seems odd that a crawler would cause a "click" in this type of model - i have never run across that happening before.  I would think that by adding java or onclick events would take care of the problem.

You wont want to try and target both.  That kind of strategy doesnt really work anymore. The Google keyword tool wont really give you an accurate count with plural vs. non plural (same with misspellings).  They essentially tell the community that they are able to interpret these kinds of things and make adjustments accordingly.

The one thing you could do is add some internal links within your site with the plural keywords to help send the signal to google, but other than that I wouldn't do much.  Trying to get "external anchor link text" for the plural and strategies like that just wont get you far anymore, and could do more harm than good.

I am confused about the tracking code as well.  If the tracking code are parameters appended to the url, it shouldnt have anything to do with a valid url. Maybe you should carify with an example:

• Scenario #1 - www.site.com/email is a valid url, and the link from the newsletter is www.site.com/email?utm_source=newsletter, the link should still work.  The tracking parameters have nothing to do with a page not working.  If the page still exists without the tracking parameters in the url, then you have an IIS/IT issue.  I have seen this one time where dynamic parameters (anything after a question mark) did cause issues on the server and it returned a 404 everytime you hit a page and put in parameters into the url string.  Its a systematic fix in the server settings and you would need to look to your host/IT to fix the issue and allow dynamic parameters in url strings.
• Scenario #2 - www.site.com/email is no longer a vaild page, because it was set up a long time ago for the email campaign, then page is no longer there.  In this case, no matter what the link is (tracking or no tracking), you will need to do a 301 redirect on the root url www.site.com/email and all variation of that url (including tracking urls) will automatically redirect to a specified page.

If the 301 redirecting is not working, then you have set it up wrong. It would be worth your time to manually go through and redirect each url to a proper spot, but worst case scenario is to do what Moosa Hemani pointed out and do a great 404 page.

Have you also entered params/strings into GWMT to help with the url handling?  I think it would be best to utilizing on-site tagging as well as WMT to make sure you have everything correct.

Canonical tags should do the trick though.  I am not sure that moz takes into account the tagging, and may just see the duplicate entries.  My errors in moz usually seem pretty high sometimes, so I dont think that reflects reality.  The Microsoft Toolkit will essentially be the same thing, but really based on IIS.  Microsoft toolkit may be a bit more accurate, but realize that ultimately its what the search engines see, not what you have in the code or on the server per se.  Sometimes search engines miss certain tags or cues or dont fully follow server settings, etc.. WMT should be your ultimate source for errors and crawling, and I would think the microsoft tool would be next most valuable followed by moz.

Not quite sure that I understand the need to put these on a subdomain.  Why not have both of these reside/exist on the corporate domain?  One of them already exists on your corporate, so you can keep that database/search there, and then move the other over to a similar location.  yes, that would require a ton of 301 redirects, but that should be ok given the scope of the project.

In my experience, moving to a new domain or even a subdomain, you always experience some traffic loss that never really comes back (unless you are naturally growing anyway).  Keel the main company domain going, put everything under a folder off the root, dont worry about the subdomain issue.

Yep. Depends on exactly when you set up your campaigns.  You will get an email when your site has been crawled by the seomoz bot.  Then shortly after that you will get a ranking update email.

You cant control the crawl rate.

FIrst off, let me answer your most burning question- is there an easier way to get high quality links without hours of work on the backend? No.  A handful of directories (business, web, local) are still worthwhile to pay/submit to, but thats where the easy part stops.

I am not familiar with linkmarket, but i did take a look at thier website- doesnt look fantastic. Sounds like too much reciprocal linking going on.  May be useful for a handful of links, but i wouldnt use that as your primary link building source.

Although it takes hours on your own, here is a good way to organize your effort to make it a little less sporadic:

1. Get an entire potential link list together before you begin.  I create a spreadsheet for each site, and then start hitting a mixture of tools; SEOmoz link finding tools, i use a product called Web CEO that has an ok link/partner finding tool that spits out a long list of potential websites to get links from.  Then you manually start searching, I really liked this link finding parameter post on Search Engine Land post that gives some good search operators to use.  Take a bunch of these combined tools with your own searching, and compile the list together in excel.  Hopefully you get at least a couple hundred options.
2. Craft a link request email template- but MAKE SURE YOU CUSTOMIZE/PERSONALIZE it!! Ask for specific pages to get a link from, know the website, make sure you sound like a real person.
3. Dedicate 1 afternoon a week (a few hours at least) to start going down your list.  Without dedicating a specific time, it wont happen.  I know from experience.
4. Track contacts/responses.  In your excel sheet, track the date that you requested a link, track any response, and finally the date you got a link.
5. Be willing to reciprocate.  Its only fair to provide a link back.  Not as useful, but you should take them all.
6. Participate in online communities.  Even when some places "no follow" links (blogs, forums, news sites) I have found that those links still play into your recognized "domain authority" in an intagable way.  Dont ignore those.

Hope that gives you a start!

1. File names- always use the hyphen.

2. Alt Text - use spaces and normal word structure.  Ryan is correct on the technical intent behind the alt tag, but it can also be a good SEO tool, and you should treat those as exact phrase keywords.  So nobody is searching for "city-bikes", they are searching for "city bikes".  The alt tag should be what the user will put into google.

Ahh... the ultimate IA question that still doesnt have a clear anwer from the search engines.  A ton of talk about this at the recent SMX Advanced at Seattle (as is with almost every one).  I will try and summarize the common sentiment that i gathered from other pros.  I will not claim that this is the correct way, but for now this is what i heard a bunch of people agree on:

1. No index, follow the pagination links for all except page 1
2. Do not block/hand it with robots.txt (in your case, you realyl cant since you have no identifying parameters in your url)
3. If you had paginated parameters in the url you can also manage those in the Google & Bing  WMT by telling the SE to ignore those certain parameters.
4. Canonical to page 1 was a strategy that some retailers were using, and other want to try.  Google reps tried to say this is not the way to do it, but others claim success from it.
5. If you have a "View All" link that would display all the products in a longer form on a single page, canonical to that page (if its reasonable)

Notes: Depending on how your results/pages are generated, you will need to remember that they probably arent passing "juice".  Any dynamic content is usually not "flow through" links from an SEO perspective (or even crawled sometimes).

The better approach to not orphaning your product pages is finding ways to link to them from other sources besides the results pages.  For larger sites, its a hassle, buts thats a challenge we all face    Here are some SEO tips for attacking the "orphan" issue:

1. If you have product feeds, create a "deal" or "price change" feed.  Create a twitter account that people can sign up for to follow these new deals or price changes on products.  Push in your feed into tweets, and these will link to your product page, hence creating an in-link for search engines to follow.
2. Can do the same with blogs or facebook, but not on a mass scale.  Something a bit more useful for users like "top 10 deals of the week) and link to 10 products, or "Favorites for gifts" or something. over time, you can keep track of which product you recommend, and make sure you eventually hit all your products.  Again, the point is creating at least 1 inbound link for search engines to follow.
3. Create a static internal "product index page" (this is not for your sitemap page FYI) where either by category or some other structure, you make a static link to every product page you have on the site.  Developers can have these links dynamically updated/inserted with some extra effort which will avoid manually needing to be updated.
4. Create a xml sitemap index.  Instead of everything being clumped into 1 xml sitemap for your site, try creating a sitemap index and with your product pages in their own sitemap.  This may help with indexing those pages.

Hope that helps?  Anyone else want to chime in?

The best option for sure is to house everything in one single domain.  Why not have it be "baseball.com/newbaseballproduct"?  Dont go subdomain if you dont need to- and dont go new url if you dont need to either.  Build your domain authority by maintaining everything withing a good IA through your base domain.

These redirect type of links are for tracking purposes on the side of the referring website- which are usually systematically generated by the CMS platforms they have.

In short, no, these are not the high value direct SEO links that you are looking for.  However, search engines are able to follow these links and also follow the redirect to the website (adventuretreks.com in this case), but at that point is of little SEO value and gets tracked as a referral type of link.

If you are paying for these listings (which i assume you would be to a degree) you would need to evaluate the value of that link based on the traffic it would send, and not the SEO value it gives you.

SEOmoz has a decent one.  Its a bit out of date, but its worth going through:  http://www.seomoz.org/directories

There are some specific technology ones in there, plus most of them will have that category.

You wont want to try and target both.  That kind of strategy doesnt really work anymore. The Google keyword tool wont really give you an accurate count with plural vs. non plural (same with misspellings).  They essentially tell the community that they are able to interpret these kinds of things and make adjustments accordingly.

The one thing you could do is add some internal links within your site with the plural keywords to help send the signal to google, but other than that I wouldn't do much.  Trying to get "external anchor link text" for the plural and strategies like that just wont get you far anymore, and could do more harm than good.

Robert-

The million dollar question Here is what has worked the best in my opinion/experience:

• Poaching via linkedin- find people with your requirements in descriptions, browse their experience and shoot them direct emails to try to lure them away (actually how i got one of my positions, i was hit up on linkedin)
• Networking groups locally- At least here in Utah there are like 50 different little networking groups- social marketing, online marketing, AMA, women's councils, tech councils, etc... I have also found that those individuals that are active in attending these types of groups are always looking for opportunities, whether they say so or not.

Hope that helps.

They have become far less valuable (almost none now) for passing PR, but for internal linking its still a little valuable, especially if there arent very many.  But for the most part footers are no longer valuable - Google cracked down on that a while ago.

Not sure why you want to use the canonical tag in this instance.  If http://www.abc.com/spain/Malaga.html is truly a duplicate or replicated page of the new /spain page, then I guess you could do it.   But it sounds to me like you are re-structuring your urls to be more friendly, and if that is the case you will want to permanently 301 redirect the old urls to the new SEO friendly one.  That will pass on the SEO juice in a more effective way then canonical a bunch of the old pages that you dont want anyway.

Is that the case?  It kind of depends on the content of each of the pages, and how that content interacts with the other pages.  Typically canonical is used for paginated instances or duplicated content that is handle in a different matter, not redirecting juice from old urls/pages to new ones.