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Yeah I wouldn't sacrifice branding but we made the decision that at the moment keyword rich domains are doing very well. I have no doubt that this success will be short lived and the project I worked on did still have a branded domain, our plan was to create a landing page with a keyword rich domain on .co because of the easy at which it could be ranked and within weeks we were ranking 3rd on yahoo for the keywords in the domain. When it is re-evaluated I'm sure that the site will be dropped well beyond the first page however currently the project itself has actually made a sizable revenue steam since the page was created. My strategy is that opportunities come and go every day and that this was just another opportunity to gain business.

I think that it makes a point that the alt tag does in fact hold more weight than was previously thought (many SEO resources stated that the alt tag was only considered for specific searches). The problem is that the alt tag leaves an open window to exploitation and that at the end of the day as far as I am aware content is still king.

I have always been of the impression that a website other than .com/.co.uk is a bit spammy however recently there has been an increasing number of very authoritative websites on other TLD's. I have personally been working on a .co and have found it very useful as I have managed to get a very competitive URL ranked.

No problem at all, in fact I've been doing some digging around because I am rather interested in seeing if I can rank another page for a keyword through the alt tag. I will keep you informed but if I can't find a relevant answer I'll try to test it on my sites.

Provided you don't have an unnatural number of links on the page there should be no reason, the whole page will be crawled - header to footer.

P.S. I like the button idea, trying to think about how I might be able to implement them into one of my projects.

I think that the image alt text will 'work' just that it would not be as strong indicator of content as the text. From my personal experience the alt tag alone might not be authoritative enough to encourage the search engines to list that page for the alt terms. I think that as it stands an alt tag may help reinforce a link but am not sure it is enough on its own.

Just as a shot in the dark, perhaps use the footer but add the links in the same colour so they are not visible?

The issue here is a combination of things.

Firstly, if you would like to rank the other pages you could try linking to more internal pages and using a combination of keywords you would like to rank for as well as some long tail keywords to help mix it up a little.

To address the linking issue, there are a few little techniques to 'hide' the links however it is more important to link with the right keywords to address the specific pages you would like to rank for those keywords. An example of this might be that if you were a financial adviser; your home page might rank for mortgage, loans and investments however if someone was to search for 'mortgage products' you might like your specific 'mortgages' page to rank above your homepage. The search engines will look at your links as well as the keywords that are linking them so for example if your home page has a link called 'mortgage services' that links to your page called 'mortgages', the search engines will determine that while your homepage relates to mortgages, the authority for the search term 'mortgage services' is actually another page on your site and so will rank that page above your homepage (in theory).

I personally am not sure how well the search engines rank picture links via alt tags. Personally I would try to sneak some links in there to confirm the structure of your website. Just a tip, for a site I once helped to optimise; we changed the css to declare a class of link were there was no underline and no obvious colour indicator as to the fact that it was a link.

Looks like I can get in from the UK.

As has been said, directories are a given (even people who are not concerned with SEO will still use directories) you will need to think outside of the box. I like to think of it more like PR, link building for me is a social aspect that involves forming relationships with website owners, bloggers, writers etc. Try to focus on establishing a 'web presence' as a whole for the website you are promoting.

I'm not sure what industry you are in but obviously some industries will be very difficult to crack on the web (eg SEO, web development, networking, business).

The other replies here have been spot on so I will only add something on the side.

You need to use link building in the most natural form possible. Instead of trying to focus your links to /business-class.php you need to spread it throughout your website with a large variation of anchortext not forgetting about long tail keywords aswell.

A 301 is simply a message to say that the page has permamently moved. There is nothing wrong with redirecting them all to a single page, infact google even advises the use of 301 redirects.

Simply, yes that just about covers it.

The things to bear in mind are that there is often a delay in recognising the new domain so there may be a short amount of time where your domain is not apearing on the SERPS.

My personal advice is as follows:

Pre-move: Buy the new domain as early as possible and put some simple content on it. Submit/register your domain with the major search engines and get a few links to ensure it is listed and the search engines recognise it (this helps to reduce or avoid sandboxing).

1. Create all necessary 301 Redirects.

2. Use analytics and site explorer to find the top 200 or so domains sending traffic to your old domain and contact their webmasters to change the links.

3. Make sure both the old and new sites have been verified and have site maps submitted.

4. Launch your new site with a media and online marketing campaign. The goal is to get as many new inbound links as possible as quickly as possible and to attract a large number of branded searches for the new site.

5. Monitor your Webmaster Central account for 404 errors and to check how Google is dealing with your 301's. Whenever a 404 is produced, place a 301 in place.

6. Monitor the spiders on your new domain. Search engines spend more time crawling sites they trust so when your crawl level is close to your old sites level you are probably close to that trust level (this is a crude measurement).

7. Monitor your search engine traffic referrals to help determine how your new site is developing on the internet.

8. You can also check your server logs for 404 and 500 errors.

For more information Matt Cutts published the following:
http://blog.milestoneinternet.com/web-development/faq-on-duplicate-content-and-moving-your-site-by-matt-cutts-at-pubcon-2009/

I have always been of the impression that a website other than .com/.co.uk is a bit spammy however recently there has been an increasing number of very authoritative websites on other TLD's. I have personally been working on a .co and have found it very useful as I have managed to get a very competitive URL ranked.

In my opinion, no. I would assume that if the DA is that high and the PA is that low then that page is already linking to a large number of other pages and that it does not have much more link authority to pass.

There are circumstances where you are allowed to use 'cloaking' as some very influential websites have done however in your particular situation a nofollow tag and noindex tag would be the 'normal' procedure.

Personally, I think it is a grey area. You are not using the javascript to hide content as such and provided you are clearly not trying to manipulate the system there should be no reason why you would be penalised for it.

1. This is the principle although not a given. A good deal of this depends on your sites trust, trusted sites are crawled into far more detail than low trust sites.

2. You could possibly add each new product's url to the site map or alternatively submit each new url to the search engines (this only takes about 30seconds anyway). It is good practice to have an up-to-date sitemap to include all site pages that you would like indexed.

The issue here is a combination of things.

Firstly, if you would like to rank the other pages you could try linking to more internal pages and using a combination of keywords you would like to rank for as well as some long tail keywords to help mix it up a little.

To address the linking issue, there are a few little techniques to 'hide' the links however it is more important to link with the right keywords to address the specific pages you would like to rank for those keywords. An example of this might be that if you were a financial adviser; your home page might rank for mortgage, loans and investments however if someone was to search for 'mortgage products' you might like your specific 'mortgages' page to rank above your homepage. The search engines will look at your links as well as the keywords that are linking them so for example if your home page has a link called 'mortgage services' that links to your page called 'mortgages', the search engines will determine that while your homepage relates to mortgages, the authority for the search term 'mortgage services' is actually another page on your site and so will rank that page above your homepage (in theory).

I personally am not sure how well the search engines rank picture links via alt tags. Personally I would try to sneak some links in there to confirm the structure of your website. Just a tip, for a site I once helped to optimise; we changed the css to declare a class of link were there was no underline and no obvious colour indicator as to the fact that it was a link.

Just as a shot in the dark, perhaps use the footer but add the links in the same colour so they are not visible?