Welcome to the Q&A Forum

thaanks Chris!

I have a customer that has all his site files as .html extensions and i'm going to rebuild this site into a wordpress site for easier management,

regarding the new permalink structure, should i just do a 301 redirect on this?

THanks for the replies.

Basically The Clients Company name is ARS Inspection Services and the domain we have is houstonhouseinspection.com

Home Inspector and Home Inspections are the main things searched for.

I'm just struggling with how to position this correctly to maximize this long term.

I've done more on a software front than i have the full onslaught of SEO.  I'm really  trying to grasp the correct way to structure this site so that it doesn't die a quick death.

It's such a long domain name, that i tend to get worried about having super long urls for services(standard section/ specialized) and service areas...(houston and surrounding cities)

Currently i have services as houstonhouseinspection.com/inspection-services/general-services and same thing but /specialized-services

That's kind of what i was thinking, now regarding the sub domain that's a great thing you bring up there.

So would you suggest for a new site i'm working on, doing a sub domain multisite install of wordpress-  I should prob keep the www in tact as well then?

This is taken from: http://www.digitalbuz.com/2009/10/21/hide-joomla-subdirectory-in-url/

If you have a website in a sub directory and want to point your main URL to it, here's a trick that worked for us.

We had a Joomla site installed in a sub-directory called "home".  This was sitting next to another directory called "dev".  The idea was to have 2 copies of the same website sitting next to each other:  a "development" site for testing, and a "live" production site.

Scanning the web, we found many people offered the following solution, which involves creating a file called ".htaccess" with the following code:

RewriteBase /

# Add trailing slash if path does not contain a period or end with a slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(\.|/$)
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

#Change http://yoursite.com to http://www.yoursite.com (Optional)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com$
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#Rewrites http://www.yoursite.com/subdir to http://www.yoursite.com/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/subdir
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ subdir/$1 [L]

hopefully that gives you what you need

I have a site that has been up for a few weeks now and is currently in a www format and i am considering changing it to just   mydomain.com

I also have quite a few directory listings (including google places/bing) for this site w/ the www. url.

If i do this, change it in my google analytics, and update my wordpress internal page + htaccess file.   Will i lose any of the link juice i had from my www pages?

Would this be something that would be advised since i've registered for many sites, or is there a potential that this could end up hurting me?

Thanks,

Say you have a website url of a rather competitive keyword phrase, would it be beneficial for me to go ahead and name my site title the same as the url?  And also should my site title go through every page, or should i consider having slight variations throughout the pages?

for example:  page title | site title  or page title| slight varation of title on sub page?

**edit -

to further expand on the question a bit also, if my google places has the company name on _there - would it be effective to go ahead and use the company name in my site title?  _

_Also if i have the main keyword in the breadcrumb as the home, does that effect my SEO credibility if it shows up on all the pages? _

I mean i have a long domain in the deregulated energy market, but it's an older domain and i have it performing well.    But as anything, everything can be better.   So if I'm treading down a dark path here, let me know.  I always operate under the premise everything can be better and nothing is non negotiable.  Clearly I'm posting here for a reason

Sorry posted on an account i use for a client.

Anyway, the domain in question is houstonhouseinspection.com  ->  Given that it's good for the niche market of home inspections.  So shortening it i don't think would be a good idea.

But the url structure i think could be reshaped and the www. could be trimmed out and i could easily keep things in the 65-75 range.

Would this be an effective measure?   .. My only issue is all the www. referrals i have from multiple directory listings that have been registered.   Multiple local ones and chambers and what not.   So ultimately with what my goals here a reshaping of the actual sub directory names would be more efficient.

I have a long domain name, so domainname/services/page title can get pretty lengthy.

I have a services page, as a summary page since there's a few of htem, with more detailed on the actual page.

In this situation, would it be better to do

domainname.com/services/service-name  which can exceed the suggested 70 characters, or would it be a better idea to  do domain.com/service-name and just have hte m under the services menu?

Is there any advantage/disadvantage to going out 2-3 tiers? or having the sub pages of those services  off the domain instead of a child of the root child page

Please let me know if any clarification is needed.

Thanks!

Clever,

Thanks for that insight -  It's like one of those things that almost seems so simple, but overlooked easily.

Regarding that - So I've been reshaping some services page that will split into defined pages for those services, since individually those services are specialized enough that the search value is worth it.

Would you suggest as i put these up start dropping them through blog paragraph/syndication to blog every other day or so - Till we get them all out?

Thanks,

I did do the canonical part from post referring to page, and it's part of a 'resource-center' but also made for a very good piece since it's a prep checklist that i put together for a client.

Otherwise i would have done the post linking, but that's something that will always be there and pretty much wont change.  But the value of it regarding this industry/niche was just too good in my opinion to not put out in a blog.  Just wanted to do it right.

I appreciate the help.

I wrote an article that is a page article, but would also be a very good blog post - So my question is two things:

1.  If i post it as a static page and syndicate it as a blog post and have it as a canonical link to the page, google will read see the blog and read the page _url as the one with credit correct? In turn not dinging me for duplicate content.

2.  Given if the above statement is correct, should I write the blog and put it on my static page referencing the blog or the way i have it as a static page with the blog using a canonical reference back to the page.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.