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Getting a web page to display your content as TRUE utf-8 requires everything to be set at the utf-8 encoding. 'Everything' includes: your database, your database tables, your database fields, your connection from php to your database, you header as set by php, your header as set by html, your content itself etc.

The following resources were extremely helpful to me when I was switching to utf-8 (which is by far the better encoding over ISO):

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8

http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/utf-8/mysql

Bonus tip: make sure your content and files are saved as utf-8 without BOM (Byte Order Mark), this will save you lots of trouble later!

You can optimize pages for multiple keywords, but I'd be careful about using your URLs for that. The URL should preferably contain the subject the page is about (which could or should coincide with your major keyword). Adding to many different keywords to your URLs will look spammy and you don't want that.

The information you've requested is found on the following link: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot

Yes and no. Depending on how you define 'choose' you will rank optimally for the keyword that you put in your title tag, or the anchor text that you let others use to link to you, or the keyword that you choose to target on your pages otherwise. However, you will very likely start to rank for the other variations as well (but less well, since there is no exact match between the keyword that was searched for and the one you 'choose').

Page 5 for a 1% keyword at Google, with normal rankings at Bing and Yahoo looks like a -50 penalty from Google to me. The dodgy insurance content that was on the domain before might be the cause of this.

More on Google penalities:

http://smallstepsseo.com/types_of_google_penalties.html

http://www.ksl-consulting.co.uk/google_penalty.html

Two posts on the SEOmoz blog might help you further, the first is about the actual value that a DMOZ placement has these days, and the second one describes a way to get listed:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-a-link-from-dmoz-isnt-worth-what-it-once-was

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/want-to-get-listed-in-dmoz-become-an-editor

Rand has written a blog about this a while ago, how not all links on webpages are created equal, you might find it interesting:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

There was very recent blog by Dr. Pete on the SEOmoz blog about this very subject, you might find it interesting:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-keywords-do-i-rank-for

Even though the page does render correctly, it also returns a 404 http status code (which you can verify by the firefox add-on 'HTTPfox' for example). It seems something in your website or webserver is mis-configured which is causing this incorrect http status code (404 error) to be fired instead of the 'all good' code (200) it should be firing for these pages considering they are perfectly accessible.

Have you tried contacting your technical staff or webhost about this issue

Even though I'm not a SEOmoz employee, I think I can answer this answer on behalf of them.

SEOmoz will not make your website more visible or accessible as a direct result of your payment. If you decide to take a PRO membership with the site however, you'll get access to premium resources that will enable you to take your website to the next level with regards to SEO, and keep increasing that level over time.

By using the (premium) tools that are available to PRO members (such as the campaigns that you can use to monitor weekly crawls of your selected websites), you can see very clearly which mistakes you've made on these sites and what you can do to improve your SEO.

I'd say Google isn't seeing this as a partly duplicate title. Especially considering both words contain no spaces (and even if it would, I'd doubt Google would see it as duplicate if both versions had significant search volume individually).

I must add though that I can't recall any hard evidence stating either way, but I suppose others that reply can.

When analyzing your bounce rates, make sure you take into account blog and non-blog traffic separately. Blogs are known for a high bounce rate because people often land on them with long tail keywords, find what they want, and navigate away again.

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If the association has explicitly requested a link back, I think it would damage the trust between the client and the association to make that link a no-followed one. Yes, the value of a one way link is greater than that of a reciprocal one in most situations, but in this case the trust of the association (which already links to you!) should be worth more than the 2 milligrams of extra link juice you might earn by no-following the link.

Did this actually happen or are we talking about a hypothetical situation here? It could be that there is a link to the demo directory you've overlooked? Has the /demo folder perhaps been used in the past and there were still old links to it?

As a meta-solution to this problem: prevent crawlers and nosy people from accessing the content by adding a .htpasswd login to the area used for client approval.

A search on Google (how ironic) for 'google vs bing seo' will bring up several dozen articles, including one semi-recent by SEOmoz: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

Have you checked Google Webmaster Central to see if there is any information on the domain there? Does your website still show up for other keywords? Does the page that was ranking for 'domain sales' still show when you perform a 'site:www.example.org' query for your domain? Have you recently engaged in any shady or black hat SEO activities that might have caused a penalty for this page? Has the page been ranking top 10 for a long amount of time?

In the example you've presented, I don't see a duplicate title tag. Product name A is different from product name B, which makes title page A different from title page B.

If you want those titles to be even more unique, you could consider sometimes such as:

Title page (A): Product name A | Unique Selling Point for product A with Good Keywords

Title page (B): Product name B | Different Selling Point for Product B with Different Keywords

That depends a lot on what you're trying to achieve with those titles. Are you looking for maximum exposure of the title to the user? Then I'd suggest ~45 characters (which is the maximum number of characters visible in the Safari browser, my personal favorite 'Atomic' shows only 10 characters in the tabbed interface). If you're trying to have the page ranked in the iPhone version of Google, I'd advice the regularly advised title tag length of no more than 65 characters as Google appears to have the same cut-off on mobile and desktop browsers. Or perhaps there is another goal you're trying to achieve?

I'd say you can safely put this issue aside. As you've mentioned yourself, xml files don't need title tags, and I presume you aren't trying to have this page rank in the SERPS in the first place anyway. Perhaps one of the SEOmoz fellows can look into this?

There doesn't seem to be much information on this topic. This is what Google has to say about it "Determined algorithmically, these highlighted brand names may help you find what you're looking for faster, and make your research and shopping experience all the more enjoyable."

Some discussion on the subject:

• Official Google Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/this-week-in-search-5110.html
• Google Support: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web%20Search/thread?tid=5c29922f70bebfa0&hl=en

Some of the following will be guesswork since you didn't provide any URLs, but I'll try my best. This old (Atlanta targeted) website, has it been around for a (quite) longer time than the newer (Nashville) domain? Besides the amount of links the older domain has most likely collected, domain age appears to influence ranking on its own (even though only slightly, #10 in the ranking factors http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors). Does the Nashville targeted website have the same amount of local (and related) backlinks as the Atlanta targeted website? You've mentioned that the Nashville website is only live for about 2 months, which I'd consider a really short time to draw any real conclusions to be honest.

With some more time and the same effort as you've put into the Atlanta targeted website, I'm sure the new one will perform in a similar fasion!

Hey tgraham,

Personally I don't see any objections to sending the traffic from the new url to a subfolder on the old domain. Since this page will probably be more relevant to your redirected visitors than your home page, your visitors will have a better user experience this way as well.

Kind regards,
Theo

PS: I presume you're aware of the fact that this way of utilizing the new domain will keep it from ranking in the search engines? By using a 301 redirect only the old domain will rank, not the new one.