Thank you, hope it is of use to you.

For 'regular' SEO citation usually offer very little to no value. Most citations include a nofollow link and citation-website are often not niche specific.

Sure users might go to a local listing service like yelp and search for a business that performs the service they need or sells the product they need. But these searches are often for local businesses. If the business we're talking about is indeed a local business than they would benefit from this through Local SEO and the users searching for them through these platforms.

For a non-local business the value of citations is debatable. It doesn't hurt, but there might be better links to pursue.

Citations are very important from a local business point perspective. Citations help increase your ranking in the local search results which can result in more customers.

As Kevin stated they do not directly impact your ranking.
The user experience might be harmed if the 404 page is not optimized for the user.

Using a custom 404 page you can assist the user to further explore the website on which they have arrived. If this is not done they might immediately leave the website and visit another one.

Google uses usage metrics in it's rankings now and therefor a lot of 404 pages might indirectly impact rankings.

Oke, i see your point.

Perhaps you would find your answer in this article-> http://www.e-nor.com/blog/google-analytics/time-on-site-2-0-tracking-conversion-duration-in-google-analytics

I would also recommend reading the following article -> http://blog.custora.com/2012/10/dont-look-at-average-time-to-conversion/

They have some valid points in there.
I hope my answers have been of assistance

I'm not entirely sure if the time is the most relevant factor to take into account here.
People browse the web in different ways and some people are very fast and some very slow.

My focus would lie more on the amount of actions someone has to take from the entry point of the site till the conversion and try to improve from there.

I do not know if there is a way to track the average time to conversion to be honest.

Ben Morei stated the difference between HTML4 and HTML5 in using heading tags already. His answer is therefor completely correct.

What i would like to add to his answer is that you should look at H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 tags as if the webpage is a book. In a book the chapter-title is a H1 tag. All the subchapters have an H2 tag. If these subchapters have another sub-area then this would be marked up with an H3 tag and so on.

Having a clear hierarchy in your heading tags will make it more user friendly. Search engines might also understand better which parts of the content are connected to each other and which are separate because of this.

Hope i answered your question and if anything is still unclear feel free to ask more details.
We have three answers to your question here now and the question is still on marked as 'unanswered'.

If your question is answered could you please mark the answer which was most helpful as the correct answer so this question is no longer on the bounty page for no reason?

Schema.org is a quite extensive vocabulary for implementing structured date. The data highlighter tool only offers limited options for implementing structured data information about your content to the search engines.

So, yes i would recommend schema.org because it is more specific.

If you think my original response was helpful could you mark it as the correct answer to close this question?

Hello Denis,

To your first question: Schema.org is indeed much more specific than Google's data highlighter tool.
To your second questions: If the client has a footer with their contact details and address location than this would be a good place to use the schema markup and then it would be included on every page.

You're talking about 'manually marking up every page'. If the contact information is in the footer this would only have to be marked up once? Don't really understand that part of the question.

**Conclusion: **It's not necessary to mark up local business information on every page, but if the client has the local business information on every page because it's useful for their users than this is a perfect opportunity to mark it up with schema information.

Hope i was of assistance and if you have any other questions please let me know

Footer links don't provide much SEO benefit anymore. It can even hurt your SEO if you overdo it.
If the links are not useful for the user than i would suggest dropping them altogether.

I do like the suggesting  provided by Eric Rubin though. A Javascript based toggle for the footer links would keep the UI pretty and clean while it still gives your users the ability to open the menu and visit any links there.

It all depends on the links though. If they are only there because of SEO reasons and not for helping users find good content then i would recommend just dropping them altogether.

Ben Morei stated the difference between HTML4 and HTML5 in using heading tags already. His answer is therefor completely correct.

What i would like to add to his answer is that you should look at H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 tags as if the webpage is a book. In a book the chapter-title is a H1 tag. All the subchapters have an H2 tag. If these subchapters have another sub-area then this would be marked up with an H3 tag and so on.

Having a clear hierarchy in your heading tags will make it more user friendly. Search engines might also understand better which parts of the content are connected to each other and which are separate because of this.

Hope i answered your question and if anything is still unclear feel free to ask more details.
We have three answers to your question here now and the question is still on marked as 'unanswered'.

If your question is answered could you please mark the answer which was most helpful as the correct answer so this question is no longer on the bounty page for no reason?

Root domains i suppose. Where exactly do you see RDs?

Hello Denis,

To your first question: Schema.org is indeed much more specific than Google's data highlighter tool.
To your second questions: If the client has a footer with their contact details and address location than this would be a good place to use the schema markup and then it would be included on every page.

You're talking about 'manually marking up every page'. If the contact information is in the footer this would only have to be marked up once? Don't really understand that part of the question.

**Conclusion: **It's not necessary to mark up local business information on every page, but if the client has the local business information on every page because it's useful for their users than this is a perfect opportunity to mark it up with schema information.

Hope i was of assistance and if you have any other questions please let me know

I would recommend going for option 2 -> domain.com/category/images

The keyword you mentioned is "Category images". Both of these words are now in the URL structure. The difference SEO wise is very very very small though.
The structure of option 2 is much simpler and more straightforward. It looks less spammy and is easier to type in. Therefor it's better for the user and for you to use option 2.

If you have any other questions feel free to ask me

I've worked with some e-commerce sites before. I'll try and explain the way i handled it.

1. Know the opportunities and limitations of your CMS (Content Management System). I've worked with Magento and i did a lot of things by myself which were done automaticly by Magento. Such as creating XML sitemaps. Knowing what your CMS does for you helps you focus on the weak points of the CMS.

2. On page optimisation: An E-commerce site wants to get found on it's products in most cases. Are your product pages optimized? Make sure that all your product pages have a really good title and description. Not only for SEO purposed. Of course having your important keywords in there helps but make sure people would click on it too. Find someone from your target group and ask them about the quality of your titles / description. Would they click on it? If no, then why not. Use their feedback to improve them even more. Product descriptions should be really good too. This webshop http://www.vat19.com/ really knows how to create product pages which are aimed at their target group and contain a lot of content. The images and video's are rich media which are relevant for the target group and Google loves this.

3. Social: There are so many possibilities for E-commerce websites on the social platforms. Make sure you have a Facebook page, twitter account, Google+ account and Pinterest account. The buttons should be implemented on at least the product pages as well. Facebook and twitter allow you to reach your target group and get more exposure to other people. It is now even possible to include webshop functionality on Facebook pages. Google+ will soon get this too if i'm not mistaking. I mean they have Google shopping and they are making Google+ the center of all Google products with an added social layer. Pinterest allows you to pin all your products and recently they added the option of adding prices and stock to your pins.

4. Link building: As Takeshi said before this is an excellant list of link building techniques: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies. Make sure you have content that people want to link to. Some e-commerce solutions offer a blog next to the webshop and i know that there is a Magento plugin for making a connection to Wordpress. A blog is something to get a better connection to your customers and is great link bait by itself. If you do other things such as product review video's or so this is also an excellant place to gather feedback from customers.

I hope i helped you somehow and if you want more advice or if anything was unclear please let me know.

Good luck

For 'regular' SEO citation usually offer very little to no value. Most citations include a nofollow link and citation-website are often not niche specific.

Sure users might go to a local listing service like yelp and search for a business that performs the service they need or sells the product they need. But these searches are often for local businesses. If the business we're talking about is indeed a local business than they would benefit from this through Local SEO and the users searching for them through these platforms.

For a non-local business the value of citations is debatable. It doesn't hurt, but there might be better links to pursue.

4000 products is indeed a hell of job to tackle if you want to write an original description for every single one of them. It is recommended to do this since it will improve the site.

I agree with Doug that you should start on the products which sell the most because you want to get found better on these products. I would start doing a given amount of products each day and keep good track of which products you did and which you didn't change.

Furthermore what i think is the most important thing is the title tags and description tags of those 4000 pages. Are they well optimized? Even if the pages are ranking well at this moment the title and description tags are the only way you can convince the visitor to click on your link in the search results and therefore they should be compelling and descriptive.

Very good one Takeshi. Didn't think about whether the site in question had similar products like these. You are also right about the user reviews.

User reviews are a great way of getting unique content on a page. If you implement user reviews and ratings make sure you mark them up with structured data such as HTML5 Microdata. This way it can appear in the rich snippet. This page explains a lot about it: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173379&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

I see a link to http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/HeutinkICT.aspx from http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/ReindersICT.aspx.

It's the bottom left block which causes this link. This way you will get a big nesting effect.

The 301 redirect would be a better option.

I will try to explain why this is better than a 404 page.

1. If people posted a link to the product PageRank to your website.(This is one of the ranking factors in Google) If the page doesn't exist anymore and brings up the 404 page it will lose the value from all the links to that particular product. If you use a 301 redirect to send visitors to a relevant product or to the homepage then the value from those links will have effect on the page where you send them to.

2. Nobody likes a 404 page. There are very cool things you can do with a 404 page so that they are still helpful to the visitor such as most popular pages, a search function and even jokes. But in the end nobody would have clicked on the link or typed in the url to your website and think: Now i want to see his 404 page.

I hope i answered your question. Let me know if anything was unclear.