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Read Yoast's "Definitive Guide to SEO" where he specifically says "pages over posts." I think you said it yourself earlier that posts tend to roll off in the SERPs over time.
And users don't know the difference. Also, you won't have to deal with the hassle of blocking the archive and category pages.
The Good: We redesigned our nature travel website (www.ietravel.com) in Drupal. Overall, it's a great improvement in look and usability. Also, we are ranking for more relevant search terms (the SEO was managed by an agency before, and there were a lot of junk terms in their campaigns that weren't converting).
The Bad: Organic search referrals have consistently been down 10-20% year-over-year each and every month.
The Ugly: I am trying to dig in and figure out why this is happening, and I'm at a loss. We are aggressively publishing to our blog 5 days a week, and I've built many keyword-focused landing pages.
Here's what I do know in terms of things that could be problems which I've seen in Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools.
I have a lot of files restricted by robots.txt - 1,337 of them. Many have to be that way by design because they are nodes generated by web forms (w/ private user data). The rest are "Dates & Rates" pages - I restricted them because for each destination they are very similar in content. Wondering now if that was a mistake. For example, http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america/galapagos-islands/dates-rates
We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages. The Lightbox Module that was installed for our photo galleries was a disaster. I am researching a more SEO-friendly solution, but that solution is a month or more away.
We have 31 duplicate meta descriptions.
My question is, could these errors be THAT significantly impacting our rankings?
I should note that according to Google Analytics, Referral traffic & Direct traffic is also year-over-year every month since the redesign. I don't understand the Referral part especially, since we took great pains to put in many 301 redirects. There are no 404s or non-indexable pages showing up in Webmaster Tools either.
If anyone has any suggestions for problem areas or red flags I should investigate, please let me know. Really, any thoughts are appreciated.
Best,
Carlton
You got it. While you can have your ads trigger for a trademarked/competitors' term, you won't be able to use it in your ad copy, therefore, your quality scores on those terms will always be low.
I would put it in a separate campaign for that reason.
Posts are known to be more time-sensitive by the search engines, so will not rank as well as pages.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success
If you're going to allow comments, how will that affect your keywords?
Your most important pages should be pages.
Here is my go-to from the good folks at seomoz:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-an-advanced-keyword-analysis-report-in-excel
Wonderful reply, EGOL. I am very inspired - I hear 'getting stronger' in the background. 
Correct you are about the competitiveness of this space - and we have actually recently had a huge competitor enter the space for our Amazon River cruises.) We are challenged with a lean budget, and I am a one-man e-commerce show.
I think you are right - it's time to go back to basics w/ the term-targeting grader. Solid suggestions on the UI as well.
Question: To your analytics point, what is the best way to determine if the long-tail search volume has dropped? I'm trying to think of the best way to pull this in Google Analytics.
Thanks again for your inspirational post and insight.
I've never heard of it. After visiting the page, I stopped reading after:
I guess if you're going black hat, this is the tool for you, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole!
Sorry, I hit submit before I was finished, but if you are new to SEO, don't use a software like this whose whole aim is to manipulate search results and build low-quality links via comment spam and 'social bookmarking' on sites Google doesn't care about.
Learn to do SEO the right way (it may be the slow way), as outlined in SEOmoz's Guide rather than the fast way, the wrong way. You will just end up chasing your own tail.