Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Agreed with Simon. Look at tons of huge online retailers like Zappos. Just needs to be done right and you're fine.

Have you already gone through all the SEOmoz PRO resources? If not, I'd definitely start there.

Hi Kevin,

Interesting timing. We JUST made the decision to switch from BigCommerce to Magento, and last Wednesday I discovered Ultimento. On first glance a lot of the customer reviews looked fake, but there are hundreds so I'm hoping that's not the case.

Long story short, from my research it looks like a lot of the features can be accomplished individually with different Magento extensions and such. That said, it looks like it can save you time. We have a lot of moving parts (which I'm guessing you do to) so went ahead with it and opted for the middle package (I think it was $300 or so) if it saves at least some time it will be well worth it for us. Plus, Magento can be finicky so I'm hoping it makes things a little less painless. This is our first Magento project so we are looking to reduce any pain points. (I've done a lot of research on speed enhancements and hosting if you want to discuss).

Ultimento also appeared to have some helpful features (not SEO related) that we will take advantage of. Again, doable with different extensions, but I like how it's all packaged up.

My developer is testing out Ultimento as I type this. My main question is if there are any customization limitations with it. We're doing some fairly custom stuff, so hopefully not.

I can circle back later this week with some more input on it after we test it out a bit. On first glance it's very clean though and the install was pretty quick.

Feel free to send me a message if you want to talk further about it (or other Magento items) offline.

Good luck!

Ha -- SEOmoz should offer a license/white-label of the forum technology. I'm sure there are many others (have not shopped yet) but I like this one.

Agreed with CafePress.

You can still focus on long-tail, but on your own domain. So www.familysite.com/long-tale-insurance-page.html etc

I'd definitely focus on long tail and also local modifiers. Insurance is probably one of the top 5 most competitive (from an SEO perspective) businesses. Would recommend not focusing your entire marketing portfolio on SEO. may be some great social opportunities, especially if you're local/regional.

My 2 cents.

Take the time spent on thinking and researching purchased links and spend it on developing great content and building solid relationships.

You may find some helpful comments on a discussion I started last week. We were in a situation where we are starting a new video/content blog with issues putting it on the root. Finally made the decision to move to a platform that allows us more flexibility with this (for this and other reason).

http://www.seomoz.org/q/a-blog-structure-dilemma-we-re-facing

This may help: http://searchengineland.com/organic-click-thru-rates-tumbling-study-97338

CTR-Curve-Google-vs-Bing-SlingshotSEO.png

Why not build engagement and recommend growing a profile?

Is her business located in Canada (e.g. she has a physical Canadian office address that will be on the site)?

I would recommend that, along with the .ca, plus dozens of other factors to specifically target Canada.

Agreed with Vistage. If it's a balance of time (and regardless) I'd definitely try to focus on the stronger blogs your guest posting on. But yes, great to have more links from some strong blogs, and just more exposure to their visitors.

I'd double check you don't have any traffic or links to these pages, then either delete or redirect.

Having the blog on a subdomain, e.g. blog2.site.com also runs the risk of not benefiting the primary domain, in terms of inbound links to the blog.

The best bet is to have the blog at site.com/blog or have it anywhere and setup a reverse proxy so it resolves at site.com/blog.

Here is a great article/infographic on the reverse proxy: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo

Plus it just looks better to the user. IMO. Cleaner.

We have the situation where a group of products fit into 2 different categories and also serve different purposes (to the customer).

Essentially, we want to have the same product duplicated on the site, but with unique content and it would even have a slightly different product name. Some specifications would be redundant, but the core content would be different.

Any issues?

Are you essentially asking if you have Boots, Dress Shoes and Flip-Flops, and on each you link to the other, e.g. "you may be interested in these awesome leather boots" or in the side nav everything is linking.

If so, yes - a good idea. It helps the search engines find other content. I would make sure there is content to the link, e.g. not just a random link in the middle of nowhere, but within navigation, related products, "other categories" "suggested products" etc etc, this is fine.

There are some white-board Fridays to check out about exact match anchor text that may help too.