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Yes, 301 redirect is the best option but remember 301 is PERMANENT! For temporary changes use 302.

I am a little confused why management wants to replace the home-page with the store page? I would have to know more about the company and the logic behind the decision (proof of why it would improve conversions). If that has not been explored through behavioral tracking I would be hesitant on doing the redirect.

Besides that you are correct with the complications. Remember is takes some time for Google to crawl the site index the redirect and give the trust and ranking to the new page. If you have a lot of traffic this will happen quicker. Also, keywords from the home-page will take a hit and change after sometime as well.

MOZ article about redirects, the best practices and installation.

Good Luck!

I must have missed this or been living under a rock but when I type 'amazon' in a google search. Below Amazon.com I see a "search amazon.com" search bar.

How do you get this?

Thanks

Hi CKerr,

The only reason I would keep a blog off the website is if you do not want the blog to associate with the company directly but instead be an outside perspective. Or if you want to sell the blog one day. Beside that the blog should be on the site in my opinion.

You can also refer to the forum below that talks about the same issue.

http://moz.com/community/q/should-a-business-blog-be-on-a-separate-site-or-on-the-ecommerce-site-itself

301 re-directs are great for this occasion. Remember that the blogs ranking and trustworthiness will follow it with the 301 re-direct.

All the best!

Remember that we are moving toward consumer friendly content. So putting in a ton of keywords that are just for crawling purposes will not win on Google, you must provide value. But, do not misunderstand keywords are valuable.

PAGE TITLE: Should be geared toward high value keywords; List of Ice Cream Flavors, Best Ice Cream Flavors.

IMAGE NAME: Long Tail Keywords; Good Old Vanilla Ice Cream, Best Ice Cream Flavors in Summer. Ice Cream Flavors With A Little Twist.

IMAGE ALT:Should be specific to the picture. Remember people most people only look at the first page in a search result but when looking for images they tend to search through 2-4 pages (and can do it in seconds)!

I use the On-Page Optimization Tool in Moz to determine my page score for a specific keyword.

On-Page Ranking Factors

All the best,