CSS is a good way to reduce your code and improve the load time of your pages – it enables you to format your pages centrally instead of having to apply HTML markup to specific areas of your page.

It really depends on where you are just now – if you are using a common CMS then you’ll probably find forum threads and blog posts on how to tidy up the code. Sorting out your own work can be a more time consuming affair!

Scott

1. Ensure your image folder is available to the Google Image bot (user agent “Googlebot-Image”).
2. Ensure all your images have unique and descriptive file names and ALT tags.
3. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and opt in for “Enhanced Image Search”.
4. Ensure your website has reasonable amounts of “link weight” – for larger sites, link weight can determine crawl depth / quota so potentially this could impact images as well (although it’s a different crawler and may work on different factors / quotas / etc).

Scott

You just need to get sites to link to you. If a large part of your link building has been reciprocal links then that could explain the drop in rankings – those may have been devalued.

500 per week is quite a lot – how were you sourcing the links? I wouldn’t recommend that many links each week – the key is to keep links coming into your site on a regular basis. Think of it this way – if you have a short term burst of links to your site, then that might tell Google that your content is popular in the short term, so you get a short term boost in rankings, but in the long term that will drop off. On the other hand, if you have a constant flow of new links to the site that might tell Google that your site is so good that people keep finding it and linking to it, so rankings will be more consistent over time.

Your link profile is important – it’s not just how links point to your site just now (and where they are from and where they point to), but also how you accumulate those links over time.

Scott

The differences between .com and .co.uk are what you would imagine – regional preferences. Which ranking is higher (.com or .co.uk)?

If the .co.uk is higher (it usually is for UK sites) it’s simply because there are less UK focused competing sites than would be included within the .com results. If the .com is higher then it could be down to your targeting – stuff like hosting in the UK, links from .co.uk sites, setting regional preferences in Google webmaster tools can all help with this.

Kevin,

I’d be wary about making too many changes to the site if you’ve just seen a major shift in rankings. My thoughts about your site would be to layout a link building plan because you aren’t doing any regular link building just now. From there you can go on to look at some on page optimisation stuff like we discussed (just minor things).

New content, blogging and so on can be helpful in the long term, but you need to think about it carefully. If you are adding new pages to a site these essentially eat into your “link weight” quota – that’s fine if the content is attracting natural links which would compensate for this (and probably help overall), but without regular link building and definite new links, the new content might hold you back. Of course if we’re only talking about a few pages then it’s not a big deal so don’t worry about it.

Also just “301″ is a bit vague. What are your plans?

I do think the best thing you can do is start a small lin building campaign and plan to keep it going regularly. The rest might be jumping the gun a little at this stage.

Scott

Hopefully this will have an effect.