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I am learning my way around SEO, having always used professionals for it in the past on previous businesses i have decided to do it myself and learn more about it. Now the dilemma i am up against is i recently changed some of my permalinks on quite a few main pages throughout the site. The site launched in April this year so we're quite new.  The problem is since my last change i have not seen any increase...a decrease which in fact hasn't recovered at all. Having now analysed them in more depth and read up more on the whole subject of SEO, (which is endless) i have put together a complete new strategy; with this increased understanding of what i am doing (but by no means conclusive) i want to complete a full overhaul on all SEO (via Wordpress which i use along with YOAST SEO tools), ensuring i have all my keywords, permalinks and descriptions spot on throughout every page, post and picture. I spent a lot of time mapping these out, ensuring there is no Focus keyword duplication, and that the site is relatively flat in terms of its layout. What i am unsure about now is whether changing my permalinks again is a bad thing to do? 
Could it permanently damage my rep going forward?
Should i just focus on my content and keywords/descriptions? I am at a loss as i don't want to do irreparable damage to our reputation.  The site is still reasonable easy to manage so changing now is the best time to do it, but if changing the URLs is a waste of time then i may just forget that and just work on the keywords, descriptions and content. Advice is 'oh so welcome' 🙂

Hi, We've had a debate around the office where some people believe that Google only crawls the first 150-200 words on a page and some people believe that they priority content that is above the fold and other people believe that all content has the same priority. Can you help us? Thanks,
Matt

Hi all! I  have used a wordpress plugin called WPML which translates a webpage into another language so that I have a webpage in two different languages (spanish (main market) and english). I'm just doing the seo for the spanish market and I'm gonna start with the seo for the english one. Should I do it just the same as I had a one-single-language page? just with english keywords, etc. I guessit would only differ in the way I do the linkbuilding strategy as the markets are different Thanks

We have a site that based on your research tools, holds its own in almost all aspects in regards to # of links, # of different linking domains, quality of links, mozrank, moztrust and all that stuff.  Compared to our top competitors, we do very well based on your tools via our campaign monitor. The issue is we seem to be dropping like crazy every month in our rankings and traffic despite this fact, and we can't get our head around the cause.  I do have a couple of ideas, and I wanted to run them by you guys to get your opinion. Domain:  bonitaj.com My Thoughts On Possible Issues... 1.  Text Content & Panda Update I know one of the big things with the panda update was quality of content.  I know one thing we have for sure is a lack of "text-based" content.  Sure, we have home page, main cats, sub-cats and product pages, but they are mostly just windows into the product pages, and don't have a whole lot of good copy.  THIS IS MOST EVIDENT ON OUR PRODUCT PAGES, where each product page is loaded with content, but only 3-4 very short paragraphs of text.  Do you think this is hurting us?  THE ONLY ISSUE IS THAT our competitors also don't have a whole lot of text-based content on their pages. 2.  Too Many Category Pages & Same Products Featured Somewhat on them I think another problem may be that on each category page, we do have a lot of the same products featured.  I don't think its crazy duplicate content or anything, but I do think that back in the old days we got a little crazy with creating "niched out" category pages that pretty much feature the same products as some of the more important and base category pages.  Do you think this is hurting us? I've pitched a solution to this that involves trying to tone down the amount of sub-cats we feature that were originally geared towards attracting long-tail traffic.  In the end that really isn't working anymore anyway, so maybe we're spreading our site thin by going to deep with some of these niche category pages? 3.  Lack of a sitemap? We used to use an xml sitemap, and really don't anymore.  We have nothing on file with google webmaster tools.  I've recently read in one of your blog posts that a simple thing like adding a good sitemap could help our 600+ page site or so get crawled a bit deeper allowing more pages to rank? IN THE END, MY QUESTION IS SIMPLY, IF THERE IS ONE OR TWO THINGS I CAN DO TO GET OVER THIS HUMP, WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST?