I've decided to recreate our site - not all of it but a good portion. I'll probably end up needing some assistance from some experts and don't mind PMs but definitely prefer to start a dialogue here about a topic many probably are interested in - what are the best practices for SEO these days when building your sites. The site I'm rebuilding has a rather large VB forum which might be further optimized (no, I don't think buying vbSEO will soon enable me with a Ferrari to drive) with regard to the pages themselves, noticing some include certain items to increase the keyword density, etc. But let's get to the heart of the matter - the top down approach including the site map. Home page needs to be redone and I'm almost finished with the navigation. I'm probably going to have some links in a drop down that contain many keywords as well (and they will be useful to link to areas, e.g. Doctor Forums with submenu for orthopedics, travel medicine, ear nose & throat, etc.). Regarding the main front page, there will be a news/journal surrounded by areas explaining what you can do, a doc database, medical dictionary, FAQs, etc. I've got xml-sitemaps which is a nice piece of software but it really doesn't do adequate maps for navigation for users. It needs to integrate the below. CMS - I'll probably move to Wordpress from Joomla. Joomla is heavy and I don't care for the way it creates URLs which is not optimal. The components are also not ever well integrated. Other than being really nice for small business web sites, I don't think it's so well suited for community and larger efforts. Wordpress can be a horrific pain but, with some plugins, it's actually slim, fast, better for SEO and our members will use it to write articles. Joomla isn't the best for that. Databases - As far as putting up the doctors database, we may need to redo that as well and we're using a general php database that does SEO URLs although I'm not sure if we may have better options and willing to hear from you guys suggestions. Second, the site's "blog" or "what's going on section" - I was told if you use a subdomain then that area will appear to be another site/domain. This is not good because the blog alone won't generate a ton of traffic, or I don't think so. I'm assuming the more pages in your primary domain the better but, who really knows - perhaps some of you do. Third - The forums state that there is a subdomain but the forums don't seem to appear to use this subdomain. Not sure if I should permanently remove it although that would probably need to be done delicately. Fourth - We also have a few different journals. We have good domains for them and want to link them into the navigation. Just not sure if better off to use them as "kneejournal.com" and "elbowjournal.com" instead of knee.mydocsite.com and elbow.mydocsite.com. The latter doesn't look great and if it's a different site in SEs then I'm better of using Wordpress Multi User with the domain hack and using it in that fashion with all the users connected. So what are your thoughts when building your sites. I have the opportunity to do this right and want to make sure that with this one, I will use the latest mindset on how to SEO your site.