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This is a little like saying, "What will get me further – more gas in the tank or a better engine?" when we don't know what car you drive, how much gas you have, what the quality of these inputs are, etc. That being said, just creating content though without generating some interest in it (social shares, links, and so on) might increase search traffic due to increased relevancy to searchers, but it might also simply give search engines another portion of your sitemap to ignore. It's tough to say without having a lot more information unfortunately. That all being said, you can rank #1 for all of your key terms and still have no sales if the UX is bad, there are no good purchase CTAs, etc, so you kind of have a third consideration in here – content creation, link building, and CRO.

Well I am glad to hear that Dorothea.

Hi Laurean, OSE is short for Open Site Explorer.

Ok, that makes a lot more sense now! If you do see errors though, drop us a line. Here's a post we did when we updated the directory last year that can also help give you some context. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-guest-blogging/ http://www.copyblogger.com/successful-guest-blogging/ I do guest blogging to the best I can and what I usually do is: Find a few of the best blogs in the niche of the client, I look at all elements - check out the social channel numbers, the amount of social sharing on the posts, number of comments, number of posts going up daily/weekly, length of posts etc. I will then try and make a headline which fits in with the blog but hasn't been done to death. I will then usually create a list type article (Top 5) because I feel the information is broken down better in this format and allows for skim reading if the user doesn't want to sit there and read 2000 words (I make sure every heading has an image as well). The client goes in the byline. That's just me, im not a pro blogger/writer I just try to produce something I would be very proud to put on my own blog.

Well back linking and establishing relationships online is where I struggle. Maybe I need a consultant more than anything to teach me ways I can do so.

Dr. Pete has a good post about this at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

That's a great list Sandip, I don't think many out there would be able to top that. Which one's have you had most success with?

You're very welcome Paul!  It's a very important question and had we not seen Penguin, my answer may have been different.  It just shows how much that update changed the SEO landscape.

When gaining links I find it affective generating various link anchor text, not all defined for the specific term I am looking to be found for. This is so the links to a given page look more natural and so not to hit the Google fuse for over optimisation. We are all individuals, so we all link in different ways and thus it is far better to have a variation in anchor links. This rule can be used for follow and no-follow links too. All the links that come into one page should be of various types.

I agree with Keri, Which is more valuable... cheers from 20 drunks or endorsement by the Pope? I might blog on the Pope's site but the time spent doing it for the 20 drunks would be better spent on my own site.

Thanks for the links - very helpful!

Hi Copyjack, There are many positive things about Localeze's product, but honestly, most of the Local SEOs I know agree that there is no product currently on the market that can replace manual citation building and claiming. Different products build a certain number/variety of citations, but only when you do it yourself can do you have total control over the quality of what you build and where you build it. The tradeoff, is, of course, that manual citation building is much more time consuming than a one-time submission via a provider like Localeze or Yext. If you do decide to go the Localeze route, I think they are a good company.

Mike.... You have rocket fuel that is not being used.  A source of power that is very easy-to-get. Your site has a collection of .pdf documents in the "Handouts" section.  Do the following to everyone of them. Open the documents and add a link to your website in the footer of the document or make the name of your organization in the header a live link.  Right now, all linkjuice that goes into these documents dies and is not being passed into your website.  I might also add a link to a relevant category page of your website or a relevant blog post or relevant article.   These pdfs probably have natural links from other sites.  Get the power of those links into your main site.   These links will enable visitors to click to your site for more info and perhaps a conversion. While you have these documents open modify the "properties".   Add a title and description.  These will appear in the SERPs as title tags and turn your pdfs into competitive pages in the SERPs.   After doing this I would "lock" the pdfs. On the "Media" page, these documents open into small windows which are separate URLs on your website.  If these pages had some text content and title tag they might compete in the SERPs.  They might also attract some links.    As above these pages should each have one or more links back to your website to pass power and deliver traffic. Be careful that these media pages do not become "thin" content or "duplicate" content.  If you can give them some unique beef they should perform well for you. We have a website with rankings that are almost totally supported by popular pdf documents and pages that support them.  You can do this too. Good luck.

Thanks guys, that what I wanted to hear!

In our case it wasn't worth the money at all. All we received was very poor links from unrelated or 0 authority sites with no traffic. It's risky so you should first ask for a free trial. (if they offer it)

Hey Charles, First, I would get in touch with the website owner or whoever you submitted your guest post to and request that they add your link to the article. I would do this very respectfully, and treat it like it might have been a mistake. I wouldn't even mention that you want to the article taken down if they do not add it, since the ultimate goal is to get the link. Also, I would create the code for the link to make it easy on them. If they decide not the add the back link (bummer), then it is your call if you want to make the effort to get the article taken down. The only reason I would take the time to get the article taken down is if you have another niche website that will publish the content and will add your link. Otherwise, I would just make note of that website and never guest post for them again. I hope this works out for you. I know how much time it takes to write good guests posts, so I really hope you get the link out of it.