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Awesome, what great advice

Try to get your targeted keyword in the front of the Title tag if possible. Your example above doesn't dilute the page as it doesnt compete with any of your other page (blue paint, green paint etc), it just adds some enticing copy to encourage clicks. When you are faced with a challenge of either using a highly searched exact match term like "Red Paint" but feel that it doesn't read well in the serps, go with what users would prefer. Example: Best for SEO : Red Paint at Great Prices - CompanyName Best for SEO + better click through's: Quality Red Paint at Great Prices Use the first example as much as you can, (the exact match keyword) and use the second example when the exact match keyword doesn't make sense or doesn't sound enticing.

Very informative, thanks for those two links

Thank you, now I understand!

Hi Lawrence, Your research is quite interesting. It sounds like there's benefit from adding links to this type of directory in the Netherlands regardless of the SEO benefit - if the Dutch are using these types of sites as their start pages, then you may actually gain a fair amount of traffic. Although we have a few banklinks from Dutch directory pages, I cannot say that this was part of any strategy similar to yours. I'd be really interested to know if it works for you, and also whether you get a fair bit of traffic from them. Please post a blog or something about it in a few months - it would be very much appreciated! Matt

You don't need to use a PR Newswire of course. In my experience as a PR, only a minority of journos use them. Far better to target individual journos after researching your key targets. Do something bespoke for each journo.

Well open site explorer is your friend! The best way to get a feel for evaluating link profiles is just to dive in and look at the link profiles of lots of sites - sites that rank, sites that don't and sites that should! Remember to take a good look at the sites themselves to get a feel for their layout, relevance and and high level feel for their authority. (humans are pretty good at evaluating this!) There are tools out there that will help you profile backlinks (such as Link Detective (http://www.linkdetective.com/) (which seems to be down at the moment) Here's an articles from the SEOmoz blog to get you started:: How to Check Which Links Can Harm Your Site's Rankings I don't know if you've got the SEO Toolbar installed (http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar), it's a great way to keep an eye on sites as you surt and an easy way to jump into digging into a sites ranking factors. More than anything else, I would say that the most important thing is to develop an inquisitive nature! Good luck! <object id="plugin0" style="position: absolute; z-index: 1000;" width="0" height="0" type="application/x-dgnria"><param name="tabId" value="ff-tab-21"> <param name="counter" value="369"></object>

Perhaps you are not doing anything wrong, but maybe your competitors are doing something right

Well, they really exist. Of course it is not a usual thing. I know that they should be nofollow's, but they are no follow's. The question is if Google ignores wrong versions or not. What do you think about the mistyped version? Is Google smart enough to ignore them, or smart enough to translate them?

It appears to be an editorially given link (good!), the alt text is not great, but it's good to have variety in your link profile.

I'd suggest keeping it to 2 links. That' s just my gut talking, though. Less can be more. I have some inbound links from press releases I published on PRWeb from 2006 that are PR3 now and don't seem be hurting me at all. They occasionally send traffic to my site. I can tell you're smart enough to steer clear of the half-million or so free Press release services that host web spam.  You would never  hire a service or buy software for posting to "10,000 press release sites" for $4.99.   If you're willing to spend $50 to $200 to put your story on a curated release site like PRWeb where it will be edited, and where it may be picked up by bloggers, then that sounds legitimate to me.  Those links shouldn't bite. I never post to a PR site that doesn't give me the right to remove the content at some point in the future. Just in case...

I don't think there's anything wrong with branding your work in this way. There's a legitimate relationship between you and the customer. Things start to get a little more manipulative when you have "web design" as the link instead of your company/brand name and even worse when you see "web design mytown" and the like. I would give your customers the options of removing the link if they wish, but as long as the link is subtle and the customer is happy with your work then I suspect they won't mind. I'm also guessing you'll have links to their sites from your portfolio page (if you have one?) It's also common to see this tactic used by template developers and again I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with this. If you are concerned with hundreds of links coming from a customers large site then you may want to limit the link to just the home page. You may also want to consider which customers wear your brand. There may be some that you'd rather not be associated with publicly. What i would say is that these links are likely to be relatively low value so make sure you build some good high-value links from authoritative, sites related to your business. <object id="plugin0" style="position: absolute; z-index: 1000;" width="0" height="0" type="application/x-dgnria"><param name="tabId" value="ff-tab-2"> <param name="counter" value="43"></object>

Take a look at these two videos from Google for reconsideration http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA5I3HHApYk These talk about the reconsideration process and some best practices.

I agree. The company that contacted you is doing something called ego bait.  When ego bait is done well it can be very effective.  Their goal is to write something about industry leaders and then hope that the industry leaders like it enough that they link back to it.  But, actually asking you for a link in return is kind of sad IMO. Personally I would probably not link back but it depends on the source.  If the Wall Street Journal wrote about the 100 best websites in my niche and I was included I would write a whole blog post about the fact that I was included!  But if a site made a list of 100 websites, and asked me to link back to them then I would treat that as a glorified reciprocal link exchange request.  I might possibly tweet about it depending on how good the quality was.

Hi Diane, Good to see you already got so many followers which is not an easy thing to achieve. Well with Twitter, Your name under the Profile Settings and your username are taken as the title tags for your profile. With profile image use, your brand name or keyword as filename. Actually, Twitter will automatically use your name under the Profile Settings as the ALT tag for your profile image as well. Optimise your twitter bio info. Applications like FollowerWonk pull out the keyword info from your bio and feed them to their users. Make sure you use hashtags with keywords which are high search volume or most efficient keywords in your niche. Other than that, checkout article1 published in mashable a while back. And this article Hope that helps! cheers.

Brad is right, and adding on to that there might be more than 2 months delay in some cases. Most of mylinks doesn't show up even after 3 months.  Best is to check in Google Webmaster and see the latest links made to your site.

I found answer - its a Google command -  xyz.com inurl:abc.com. thanks guys

Hi Sara, We have used the following and found them quite effective: UK - PRWeb UK Germany - DPA.de Spain / Latin America - Logos-pr.com