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I was looking at competitors to see why they were outperforming us in some areas. We convert  mostly from returning visitors who have either searched for variations of our brand or searched for a specific brand or product we sell. We rank well for those terms, but also need traffic from some high-volume competitive generic terms to bring customers into our conversion funnel. Our sites don't yet rank highly enough for some of these funnel-entry terms due to weaknesses in external link networks. I don't have time to replicate the quantity of links some of our competitors have, so am looking to beat them on quality instead.

The Spiders cant crawl the app ( assuming its a native app ) in which case I dont think there will be any "direct" SEO benefits, but you might get new followers for you brand who might  indirectly help in SEO but if its a web app and if search spiders can index the content then it will have some direct SEO weight to it. NOTE : this is just my thought ( would be interesting to see if anyone thinks otherwise ) Hope that help

There has been quite a bit of experimentation which indicates that the "First link counts rule" does not hold in certain situations. This Youmoz post gives a good explanation - Exceptions to the First Link Counts Rule Hope that helps, Sha

I just watched this video and I was going to ask the same question. Are SEO agencies really employing this as their No1 Tactic. Does this still work in Panda world for backlinks as the Market Samurai Suggests... watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=nsL5_neIHD4

The more links you have on one page the less PR is passed to each page linked to. 10 links means each link will get 1/10th of the link juice. 100 links means each page linked to will get 1/100th of that PR, for example. I don't know why a site would have more than 100 links on a single page, unless it's a directory listing or something, but Google should spider the whole damn page regardless of the number of links. Back in the days I think they spidered 100 links or so and then moved on, but nowadays they keep crawling I've been told. They want to find EVERYTHING on the web these days so they can give the best search results possible.

hmmm... this is a marketing company?  They need a kick in the pants.  It sounds like as an intern you will be with them for a limited amount of time.  If that is the case then follow the advice given by others. However, the folks at this company really need to go waaaay back to the basics. If I was an intern there I would try to do something else - instead of attempting hatchet surgery on a sow's ear. (This can be risky because you don't know who conceived the original site and what the company thinks of it.... however they must not think much of it if they are willing to turn it over to a stream of interns. Also your comments that the owner of the business thinks that forum spamming is good advertising shows that they don't understand the web.) However, the truth is... this website should go back to the planning stages....  this company needs to determine: the objectives of the website, what they expect visitors to do, learn, buy, contact, etc. when they arrive at the site plan a pathway through the site for each type of visitor that will lead to both visitor and company goals and then storyboard a website that accomplishes both visitor goals and company goals determine how people interested in the services of the company might search for the site determine a cluster of keywords that will market your services in the geographic area that is served plan content for the site that will position it in front of those keywords Should you do this?  Hard to say.  It depends if the company is serious about making a good web presence or if they are satisfied with their current farting around. I don't recommend posting their URL here... would be bad marketing.

Ah now I see. Outbound to other sites. Yes you definitely don't want to do that!

Your 1st question: Go to www.google.com and type in the domain name, with and without the "www." For example, search for "www.domain.com" and then search for "domain.com" (without using quotes around the domain name). If the domain shows up in the search results then it is not banned in Google. To investigate a domain further at Google, see what Google returns when you perform a site: search at Google. For example, if you go to Google and search for "site:www.domain.com" and then "site:domain.com" and Google comes back with "Your search - site:www.domain.com - did not match any documents," the site most likely is banned at Google. Your 2nd question: Was best answered below. Do not associate with any sites that have been determine to be spam, been penalized or even banned from Google.

In an ideal world the links to your homepage should be descriptive and help people looking for what you offer to find you. So, most of those would be branded terms then there would be a wide variety of descriptive terms with some having more  value than others. Re selling your application, what does it do? Is it in demand? is it unique? Does it do it better than the free ones? Are you in a position where getting the app out there and build brand recognition is more  important than generating a few bucks? There are no generic answers for these kind of questions, it depends on the business and your specific goals.

internal linking sounds so obvious yet I didn't think about it! guess internal linking is better than nothing. about the last technique, its too tricky and risky for me. great suggestion nonetheless.

Hi Dan Ran the report and its as I thought My site has better rankings across the board than 6 of the top 10 results? For example on page optimisation analysis is graded A and there is only one other A grade in the top 10 FB shares - we have none but only 3 of the top 10 have 1 FB share each, while we are the only one with a Google Buzz share. We have the 4th best domain authority and mozrank, 3rd best moztrust Linking c and root domains we are 5th best and 4th best page authority We have been building links the past 2 weeks but these dont seem to be showing in the report as on exact anchor text links we have 0 when we should have several.  BTW out of the top 10 8 out of the 10 have 0 for this metric Does it take time for the links we have built to show in this report?

google directories don't exist anymore. this question was asked before google killed their directory.

I wouldn't recommend spending money or much time on a directory inclusion/link placement for a page that is not in the primary index and has at least a PageRank of 1 (the page itself - not the domain) Thanks for your great list and sharing of experience. But, I have one question about above statement. Does it really matter? Recently, I saw following Webinar on SEOmoz. Future of link building Effective link building Both Webinar are excellent and get too many new things about link building. They recommend to do directory with specific manner and spending less time over there. They are focusing to do something real to gather natural links. What's something real in link building. I can 100% agree with quality and paid directory where we can add our website with certain budget management. In social culture, natural link environment... Does it rally matter to focus on directory? What you think about it? If you can give me more idea so it will help me more to understand about it. Thanks again for your answer.

I figure they can find related sites in several ways.  How can you tell if they have made this determination?

The stumble upon (paid) did the trick