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You need to decide on a single URL structure to your website. http://www.mydomain.com/hello http://www.mydomain.com/hello/ http://mydomain.com/hello http://mydomain.com/hello/ The above four URLs could lead to the exact same page depending on how your site is set up. This would cause confusion for search engines. Which page do they index? Also, when someone links to your site, the links would split between the various URLs so your backlink power would be divided. The solution? Make a choice, then 301 or canonicalize your site based on that choice. If you decide you want the "www" version with the trailing slash, then the canonical code for your page would be: Adding this code lets search engines know which page to index and to consolidate your links to that page. With respect to your keywords, in general you wish each page to focus 1 or 2 keywords. I try to ensure they are used about 4 times on the page. If you see 33 keywords on a page you may be targeting too many words, or using them too often. It could also be that everything is just fine. It depends on a few factors.

Generally Agree with EGOL .. but wanted to add (for queenz) that you seem to answer your own question .. you gotta get your copy and tags down first... paramount .

What are your thoughts one paying an SEO to do linkbuilding? My thoughts on linkbuilding are different from those of most SEOs.  I attack rankings with content and let linkbuilding happen naturally.  That makes the links happen slowly, but nearly 100% of my time goes into producing permanent equity for the website.... and instead of paying a linkbuilder I would rather pay an author. but sites that have a high domain authority will have to be manually done by someone in house. I agree.  Although we generally do not do link building we occasionally request a link from an authoritative website.  I make all of those contacts myself.  If they will be linking to us based upon the merits of our content then someone who can speak to the content will be the most qualified for making the request.  The more technical in nature your content becomes the more important it is to have content area expertise making the contact.

Thanks for the replies. Unfortunately I am using amazon cloud server for some sites, I'll have to look at some creative solutions to get them on different IP blocks or IP's altogether.

Thanks guys. I knew it lost some link juice, but it seems like its definitely worth the extra effort to go back and update the old links. Thanks for the input! -Dave

A badly-spun article can also make your company look bad and incompetent. Do you really want your company name attached to an article that was written by a machine? And do you want a backlink from a spammy blog or directory that is filled with other such articles? You're not getting on most of the good sites with that type of article, as the good sites have humans that can spot these articles and leave them in an unpublished purgatory (at best) or ban the submitter/destination URL from that entire site. Now that it's been a couple of months later, can you tell us what you decided to do, and anything interesting you found?

Hi Chris, Did you find a tool that met your needs? It'd be great to hear about it and be able to share with others. Thanks!

Hiya, Your best bet to begin with would be to read the following: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research And go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Then enter a few keywords you think might be about right. The keyword tool will suggest a bunch of others and show how many people (roughly) search using each word or phrase each month (on average). It's a good idea to check the box for "Exact Match" on the left to get a close as possible figure. Other than that, try a few of the keywords in Google and go on to the sites that come up (competitors for those keywords), then right click somewhere on the page (in a blank area around the outskirts) and click "View Source" (or something similar, depending on your browser). A new page will open. Do CTRL+F to find, and type "Keywords" (without the quotes) then you should find a list of META keywords that site is using it their header. It may not be there though (if they have any sense), and it may not necessarily be good keywords either... it should give you a general feel though if you look through a bunch of them

Thanks for the great feedback in the P.S. - we really appreciate it! Did you know we have a feature request forum? It's a great place to share your ideas. Other people can vote on them and it will help us determine priorities. You should check it out: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums Thanks! Keri

I think that it depends upon the size of your organization and the position where you sit. If you are responsible for a lot of people then you better be planning a lot.... but if you are the widget guy then you don't need to plan as much, your job is to make widgets.

Howdy Wouter, Matt Cutts says some url shorteners do infact pass some value. I know Linkedin isn't using a shortener, but I suspect Google treats those similarly (from Linkedin). That said, Google knows Linkedin well, so they probably assign values to their links in a specific way, regardless of how Linkedin marks them up. That's my hunch and of course, I could be wrong. But with high profile social sites such as facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc... Google knows best about how to treat their massive amounts of outbound links. Just a thought. Does this help Wouter?

You could tell which company? And what keywords would like to optimize the off-page?

Thank you for clarifying and sharing your knowledge.  I think it is easy to get stuck in a link building rut with little variance when working on local, so this will very much help.

That's pretty much what I suspected. I was thrown off by Sarah Copeland's positive review. Thanks!!

Thanks Theo, it will show me the most effective 3000 links I guess, how about the rest? I want to see all the internal / external links and their anchor texts? Any other tool I can check? I also have SEO Powersuite but not sure whether I can use it or not.

Your terminology of "one-way" and link "exchange" would seem to be in conflict. Since it seems that you're not really talking about one-way, but actual link exchanges, I'd echo what searchpl says: be really careful. In my opinion, the risk is far greater than the potential reward, and you'd be better off acquiring true one-way links.

To clarify - It's a popularity thing to me. It's not directly related to overall traffic, but if a site gets more traffic, it's going to be talked about more, linked to more, etc, which increases SEO. That's what I was getting at. Guess I didn't make that clear

OK.  Thanks for your time.