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I absolutely agree Marc. This is a HUGE Pro Tip that took me a while to fully appreciate. By targeting the long tail version in the short run, you can build up some traffic, trust and other metrics. But you're also simultaneously targeting the head term so as time goes along you'll likely end up ranking for both (if you've followed a well devised strategy of course) Thanks Marc, Cheers

Good suggestions.  Ontolo has a service were you can add your most imp links to, and monitor if those go down. However, it would be nice to get alerts, for example google alerts, when a link goes up, and also when it goes down.  Ideal for all links per domain.  Anything out there on this?

There are different names around this concept - search visibility, web visibility, keyword visibility etc. Ideally you want a tool that will quantify your website's "visibility" for a particular set of keywords or niche. Any such tool or report would take not only keyword volume into consideration, but also weight based on rank. Because of what we know about click-through rates, positions 1-3 are much more valuable that position 25. In fact, SEOmoz doesn't rank keywords past position 50 because the return on investment for webmasters past that point is almost nil. Google Analytics tries to provide some of this data in their SEO Reports, but the information doesn't include competitor data, and is an estimate at best. The best "out-of-the-box" tool, to my knowledge, is the visibility score offered by Advanced Web Rankings. Perhaps a better, and free, way to get this information is laid out by Ben Estes in this post about Defining Your True Competitors. Requires a bit of Excel wizardry, but it's an excellent method. SEOmoz is constantly updating it's Rank Checking capabilities. If this is a feature you would like to see, I encourage you to fill out the survey located at the soon-to-be-replaced Rank Tracker, or submit a vote at the feature request forum. Further Reading: Search Engine Visibility as a Metric

I think being a genuine member of a forum can be helpful, though it can also be time consuming to become a real member of the community and participate even when you're not getting an immediate link. One helpful part of becoming a member of the community that is related to your client/site is that you get a feel for the questions that people ask, current problems in the field, and can get a lot of ideas for content and products that are needed in that field.

I am pretty familiar with the challenges with machine learned list generation. There are so many quality indicators that can be faked.  headed up some similar projects to make these exact things viable. I feel your pain. I appreciate the one on one. Dont be a stranger. exchanges like this are what make seo what is. P.s. one thing we did is look for any directory, scrape its categories based on their listings, rank them based on PR, and multiple other strength indicators. Then filter through the list by seeing who charges, who doesnt, and who exists and the amount of outbound links on pages with less than 100 links, are they blog rolls, are they etc... todd. I wish you the best. TODD

Excellent response THB. We do both for all sites.

If I am understanding your question correctly, you have a page on your website which has gained popularity. You would prefer three other related pages to benefit from this popularity. You did not share your URL so I will make up an example: Popular page: apples Other three pages: apple juice, apple sauce, apple butter On your /apples page, whenever you first mention "apple juice" in content, use the phrase as anchor text pointing to the /apple-juice page of your site. Repeat the process for "apple sauce" and "apple butter". This process will provide you with three relevant links in content which also capture the perfect anchor text for your page. It's the best type of links possible. The only thing you can do to further improve the value of these links is to ensure they are as early in the article as possible. A secondary approach which is not as effective would be to offer a sidebar block titled "Relevant Articles" or something along that lines, and then offer links to the other 3 pages in that block.

I would defiantly agree that results can fluctuate between different times and computers. One site I have been monitoring carefully recently has been bouncing around a lot between the 1-6 spots. One minute its up, the next down - and different machines at the same time show different results. One trick I have found is to put &pws=0&gl=xx on the end of the URL. pws=0 turns off personalised search while gl=xx simply breaks geolocation. I often find that when gl=uk shows results I don't know wheteher to belive, gl=xx shows the more stable result.

haha thanks!

The definitions for the mozBar metrics can be found in the URLs below: PageAuthority - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority mozRank - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank mozTrust - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust Domain Authority -  http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority For spotting a weakness in a competitor, I wouldn't rely solely on the mozBar.  But for all intents and purposes of your question I would look at two key metrics to compare: the PageAuthority and total number of linking root domains. PA gives you an idea of how much more/less authority you have compared to your competitor's page.  The number of linking root domains gives you a rough benchmark of how many more unique linking domains you'll need to catch up to them. Hope that helps!

Hi Sha Menz, Exactly this is what I was thinking and looking to hear! Really happy to find this information. Now I can move forward, because I was doubtful whether I was right or not. thanks so much!

Bonus points, that's cute. Best way to get a point is to do this.

Yep, i think you nailed it. I crawled another 2 sites I manage, one has sexy bookmarks, one doesn't. The one with had 404 errors. A quick search for sexy bookmarks causes 404 had some results as well. You're right about the issue with the other plugin, commentluv. Will definitely take that suggestion to the developer. And a hat trick, you're right about the block of latest from the blog on the footer. Been meaning to take that out for ages. Very grateful for your attention and wisdom! Thank you!

It's working now, thanks!

Hi Adam, The URLs in Open Site Explorer get updated about once a month, and the data can be up to two months behind. November 2nd was the last update, and the next update is scheduled for November 30th. You can see the schedule at http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule. Hope this helps!

If you export the report, it will show you the referring page