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Hi Marcos, Here's a response from the help desk regarding Juicy Link Finder (specifically regarding unicode characters) that I copied from http://www.seomoz.org/q/juicy-link-finder-doesn-t-support-hebrew-utf8-input. I'm asking the help team to come take a look at this thread and see if they have any more suggestions for your case, but this should help in the meantime. Keri Morgret, SEOmoz associate Hi Kevin I feel like I've got to be honest with you. It's an old tool and we're not very proud of it anymore. It doesn't take advantage of our awesome web index, or all the cool analysis we've done around powerful links. We're working instead to replace it with more powerful link tools. Our newer tools are built to support Unicode, but most of our older ones don't. Sorry about that! For example, I think you'd be much better off trying our Competitive Link Research Tool (it's in Labs and therefore sometimes gets overloaded, but it's so cool when it works!), or even running your competitors through Open Site Explorer. www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect www.opensiteexplorer.org The bottom line is that Juicy Link Finder is unstable and doesn't support Unicode (because we're deprecating it in favor of new technologies), and it doesn't give you very sophisticated results.

Thanks!

I know I'm a little behind the times on this one, I'm thinking of using headway for my next site and seems to have some really nice SEO features.  Built in meta-description fields (this doesn't come with WP), a SERP preview,  easy nofollow, noindex....  All kinds of stuff. Maybe I'll write full review once I've tried it.

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.

Dear Michael, Does your agreement state what you should be getting for your investment? My agreements spell out exactly what my clients are getting- 10 articles, blog posts, videos press releases etc.. Was it strictly link building?  Was there any mention of optimizing your Google local places? What were your goals when you started? If there were no goals set how can you gauge success? Have you had any meetings with them?  Is your traffic increasing?  Are you getting more sales? These are all questions you'll need to ask.

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 .

Above suggestions look great.  Also something that links SEO with the rest of marketing strategy.

Hey Ryan, thanks for the ideas. Respectfully, I disagree however. With something as simple as 'rand(1,4)' in php you can generate random #s. There's no telling what Google could do with their algorithm(s). Okay, so it's (relatively) easy to do, but why would they do it? After-all, they have heavily invested in complicated models that do the ranking for them... Well, they've heavily invested in complicated algorithms, and if cracked, bump- there goes there flagship product.  I'm sure SEOmoz aren't the only people attempting to glean insight using machine learning. And perhaps, others don't like to publish their findings and tip anyone off. Of course, I'm not an A.I. scientist, so perhaps I misunderstand how unsupervised machine learning works, but I'm under the impression that it very well can be used to logically explain all of those factors. I'm sure there's tons and tons of work that would go into it, but if you had the resources (and some do), wouldn't you do it? This is why I wanted to post this question though- to get feedback and other opinions, so thanks Ryan!

I was wondering if the displayed results are how Google ranked my pages. For example my about page comes before any of my products, my products are more important. If Google did list in order of ranking then I could find out my competitors best pages too. I know I can do mine through Analytics but I can't do the competitors. Google must have some logic in displaying them in that order. I thought the sitemap suggested to Google what my most important pages were and hoped it agreed - from your comments I think the main purpose of sitemaps is to ensure my most important pages get indexed and then it's up to Google how important they are for SERPS.

You guys are great, Thanks. I'm amazed by your response times and even AddThis came back to me by email in under a minute.

The placement of these tags within the head doesn't matter - Google and the other search engines will find them - but Wordpress sometimes seems to put a lot in the headers which isn't great and less code is always preferable for SEO.  There is a good article on meta tags here by Kate Morris: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-wonderful-world-of-seo-metatags where she says: _"Think about it like this, your page code is like a set of step by step directions to get somewhere, but for a browser, extraneous meta tags are the annoying 200 feet line items in directions that tell you to stay on the same road you were on!". _ So strip out anything not needed if you can and just have the core tags that you need. She also answers your question regarding keywords - that is, they're not necessary and there's no point spending time optimising them.  If anything, they're a negative because they tell your competitors what keywords you're targetting! Hope that helps, Jen