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I would also like to add that since you are talking about just "External Links", and obviously there can't be any "paid" links, you need to ensure there's a good diversification of the kinds of links you attain. There are companies out there that do Press Releases, Directory Submissions, Guest Posts and so on. If you as a client only has "links" as deliverable, it's going to be tough. And I don't think it's your best measure of success. It might make sense to hire a full time or part time person local that is either already a link builder or can be trained. Doing too many links of the same type often leads to problems and then a few months later you might be looking for somebody trying to get rid of some of the bad links built in the process. It's always in your best interest to try and hire somebody inhouse if that makes sense and if that has not worked for you or is not making sense financially, I am not sure if an agency or a firm out there can build quality links with the kind of quality control one may need on incoming links. You know what I mean. I hope this helps.

Thanks for your response. I think that makes a lot of sense.

While we don't know the exact math, I think the existence of two PR measures (internal and Toolbar) is pretty much established fact at this point. TBPR is a simplification of a much more continuous PR scale and is almost definitely non-linear. The difference between TBPR 6 vs. 7 is MUCH greater than the difference between TBPR 1 vs. 2, for example.

I would agree with the above as you can really get some good buyer orientated traffic. This tool can help you find forums related to your keywords = http://www.soloseo.com/tools/

I buy most of my expired domains through GoDaddy Auctions. Once you win an auction, it typically takes 4-5 days before the domain name is transferred to your account. Also, I use www.registercompass.com to evaluate expired domain names.

This site gets a lot of image search traffic.  I can not tell you if the captions assist with that traffic.  But I do know that kickass images on a same-topic page will get traffic.

Just updated our "About Us" page. Thank you for sharing that. I believe that will help significantly! If anyone is curious to see it, it is here: http://www.aboutus.org/ApplesOfGold.com

No Longer free. $149

Awesome. Thank you, JXT Group. That worked. We used to show reviews on our ad words campaign too and that disappeared when our Google products dropped off earlier. do you know about that also? thanks!

it is automatic. thanks. see above reply.

Honestly, submit and forget it. You could wait months, and I don't know of any secret way. If you're following the DMOZ rules, then no submission service is really going to help. In many cases, there just aren't enough editors. The other issue is that many new DMOZ links are on deep pages, some of which aren't even getting indexed. No indexation means no link-juice. See my blog post from last year: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wheres-the-love-dmoz At the end of the day, it's just one link. It's nice to have, but your efforts are better spent elsewhere, IMO.

Thanks for chiming in. This does clear up quite a bit for me. Ideally, I would like a balance of relevant links & general high authority links. With that being said, can anyone suggest any high authority sites other than dmoz that I can add my site to that would help?

That's a good reminder: that PR is really only a measure of backlinks. I just wonder how many backlinks is the threshold to get PR4? I supposed to can study some PR4 sites and see if I find a pattern there. 894 unique domains linking to me I suppose is qualifying me for a PR3? Almost 1 million links from those domains combined. I'm not sure how I have almost 1 million links from 894 domains. It's possible someone is linking to me from half a million pages somewhere. I'll have to study it more. But yes, you are right also that my main focus is profit, then sales, then traffic and conversions. It's just that having high PR will bring me more traffic which will bring me more sales, so I'm trying to increase this. I didn't realize that PR is 1 out of 200 metrics involved. I thought it was more like 1 of 4 or something. Thanks for the advice.

Why wouldn't you submit to multiple high ranking content directories sites? If a few pick you up great.... Are you worried of a dupe content penalty? Are you using C tags to avoid this?

Your link returns a 404. Could you cut and paste?

Well, yes, it makes sense that perhaps they would have a reason to give a boost to a site that could earn revenue for them. But I believe at this point it remains speculation.

In regards to mentioning you are going to link to your site, I like this quote a lot: http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/graywolf-tweet.png

I am new to this, but I have heard it said that some no follow links likely provide value.  For example, Wikipedia, because it is so well-curated and tolerates zero spam.