Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Press releases are not seen as paid links they are used by big companies to get news out and are not considered spam or paid-  That being said they are seen as duplicate content and discounted unless they are picked up and reworded.

I have heard others complain of drops after starting ads to promote posts but i have never seen any data to support it.

If they got picked up by media and reworded then that is great for seo if they just got picked up as is it doesn't help seo so much.

I use seomoz , ahref and raven tools - Would love to hear what others do aswell

Correct

The home page doesnt have a keyword in it only the sub pages do.

so you home page is www.example.com and the page that is about keyword is www.example.com/keyword

Hope this helps

Niche Directories are fine if you think users will find your service in it

(ask yourself do expect that link to get clicks & If search engines didnt exist would you  still want that link) - such as a directories of seo companies based in Settle.

Without seeing the link i would say - i dont think any 1 sidebar  link  will have a negative effect on you if you have a normal looking backlink profile.

I only see 1 link to your site using ahref and opensiteexlorer.com - It looks like you need to get more links

Best is to do site.com/blog so the links to the main site helps the blog otherwise you need to get links for 2 domains

If you plan on doing a bunch a month you can get it cheaper thru vocus the parent company -pm me for my contact at vocus

I cant really understand your question -but you can see links for your site using opensiteexdplorer.com. If you want to see links made recently i would use  http://ahrefs.com/ or http://www.majesticseo.com/

I think  Press Releases are great for brand new sites to get ranked for the brand name they are also great for reputation management or to own a branded serp.

For regular seo i only see value in it if the content of the pr will get picked up and rewritten by real sites. In order for this to happen you have to have a great compelling piece of news.

I hope this helps

ps. You can find a number of  Press Release companies - prweb , prnewswire, marketwire ,ereleases etc

How much would you pay per article? Or for all 200? - pm me

You can write great content for your site that people want to read and share- Another great way is by writing high level guest posts on sites with high traffic and then linking back to you in the bio. Youmoz posts are a great way of gaining traffic and credibility to your site and service.

ps.- Remember to provide value -You need to write really good content to get noticed

Adwords has a re-targeting feature which generates the code you need.

It has changed alot - Your linkbuilding now should be with the goal of getting relevant traffic to your site in a natural looking way (watch anchor texts). So all the old methods still exist as long as your trying ton get traffic to your site from them - I would try to focus on creating great content on your site people would want to send traffic to from around the web and guest posts on sites with audience that may send people to your site. Think more about marketing and relationships then linkbuilding - Hope that helps

Ps- seo take longer and is harder post penguin/panda

Check your exact match anchor links for your site could be that word was overly used causing a penalty on it.

First look at your analytics dont just trust semrush