Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Here is a similar Q and A that I wrote a response to suggesting 4 tools which I have found immensely useful. Market Samurai also has some video tutorials that teach a really good strategy for finding great keywords.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-keyword-research-tools-do-you-recommend-to-help-with-seo

hope this helps.

Question number 1: No

There is a good rule of thumb:

If a competitor can do it to you then it is not harmful to you.

Here is why: There are many sketchy places you could get links to a competitor which would then give you control over their reputation without their say.

Question number 2: Also no but sometimes yes! (read below)

This one is a little different. Getting a link from a questionable source is not bad for you as described above, however if you reciprocally link back to that source then you may be vulnerable to being penalized by google if the site linking to you has been penalized. It is your responsibility to make sure you do not vote to bad neighbourhoods.

To further answer question 2, if you are reciprocally linking to a bad neighborhood and also linking out to another site your outgoing link can only be harmful if that site reciprocally links back to you.

So as long as your follow the answer above for question 1 then there will be no trouble

Hope this helps.

1. SemRush - SemRush is by far the best tool I have used for keyword research. You can see almost everything you can imagine about all your competitors keywords. You can also get an almost endless list of keywords almost instantly with any search. For example I searched money and instantly got a 10001 long list of keywords including the term money with incredibly useful data which you can save and keep even when you are not a member. This one offers a free trial though you need to give a credit card and cancel before its done.

2. Keyword Country - Keyword country is great. you can search and sort by almost any data types and with all sorts of ranges. You can search by CPC for keywords which is just ridiculous. This one also offers a free trial. Well worth checking out.

3. Market Samurai - From my experience market samurai was my first and favorite keyword tool for a long time and it even comes with a free trial.

4. Adwords Keyword tool - I wasn't much of a fan of this one at first but then I noticed if you log in you can see up to 800 results and use it pretty well to find some good keywords.

Generally I use several tools together to do my research as I find each has its strengths and weaknesses.

This is with over a year of experience. Enjoy!

When I started adding related posts at the end of each post and created a strongly relevant internal linking throughout my posts my ranking shot through the roof.

Yet another related post plugin for wordpress is great.

I have noticed that getting links from the appropriate TLD extension really determines where you rank on each google serps for the individual country.

you can search for sites related to yours for the specific TLD by putting inurl:.com in google along with your keywords.

the same thing works for all other extensions.

this makes finding .edu link opportunities a breeze for example

Besides link building you will want to make sure on webmaster tools you have set your targeted country to the country you want to rank best for. For example I have a site about college students which I've set to target the US since Canada mostly calls post secondary education University and College so the audience is split much more.

Hope this helps.

This is a really good question. Actually what I think is best is actually keeping the links separate and using the appropriate and most descriptive text for the page the text link points to and using the next best phrase in the image for the alt text. ex if you have a product called "big red dog house" then that would be the text link anchor text and the image alt text would be "large red dog house".

To solve the issue of too many links you should create subcategories within the categories to display fewer listings per page to reduce the number of links.

Now if you are worried about burring products make sure to divide the categories as evenly as you can so they do not go too deep. So if you have 70 products that were on the "dog houses" page try to make the dog houses page lead to a page with two links to categories "small dog houses" with about half the products and "large dog houses" with the other half. this way you create a tree of sorts (you can make many categories). The idea is to layer your navigation to guide the user towards what they want to find while structuring your navigation to give your products the attention they deserve from and seo stand point.

hope this helps

Your best bet is to learn how to find dofollow links from high page rank sources.

A good way to do this if you have limited experience is to find a forum or registry required site that allows you to comment while getting a link to your profile with each comment. Also make sure that the profile allows you to have a dofollow link to your site. It is not too hard to post comments on pages and threads with 4PR+ which will boost your profile a great deal and thus boost your site's PR while being a legitimate way to provide value and get good results for yourself too.

buying and selling links is frowned upon by google.

Wayne gave a good answer.

From a great deal of research I have found that a 301 redirect loses some of the link juice to avoid people abusing the power of building many domains and then forwarding them all to one main domain.

In my opinion this is well worth it still especially when you don't have to go through the work to have established the link portfolio.

One thing to look out for though is making sure that the link portfolio really is as good as you think it is.

Look into the backlinks and see if they are from reputable sources which will stay there or if thy are just a mass of profile backlinks and comment spam which could just make it seem like they have a lot of good links or even get those links removed later on.

At the very least the 301 redirect will help get the robots to your site to increase crawl frequency which i find to be great when you want your pages to be indexed and updated quickly on google.

I suggest looking into building links with tumblr. you can make a tumblr blog and in the options you can set that tumblr blog to forward to your website's domain. after doing this you can then like other people's posts on their blogs by clicking a little heart on other tumblr blogs and by doing this you will get a link back to your site from their blog. this is a really easy way to get a lot of links quite easily.

having a lot of experience and practice I managed to get well over 10,000 in about a few weeks. Part of the reason for such a large number of links is because posts can be reblogged which means that another person's blog will have a copy of a post including the links to your blog. This means that liking one post sometimes gets you even over 10 links on 10 other tumblr blogs.

This is great for getting indexed and getting crawled very frequently though not so great for getting a variety of anchor text.

if this is unclear check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJYWNh1S_8o this video is a bit old but i think it goes over how to set up your account to point to your site.

hope this helps.

I am a huge fan of building links with tumblr. On webmaster tools, when the domain linking to me is not a tumblr subdomain but is using the tumblr platform, it says these are unique domains and easily puts my site well into the hundreds of different domains linking to it.

While I do agree that linking with the same anchor text may have diminishing return you are still receiving page rank and giving the google robots more opportunities to crawl to your site which ultimately still holds a great amount of value regardless of how google sees their ip. It is a myth that google even considers the same IP to be a negative feature. Google sees each page as a unique site (even within the same domain and same IP). If that site is reputable then it can pass on good value and if it is not then it doesnt. So often when people have many sites on the same IP they are not skilled at making them authoritative and thus assume that more sites from the same IP or more links from teh same IP can't add much value which is really not the case.

Hope this helps