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Yes

Try out http://myblogguest.com/ (highly recommend) and https://linker.eightfoldlogic.com/

I have not used it as a particular strategy; however, I believe it does because I have seen positive effects from competitors & others using it to good effect. That is how I made the inference above is from observation of others linking profile & rankings.

The positive & powerful part of Tumblr is in the engagement & interaction with the Tumblr community. They are all about sharing and reblogging interesting stuff.

This is really a determination based on your strategy and who the consumer is. Two examples that are both successful but take complete different approaches are Huffington Post (multiple pieces per day) and The Oatmeal (once a month).

Are you trying to get into Google news? Then you are going to need 2-3 pieces per day.

Use both on the page and follow iNet SEO's advice about making it sound correct.

Guillame,

There are a lot of factors that go into this including the authority of the site you are getting the link from. If I had to pick just one then I would go with #3 most of the time.

First, you are wasting time looking at Pagerank in my opinion. You could look at your backlinks acquisition history and compare that to organic traffic history for your site to come up with a model.

Organic traffic is not just search traffic; so it would be good to look at a websites traffic data instead. Try to calculate a CTR for traffic on sites you have a link already and use that to build a model for future sites you are targeting for a link acquisition.

Hi Michael,

Yes you are right about #1, this type of thing would probably be best explained with an in person meeting where you do the searches together live and explain the results. If face to face isn't possible setup using gotomeeting and share your desktop and show the client. If the client doesn't rank for local yet suggest getting ranked local first (easier) and then going national.

It is possible to rank for other cities and your strategy would come down to the goal. Do you want to show up as a local result or just have the site show up in the regular SERPs. There are ways to show up for local results without having a physical location but it starts to fall in the grey hat tactics area.

You wouldn't want to do that because most likely Google would just ignore your tag. Here are some good write ups:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

One item that will help with sitelinks is having your site verified in GWT and a clean sitemap.xml submitted to them with the URLs you want for sitelinks being the first URLs in the sitemap. I have worked on two sites that did not have sitelinks for thier brand once I did this they showed up in a week.

Sometimes the sitelinks will disappear after a few weeks and then reappear in a couple weeks when they first start showing up for your site.

Hi Samuel,

This is really going to depend on the type of customers the Fortune 500 company is targeting so I will go with your JCPenney example.

1. Partnerships - Find out who heads up business development and review the sites of every partner. If the partner does not have a link to you then get the Biz Dev person to call them up and ask. Another good tactic is to send a gift basket outside of the holidays, then follow up with a call asking. When a partner page already exists on the site it is easy but if you are major partners then you can ask for one to be built.

2. Charity - Does the company or employees participate in any charitable work? Check out the charities for donor pages and get your site listed if not already. Partner with the charity to do a local or national fund raising drive, hit up bloggers who are fans of either the charity or brand.

4. Identify Brand Advocates - Find the mommy bloggers and others online (forums included) that talk about your brand, competitor brands, the products you offer, etc and engage them. Let them hold a contest on thier blog for a gift certificate is a simple example. Coca Cola

5. Sponsored Blog Posts - This falls a little bit on the more risky side but it is an option. Vacations to Go has employed this so take a look at thier backlink profile for further insight.

6. Offline Marketing - Bridge the gap of offline marketing by creating a page or minisite for each offline campaign that points back to the main site.

7. Coupon / Deal websites - There are hundreds if not thousands of sites that feature coupons & deals by major companies. Dig in and find them. A good tactic is searching twitter, google, technorati, etc for words such as coupon, deal, rebate, sale, discount, promo code, promotion, promotional code. Create a list of the sites and submit your coupons & do an outreach campaign to the bloggers / twitter users.

8. Conferences - There are both industry & consumer focused conferences. Become a sponsor or speaker and get listed on the conference website.

9. Create a Youtube Channel - Make videos about interior design, cooking, back to school shopping, etc. However people use your products make videos of that, just be helpful. There is a reason Oprah, Dr. Oz, Food Network are so popular.

I could go on but this should give you a good starting point & keep you busy. The idea is you need to energize & engage the people who already use your products and leverage that to expand the customer base.

What is your favorite tool for getting a report of URLs that are not cached/indexed in Google & Bing for an entire site? Basically I want a list of URLs not cached in Google and a seperate list for Bing.

Thanks,

Mark

The google estimated cpc and minimum bids are notorious for just flat out being wrong. I have seen terms that suggest less than 10 cents yet when you run a campaign cost over a dollar to be on the first page. Similiarly I have gotten ads on the first page for 25 cents that had suggested bids of over $5 click.

Best bet is to use $100 to test; that is the only way to know. SEMrush and SpyFu both seem to provide more accurate data than Google regarding PPC costs IMHO.

There is no way to do it from the web application interface and in my talks with SEOmoz in the past there is no way to set to a specific time or day. I'd recommend either calling or sending a request to customerservice@seomoz.org. Phone number is on http://www.seomoz.org/about/contact

I would do both at the same time that way if you take any hit/penalty for the changes it is only once. You may also want to submit a change of address through webmaster tools for the subdomain switch.

You will be fine as long as you follow these basic rules

1. No redirects
2. Content on the page
3. Navigation on the page

Highly recommend excluding the pages in your robots.txt file for extra protection.

1. Make sure you have unique content (phone number, hours, address) on each city URL you want to use, pictures are a big plus.
2. Use the bulk upload, see https://www.google.com/local/add/g?hl=en-US&gl=US#uploadfeed. Before you submit make sure to read, http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?answer=178024 and http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=28247&topic=28291&answer=173669
3. Make the name in your bulk upload spreadsheet unique for each location (Business Name - City, State)
4. Use the store code field which uniquely identifies each location of your business
5. Fill in as many of the "optional" fields as possible that make sense for your business
6. Use a different phone number for each location
7. Use a unique description for each location

Those are my 7 top tips; I'll add more if I think of any.

Two other options that may help but I have no real experience/proof on is advertising your locations with Google Boost  and Google Tags. If you are legit & spend money you may be able to get your account rep to coughhelp/pullstringcough

Smart Draw is seriously awesome; just downloaded for a 7 day free trial. I used Mockingbird in the past but SD looking way better now.

Regarding #1: Link to your home page or another page that you want to flow link juice to on each subdomain; and have non-linked text around the anchor/link. Ideally you would find a way to migrated these to subfolders rather than subdomains but that might not be an option.

Regarding #2: Using a rel canonical tag will help.