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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

You can still look at the categorical terms that you base your long tail strategy on for the methods mentioned. A good way to get an indication is looking at competitor links; then use traffic numbers for "phrase match"

You might consider making your link building more strategic in that it focuses less on the link and more on high value traffic potential. Target sites that are a really good match for what you sell.

Lets say you sell paint. Target fan sites then show rooms painted for favorite team themes and link to the paint colors on your site to achieve the same affect.

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.

I wrote a post on creating a link building budget that would probable be of some help: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/linkbuilding-budget.html

The hard part about this is you do not really know how much an acquired link is going to help your rankings. You basically need to determine:

• How many links are necessary to rank for desired SERP position
• Revenue that traffic has to your business
• Calculate ROI for link building for a year or more

Exporting data on a regular basis from OSE is necessary to do this; and you need to do the analysis in excel to get the answer. Basically you want to export your links & linking root domains at least once a month or after each linkscape/OSE update.

Then you would put linking root domains from last month in a column and linking root domains from current month in a column. In a third column you would do a comparison match with an excel formula to see which are missing. Here is some help documentation on the excel formula: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/use-excel-to-compare-two-lists-of-data-HA001103915.aspx

Assuming last month domains are in column A and current month domains you could use this formula in column

=ISNA(MATCH(B2,$A$2:$A$10001,0))

This shouldn't be too much of an issue as long as you don't link to pages by the reverse proxy IP address. It usually causes problems in the form of spam attacks. Read through the comments on this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/delicious-cloaking-to-combat-spam

Damien,

I guess I was not very clear; basically I am suggesting the same thing as you in that you would use the same variable that stores the URL to pull in the canonical URL.

Add the rel canonical to your template so that whenever the ajax creates the new URL it already has the rel canonical pointing to the preferred page.

Couldn't disagree more; however, WHERE the links are coming from definitely has had an effect.

Are you located in the city that you are trying to optimize? If not you should try to get someone to search from that city as a rank check.

Apart from that I would focus on getting links to your site that include the city & state name (not necessarily both in the same link). Also work on getting more citations with the city & state mentioned near your URL; this is a good tool: http://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/

You might also want to read / watch:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-basics-of-local-seo-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-for-keyword-cityname-in-multiple-geographies

David Mihm's blog is a great resourece too: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/

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.