Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I don't know if you saw this. Its very good timing that Rand wrote a blog post about this very subject! Check it out, as always its a worthwhile read. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-citations-5-tactics-to-earn-links-for-your-local-business

I agree with you on both fronts.  I never target any specific long tails, but I always build content to rank for long tails.  The way to do this is with quality content with a large word count.  I never write the content with any long tails in mind, but I know that with quality link building I will naturally rank for some long tails. One of my sites gets thousands of visits from hundreds of keywords.  I might get 5-10 visits a month from each phrase.  It would have been silly to plan for any of these keywords.

"How do I know when a site has too many links versus the number of unique cblocks?" There is no set number or formula. You want your links to be as diverse as possible, and C-class IP blocks is one metric that matters. "Is this the total number of unique cblocks on the web or am I using the tool wrong?" There are many more than that. Not familiar with the tool, but it may be a limitation of the tool. It looks like it uses Yahoo backlink data, which is limited to 1,000 links.

No you will not get peanlized for that amount do not worry just try and make the anchors different and natural =).. google will only take action if you have 3,000,000 links for example from 1 domain and 5 links from 5 domains in a space of 1 week and all the anchor texts are the same i.e. "SEO Consultant" on 3 million pages from 1 domain lol.. you can also look at domains linking in Google Webmaster tools Regards

It's always interesting to see how sitemap.html performs in terms of pageviews. According to Analytics at least, many users find them useful -- and that's enough for me to usually want to recommend including one. Try it, test it, and if users find it valuable then keep it. Like it or not, I think it's true to say that there's still a small segment of web users who use sitemaps as on of their main methods of navigation so I think on that basis, there's an argument to include them.

The key thing to do is to have unique content on both pages but the content may still be optimised or focused upon the same keyword or phrase as the other page. Also make sure each page has unique titles, meta description etc so that the search engine has no reason to look at the pages and think that it would be best to just display the one page due to duplicate content issues.

Lewis, Thank you for the clarification!

That is certainly possible, and it's a smart thing to do in many cases. The easiest example of this that I could think of was the terms "buy mens nike shoes" and "buy womens nike shoes". store.nike.com ranks highly for both results, but with an almost completely different set of pages for each. Many large brands will have several similar items that are differentiated by the long tail, so you should be able to find more examples fairly easily.

Sometime keyword research tools show that there are not to many people are looking for certain keywords, but it doesn't mean that this keywords are bad. It is probably recommended to optimize for the keyword "Babe Ruth Posters" however it is not bad idea to optimize for two other keywords phrases too, they have main keywords in it too. As well I noticed that sometime some of my clients coming up with keywords which are "not known" by keyword tools but even though they are being used. Optimization of each page according the content is good idea. If it is "winning" poster then it is winning poster. Especially if you have separate section or product with word "winning" in it it will be recognized. Of course all optimization and decisions are up to you.

Hi Damien, On this project, I'm not making  the changes, I just make recommendations.  I just want to make sure my recommendation is accurate. Thanks for your guidance. Eric