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This is something else where you can consider quality and the internal linking of the forum itself with regards to the quality of a followed signature link. So, the forum has tens of thousands of posts and pages. If you have say 20 posts of no real substance on backwater posts to get your post count up and get your followed link and leave it at that... well, the link is going to be of little value. If you have hundreds of posts, from some quite weight discussions that in turn get linked to from external sources, then, your profile is much better linked to from these weighty pages and in turn, is of much more value as an outbound link. This is a very simple look at how quality can be discerned quite easily for individual links on any given forum and how you simply can't get away from providing a quality contribution (or at the very least, hawking in on quality discussions but I would venture they have a solution for that also).

Thanks Dana.

Try http://www.ahrefs.com  They have a free and paid version and are pretty good about showing new backlinks every day. You might also try the software plug-in at http://www.screamingfrog.com  - Also an excellent resource, not only for backlinks, but many other things too (i.e. crawl errors, etc). Good luck! Dana

Hi Hardley, Dana has listed some great factors to consider when choosing directories. However just consider the relevance of that directory rather than just the raw authority of the site. Example (I've just been to Australia Zoo, hence this example) You're doing SEO for a company that transports Kaulas. The best link you could get isn't from a high authority site, with a PR of 8, & 1,000,000 links. It's from the most relevant sites. Out there somewhere will be a website on the perils of transporting Kaulas, written by the foremost expert in the world. Target that site. In the case of directories, you target animal related ones. Because Google will know what the site is about, you won't need to worry about adding a list of keywords. Hope that help Iain - Reload Media

Yes, there's definitely an awesome way to do this in SEOMoz. You need to set up a campaign, and then associate keywords with that campaign. If you have several different categories of keywords you can separate them with tags to group like words together. I would highly recommend also putting in as many competitors as possible so you can see where they rank for the same terms. Once you've put in your keywords, SEOMoz will crawl once a week and track the rankings over time. You will also be able to export complete history for keywords over time. THis is extremely helpful in determining if you are going up or down for your most important terms. Every site is a little different, so the best thing to do is just get in there and play with it and you'll soon find what works best for you. Hope that helps! Being able to track keywords like this, together with compeitors' rankings is what make SEOMoz Pro worth every penny (IMHO). Dana

I think there is a lot of value in getting backlinks to interior pages, often referred to in SEO as "deep-linking." However, you need to be really careful about how you pursue this. Naturally, I Website gets most external links pointing to its homepage and a much smaller fraction pointing to interior pages. If all of a sudden you start getting a disproportionate number of external links to deeper parts of your site (i.e. product pages on an e-commerce site) with very specific anchor text, your link profile is suddenly going to change. That could cause Google to do a double take and possibly consider those links as suspicious. You definitely don't want that, so just be cautious and only do it when it's a natural linking situation from a reputable site. Hope that helps! Dana