Welcome to the Q&A Forum

See: http://searchengineland.com/live-blog-you-a-with-matt-cutts-at-smx-advanced-123513

about Google's Disavow-This-Link tool

I haven't ever used them or even heard of them. I did see some decent reviews and a good summary here.

I typically go to Google and look up kw's you want to rank for. Take a look at the sites and if you see a site that you could potentially use your content, approach them. Make sure to make the content "useful"  to them. Good luck!

I think history is a factor, but not a major factor. Typically when I begin a new adgroup I bid a higher cpc to get good impression/ctr numbers and slow off later on as it seems that adwords will embrase your adgroup better than not doing it..

Is it showing All adgroups (as opposed to All Enabled/All But Deleted)?

I'm pretty sure he would be dialing up his lawyer if he knew.

Strange, a pr article ranks higher than their website in organics (for seocosmo). Maybe Matt can help them out on it

What is the objective of doing this (this may help with the answer). As for the value (and overall SEO on images), check out Takeshi's answer int his post:

1. ALT Tags - This is the most important property for SEO. Use your keywords here.
2. Image Title - This has zero SEO value for Google, but can provide a good user experience
3. URL of JPG - This has SEO impact, use a relevant name:" keyword-keyword.jpg" not "IMG00001.jpg"
4. Schema - I haven't seen any concrete studies, but semantic markup helps Google determine what the image is about, so it can potentially help. Use it if it makes sense.
5. Meta Tags - Meta tags don't matter
6. Pinterest - Pinterest pulls all images on a page automatically as long as they are bigger than 80x80 pixels
7. Other social - Facebook Opengraph tags are great because they allow you to specify what image will be used when your content is shared on FB. However, it has no impact on SEO.

Other factors for image SEO: People linking to the image, the content surrounding the image (should be related to your image), the overall theme of your site (should be related to the image), use large, high quality images.

Wesley & Jesse hit the nail on the head. Don't do it. Even if Google possible can't detect it directly, they can spot it indirectly in the means of user experience.

Is the only reason you are using this team is price?

Those two are the best. There is also semrush.

Things to look at: phone calls (you getting any), check source of your traffic and their keywords (purchase intention), bounce rates/ppv, competitor prices/what are they doing, anything broken,  abandonment rate and etc. Also focus on what you are not doing by studying competition.   Tough one to diagnose...

Google feels that that page is more relevant for that keyword than the homepage. Just looking at the on-page factors, I agree w/Google. The url, heading and overall copy seems to reflect that term more than the home page. Also, this page is much better landing page than the home page for people searching for info on this term.

Take a look at this article by Rand: Testing the Accuracy of Visitor Data from Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, Doubleclick & Quantcast

We have been using MacRae's for a number of years and it returns a positive ROI. It's a good quality directory and we use it for industrial B2B advertising (we also use ThomasNet as well).  Others include: MFG.com/Globalspec.com/Alibaba (however--we don't use these anymore).

Try viewing the Lynda tutorial on it (the site has great tutorials--but I have never viewed this one). Also, Perry Marshall has a great book on adwords. Adwords get's extremely complicated and expect to many mistakes. Do your best at minimize them as much as possible and watch the numbers DAILY! Good luck!

Remember to focus on your meta descriptions as well. They have a huge impact on ctr and can work with your page titles to drive ctr.

Agree w/Mike. SEO is never fully completed. The point where you're satisfied with your efforts is usually when your competition will put forth more effort to overtake you in rankings....

No it will not hurt your SEO (as long as implemented correctly) and will most likely increase user experience.

Try contacting the webmasters of the spammy sites to takes the links down before disavowing (see Matt Cutts video on the subject).

Thomasnet has two types of listings: Paid & Free

Free Listings = Listings that have a nofollow attribute, free to list, follows paid listings
Paid Listings = Points allocated to these listings have the nofollow attribute removed

We still get some decent leads on ThomasNet (better than Macraes & GlobalSpec).

Great job guys. The site looks awesome!