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I agree. I would plug those starting point / core keywords into Google Keywords Tool and/or SEMRush and see what you get. Somebody well versed with the industry is helpful but so is someone completely unknown to the industry. Sometimes we call certain things in a certain way, but that's now how majority of the people on the web search.

As Phil said, I would not worry about the age. I would find a subject matter expert, I am sure there are tons of people available on SEOMoz who do freelance. Just see if someone is available, do a small test project and take it from there. If that does not work, sites like Odesk.com have plenty of providers, but then tons of them are offshore. So everything has it's pros and cons.

Think of building site authority very similar to brand building. How did "Coke" or "Pepsi" become a brand ? Then think about Online Only companies, how did they become a brand ? Essentially take all sorts of things in the offline world to the online world and that's essentially Brand/Authority building online.

Anything and everything that spikes discussion around your domain name, brand and your website contributes towards Site Authority. Facebook Links, Pinterest Pins, Mentions/Cittations in online news, articles, websites. Think contests, infographics, link bait.

One way or the other they will lead to links and is in some form or the other... link building. But it's definitely not the link building you are talking about  (3 way, or non-reciprocal).

I hope this helps / clarifies and ignites some ideas/thoughts.

I am presuming all those domains are linking to each other, correct ?

Are they regular or nofollow links ? It boils down how much authority you have on your main domain as well as the other domains. If I were you, I will keep the main e-commerce website on one server and everything else including niche blogs etc on a different server. It's not just SEO, but also security issues.

Essentially, to answer your question, it may not be hurting you to have the niche blogs, a forum with user generated content, the articles site and the corporate site on the same IP/server, but it would help you a lot more if they were on a different server, possibly different Class C IPs. So, you will gain from these links being on a different server. Keep in mind, these links are important for you and its good to increase their value by hosting them separately, because these sites are links that your competition can never get linked from. I would also consider doing a nofollow on them, and that's just my thoughts. I prefer lower risk. Again, it depends on what your e-commerce website's link profile is.

I am sure they did, but we were never able to have a read on it because price data was never added to the site. We just started measuring the Call to Action / Conversion as a successful RFQ or a visit to the contact page from these product level pages.

Definitely submit (it's a high quality link). However, do not have any hopes. Spend 5-10 minutes doing your submission in the right category. If you are a regional business, don't forget to submit in your regional category. That works really well, only if your contact page has the physical business address listed as well as in the whois (Yes, the editors check).

Submit it, Forget it. If you get a link. Celebrate.

1. Where are you ranking currently compared to your competition?
2. How many common keywords to you see ranking between your website and the competition?
3. How large is your website compared to the competition ?

Looking at the metrics, I think the fact that you are competing with internal pages and yours is a homepage, makes it easier. Are you sort of a niche site ?

It's more of quality and then relatedness of the links, then just pure quantity. I would continue to build brand links to homepage, inner pages and adding more content to strengthen my presence in the niche.

I hope that helps stay on track. You are definitely on the right track in terms of what to look at. Just don't get distracted in the number of root domain links / domain authority.

If you have a reason to have a press release, definitely do it. Think about it from a user's perspective. If they see your press release in Google News, would they read it and if they do, is that something they'd call a news ?

As for the distribution, yes, all/most sites have "some" SEO value. But the way I think about a PR is...distribute it with the intent of it getting picked up by offline media potentially and other news outlets..not just for the backlink.

Also, I would not recommend doing too many press releases just for a backlink.

What kind of blog is it ? Is it a wordpress.com or typepad.com or blogspot.com hosted blog ? That could be the only reason why you could not use a sub-folder.

I would recommend using wordpress.org hosted blog and install it on /blog/ and then import content from your existing blog, whatever platform it is, I am pretty sure there are import plugins available in the wordpress plugin database to import your content seamlessly.

Directory links are the "manipulated" links of yesterday. I would strongly suggest to ignore them. Great details Alick300. I would suggest to spend some time reading Moz's Link Building and SEO Guides i.e. http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

It's very easy to get in trouble with the wrong links.

Saw this earlier today from a Newsletter. Kudos to Buildmyrank for openly accepting what happened and stuff. Anybody who was using their network for links, would they care to provide some examples of the kind of links were generated through their network ? I am kinda curious to look at them and see what patterns if any existed in there.

Very interesting question Donnie. Although pretty simple, it's a little complex at the same time.

Here's what I am thinking: It does make sense to have it unique on every PR, somewhat related to the theme of your PR. However, it's an about us...not about the PR. I think although right from the SEO perspective, it might not be 100% right from a PR/business standpoint.

My mind is also relating this to the fact that if we have a header and footer on every page, it's the same/duplicate content. Should that not be unique then ? I think Google is way past these things. Google understands what duplicate content is (to a very great extent) and I would not worry about it if you are doing less then 10 press releases a year. However, if you are doing something like 1 press release every week for the client, then it might make sense to have a relatively unique copy written.

But before you decide, I suggest you discuss it with a PR professional. Sometimes, for us, it get's difficult to think outside the box (SEO Box :).

DMOZ over the last couple years has been Submit It and Forget it. There's not much you can do. I have been a DMOZ Editor in the past and it is what it is.

Also, in the days of today, I do not value a DMOZ listing as much as I used to 5-7 years ago. I would suggest to keep working on your alternate link strategies.

I would suggest implementing canonical tag for Magento. That would take care of duplicate URLs for the same pages. As for the review pages, if you are not using the functionality, isn't there a way to disable them completely from within Magento administration ? If not, I would first install that canonical fix and see what you see on those review pages. If not, you can always do a disallow using robots.txt but it's better to have them not exist at all specially when you are not even using them instead of doing a disallow/noindex kind of thing.

I hope that helps.

Eric, Have a few questions for you:

1. Do you have executive buy-in to do SEO Work?
2. How much SEO potential is out there for your website to rank?
3. How well does it rank today?
4. How big are your Top 3 competitors? Have they been growing last 1-5 years?

If you can demonstrate the size of the opportunity you have and prove it's achievable with a smaller project, test or experiment, you might have "unlimited resources" ;). Just saying :).

In my opinion you are fine when you are targeting individual the 3 keyword examples you laid. It's very similar to if I had a website about Toyota Camri. The homepage is where I might target that keyword, but then I might have a separate page for each year/model, so 2000 Toyota Camri, 2001 Toyota Camri and so on. No issues here.

The issue would be if from the 2011 Graduating Class page, you are linking to another page with 2011 Graduating Class as the anchor text. That would be more of an issue.

Does that make sense ? I hope that helps.

I agree with what you are thinking. The biggest effect would be if you can move them all onto one domain name (sub-folders) and setup 301 redirects. Keep hosting those domains forever since the 301s would stay only as long as you own the domains and continue to host them to serve the 301.

Moving them to sub-domains might be minimal / zero effect. I only see risk in doing that.

Ask yourself: Does it help the users in integrating all the content into one big website ?

Well, just check every once in a while and see when the page gets updated again. Maybe set a reminder to check once a month. As for the 301s and 404s, there are in-built tools within DMOZ to detect those as well as expired/expiring domains etc and so on.

It's just that sometimes the queue is too long. And since it's volunteer work, there's just not much you can do. I know as an editor of a regional category, I used to have tons and tons of submissions and unless you are spending an hour a day, you can't catch-up and eventually you give up.

The editor for that category has tons and tons of categories he is authorized to edit, which makes me think he is a senior meta editor.

As I said above, DMOZ is not worth thinking too much about. I know it stresses one out, but it's beyond control. Submit It, forget it. Move on

It's just another link. It's completely navigate-able and they have canonical tags in place to prevent any duplicate URLs. It looks good. http://www.ties.com/long+black-ties Canonical is consistent with the linked URL.

I definitely think there's potential as long as it's not over used and instead of being semi-related, it's tighly related. See my response to a similar question here. You have to weight the risk and the reward and it's best done with bringing value to the user rather then just links (even though we all know the reason is links).

Yes, you can use the crawl test tool here at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test It's limited to 3,000 pages and you can run upto 2 reports per day. I hope that helps