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Thank you for this information, Optimize.  Not having a very technical background in this area, it seems quite confusing to try to implement this correctly.

Good article, Doug.  Thanks!

I would focus more on social media with that 10% increase that you were looking to build on. To answer your question I don't think it would raise any red flags with google as long as they were good quality directories with a higher pagerank. My advice would echo what James had suggested to link to category pages instead of only focusing on your homepage to help build your authority to inner pages.

By SEA I mean paid search in general. I would pick Google AdWords and use search query reports combined with conversion data.

I agree with EGOL. It should still help the rest of your site, although having the blog in a subfolder is better at passing link juice to the rest of your site. Speaking of blog directories, I recommend submitting to AllTop.com. They are a pretty high authority blog directory and it may actually send you traffic.

There has to be a way to see all links pointing to your site... Actually, there is not. Any tool which provides a report of links to your site has to collect the data somehow. The most common means is to crawl the internet, collecting data on each page that is encountered. There are very few organizations which have sufficient resources to crawl billions of web pages and process the data in a timely manner. Google is by far the most efficient. Even so, web pages can be blocked by various methods: the page could be on a member-only part of the site which requires a username and password to view. Such a page cannot be discovered by crawlers. the page could be tagged with noindex, nofollow to where the link is not discovered. It can also be blocked with robots.txt the link may be presented in an iframe, flash or other means which the crawler does not capture. the page may be buried so deeply on a site, or on an island page, where the crawler does not ever reach it. In the above cases, a link to your site may exist but not be found. An excellent means to capture undiscovered links is using Google Analytics to determine the source of any traffic. This method can help you discover links to your site which otherwise were not discovered via a crawler. If a link does exist but is not captured by OSE and is not sending you any traffic, the link likely has no value at all.

Great, thanks, Keri!

yeah, you want to avoid duplicate content issues where google has to choose which content to display so go for the snippet option. I like Wordpress. If you are using this platform I use the first 2 paragraphs for the main post feed and use the "Excerpt" option to control the snippets on category pages.

If you are using magento commerce, I can help you out. What software are you using? SSL should only be at checkout.

I don't know how frequently Google will index new links. For OSE, the linkscape release date was the 25th, but the crawl was done probably a couple of weeks before that. It takes some time to crawl, then some time to process those results.

Every domain is unique. seomoz.org seomoz.com seomoz.hu The above represents three separate domains. They could all be owned and operated by the same person or company. They could all have separate owners. Either way each domain would be considered it's own entity. If seomoz owned all 3 of the above domains, and they chose to link to you, then you would receive three unique links to your site from those domains. The value of those links would be determined based on the DA of those sites, and the PA of the pages which are linking to you. I know for Yahoo, you can get listed in all their local country's Yahoo directories. I am unsure of how the process works for Google.

Hi beeneeb, I will be using the blog to create credibility and draw in perspective customers on topics within my industry.  It will be a blog within a website.  Thanks for the answers everyone!

Thank You, Darryl.  Do you know if it is required by some online merchants to have SSL on all pages of a site, or just credit card info pages?  Or do they not require it at all?