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The two thoughts that come to my mind when thinking of anchor text are: what word or phrase would encourage readers to click what word or phrase would work best for search engines? What is a user likely to type into google? You offered the phrase: "See what Cerritos Nissan customers have to say about their experience at this great Orange County Nissan Dealership. I would suggest something along the lines of: Read feedback from Cerritos Nissan customers regarding their experience at this great Orange County Nissan dealer. "Feedback from Ceritos Nissan customers" would be a link to your our-experience.htm page. "Orange County Nissan dealer" would be a link to your home page.

What benefits do you see for using both as opposed to just one? Regards,

This is an interesting idea.To maximize your SEO benefits I would: Make the image link back to the post on my site not the image itself. Provide an alt attribute for the image tag Provide a title attribute for the link Image links have less value then text links.  How much benefit will this stategy really give you is tough to quantify. It depends on how many sites are republishing content from your RSS feed, what the quality of those sites are and how relevant the are to your site's industry. Having the image link back to a post on your site has the added benefit that if someone reads a post on another site on in their RSS feed and clicks the image they'll be taken to your post.  Every additional visit to your site is a chance to capture another new reader. Images don't have a ton of value.

I believe they are, yes. Here's another concept.  Yahoo's own search results come from Bing.  What would be the point of Yahoo displaying the exact same results as Bing though?  So it's a known fact that Yahoo takes Bing's data and changes it for the main Yahoo search. So in that same way, I am saying I believe Yahoo then goes even further and provides yet a different result set for "powered by Yahoo".

It sounds like a useless scam. The good thing about getting "liked" by a Facebook user is that your link/info shows up on that persons wall for ALL their friends to see and it gets you more visibility and the chance to get more traffic. With these companies that offer to sell you "likes" it will do no good to you since it will be only fake Facebook accounts, with no real friends, that it will show up on and not give you the added exposure or value that you really desire.

Well, let's look at it from an hourly perspective. 14 posts a month on twitter and facebook = maybe 3-5 hours? 3 blog posts = could be 3 hours, could be 20 hours, depending on depth and complexity As far as hourly rates, I would expect something roughly as follows: <$100 for small, startup, new, etc agencies $100-200 for small to medium agencies $200+ for larger and more established agencies So if we budgeted 15 hours, cost might be $1,000-$3,000+

That's what I figured. What a waste of money. I would hire an internet marketing agency, but since we are an internet marketing agency, it doesn't make much sense for us to hire ourselves to do this.

I use linkscape but I'm looking for a tool to manually add in backlinks and make sure they're still active. Linkscape also has a level of filtering where only some domains end up crawled completely.

If I understand your question right - I'd say that I generally see pages ranked rather than individual posts or pages within a greater page...but I may be misunderstanding.

I was hoping to find better responses here, like where to find quality linkbuilders to outsource to LOL Guess I haven't had enough coffee yet and am still sleeping....

Our experience as well, generally months on end and an endless stream of duplicated listings. I'm at least looking forward to the listing separator tool they're supposed to release spring/summer '11.

It's worth considering it anyway.

I think that Daniel and Gianluca are on track here, but I just wanted to try to structure it a bit. Google has over 200 ranking factors now, and we use "natural" link profile to cover a pretty big chunk of them. Generally, I think natural means: (1) From a diversity of sources (blogs, forums, PR, etc.) (2) Using a diversity of tactics (comments, contextual links, etc.) (3) Having a diversity of anchor text, including keyword-targeted and brand-targeted. This is probably one of the easier cues for "unnatural" links. If you're SEO'ing for "medium blue widgets" and 99% of your anchor text is "medium blue widgets", it's not natural. (4) From topically relevant sites. This is a nice-to-have, but it's not clear how well Google can measure relevance. General authority and "trust" may be more important, although I think relevance will matter more over time. (5) Not from paid sources. Technically, ads should be nofollow'ed, and some paid placements are a lot easier to spot. If you're right under a "Sponsors" banner, in a box with 10 links from wildly irrelevant and disconnected sites, or in a sitewide footer, your link is going to look unnatural).