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www.ispionage.com shows you what keywords any site ranks for. They give away some for free and then  you have to pay to see the whole list. But you can get some good intel from the free list, too...

Yikes. 750 links (even if split into sections so you don't see them all at once) on 1 page is not 'human-friendly' (as I know you know). Is that really necessary? I looked at the site and having navigation sub-menus that go 4-deep is kind of a usability issue for people that aren't great with a mouse. Maybe look at ebay's menu structure; they certainly have a large db of products in many categories and don't resort to 100s of links per page just for navigation.

But from and SEO point of view I'm not sure the 750 links are hurting your on-page ranking for a phrase that the page is otherwise optimized for. If you had a page optimized for "widgets" and you did all the correct on-page things for 'widgets' and then had external links pointing to the page with anchor text of 'widgets' then I'm not sure how much you'd be penalized for having 750 links on that page. Given that on-page factors are only about 20% of the ranking equation anyway, I'm not sure it's a huge deal from an SEO/ranking point of view. It's more of a human usability thing, IMO.

You typically optimize 1 page for 1 phrase. If there are two phrases very close together, like 'widget' and 'widgets' then you can optimize the same page for those 2 phrases. You will have sub-optimal results if you try to rank the same page for 3 or more (or even 2) phrases.

If you have 40 phrases you want to rank for in the SERPs then you'll need 40 different pages on your site. Build a spreadsheet where you map 1 url to 1 phrase to help you keep it straight.

Anything that is human reviewed, has editorial standards, and enforces longer word length. The opposite, which would be sites that accept anything, including posts that are less than 300 words, would not be good.

In the 'good' camp I would include

www.ezinearticles.com

www.buzzle.com (600 word min)

www.selfgrowth.com (500 word min)

would be interested in hearing from others on which ones they use that are human-edited or otherwise have more strict than post-anything-you-want submission guidelines.

Depends on what you consider a 'conversion'. Is entering an email address to sign up for a free newsletter a 'conversion'? Or does it have to be a revenue producing event? The first will have a much higher rate than the 2nd, obviously.

One thing I can tell you (since I have seen the numbers for a dozen different companies that do this) is the conversion rate from a 2-week or 30-day free trial to a paying user of the service averages around 50%. ie half the people who take a free trial of a service will end up paying for that service. The numbers range from 40% to 60%. It'll be higher if you ask for more info up front (because you end up filtering out the lookyloos who aren't serious if you ask for more info at the start of the free trial).

What I do not have great data for is the conversion rate from first-time-visitor to free-trial (or revenue-event). I have anecdotes that tell me it's low single-digits (2% to 5%). If you're talking about a 15% conversion rate from first-time-visitor to revenue-event then that seems high (unless you're selling Lady Gaga concert tickets or something). Those numbers are usually very proprietary and I'd be surprised (and interested in) if you find any solid data on them...

Almost everything I've read says to do it in subdirectories off the main domain (your strategy 1). You get domain age on your side, as you mention, plus any link juice that may flow to your landing pages from wherever you promote them. Your strategy 2 could be seen as a link farm (many small sites who only exist to promote another site).

Are users likely to use his name when searching for his site, or are they more likely to search for the kind of service he offers? if the later then forget his name in titles (except maybe the home page). IMO the title should match the likely search query for optimum SEO. And repeating the brand in every title is a waste, IMO. If you have 10 pages optimized for 10 different search queries then the title of each should be (or at least begin with) the likely search query that each page is optimized for.

I have found it hard to evaluate links on a weekly basis, too. All tools give different results. You need to pick 1 tool, create a spreadsheet, and then track links with that same tool week to week. At least you should know on a relative basis if you're improving or not, even if you're not getting the exact true link count.

The Link Analysis tab of SEOmoz shows some stats (external followed links, followed links root domains, unique C-blocks) that are useful to track over time, but they only update about once a month (note to SEOmoz: weekly would be great)

The one thing you CAN track week to week is your SERP rankings, on the Rankings tab. You can track number of phrases you have in the top 3, as well as number of phrases on page 1. If your external link building is progressing then those numbers should go up week over week.

And those numbers drive your organic search visits per week, which you can view on the Traffic tab, or in Google Analytics directly.

As far as follow/no-follow goes, remember that you want a 'normal' anchor text distribution and usually a normal anchor text profile will include some no-follows. So keep some no-follows in there...

Then I suppose what the query was that brought them to that landing page. If someone searches for "replace my windows" or "I need new windows" and ends up on a page offering a free consultation (and assuming the company looks credible, etc) then I can imagine a pretty high conversion rate. 15% seems believable. Maybe even higher if it's just email address in exchange for product info for products related to the initial query. But again, no one is going to share this kind of data because if it's really good it will attract new competitors and no one wants to invite competition...

1. Free traffic. Company on a shoestring that can't afford to buy traffic with PPC (my particular keywords are $5 or more per click). Have lots of time, though. So can learn and implement correct and good SEO.

2. Almost immediate gratification of seeing higher rankings in SERPs followed by higher number of visitors/day. Direct correlation between my efforts and results.

3. Satisfaction from beating the other players (people competing to rank for the same phrases I'm targeting). It's almost game like, and Google keeps score with rankings.

Only if the 2 keywords are very close together, like 'widget' and 'widgets'. Otherwise, 1 keyword per page works best, or else you'll confuse the googlebot as to what your page is really about and what it should rank for.

It's a single site. It's not a weather app; I was using weather as an example. I have another (non-weather) data set that has similar characteristics -- 6 or 8 unique data points per item (a couple of which are dynamic and change as time passes). And several thousand of these items. I want to display them via template.

I guess I'll try it and see if Webmaster tools complains about dup content. Thanks for the ideas, guys...

I would like that, too. Especially for things like new C-class IP addresses that link to my site for the 1st time, or new root-level domains that link to me for the 1st time. Would be great if OSE's data included "date link was discovered" for each link. Then we could begin to tie together new links with changes in rankings.

Since it's a weighting of many factors, everything else (the non-keyword-domain factors) should go up in relative proportion. I don't think they will explicitly turn up some other factor in order to counter the turning down of one factor.

Thanks, David. I thought I had read that meta keywords were still used by Yahoo or Bing (definitely not Google). Is that not true? Does it harm anything to have the meta keywords if I just leave them as-is (since I already have them), or should I pro-actively go remove them?

Well, SEOmoz.org is a PR7 site. How many links do you have from PR7 sites? Even if on a sub-sub-sub page they are valuable, and hard to get. Plus, it would count as another c-block IP address that points to you, which has some value independent of relevance of the referring site.

I understand your point that relevance of referring links is critical, but there's also value from non-relevant, high-PR, new C-class IP addresses pointing to you. It's worth getting.

In my expience, the reports you see are the sum of two things (1) it automatically includes a report in cases where your site is in the top 50 results of the SERPs for each campaign keyword, and (2) you can manually cause it to add a report by going to the Report Card page (second sub-menu choice on the On Page page) and giving it the keyword and then the URL you want it to report on for that keyword. I believe it will remember these manual pairing additions between sessions (mind seems to). This manual process is very helpful when you are working through your on-page optimization so you can see how you're doing (from an on-page point of view) before you achieve top-50 status in the SERPs.

Paul, I assume you mean making the image file name the same as the alt text? And both for the phrase that the page is optimized for, right?

Article submission isn't bad, but those are generally low value links. How about guest blogging on other (hopefully non-zero PR) related on-topic blogs? Offer an article to a relevant blog in exchange for a linkback from the blog article. It's kind of like article marketing except that you pick the destination based on PR and relevancy, rather than just submit to a big generic article database.

You could also create landing pages for your site with the articles, and then promote the landing pages with SEO. Then have those landing pages feed into your main site.

Depends how competitive the keyword is. If highly competitive then, yes, put phrase at start of title tag. If you're already ranking well and the phrase is not too competitive then you have a bit more leeway. See http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag#seo-best-practice