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Great question Jon.  I hope you get some good answers.

Frankly, I haven't found any tool truly that great in building them.  In terms of researching them, the ones you've listed above are great for the most part.

I try to just keep up as much as possible on all the top webminars and posts about link building to find the best "strategies" and solutions for link building.  Unfortunately, I don't find any tool to be truly that good in building links.  I just spent 6 hours today building local directory links for a client like the yelps of the world so they have not only have more backlinks, but also have more sources of traffic.

Frankly, one of the "best" tools has been finding great vendors IMHO.  And when you find a great vendor who can build them for you, you've literally got the best tool of them all - labor who will do it for you.  Wish I could share all my great vendors here, but unfortunately, it took us years to find them.

Are you asking for a white label solution?  You can .pdf the reports in SEOmoz and deliver them if you're o.k .with the SEOmoz logo on it.

However, if you're looking for white label solutions, you have to either buy some other 3rd part tools or take the data and throw it into a spreadsheet and format it for a client.  It's what I do...grab the data from various sources or sometimes even screen capturing some of the stuff here because the graphics is very nice & deliver it to clients in that way.  It's a bit time consuming and why I'm trying to find an optimal tool myself to present rankings.  It's why I asked recently for any recommendations on a great subscription or tool that can do this as well.  Most have one problem or another unfortunately.

Like you said, if it's not duplicated, it should be fine.  Just build the url structure and the other on page elements of the pages that are generated via the forum and the blog to be SEO friendly.  Just make sure it's not duplicating and that it's unique.

When you think about it, you want unique content when you're searching for it online.  Just don't repeat the same information in your forum & blogs and you should be fine.

Hi Todd,

I think the ultimate question is what's wrong with your site, no? I don't think it's this in terms of having too many links on a page. It's only one of the many factors in terms of getting you ranked. The way the links are set up internally can make a difference, but I would have to spend a bit of time checking out the site to see how they're set up to see if they're working.

What's your goal? I'm assuming it's to rank better. Frankly, the first thing I check always is what's your backlink profile looking like. I'm assuming you want to rank better for terms other than your brand name. Right now, it doesn't look like you will.

So, this warning about links is the least part of your problem. Also, your title tag for your home page is not as "SEO friendly" as it could be and if I spent more time looking, I bet you there are a number of other things you could tweak on the site. It's not the "too many links" on that page I would be worried about...

It might be true, but when the drops occur or when the SERP is manually rated and changed in terms of the makeup, it could be because whatever's triggering it could have been finally re-evaluated at the time you dropped.

However, I don't know if I know all the different pieces you do.  Even with the above description of the issues, I think there's a lot more going on potentially that as "outsiders", we can't help with as much.  Even when we know everything, we still might be clueless.  Sorry, but I haven't had this problem with a client before.  I know it will sound cocky, but we've only had the opposite problem (well not a problem) that the rankings go up.  I call it a problem because sometimes a ranking improvement doesn't always translate into traffic (or qualified traffic for that matter).  Sorry, going off on a tangent...

I don't see it being the larger problem.

Have you considered that your competitors have jumped up their SEO efforts?  Have you been paying attention to their backlinks and seeing if they've been doing a bit of link building on the keywords you're targeting?  It's a lot of work, but if you know the 2 specific SERPs you're targeting, perhaps you can pay attention to what they're doing.  Some SEO software out there make it a bit easier to keep track of...

Good to hear it helped.  I'm not always sure if people understand what I explain because I have so many thoughts going on in terms of all the different issues at play when it comes to SEO.

Best of luck with your targeting.  It can definitely be a learning experience.  Cheers.

Can't say that the 200-300 clicks threshold is the minimum, but I do like the idea of using Adwords to validate their estimates in the keyword tool.  However, I use the impressions level identifying that there are at least that many searches on the phrase.  Sometimes in the keyword tool, it says <10 in searches and then you'll see via an Adwords campaign 1000 impressions for that phrase [exactly].

The reason why I don't think the clicks is as important is that you might get a .04% click through rate on the 1000 impressions which would make you think it's not worth targeting that phrase, but 60-80% supposedly hit the organic results and only 20-40% hit the adwords.  So, I'm more interested in the fact there are at least those number of searches in existence.

However, more importantly, it's not just whether there's inventory, but it's important to analyze the results in that search and to determine if it's difficult to rank for that term.  There's a lot more than just seeing if there's enough inventory, but I do like to start here if a client has the budget to spend on adwords.

In your drop down menu, there's a ton from just the Locations tab.

I'd have to look at the report to see why it's saying it's a problem . Sorry.

If this occurred around Nov/Dec, then it might not be the Panda changes.  I just though since you posted recently that maybe the recent Panda change (3.2) could of been a possibility.

LOL.  Exactly.

Exactly.  An increase in links doesn't mean an improvement in your MozRank or Page Rank for that matter.

I had one website that had 20,000+ links to it, but it's rankings were terrible.

Guess why?  It was because the 20,000 links were for one topic and they relaunched the website for another.  The type of links, the anchor text in the links, the places where they are coming from, etc. matter.

When did it happen?  Any chance it happened around the 18th?

http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-3-2-update-confirmed-109321

It's an interesting question about tracking many vs. a specific group of key terms.

The main reason for multiple terms, I would say is that we truly don't know what google's doing on the back end (or rather don't know every association they make), and so we may see how one term jumping up may also affect another term.  There's so many permutations of each phrase:

dallas seo, seo in dallas, seo dallas, dallas seo firm (+ reverse), dallas seo company (+ reverse), etc.

While I'm not exactly keen on knowing all permutations of every single phrase, it's interesting how google gives us credit for one and not the other, but we won't know unless we're either tracking it or it pulls into our GA account.

With that said, you're probably right about the KPI's, but you might not find a phrase's potential without knowing that you're right on the cusp of bringing it up to page 1 for a client or yourself.  If you do know that, you can make the efforts to pull it into the prized 3 positions where there is actually traffic and then see if it does pull traffic for a client.

I don't know if I'm answering or clarifying my stance really on the multiple phrases that well, but the ultimate point is that sometimes being able to see factors on phrases you don't keep close tabs on every day can be interesting in a) learning more about the algo's correlation between phrases and b) whether you're close to getting a phrase somewhere where it might mean something to you in terms of traffic, etc.

Then again, how many people can regularly process thousands of keywords and put the connections together in their head?  Right?

Do realize one thing Alessio.  Asking a question like that here in a website/SEO authority site where nobody wants to ruin their reputation, you'll probably never get someone to say:

_F*ck yah!  Go and do as much Black Hat as you can!  It' works!  _

You know, over the years, I've seen a lot of people jumping into the arena of SEO and asking questions similar to yours.  I did.  When I first got into the business, a guy who I considered someone who's VERY ethical and incredibly White Hat taught me a strategy that probably might be considered Gray or at least spammy in terms of today's standards.

Frankly, we found a bit of a jump due to blog commenting in our initial days and we rank quite high because of it, but some would argue that's spammy as well.  At the same time, writing comments on blogs that add to the conversation are supposedly a "contribution" vs. spam.  At the same time, I don't know if I would be or would have been commenting as much to blogs as I did in the past.

I had a conversation with a very highly respected SEO who speaks at some of the largest conferences in the world and also is one of the top people in a company SEOMoz absolutely loves, but we agreed that some of the "old strategies" work and are still applied.  Do we do them 100% of the time?  No.  But will we say we don't do them?  I'll let you figure that one out.

I recommend to clients all the time to do link building in the most white hat, natural ways possible, but guess what?  They rarely follow up on those strategies even if we give them everything it takes to apply them.  However, I would avoid doing things like cloaking and anything that is extremely black hat.  However, do note that you'll usually get answers from people saying stick with doing things as "white hat" as possible.  Who wants to take a beating here proclaiming the opposite?

By the way, it looks like you have an SEO consultant on staff.  I just clicked on the gal who talks about SEO at your firm.  How about asking her?

Have you checked out blumenthals.com/blog?  Mike's great at local.  Maybe he might be able to answer this question if you get it front of him.

I'll be the 3rd person to say it, we need to see the website in order to help you.  You're not helping yourself by just asking a question basically into thin air.  You had literally 3 chances from 3 guys who might of been able to help you, but who knows if we'll be back.

You could build links and help the competitors on the page other than your store rank higher for the phrase.