Local SEO Help

[greenhornet77]

Getting confused about what is helpful. I have a few questions.

1. Is it beneficial to link to other sites like wikipedia from our main url or our wp hosted blog? Does that help our SERP?

2. We have just built a new sitemap for our site, which is good, we didn't have one before. Should I still do internal linking?

3)If I can get a person with another blog to link to us, would it better to get it in a post or on their main page with a button or text listing?

Thanks everyone:)

I am just trying to figure out how to spend my time wisely here.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there - The SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo might be a useful starting point for you.  Chapter 7 focuses on linkbuilding. You mentioned local SEO. Do you have questions specific to local search?

[SEO5Team]

1. Base it on user experience. Will it benefit the visitor if you have an external link on your page. If it does then add the external link. This will not only provide a good visitor experience and showcase your site as a trusted source for info , it will also help in your rankings if you're competing against a site that links to nothing or just poor quality internal links . This has been covered in another post here

2. Internal linking should again be done if its benefits the visitor experience and you have links to good quality related internal content. Keyword rich anchor text internal links are often used for getting high ranks for particular keywords. Just dont overdo it by using the keyword so much on a particular page that you suffer the consequences of the over optimization  penalty

3. i would say that an inbound link from the home page is more valuable than an inner page. You can benefit in 2 ways, more traffic referred to you assuming that the home page of that site gets the highest traffic out of all it's pages and the 2nd benefit is that the home page of that site has a higher trust factor as compared to it's inner pages with Google. I would recommend a text link over a button. Text links enjoy a higher CTR as compared to buttons/banners.