What Gamer07 said.

PPC doesn't influence organic rankings but that doesn't mean you shouldn't bid on a  competitor's brand name.

The keyword difficulty tool gives an indication of how hard it will be to rank for a certain term. So the lower the difficulty the easier it is to rank for.

A good rule of thumb is that you want to rank for terms with a low difficulty that drives a lot of users who are likely to achieve your goal. So for me he perfect term would -

• Have a low difficulty score
• Have a high volume of searchers
• Have a higher than average conversion rate when those searchers hit my site.

Hope that helps.

I use BuzzStream to track link building in the way you mention but there are other services out there. Even a simple Excel spreadsheet can do the trick.

You'd be hard pressed to find any automated directory submission that's white hat. In fact auto directory submissions are pretty much the definition of crap hat SEO.

This soon after Panda you'd have to be particularly brave to try en-masse directory submission. I'm not saying that it won't work or that it will have a negative impact on your site but I certainly wouldn't try it.

If it's a testimonial of an company I believe you use the Reviews fields with Organization as the Thing.

So if you take the example page on Schema.org (below) and swap out the Product for an organisation you should have it.

http://schema.org/Review