Biggest secret that I have is to make great connections to people in the business.  I can't count the number of times I've run into a strange issue and it's great to be able to email someone you've meet with your question and get some expert feedback.  Not to mention sometimes they share their super secret SEO tricks and tips.

There is no set amount of links that a site needs to be successful. I think you may have that 150 number confused with what we usually consider an acceptable amount of links ON a page. Not links pointing TO a page.

A good strategy might be to submit your site to a few directories a month, spend time working at creating partnerships (that might bring links), while also creating compelling content that people want to link to naturally.

If you're seeking link building ideas, I'd highly recommend reading through our linkbuilding category from the blog. Tons of great ideas there!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

Hi,

I definitely believe Google that these won't be treated as country-specific domains, and if I were offered a keyword.co versus a keyword.info domain, I'd most certainly go with the .co. I think that it will resonate with people due to being similar to what they're used to seeing. This, of course, has nothing to do with a technical advantage: we'd like to believe that a TLD doesn't mean much from the perspective of a search engine, although you do see .com keyword-rich domains ranking better than other TLDs with the same keyword, in a lot of cases. Again, you don't want to confuse cause and effect: does the .com really help, or are .com domains usually owned by people who put up better websites? Hard to say.

When big companies use a TLD, that certainly lends some credit to it, and I think the domains you've bought are good. I don't think you've wasted your money, especially if they were quite cheap!

I wouldn't spend too much time or money buying every .co. domain under the sun, but I do think they're a better investment than many other TLDs. I don't have any stories of big successes yet, and I'd go as far as to say that the TLD is a bit too new to know what its fate will be. I do, however, doubt it will become as highly spammed and disregarded as the much-maligned .info and .biz.

Hi Kicksetc - it's not quick and easy, but you can do some comparisons that will be helpful.

Basically, you'd want to build an Excel chart (or Google Spreadsheets / OpenOffice) that mimics the metrics that might go into local rankings. For example, see this post talking about all the potential ranking factors and how they correlate - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-seo-lessons-learned-from-rank-correlation-data

You could extract out those data points and compare them against each other for different queries to get a sense of how competitive/hard it might be to rank in the top results on a local/maps/places search.

Sorry there's nothing quick and simple. We're working in the long term to expand our KW Difficulty tool to perform analyses on local/places results, but it's going to be a while before we get there.

Best of luck!

First, no, SEOmoz does not offer any automatic directory submission tools. We do offer this page as a service to our customers, and you may find it useful: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Yooda does seem like a nice piece of software, though I can't say that I've used it.

I've also heard decent things about this one:

http://www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com/tutorials/73-fast-directory-submitter-video.html

For the most part I've found automatic submission tools to be pretty frustrating, and almost certainly never worth the money. I'd also be careful not to run wild with directory submissions, as Google could pretty easily detect spikes in backlinks from directories.

I hope that helps!

Hey Donnie,

I've used both CakePHP and WordPress to some degree, in fact SEOmoz's main site is built on CakePHP.  I'd say that for someone with limited coding knowledge, I'd send them to WordPress because of all the plugins.  If you have a good handle on PHP and like creating your own plugins then first up CakePHP.

Personally if I had a choice I would use WordPress every time, since it provides my clients with access to a "backend" where they can edit pages and such if needed.  CakePHP is for hard core people who love to write code and such.

I don't think we have plans to switch to that, though I'm not always in the loop on things like that.

First off, I'd just say that internal navigation controls tend to have only a small impact. That's not to say it's not worth doing, just that you shouldn't expect a massive ROI unless your nav structure is truly horrible

That said, nofollow might not be the best choice - here's why: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow. You might also want to read - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-illustrated-guide-to-matt-cutts-comments-on-crawling-indexation

There are some potential other ways to do this, though:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation

Basically, my suggestion would be to think about how you could implement some form of consolidation or possibly use less navigation by default (maybe only enable the long drop downs if a user is logged in, or only show them on the specific category pages).

Let me know if you've got follow-ups after checking these out. I'm happy to help further.

Hi NicB1,

We use Amazon CloudFront here at SEOmoz and it allows us to setup a CNAME for our CDN. So if you look at our images you will see we use a few different ones, such as cdn.seomoz.org, profile1.seomoz.org and profile2.seomoz.org. While I haven't done any studies on this, I can tell you that we have not seen a major change in image traffic in making the CDN switch a few months ago.

I'd check with your CDN people and see if you can setup a CNAME and place it on a subdomain.

Casey