1. The different colors provide simple visual aids to help you identify metric strength. For example, the colors are divided into the types of data they represent.

• URL Metrics - Green
• On-Page Optimization - Blue
• Domain Name-KW Match - Yellow
• URL Anchor Text Metrics - Purple
• Domain Wide Link Metrics - Red
• Social Signals - Green (again)

Within each metric, darker colors indicate which URL has achieved the highest level within each category - the "winner" of the metric, so to speak.

The best way to use this tool is using it to see how the top positions are winning, and compare yourself to them. Perhaps you are winning on social signals, but need better on-page optimization. There's no right answer, but the tool provides a wealth of information to see how you compare to the competition, how they are succeeding, and what you can do to improve.

2. The Term Extractor, unfortunately, can be a little temperamental. This is a known issue and our engineers have plans to improve this feature down the line. This is a really helpful tool when fully functional, and it still provides pretty good results for most users.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Great answers here.

Keep in mind the idea of "keyword stuffing" is a fluid concept. A well-written Wikipedia article may use the same keyword 60 times without being flagged for stuffing.

Context is key. If it makes sense to use your keywords multiple times than it's usually fine. The biggest violators that we usually see are in the title tag "Buy Cheap Florida Homes - Florida Home Finder - Your Best Florida Home Broker" - ouch!

As for plurals, Google will rank different pages differently based on what they perceive as searcher intent. I don't know of any hard and fast rules here - some plurals are considered synonymous with the singular version, while other times it can make a difference in ranking.

Hi KS,

In a short answer, directory submissions have been abused over the years and we've seen a marked decrease in their effectiveness even as recently as the past 12 months.

The old rule for directory links was to build them in a 2:1 ratio. That meant for every two directory links, be sure to build at least 1 regular, high quality link. Today, the ratio is more like 1:1, or even reversed to 1:2.

If a directory is easy to get into, it's probably not worth your time. Too many of these links can lead to a drop in rankings. Done judiciously, they can give a small boost to your rankings, help round out your link profile, and help target specific anchor text phrases (again, when done in moderation)

Here's an article we published a few months back you might find helpful: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices

As for classified submissions, I'd be wary as I've never seen any evidence that they help SEO, and like low value directory links, too many "easy" links can harm your rankings.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Are you looking for domains that link to the root domain golffacility.com? If so, be sure to filter for "pages on this root domain" in the linking domains report. Here's the link:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?page=1&site=golffacility.com&sort=domain_authority&target=domain

...which shows over 600 linking domains.

Or individual links here:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=golffacility.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=&target=domain&group=0

Now, OSE will only show you up to 25 links from each domain. We've found that beyond this number, the value of each new link you find doesn't add much value. (often these are caused by sitewide links)

By comparison, if you search ahrefs for links to just the homepage, they list 14 links, consistent with OSE:

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/refdomains/exact/golffacility.com

Hi Karen,

SEOclient12 had some really good points, so let me just add my own 2 cents.

To boil down the question to it's fundamentals, you're asking if a keyword rich domain is better for PPC campaigns is more effective than directing the ads towards a non-keyword rich domain.

The easy solution is simply to amend the Display URL to include keywords. If you have the space, you can generally put whatever keywords here you want, including Dynamic Keyword Insertion. This has the usual effect of increasing your CTR, which in turn raises your quality score and lowers your cost per click.

(if you aren't familiar with Keyword Insertion, it's a great technique worth checking out)

This is the preferred solution and generally a lot easier than setting up unique domains for each ad. That's not to say that a unique, keyword rich domain won't help your conversion rate, but my suspicion is the benefit, if any, may not be worth the trouble.

Also, if you do set up multiple domains, be careful about linking them together (or make sure to keep them out of Google's index) as too many linking domains may be interpreted as a network.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!