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Meta Robots.

Not that I'm aware of.

Even if it isn't penalized, I don't see it as a long-term strategy with the rankings focus on User Experience post-Panda.

And are you going to attract the right kind of people to your site with all caps?

I was caught up in the wording.

OSE lists the number of internal and external links for a website.

But you also have to factor in where they are linking to. Links to spam sites is not a site you want to be associated with.

I understand what you're saying. It can be a great deal of work getting a link from someone and you want to find an exact way of rating one over the other. But I think you have to factor in all of the other context factors.

I know from Rand and others' comments that a low PA/High DA link is favorable compared to a High PA/Low DA link.  And I believe the PA score is affected by the number of outgoing links (Not 100% sure). This would mean that DA is a larger factor than the number of outgoing links.

It would be convenient if links were absolute in value. E.g, four links are worth twice as much as two links. But they are not and there is a ton of value in analyzing where links are coming from and where your competition is getting links.

Open Site Explorer is a good option for this. So is Yahoo Site Explorer. Majestic is another option.

OSE is my preference. Each one will likely give you a different number of links. Some links are discounted for appearing spammy, some are considered duplicates, etc. While you may not always have an absolute number to rely on, there is value in analyzing what you and your competitors have and improving on that over time.

I believe you are talking about inbound links. Links to you.

"In the event that there are three sites on which you have been offered the opportunity of a link"

To answer your question: I don't believe so. It's not as simple as counting the number of links on a page. You also have to factor in link placement. Top of the page vs. bottom of the page. And while you want to hold the other factors constant, anchor text, relevancy, etc., they will never be constant. There are always variables involved.

You would be different, but making your titles in all caps appears spammy.

Do you click on emails that are in ALL CAPS?

The home page, from my perspective, has too much information. One section is diabetes. One is osteoporosis. Another is Vitamin D. And that isn't even half of the front page. This combined with the two-column drop-down navigational buttons is a lot to process.

The drop-down tabs and rollover images appear instantly making the website interface feel jumpy.

I'd focus on simplifying the front-page and having less internal links directly off the home page.

The first is talking about Meta Descriptions. The second is talking about Meta Keywords. Two completely different things.

Meta Descriptions are important. Meta Keywords are not.

Maybe it's because you have two home pages. Each one splitting your backlinks.

http://www.1step2heaven.co.uk/index.php

and

http://www.1step2heaven.co.uk/

Or some of those links might not be counted due to having bought links.

I wouldn't focus on your statistical discrepancies at this stage. Instead I'd focus on adding more quality links and adding strong content to your website.

Your page content is well-optimized, but the user experience (UX) could use a tweaking. There are flashing banners and categories, which make the website look spammy. Google's latest Panda Update has put an emphasis on UX, making time-on-page and bounce rate more important. Improving those attributes and having a graphic artist de-clutter your page layout would help.

The keywords in the URL isn't a big factor on its own. But since most people are lazy when in comes to anchor text, they only put the website name, which includes the keyword and gives that site a rankings boost.

Make the keyword rich domain an information site. Build traffic for that and link-to/reference your brand site.

Your title is long, but not long enough to be cut off by an ellipsis (>66 characters).

A common title format that I like is: Product - Category | Company

You can always test different title formats and re-calibrate if necessary.

http://www.tareeinternet.com/forum/knowledgebase/54-canonical-urls-301-redirects-important-search-engine-optimization.html

This post covers Apache redirects in-depth.

Read this if you don't want an entire overview:

"Part 4 - How can I add a trailing slash to requested URLs ?

Description of the problem:

Some search engines remove the trailing slash from urls that look like directories - e.g. Yahoo does it. However it could result into duplicated content problems when the same page content is accessible under different urls. Apache gives some more information in the Apache Server FAQ.

Let's have a look at an example: domain.com/google/ is indexed in Yahoo as domain.com/google - which would result in two urls with the same content.

Solution:

The solution is to create a .htaccess rewrite rule that adds the trailing slashes to these urls. Example - redirect all urls that do not have a trailing slash to urls with a trailing slash:

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example.php
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

Explanation of the add trailing slash .htaccess rewrite rule:

The first line tells Apache that this is code for the rewrite engine of the mod_rewrite module of Apache. The 2nd line sets the current directory as page root. But the interesting part is:

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 

makes sure that existing files will not get a slash added. You shouldn't do the same with directories since this would exclude the rewrite behavior for existing directories. The line

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example.php

excludes a sample url that should not be rewritten. This is just an example. If you do not have a file or url that should not be rewritten, remove this line. The condition:

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$ 

finally fires when a url does not contain a trailing slash. Now we need to redirect the urls without the trailing slash:

  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301] 

does the 301 redirect to the url, with the trailing slash appended. You should replace domain.com with your url."

https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/357?step=357

The most recent Panda Update put more of an emphasis on User Experience (UX). Now this makes metrics such as time-on-page and bounce rate more valuable. You can't rest on unique content or page optimization anymore; you have to provide what your audience wants in an engaging manner.

Backlinks are still important. Facebook shares, the +1 button, and other social media items appear to be gaining momentum.

Watch this if you haven't already:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-panda-update-changed-seo-best-practices-forever-whiteboard-friday

It would have been better to do it earlier.

But losing that small percentage of link juice (1-10%) is a small price to pay for canonicalizing (with a 301 re-direct)  that website.

You have a lot of links to gain by doing this (1,084) and you prevent duplicate content issues.

And a similar reply from Casey Henry:

"OSE is updated monthly with the freshest data that it crawled from the month before.  There are a few different things you need to remember when looking at links in OSE.  First, It may take up to two months before you link will appear depending on when it was crawled and when the system processes it.  Second, the web is very very large and sometimes the spiders don't get to every website and collect every link you've earned.  I suggest you not worry too intensely that the link doesn't appear in OSE but continue to work on getting a wide variety of links.  It is highly likely that Google has found this link and we are still working on it."

http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/46021/back-links-not-showing-in-open-site-explorer

In the following URL, "example.com" is the domain URL and the entire URL is the page's URL:

http://example.com/category/page/

Consider the page an extension of the domain.Your page statistics are going to be better than the domain statistics If you have a page that is performing better than the rest of the website.

No. You have to research and locate quality, relevant links in your industry. There are many link building articles on this site.

Reading this should give you an idea of how to go about acquiring links:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011

1. It will help, but not as much as if it was at the top of the page (assuming it's relevant and that the site is not spammy).

2. You should host it.

3. Yes. When anchor text is directed toward the same search page, search engines only count the first occurrence. Make your keyword the link.

4. I'm not sure what you're asking. If you are talking about multiple linked keywords, I'd advise against it. If you are saying to use other keywords as relevant surrounding text, maybe. It's up to you.