In a nutshell, it's the number of other sites that link to your page/site. You can find more info here:

https://moz.com/help/guides/moz-pro-overview/links/competitive-metrics

Number of linking root domains (# of linking root domains) includes only the number of unique root domains linking. Two links from the same website would only be counted as one linking root domain.

Engineers at SEOmoz have found that "# of linking root domains" is much more highly correlated to real rankings than "# of links".

Generally the more "connected" your page is to the the greater the authority the search engines will consider your site to have.  Not all links are equal though, and there are other factors involved...

Hope this helps.

If you buy the domain and re-direct then remember to think of your competitors customers - not just the potential ranking boost!

Ideally you want their customers to become your customers, so think about how you might redirect specific pages from their domain to landing pages designed to reassure people looking for you competitors products/services and position yourself as a viable alternative.

The last thing you want if for them to think they're in the wrong place and bounce straight away, never to return!

Before buying the domain, can you get any supporting stats / analytics? How many direct visitors, how many via search etc.You're likely to have a small window of opportunity, but it's definitely worth thinking about how you can get some of those customers that you might not be able to replace just from search.

Looking at which products have the highest value to you (margin) is a good place to start, but you also need to consider which products matter most to your customers.

Take a look at which of your products are getting the highest search volume. Can you see why? Is it the uniqueness of the product, the great product descriptions capturing long tail traffic or a lack of competition in the market place?

Which of your product pages are are actually generating sales? Can you establish why? Are there opportunities to up sell your higher margin items rather than just a random related items list produced by your ecommerce platform.

The key for me though is understanding your customers. It's a lot easier to build a strategy to reach and attract more customers - once you've established who your customers really are. I've seen many people fall into the trap of thinking that "the internet is their customer".

What are their needs, their motivations? What language does you customer use when talking about your products? A great place to look is at any customer feedback, testimonials and comments etc.

What information do they need when they consider buying your products. Why problems do your products solve. Would how-to guides, frequently asked questions content help attract people who know they have a problem or a need, but don't know what the solution to that problem is?

Even if your products pages face strong competition from other sites, you can still win by becoming the prospects trusted guide/authority earlier on in the buying cycle.

Absolutely agree with EGOLs advice. Don't use manufacturer supplied product descriptions or generic, bland copy uninspiring copy.

Remember you're writing your product descriptions for people and not search engines. As well as attracting the traffic, the descriptions have to sell the product's value/benefits. Don't just list features, tell people why these features matter - what are the benefits to them. Eg: 5 point locking mechanism to ensure the safety of your valuables.

Don't think the space makes any difference. Take a look at this old article from google:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html

"If you have multiple content values, you must place a comma between them, but it doesn't matter if you also include spaces. So the following meta tags are interpreted the same way:

"

I'd also add some research upfront...

You and your business - What are your business goals and how are you going to measure the success of your campaign. It's not just about the #1 rankings or even the traffic, you'll want to be looking at sales or business leads etc. Once you know what you're trying to achieve you can start to work on a strategic plan to achieve them!

The greatest template in the world isn't going to tell you what your goals are or how to achieve them!

You mention brand, so you'll need to figure out how you'll measure brand influence (searches for your brand and/or direct traffic can be one indicator, as well as mentions of your brand in social) but look at how this branded traffic is converting.

You need to understand the market your operating in and watch out for any seasonal variations or any external factors (economy, competition, policy/law) that may influence your business.

What's your budget and what resources (esp. people) do you have available. Are you going to do this internally, with help from a consultant or with the involvement of an agency.

And you can't forget your customers...

Your Customers - Who are your customers, what are their needs/problems and motivations. What are they trying to do (their intent) when they visit your site. How does this affect their choice of keywords when searching (and remember that the same people with the same problem may use different keywords when they have a different level of awareness of their problem and the solutions that exist. Don't be afraid to talk to existing customers. Discovering the language they use can be enlightening and will help you avoid industry jargon etc.

Your Competitors - You need to take a good look at your competitors, and not just their link metrics. Look at their websites, social, customer services from a customers point of view. Be realistic about their strengths and weaknesses. What are they doing wrong, what are they doing right and how can you beat them!

Your content - What assets / content do you already have that you can exploit. Once you know what your customers goals are, and how they are searching how can you build content that helps them achieve their goals. How can you optimise your content so that you're not covering too many topics on a single page - keep your content specific and relevant.

Make sure you've got your analytics and reporting set up. Make sure you've got your goals set up correctly. You'll need to know how your website is performing today before you start working on your strategic plan. Make sure you're happy segmenting your audience to reveal the different behaviours of these segments and specific opportunities.

Audit your website - Carry out a full audit of your website.There may be some quick fixes/wins that you can easily make straight away. It's important to know if you have any technical problems or limitations that your campaign is going to have to work with.

Here's a good site audit article: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

There's no point optimising your titles if your pages aren't being indexed!

Planning - When you start looking at the tactical actions you can take, make sure you understand their cost and commitment, the difficulty and likely impact. You'll need to prioritise. I don't know how big your team is, but trying to do everything at the same is likely to be a nightmare, especially if you've got some of the more challenging things to do such as changing the culture of the business to provide more/richer content and increase customer engagement on social platforms etc.

Also make sure you understand any risks. Make sure you're aware of search engines policies and any governance/guidelines you're going to need when you start doing your social outreach. One badly written email,tweet or a poor customer review can undermine months of effort. For the risks you can anticipate, plan a suitable response.

Review - Make sure you set up regular reviews to look at the results of your campaign and evaluate how well your metrics and tactics continue to be relevant to your business goals. Don't be afraid to ditch metrics that don't provide actionable insight and avoid death by metrics! Don't fall into the trap of tracking too much!

Good luck!

How much difference has all these blog comments made? What other link-buidling activity are you involved in? Blog / Forum comments are pretty low-value.

How about picking a handful of the more authoritative blogs, with the higher numbers of subscribers and seeing if you can get some guest posting opportunities.

Blog comments are a great first step when building a relationship with blog/blog author, but you need to get involved in the discussion and not push your own site.

Once you've got some engagement going then you can approach the blog for guest post opportunities...

I think if you've commented on 1500 blogs then it's probably time to move on to some higher value tactics!

While you obviously want to get your keywords into your title, and the general wisdom is the nearer the front, the better but it's not the whole story.

As well as optimising your titles for keyword relevancy/rankings you should also consider optimising for click-through.

The page title and the description used in the snippet in the search results are likely to be the first thing your visitors/customers are likely to see and if nobody is clicking on your entry in the search results it doesn't matter where you rank.

Think of your snippet as a small-ad or adwords snippet. It's got to provide a compelling reason for someone to click on your link. Can you find a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors and stand out? Can you do anything to give people confidence that they're going to find what they are after if they click on your link.

A well written title can punch above it's weight in the search results. (Like wise, a bad , un-engaging or spammy looking title can undermine your efforts.)

Also remember that your page may also rank for keywords that you're not optimising for, these may be long tail keywords with higher intent than the more generic keywords so make sure you look at the keywords sending traffic to each landing page (even low volumes) and look for themes/topics/intent you can optimise your pages around.

If you're targeting multiple locations (Photographers miami and photographers orlando for instance) then you'll need to make sure you avoid duplicate/thin content. How can you make these pages relevant to that location...

Think about the intent and commerciality when considering your keywords. If I'm searching for "photographers in orlando" am I looking for camera equipment or am I more likely to be looking for a photographer to take my picture and if this is the case - why would I want to buy any camera equipment!

In my experience, especially if you've got a content rich site (and I'm assuming you do as you mention a two tier bar), getting the information architecture right first is absolutely essential You should be fitting the navigation around the content - not the other way round.

I don't know if you're able to modify this architecture. If you can then you need to be a little bit cautious. Make sure that you test any changes with members of the target audience. Make sure that if there are any changes to URLs (renaming sections etc) then you create suitable redirects. Don't ignore testing your architecture!

Make sure that the words used for each item provide the visitor with a clear understanding of what they're going to get if they click on the link. Don't use generic words/phrases like "articles"

Can provide incentives/compelling reasons for people to want to explore sections on your site? This will depend on the nature of the site of course. Don't over-do it though.

The entire Navbar should provide the visitor with a clear overview of the scope of the site. It's probably the first thing they'll see once they arrive and you want them to be able to quickly scan it and know that they're going to find what they're looking for. (Information scent)

Make sure that the Nav bar clearly indicates the current page/section to help the visitor know exactly where he is.

Use words on the menu bar that are going to be meaningful to visitors. Avoid jargon and acronyms. Try to take an external perspective. This is where keyword research can also help! The words you use should tie in to your keyword strategy and audience.

Think about how your navigation can reflect your brand and credibility.

What were the particular issues you face with the current navigation. Can you provide more specific detail, examples or the name of the site?

What were the reasons for choosing a two-tier approach?

Hope this helps!

One solution would be to put this supporting information onto the product pages (and 301) but...

This might be more of an opportunity than a problem!

Not everyone searching for a product is actually looking to buy now. Recognising that different people will be in different stages of the buying cycle and creating content to support and more these people towards your sales pages.

Make sure that your blog posts also sell - both the products and also your offering/usp.

As well as just having a link - make sure it's an obvious call to action with a clear proposition too. if they want to go ahead any buy the product - give them a reason why they should buy from you.

Your blog posts might provide you with a great opportunity to communicate the added value, authority and trust in your brand to your prospective customer.

As well as having a link at the bottom - make sure that you've also got a clear and obvious "looking to buy now?" CTA above the fold for those competitive/impulsive people who do want to buy now!

What's happening when people arrive on your blog pages, how long so they spend on them, are they moving on to your product pages?

Is there a difference in the conversion rate for people entering via the blog and going on to your product page vs those that arrive directly on your product pages?

Got to agree with EGOL here. As soon as you start boiling articles down to numbers like this you're going to lose. There's no magic formula that will protect you from bad copy.

Ignore the links for a moment. Think about how your blog post is going to help promote you business/service. Is it being posted somewhere your target audience are going to read it? Is it useful/interesting to that audience. What's the one thing above all else that you want the reader to do once they've read the article...

There's no absolutely perfect way to prioritise the order to review/update the existing product pages. You've just got to determine which products matter the most to you.

As we've mentioned you want to think about prioritising the products with the most sales, products with the highest margin, new products, hot products (ones that have a social buzz about them!) etc.

You may want to rule out products that are near end of life and will be removed from your catalogue soon or products that have low sales and low margin (think about the ROI of your time/cost)

As for how many you do - you'll need to go with what you're comfortable with. The problem with trying to do too many is that it becomes increasingly hard to create great content the more you do. You're better off writing a few great ones than forcing yourself to churn through loads. You want to sound unique/fresh/natural. Hard to do when you're tired!

When it comes to writing the descriptions, comments/feedback is a good place to find out what really matters to people, the concerns people have, the suitability for a particular audience etc.  (Tip: You don't have to look at the comments on your own site.)

If you've got a great social following, then you may be able to think of an interesting/creative way to utilise that to help you out.

Of course, before you start working your way through the list, make sure you create a checklist/process for adding new products so that the problem doesn't get any worse while you're working your way through!