Thumbs down from me on that splash page.

301 page-to-page for directly relevant content?  YES, unite the clans.

Some people believe that the most reliable way to determine keyword difficulty is to visit the SERPs and see who holds top positions and then you will know "who you must defeat".

If you want something a bit more reliable, then click into the top-ranking pages, examine them and then know "what you must defeat".

The combination of who and what is very informative.

Who and what have informed in advance of battles for thousands of years over all types of terrain.

I don't use keyword difficulty scores.  I want the information above.  Then, I match that against my skills and the resources required to become competitive.

Great mistakes are made when skillful people allow keyword scores to scare them away from competition and when low keyword scores lure less skillful people into battles above their abilities.

asked enough questions to know that now I need to focus on content at this point

Great!  Spend all of your day working on content.  When you produce that content be sure that your page is going to be one of the very best on the web for your topic.  Then spend five minutes to compose a great title tag.

When you want to take a short break come into Q&A or look at the SEOmoz blog.  No more than an hour out of a day.   Ask questions.   Keep records of what you do and what works and what doesn't.

If you are working on a single site, once you have it set up and running then creating content - enough to saturate the SERPs in your niche will keep a steady flow of traffic coming in for new keywords.

As long as you are creating best on the web content (don't bullshit yourself - it gotta be really good) then all you need to do about SEO is to spend five minutes on each title tag and spend no more than an hour a day keeping your ear to the ground.

Your greatest danger is producing pedestrian content that will not draw attention to your site.

I am making more content, better content, videos, free printables, expanding my keyword reach.  I make sharing very easy with addthis buttons.

Traffic is going up every month, sales are going up every month.... eventually I will overtake them on the "trophy keywords" but for now I am gutting them everywhere else.

I'm a developer with little SEO / Marketing skills.

Invest in yourself.  Spend that $1000 having a great SEO do a study and recommend on your site.  They study it, make a list of tasks that can be done to improve your site, then spend an hour on the phone with you to improve your SEO.

This improves your site immediately and gives you skills that you can use over time.

has asked to have a book they are doing to be taken viral

heh....  They think you are a magician. 

I have the same experience as Marie.    I create content that I think should explode on the web and submit it to slashdot and not much happens.  Then, two years later one of my visitors submits same content to reddit and it spreads across the web, bringing me 100,000 visits to that page in 48 hours.

I have several pieces of content that have done really well but for each of those I have several that I thought would do the same thing but did not... and an awful lot more that are "best-on-the-web"  for their topic area but have not gone viral.

The topic isn't right to go viral, or the time isn't right, or the right person isn't pointing to it.  These things are really important.

Tell your client to get the Pope to say that he is reading their book... or have Justin Bieber be seen carrying it around for a week or two.  Things like that have more influence than you on the success of their book.  If they have written a sleepy little pamphlet about something that nobody gives a hoot about then it will be easier to make pigs fly than to get their book going viral.

I honestly believe that Domain Authority is a decoy that takes you away from the basics of making a great website, the basics of winning on the web, and the basics of making money.

If you spend your energy on making a great website, making money, and winning on the web then you will have something tangible for your efforts.

If you instead spend your time chasing..... What can I do to get high DA??... then the energy that you  spend is inefficient.

Working  to build high DA will not directly make your website great, make you win on the web, or make you buckets of money.   Chasing high DA when your goal is something else is like trying to kill a rabbit with a ricochet.

So instead of shooting at a rock with the hope that your bullet will bounce off and kill the rabbit, you should instead just shoot that rabbit.

DA worship is not a good use of your time.

A person with a four year degree in anything and good grades will be able to apply their general education credits to any other degree at most universities in the United States.  Picking up a second bachelors might take two years.

There are a few Master's and MBA degrees in internet marketing.  The question might be, do you need start school now or even get a degree?  Each degree program is different.  Some have undergraduate courses that are prerequisites but you might not need a relevant undergraduate degree.  The prerequisites, if any, can often be taken before or while you are competing graduate courses.  More information is posted on the program websites.

If you live in or near a major city he might be able to land a job with a local company and enroll in school part time.  That will get him experience that will make the education relevant and education that will increase his competence at work.

If he has a keen interest in this, he should be in here reading, watching webinars and asking questions. You can learn alot here for free.

Depends what you can do with it..

If you have an ecommerce site selling high value items with a great conversion rate and very high customer lifetime value that link will be worth 4x as much to you as the guy with 1/2 your conversion rate and 1/2 your profit margin.

The link might be worth even less to someone running an adsense site on a noncommercial topic.

Also, it depends upon the maturity of your website.  If you have a new site with very few links then a new link can be kickass.  However, if your site is established with thousands of links then one more will not have a dramatic effect - unless it is a valuable link that hits a relatively new content page.

I only post articles on my own site.

I believe that posting articles on other websites creates new competitors and fuels existing competitors.

If you give an article related to your business keywords to another website and that site is more powerful than yours they will outrank you in your own SERPs.  Do that a few times and you really damaged your business.

When I have a great article I post it on my own site and submit a two sentence description of the content to places like slashdot and reddit.  These sites refer visitors to you - and when they see that you have great content they will like, tweet, link and bookmark YOUR site instead of your competitor's.

Lots of people are going to disagree with me but that's OK.  They are going after short term goals of getting links and ignoring the impact of new competitors and duplicate content.  (don't believe them when they say if they post it on their own site first that google will know it belongs to them.... that is BS....  PURE BS)

If one of my competitors would give me a great article and I post it on my site tonight it is a pretty safe bet that I will be above them in their own SERPs taking their traffic and making their money by 8:00 AM tomorrow morning.

One domain have authority 44 and other 24... After I merge I will have authority 68?

I doubt it.  I think that domain authority is closer to logarithmic rather than linear.... If I am correct, merging a DA 44 with a DA 24 might lift the DA 44 to 47 or 48.   Why?  A DA 24 is very weak compared to a DA 44.

Also, if the DA 24 has a lot of the same links that the DA 44 has then don't expect to gain much of anything in the rankings.   The best benefit will occur if the DA 24 has links and other quality signals that are totally different from the DA 44.  Then merging will bring fresh strength to the DA 44 - but again, a 24 is very weak and the benefit might only be worth a few points higher on the DA scale.

This is just my experience and opinion.

I am an old white geezer in his seventh decade who has lived rural most of that time.  I don't have any idea how the diversity of people on my website are going to behave because when I see what they do on CrazyEgg it always surprises me.   So, I can spend my last few years blowing buckets of money on PPC or I can ask someone who has looked at the behavior of people on Thousands of websites to take the first stab at it.    The folks at services like SiteTuners will take a look at your page and tell you how they would change it for not a lot of money.  I am going to predict that it is cheaper to have them put some education into it than for an old fart like me to guess.

I have no affiliation with ST other than paying them to tell me how to fix a few pages.  There are plenty of other companies who do this stuff.

I just ran KWD and got 44%.

After looking at the sites on the first page, I would not want to compete with them.

HomeDepot, Amazon, Walmart, Lowes, Sears, AceHardware, Kmart.....  Not only will the SERPs be really difficult to conquer (impossible for most people).... but some of the businesses ranking on the first page are more into the sports of runnin' other people out of business, beatin' down their suppliers,  and payin' their employees nuthin.   They value that stuff higher than makin' a profit.

When I see them sellin' really cheap garden hoses and offerin' free shippin'...  I know that it is a race to the bottom.    Good way to lose your shirt a couple different ways.

My idea of sellin' on the web is to find products that usually are not sold in these types of stores and building a biz around them.   If you go into Walmart and ask if they got jimmywidgets and the clerk says "huh?"... then you know you got somethin' that you can make money at on the web.

We are working on ranking towards some hyper competitive keywords...

I do not believe that the work that they propose will be effective for your "hyper competitive" keywords.

I wrote this Moz post a long time ago but the details (and member comments) are still relevant.

http://moz.com/blog/ten-tips-for-buying-a-website

The only thing that I would add is....  If you are buying a domain today it would be a good idea to do a Panda, Penguin and Unnatural Links risk assessment.

Good luck.

I don't have clients.  I work on my own websites.  Some are retail monetized by sales, some are informational monetized by ads.

The best place to start with ads is Google Adsense.  Their website has all of the information that you need and lots of sample websites to learn how itworks.  To make money that way you need to produce content of high enough quality that it attracts an audience or attracts a lot of traffic from search and social.

** Where would those with more experience suggest we start looking?**

Honestly, I would stop looking at metrics and start looking at ways to make your website better answer the query and better deliver what your visitors are seeking.

The metrics give no information on how to improve your rankings.  They are simply a guess at where you would rank using data that is different from what google uses.  Sometimes a good guess, sometimes a bad guess.   Go out in the SERPs and look at the rankings and look at the metrics. Do that over and over.  Make up your own mind how good they are at predicting rankings.  Watch Q&A and see how many people come in here asking the same question that you asked.

If you want to improve your rankings, begin by looking at your title tag, be sure it is description of your page and what your visitor really wants for that query.  Then look at your page and see if it delivers excellent information to answer the query - and lives up to your title tag.  If it is not the best at answering the query - clearly, completely, easy to understand, and well-illustrated, then put your work into that job.

You probably know better what answers the query than any information that metrics will provide.

After that, some things will be beyond your control.   A big popular site like amazon or wikipedia is going to win all ties, all close races and a lot that you will never understand.

If you have a small or a newer site that has not become popular, then time and promotion will be needed to become competitive with similar-quality content on stronger, more established and popular domains.

If this is a site that is just starting out I would invest in the listing. It could help get you off to a faster start.

However, if this is an established site with thousands of quality links already then I don't think that this one link will make much of a difference.

Just how I would view it for my own sites.

Thank you Ryan, I am glad that you liked that post.

What would be the best practice for ranking a new site .. lets say a business site that does not have a blog to produce regular content in it....  And specially, when you are competing against big competitors.

At my office we are a small business up against big competitors and spend zero money on PPC.   All of our sales come from organic rankings.  We have 3 full time and one part time people working with occasional help from consultants.  Two people spend almost 100 percent of their time on content.  The other person does fulfillment and inventory work.  The part time person does administrative work.   I hope that shows the importance that I place on content.

I work at an office.   My office with a couple employees.

I started making websites while working at a full time job.  Eventually I had to quit something and quit the job.

You sound like a dedicated person.  I respect the posts that you make here.  You are obviously good at your work.

So, think about building a couple websites of your own.  You might need to work for someone else while you do this but eventually you might be able to work entirely for yourself.

Several things can cause a drop in page rank of the homepage

-- loss of links to the homepage or any part of the site

-- important sites that link to you loose some of their links and thus have less pagerank to pass on to you

-- changes in the links that important sites have up to you - changing the code so that they do not pass pagerank - these could be connections through a script

-- changes in the linkage structure of your site that change the flow of pagerank through it

-- periodically google recalibrates pagerank (If they didn't tons of sites would be making it to ten.  This is a math adjustment similar to adjusting for inflation.  If your site  gains PR at a lower rate than the web average your pagerank could go down

-- adding a ton of pages to your site could cause a drop in pagerank as pagerank flows out of your main site and into those pages - similar to adding a new wing onto a swimming pool and then connecting them to allow water to flow in

-- (some people will disagree with this one    -- adding a lot of links to your site that connect to other websites

-- doing something naughty that makes google drop your pagerank as a warning or as a punishment

-- if your site just recently earned four, maybe it was a very low four, now your site is showing as a very high three, this could just be flux in the calculations and rounding... keep earning links and four will return soon

is there a standard practise/best practise for SEO to do this and ensure Google doesn't think i am plagerizing content etc

The best practice is to contact the author of the content and obtain permission.  That is the legal way to do it.  Otherwise you are committing copyright infringement which can land you in court.   If the owner files a DMCA with google (millions of pages get a DMCA each month) your page will be removed from the SERPs.  If you get a few DMCAs filed against you, it is possible that your whole site will be removed from the SERPs.

If you start republishing a lot of articles, even with permission, without setting them to noindex, then google will see your site as a duplicate content site and will either filter your site from the SERPs or hit you with a Panda problem.

Even better practice is to write unique content for your website.  Then nobody is going to take you to court, nobody will file DMCA, google will not filter you, and google will not Panda you.  If you can do that repeatedly with excellent content that visitors love then you will be in a position to make buckets of money.

Most of my websites are on EMDs.  Things like coffeemakers.com and widgets.com.  I believe that they make your site easy to remember and they give you a slight boost in the SERPs.  I also think that they help convert sales.  They are not going to make up for bad prices, sloppy content or anything you might be lacking.  But given that what you put forward is good, I think that you will get a better conversion rate on an EMD like "coffeemakers.com" if your site is all about coffee makers and you are very competitive in that space.  I think that you get a little more credibility than you earn with an EMD.

Lots of people are going to disagree with that.  They can have their opinions and I can have mine.

The asking price is $42k for a site that is a keyword that gets 60k searches per month.

You used the word "site".  To me that is very different from "domain".  Are you getting content, rankings, and a history?  Or, are you buying a naked domain?  Big difference.

You said it gets 60K searches per month.  Where did that data come from?  Are those 60K searches pure or is disambiguation needed (such as Java=coffee, Java=island, Java=programming).  How pure is this three word keyword.

You used the word "brand".  To me that means "trademark".  Is the EMD free from any words or phrase that might be infringing?

Also... what is the history of this domain.  Have previous owners gotten into panda, penguin, unnatural link, spam, or other types of sin that could hang over your success?

Finally... is this domain in a niche where there is money changing hands and where a real business can be supported.  Do you have the ability to pull off #1 rankings without this domain.  You don't want to be an old fart like me taking on LeBron.  Just like fancy clothes are not going to make you a banker, a fancy domain isn't going to open any doors.  You still gotta pull off the rankings.

All of this is nitty-gritty stuff that you want to have straight before you spend serious dough.

Would you dominate your competition?

My bet is "yes".

This will come from awesome work.

There is your answer.   It is not "what you do", instead, it is "how well you do it".

I found a great writer by going out and looking at blogs in my niche.  This allowed me to see the quality of the writing and the productivity of the person over time.

Also, if you need general writing you might be able to hire a person who graduated with honors from an English writing program.  I ran an ad on Craigslist - wrote the qualifications really steep - and was very surprised at the quality people who applied.

I would not use a .co

I would use anyold.com before a .co

This preference of mine is tied to the fact that the average person has never heard of .co and will instead think that you mean .com.

If you use gold.co then lots of people, visitors who you earned, will visit gold.com.  You will make them rich by all of the traffic that you will send.

What discernible differences will there be between ads and organic content?

I believe that your traffic sources will determine how this hits you.  If all of the ISPs give all subscribers access to Google then I don't think my traffic will suffer very much - because Google is where most of my traffic comes from.

However, if most of your traffic comes through direct visits, then you will need to think hard about how to continue attracting a steady flow of new fans - if they are not coming from Google.  Then you will need to resort to an accelerated and exposure targeted ad spend.

A very new type of ad will probably develop.  That will be ads that appear between the websites that you visit much like the commercials that you now see between the programs that you watch on television.  The ISPs might also slap their own ads between your pageviews.   This could upset the balance between ads as a traffic source and organic search.

The ISPs might all place a bar across the bottom of the screen.  This will offer you search, weather, shopping, reference, and utilities - all pointing at sites who pay or share revenue for this exposure.  Advertising gets clicked up another notch.

Just a couple of questions....

What work have you done with these clients to understand their business and determine where their products and services should be visible in search? Perhaps they need a marketing plan before linkbuilding?

Also, for each query where they hope to be visible they will need a page of attractive, informative, and compelling content.  Perhaps they need content development so that each built link will hit a page that effectively promotes their business?

The above might be part of the linkbuilding proposal.  It will help educate them and identify the targets and content needed for the linkbuilding to be successful.

I believe that you and your client have more information about this than anyone.

The combination of naked, shaman, EMF detectors, orgone accumulator pucks, hoes, freaky sex, etc. will strongly attract a certain type of customer and at the same time strongly limit the appeal of this business.

The average ecommerce guy isn't going to understand this business.  For that reason, any specific advice that you get from him or from me will not be well-informed.

So, if your client has any history of success, I would suggest studying where that success springs from, and then model the Facebook movement after that.  Or, identify similar businesses that appear to be successful and learn what seems to be working from them.

In short, I would find working models, try them, tinker with them, discover if any of them work.

I don't want my home address or phone on my websites because I don't want people coming to my house on business matters and I don't want the phone calls.  There are many legitimate reasons why a person would not want these things published.

But, Google has a definite bias towards people and businesses who list their name address and phone on a website.  Here is a quote from one of Eric Schmidt's books, as quoted in a SearchEngineWatch.com article at http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2241704/Eric-Schmidt-Google-Will-Give-Higher-Rankings-to-Content-Tied-to-Verified-Profiles.

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

The part of this that bothers me is how difficult google makes it to speak to members of their product team such as adsense or adwords.  Their business model is based upon allowing machines to do all of the work.  Part of that is being one of the most-difficult-to-contact companies on this planet - yet they want all other companies to be on an available for interaction 24/7/365.

whispering

Please consider deleting this thread so nobody finds out. 

PPC people are smarter than organic SEOs.

The domain will remain the same.The plan is to create exactly the same pages in the new CMS, as what we have today. And to use the same URLs for each page. Content will remain the same in step one. We will only apply a new layout and design.

This sounds like a fairly safe plan.  The only cautions I can think of are...

1. Be sure to maintain the same title tags, meta descriptions and on-page markup.

2. Changing the navigation structure (the persistent links in your design that repeat on every page... and any other significant internal linking) could divert or strengthen your flow of link juice.

Its good that you are working carefully to defend your current rankings but is there anything else that you might do such as bread crumbs, improved internal navigation, related content promotion, in-paragraph text links, etc. that will IMPROVE your rankings.  When you make a big design change the goal should be to improve rather than to simply maintain.

Go for it and good luck.

If you just have great original content all will be right with the world. The truth of the matter is that it is impossible to remain competitive in difficult search verticals without SOME use of link purchasing or SEO aimed link campaigns.

These methods do work, however, they require a long and dedicated effort - often lasting for a few years before payday arrives.  And, they only work if your content is exceptional and best-on-the-web in your niche or close to it.

The risk of the white hat method is that if you fail either in your dedication or your content quality (or as Alan says "your technicals suck").  Then you will fail.

If you simply make a great site and wait for people to link to you naturally, your client will fire you before you get link #1.

I agree with this for three reasons.....

1. the amount of time required for content to win is far longer than the patience of almost any client

2. the cost of the content attack is an enormous investment in time that is backed by subject-area expertise

3. most of what people call quality content is crap.  It sucks and it is not competitive.

It is what it is, if I'm wrong tell me how.

I agree with you.

The problem with the SEO model as it applies to the "content attack" is that the SEO tells the business... I am going to take you to the top.   Unfortunately the business owner buys into that and thinks that the SEO will take care of everything.

In reality the business needs to dedicate significant talent and time into producing the content needed for the attack and the SEO will need the sense to recognize and the courage to say when it isn't good enough.  Most people don't have what it takes to win the content attack.  Remember, there are only ten positions on the first page of google and any piece of good content is not going to be excellent enough to earn a position.

Yanking a couple of articles that make up a tiny amount of your traffic should not be a problem unless those articles have a lot of links or other off-site assets or unless those 0.51% of visitors do a lot of buying.

If you are worried about this, have someone write same-topic replacement content and toss it up on the same URL

I bought a domain that had about 25% infringed articles.  I took them down right away and tossed up replacement content and the rankings held.

I author articles for Adsense revenue and my metric is

income from the article / cost of article production

Cost of article production includes my time, webmaster, photography, graphics, etc.

This metric begins at zero and when it gets to 1 then you have broken even.  The metric will improve as long as the article is on the web and being viewed.

If you want a slightly different metric that is probably more valuable then ....

cost of article production / average monthly income from the article over past 12 months

... because it gives you an estimate of how many months it will take at current income rate to recover your cost.

I think that it is more valuable to measure your performance article-by-article because then you know what types of content are performing the best - and that can inform future content development.

This type of metric is based upon the assumption that you are creating evergreen content that will be on the web for years rather than creating newsy content that will be consumed and outdated in a week - but similar shorter term metric could be used there.

I also have retail sites and write lots of product-related content.  This content is written to drive traffic to sales pages and to display adsense.   I keep an eye on how many sales each of these articles are producing and that also informs the development of future content.

One view is that as long as your site pages have relevant content and are easy for the user, Google will rank you fairly.

The other view is that Google has 'rules' you must follow and even if the site is relevant and user-friendly if you don't play by the rules your site may never rank well.

Which is closer to the truth?

They are both a small piece of the truth.   To rank on google your PAGE must be:

1. relevant to the search term and presented to google with proper title, crawability, and text visibility

2. have substantive content about the search term

3. be validated by other websites by being linked from them or mentioned by them (these are just a few validations)

4. be validated by visitors because they have queried it by name, stayed on it, bookmarked it, mentioned it by name in web readable content (these are just a few validations)

Any idiot can do #1.  A good author can do #2.  But, #3 and #4 are really difficult to accomplish by people who are not related to you or paid by you.

In low competion #1 and #2 can be enough to get your ranked.  The higher the competition for a query the more you need #3 and #4 to rank.  For some queries it can be almost impossible for a newcomer to rank on the first page of google without investing $xxx,xxx or more in website assets and promotion.... AND... having a plan in place to present the site in a way that google will be able to read it and interpret it in a way that will maximize the #3 and #4 assets.

are there any SEO downsides to not having any substantive content on the home page

These are not thoughts.  They are facts.  If you have a homepage with just a few words you will get a certain level of traffic.  However, for almost every relevant word that you add to the page you will probably get more traffic as those new words combine with existing words to create many more combinations of new queries for which you are relevant.

Here is a short story....

We had a lot of pages that had one sentence descriptions of photos.  They got a little traffic.  When we increased the text content on those pages to a couple hundred words the rankings increased and the traffic went up by 10x.... When we upgraded those pages to 2000 word articles with several photos the rankings went up again and the number of visitors went up significantly - some to thousands of visitors per month.  Now some of these pages get more visitors in ten minutes than the one-sentence pages received in a day.

Our guess is that if the home page doesn't have much copy, that odds are that other specific pages will tend to perform better for non-brand search terms, which seems OK.

I think that your guessing is harmful to your wallet

If people DO find the homepage, it would likely be a brand search or an ad referral, in which case the minimalist, non-copy design would be conversion-friendly. Does that theory hold any water?

Most of the visitors who enter my site by the homepage are coming from queries that have nothing to do with my brand.  My homepage looks closer to the LA Times than to what you are describing.  I want my visitors to say DAMN!  Look at all of this stuff!

The retail sites where I have this convert really well.  I would be very hesitant to use your proposed homepage unless I was selling just one item on that website.

"(which will presumably have more SEO benefit)"

I agree.  I would go with putting the KB in a folder on the clients domain.  That way, links into the KB will be hitting the main site instead of a subdomain.

I agree with Matt.  A few weeks ago I would have consider these to be "low value".... Today, I consider them to be both "low value" and "dangerous".

The best two days that I have ever spent was at Brad Geddes' Adwords Seminars.  I've attended them twice and learned a ton both times.

Go there expecting to THINK HARD.  I thought they were about as challenging as a college calculus class.. anybody who thinks that he is going to sit there, sip coffee and fart should stay home.  This is really a math class of conversion rates, bidding strategies and profit margins.  Spreadsheets!  

http://certifiedknowledge.org/adwords-seminars/

So it doesn't look like Google is penalizing them, and are actually rewarding them.

I agree.

I think that most of the time, Google will filter pages like these.  Some of the time the entire website will be reduced in rankings.

But, sometimes stuff like this will get good rankings, and those good rankings might persist for a long time.

If a person decides to place that type of content on his website, he should know that it will probably have a short life in Google's search results and might cause his site to be penalized.

"Embedding text in graphic headers and applying

to the graphics to get the SEO value"

I want as much text as possible on the page.  Every diverse word pulls in longtail traffic.

And... applying

to a graphic for SEO value?   Why do you think that will work?  Just use text.

"Reducing view-able text on a page for design reasons and by using JavaScript to hide text in accordions or tabs."

Any time I have done this the SEO value of the text is lost.  That's what my analytics tells me from lost long tail traffic.

If a designer told me that he needed to hide text for design purposes.  I would challenge him to find a way to put the text on the page and make it look great.  If he was not up to that challenge I would have a new designer.

Others might disagree.  That's OK.

I would publish ALL of this information on a big single kickass page using your "Seven Signs" as subheadings.  At the top of your page there would be a nice article menu that contains anchor text links that shoot the visitor down to the sections of the article.  These are powerful for optimization.

People who land on this page will faint when they see all of this information in a huge authoritative page.  An impressive presentation like this can attract a lot of links if you do a good job.

Just one concern.... I hope that your article has better punctuation, grammar, capitalization and format than your question here. It would also be a good idea to avoid the etc. etc. stuff - replacing it with clear detailed descriptions.   I am not trying to be  mean with this comment but hoping to kick you up a notch in your asking questions here and in your writing in general.

Good luck!

If you have a "message to get out" then give that article to everybody everywhere.

If you hope that the article will attract traffic, likes, tweets, etc for your site then publish it on your site and on your site only.

Don't give your best content to anybody or they will get your traffic, likes, tweets, etc.  Plus they will compete against you for your own keywords.  And, that will give you duplicate content.

The only exception to the above is if you can place the article on a site where it will be seen by many many many more people than will see it on your own site.

I think that these interests are best when developed early - such as in K-12.   I think that waiting until college to recruit students into STEM is late.   Students should be introduced to it early so that when they graduate from high school they know what path they want.

To help with that I go to DonorsChoose.org once a month and sponsor a couple projects.  DonorsChoose.org is a website where enthusiastic teachers can propose a project and ask for citizens like you and me to contribute.  The staff of DonorsChoose.org review proposals, purchase the requested materials and have them shipped to the teacher's school so that you know that your money is spent as promised.  But, you should review the project too and support those that from your experience will give valuable learning to students.

A teacher who thinks enough about a project to write a short proposal, with a budget and articulates their interest in public is probably a pretty good bet.  And, since they must do this outside of their normal duties it is a pretty good bet that they are an enthusiastic teacher who goes above and beyond the minimum requirements.

Selling an existing local website is like trying to sell used goods... or fixer-upper houses.

It ain't gonna suit.   When you find a buyer you are going to have to repaint, rebrand, and they ain't gonna like the domain that you picked out.

The guys who do painting here already have a brand.  The name that was used when they were baptized and the name that they have done biz under for the past twenty years. They will not want BugtusslePainters.com.  People who search will see it and react.... WhoTF is that?   Where is TomThePainter ?

That painting contractor is not going to know the value of a website, the plumber is not going to know the value of a website.

Now, if you want to make money selling a ranked website make one in an industry where people know how much they are worth.  Get a site ranking for Texas Hold'em.  You will have people fightin' to get it.

"What is the best way to increase time on site?"

Attempts to improve "time on site" and "pages viewed" are closely associated with the keyword that delivered the visitor.

In general, improving content.  This is not only writing quality but also the visual impact of  landing on a page.  Nice, big, relevant, juicy images (or video) above the fold grab attention and can hold the visitor.

Getting the second (and subsequent) page views depends upon giving the visitor options to additional content pages.  Go to this page on CNN and study it.....

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/01/us/colorado-marijuana-club/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

Look at how they have big video at top.... then several related topic videos immediately below it... the right column generally presents lots of  enticing topics that could be "news pulse", "most popular", CNN on FaceBook, "recommended stories" and more.

If you don't want the visitor to bounce then provide sticky content and sticky options.