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Check out this thread on the keyword difficulty tool.
In short, the percentages are meaningless unless you have experience with ranking terms at different levels. Even then it's just a starting point, and you'll be best served by analyzing the underlying data. For example, I generally have an easy time with keywords at the 50% difficulty and know that first page is reasonable within 90 days - but that's personal experience and your mileage will vary.
Aside from hacking their server and looking at their log files (highly illegal - not recommended) or asking nicely and hoping for the best, your best bet is the Advanced plan from Compete.
The price for the plan can seem high at $500 per month, but when you actually need the data, it's a pretty good deal. (As far as I know that's the minimum plan needed to get competitor referral analysis).
Keep in mind that the larger the site the more likely the data is to be relevant and accurate. If you're just curious about a competitor who's only getting a thousand visits per month, then Compete probably won't deliver much value.
The name of the category itself is largely irrelevant as long as it's tangentially related to your site. The description of your site and anchortext in the listing is where most of the relevancy comes from anyway. The most important thing to consider is how many people are in that category, and where exactly your listing will show up. A lot of people get caught up with the PR and mozRank of a directory's category only to realize after they shelled out some cash that their listing will forever reside on a subpage that has no PageRank and is likely not in the primary Google Index.
But no need to repeat the information I just posted -> here are more tips in a related Q&A thread.
Things to consider:
Is the page indexed in Google? Is it duplicate content (likely to not be placed in the primary index) or original? Is the content quality acceptable? Is the page in the main Google index (preferred) or supplemental index? A page is most likely in the supplemental index if it is showing up in Google but has a PageRank of N/A
I wouldn't recommend spending money or much time on a directory inclusion/link placement for a page that is not in the primary index and has at least a PageRank of 1 (the page itself - not the domain)
Does the page itself rank for any keyword phrase in its <title>or <h1> tags? Is the page cached in Google, and if so, how long has it been since last cached (to find out, Google <em>cache:www.website.com</em>) Those are some good basic indicators the page has value.<br /> </span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">How many external links does the page have? If it's a directory inclusion, will your listing show up on the first page or a worthless sub-page that has no juice to pass? Who are they linking to on the page - are they authoritative sites you'd like to be associated with?<br /><br /></span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"> Does the page itself have any links pointing to it, or is its authority derived solely by internal linking?<br /> </span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">How many times has the page been shared/liked on Facebook, tweeted about, and +1'd?<br /> </span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Unless the site has a penalty, getting a link from a unique IP address and domain name trumps relevancy of their content to yours (from everything I've seen).<br /> </span></li> </ul> <p>That should get you moving in the right direction. It helps to collect all of this information first about pages you'd like to pursue and then order them in terms of value they'll provide and proceed from there.</p></title>
Logically, it usually makes sense to only have one
<hgroup>that contains an
</hgroup>
Since .com domains are assumed to be targeting the United States by default, you don't need to do anything to target American searchers beyond having a site that is in English and is linked to from other English websites. There are a few reasons you'd ban visitors based on IP/location, but none of them have to do with improving rankings.
These include:
The free API is good for up to 1 million lookups each month. 3 million would cost $300/month, and it's a $100 for every million after that.
The only way that those overall percentage makes sense is if you have experience ranking terms at different difficulties. At least that's what I've found. It's generally accurate but void of any helpful context in and of itself. The more meaningful data is the underlying metrics of the pages competing, specifically:
Those factors are what the overall percentage is trying to convey, but it's generally just good to use as a starting point -- SEO is meaningless without context!
HTML5 is fantastic for SEO because you can better segment main content, menus, headers, footers, links sections, etc. Some examples:
Improve Page Segmentation; an example:
<hgroup>
</hgroup>
Lorem ipsum, etc..
Typically, these tags replacetags. The benefit is that these are more meaningful and provide more context to search engines.
Let the search engines know what content on your page isn't the primary focus using
<aside></aside>
Identify primary navigation using the
<nav></nav>
tag
New
<header>and
<footer>tags (within ) are flexible and good for reducing the possibility of duplicate content issues if you have a "fat" footer with a lot of content or large flyouts on your primary navigation that repeat on each page. </footer>
</header>
I've seen ranking improvements from just upgrading a site to HTML5 and implementing solid page segmentation using the aforementioned tags. The caveat is that not all browsers support HTML5 natively, so you'll need to ensure that the website degrades gracefully in the absence of support for the newer tags. I recommend something like Modernizr to take care of that.
Finally, IBM has a good article with examples on how to implement HTML5.
It's normal for a site's keyword rankings to bounce around (or do the 'Google Dance') after receiving a lot of new new links (or a few very authoritative ones). Without knowing more, I'd say that you're probably just witnessing the various components of the ranking system at work. The volatility seems to correspond with the amount of new data the ranking system has to process - I've seen a page that had sat at #3 for a year fall to the 400's for a couple of days after a successful social campaign that resulted in hundreds of links and tweets, only to return at #1 and hold steady ever since.
So If it does not improve, the appropriate reaction is to just proceed with you link building plan. Social signals are important for validating an unusual pattern in link building (for your site/niche), so make sure you're addressing that and you should be fine.
The only way that those overall percentage makes sense is if you have experience ranking terms at different difficulties. At least that's what I've found. It's generally accurate but void of any helpful context in and of itself. The more meaningful data is the underlying metrics of the pages competing, specifically:
Those factors are what the overall percentage is trying to convey, but it's generally just good to use as a starting point -- SEO is meaningless without context!
HTML5 is fantastic for SEO because you can better segment main content, menus, headers, footers, links sections, etc. Some examples:
Improve Page Segmentation; an example:
<hgroup>
</hgroup>
Lorem ipsum, etc..
Typically, these tags replacetags. The benefit is that these are more meaningful and provide more context to search engines.
Let the search engines know what content on your page isn't the primary focus using
<aside></aside>
Identify primary navigation using the
<nav></nav>
tag
New
<header>and
<footer>tags (within ) are flexible and good for reducing the possibility of duplicate content issues if you have a "fat" footer with a lot of content or large flyouts on your primary navigation that repeat on each page. </footer>
</header>
I've seen ranking improvements from just upgrading a site to HTML5 and implementing solid page segmentation using the aforementioned tags. The caveat is that not all browsers support HTML5 natively, so you'll need to ensure that the website degrades gracefully in the absence of support for the newer tags. I recommend something like Modernizr to take care of that.
Finally, IBM has a good article with examples on how to implement HTML5.
Things to consider:
Is the page indexed in Google? Is it duplicate content (likely to not be placed in the primary index) or original? Is the content quality acceptable? Is the page in the main Google index (preferred) or supplemental index? A page is most likely in the supplemental index if it is showing up in Google but has a PageRank of N/A
I wouldn't recommend spending money or much time on a directory inclusion/link placement for a page that is not in the primary index and has at least a PageRank of 1 (the page itself - not the domain)
Does the page itself rank for any keyword phrase in its <title>or <h1> tags? Is the page cached in Google, and if so, how long has it been since last cached (to find out, Google <em>cache:www.website.com</em>) Those are some good basic indicators the page has value.<br /> </span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">How many external links does the page have? If it's a directory inclusion, will your listing show up on the first page or a worthless sub-page that has no juice to pass? Who are they linking to on the page - are they authoritative sites you'd like to be associated with?<br /><br /></span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"> Does the page itself have any links pointing to it, or is its authority derived solely by internal linking?<br /> </span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">How many times has the page been shared/liked on Facebook, tweeted about, and +1'd?<br /> </span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Unless the site has a penalty, getting a link from a unique IP address and domain name trumps relevancy of their content to yours (from everything I've seen).<br /> </span></li> </ul> <p>That should get you moving in the right direction. It helps to collect all of this information first about pages you'd like to pursue and then order them in terms of value they'll provide and proceed from there.</p></title>
Aside from hacking their server and looking at their log files (highly illegal - not recommended) or asking nicely and hoping for the best, your best bet is the Advanced plan from Compete.
The price for the plan can seem high at $500 per month, but when you actually need the data, it's a pretty good deal. (As far as I know that's the minimum plan needed to get competitor referral analysis).
Keep in mind that the larger the site the more likely the data is to be relevant and accurate. If you're just curious about a competitor who's only getting a thousand visits per month, then Compete probably won't deliver much value.
Your server logs (and website analytics) will always be the best place to mine for new keyword opportunities you may be unaware of.
For monitoring keyword rank there are quite a few options, and it just depends on what you're looking for. If you're like me, the Pro service here with weekly updates is too slow. SEScout.com has hourly updates and is usually very accurate. They have free acounts available that are good for tracking projects with 10 or less keywords.
Like pretty much any SaaS though, they can get expensive when you want to track hundreds or thousands of keywords on a regular basis. That's where software tracking is usually a better choice, such as RankTracker. I've more accuracy problems with this program for local listings, but for non-localized SEO it's great.
If you want keyword ideas based on speculative data, then SpyFu Recon is pretty neat. However, in order for it to really be of any use, you need to have a site that's already pulling in some decent traffic for its keywords.
Logically, it usually makes sense to only have one
<hgroup>that contains an
</hgroup>
The free API is good for up to 1 million lookups each month. 3 million would cost $300/month, and it's a $100 for every million after that.
Since .com domains are assumed to be targeting the United States by default, you don't need to do anything to target American searchers beyond having a site that is in English and is linked to from other English websites. There are a few reasons you'd ban visitors based on IP/location, but none of them have to do with improving rankings.
These include:
First of all, I like your new design, and typically, large sub-navs are excellent for usability and spidering. As Michael Martinez from seo-theory.com once eloquently put it: "[PageRank] was made to be wasted. Real SEOs understand that."
If you think of your homepage as a balloon and PageRank helium, then trying to capture as much PR as possible to increase rank seems logical. Unfortunately, that's not a correct analogy. If you've just re-designed your site, it's likely that there are new problems created you're unaware of. Or, also likely is that - depending on how new your site is - Google's system hasn't finished fully evaluating it. It's normal for a redesigned website to see some rank fluctuations over the course of several days (or even a week or two) while it is in various stages of being indexed in ranked.
Do not use ""style='display: none'" to hide links. This is cloaking in its most basic and easily detectable form, and whether you mean well or not, Google can't detect your intentions - so don't expect them to.
TL;DR I would recommend you re-evaluate the rest of your site first, your competitors, and link situation before worrying about too many links on your main nav bar as it's usually not the issue.