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Are you talking about posts that are about SEO? Or would you like to know which is better SEO practice for all kinds of topics?

It depends on your writing skills and on how interested the audience you're targeting is. Nobody wants to read War and Peace, but at the same time, a very short post also offers very little value most of the time.

I'd say keep it to one page, give or take (maybe between 1,000 and 2,000 words) as a baseline, and you can vary that based on how good your stuff is, the feedback you get, and generally what you're trying to accomplish.

Basically as long as you can capture and hold a readers attention, and it doesn't feel like a chore to read the article/page, then you've done your job.

As far as the SEO merits of more content vs. less, I'd say the above still applies for the most part - compelling and valuable content is valuable regardless of the exact word count. As long as the page accomplishes what it needs to and is of high quality, you should be fine. But I wouldn't say you're likely to rank with 100 words on an article page.

One of the SEOmoz webinars?

I haven't heard about this, but I'd imagine it would involve finding relevant authorities and databases that hold some interest in the patent and getting them to reference your site directly in association with it.

Are you talking about links in the footer? In the sidebar? Navigation? Or content?

When you're talking site-wide links in general, you only want links that make sense to have sitewide (for example: your homepage, about us page, contact page etc.), and you don't want to use anchor text that manipulates relevancy - if you're linking to your homepage, it makes sense for the anchor text to be "home", and I don't think you'd be penalized for that.

It's worth checking out Rand's recent over-optimization whiteboard friday though - there was some very good info in there regarding site-wide links.

These are both videos from Distilled conferences that offer what you're looking for

http://www.distilled.net/store/sl-2011-cases/

http://www.distilled.net/store/linklove2011-structure/

Rand has a great post on targeting a single keyword across multiple geo's.

I'd say overall, it pays to keep in mind Google's "serve the user, not the engine" philosophy - if you don't want users to see certain pages of your site, then you'll have to try and keep them separate or deep down in your internal link structure (ie at least two clicks/links away from each other), so that it's unlikely that they'll be able to just "click through" to an almost identical page.

No problems

I tend to use Google's Keyword Tool to find keywords I'm interested in, and then I just use Market Samurai to check the competition.

But keep in mind that a lot of SEOmoz tools would probably do the same job a lot better - like their Keyword Difficulty Tool, Open Site Explorer etc. I just haven't had as much time to play around with those yet  

I still like to use both however, because Market Samurai pulls their data from Majestic SEO, which is a larger index than Linkscape. So if you look at both you should get a pretty good picture of where you're at.

I'm working on a personal project at the moment...basically the blog will be active before the website - it's one of those things where the blog is the journey to the finished website kinda thing (picture it sort of like an adventure traveller who plans to write a book about his travels, and also blogs about his experiences as they happen - eventually leading up to the launch of the book).

Ideally the blog would be a part of the website, so all the links the blog gets help your website to rank (and it's the website I'm interested in ranking obviously, not the blog). But there are two  problems:

1. I don't really want people using my website before it's completed.

2. I'd kinda like to have a different design and theme to the blog, and for it to have it's own domain and branding. I also don't want to clog up my website with random blog posts - and I'd like the freedom of an independent platform to do things that my website is not designed for.

Any suggestions on how to solve this problem? Is there a way to let Google know that the blog is a part of my site even though it's on a different domain? How would I funnel all of the link-juice from the blog most effectively?

Possibly. Another possibility is that it doesn't even matter - I recall you said that the URL's from OSE landed you on dead (presumably 404) pages. So if the duplicate content is not actually there in reality (ie, when you visit the page), it might just be an error or an artifact of OSE's crawl procedures meeting with some weird code in Miva.

But yeah if you feel like hiring a "Miva pro" is what you need to do then that could be a good idea too - I'm really not in a position to say either way, with my lack of experience with the software and all.

Best of luck anyway.

My guess is that these brands are looking at it more from a perspective of getting people to follow their +1 accounts so they can use them as a promotional tool, more than looking at it from an SEO perspective, but I could be wrong.

This is why it can be frustrating to work with third party platforms that don't afford you a huge level of control or customization at the code level. Assuming it's not canonicalization issues?

I haven't used Miva personally, so I don't know much about that specifically. Have you already taken up the matter with their support department?

Are you talking about posts that are about SEO? Or would you like to know which is better SEO practice for all kinds of topics?

It depends on your writing skills and on how interested the audience you're targeting is. Nobody wants to read War and Peace, but at the same time, a very short post also offers very little value most of the time.

I'd say keep it to one page, give or take (maybe between 1,000 and 2,000 words) as a baseline, and you can vary that based on how good your stuff is, the feedback you get, and generally what you're trying to accomplish.

Basically as long as you can capture and hold a readers attention, and it doesn't feel like a chore to read the article/page, then you've done your job.

As far as the SEO merits of more content vs. less, I'd say the above still applies for the most part - compelling and valuable content is valuable regardless of the exact word count. As long as the page accomplishes what it needs to and is of high quality, you should be fine. But I wouldn't say you're likely to rank with 100 words on an article page.

By "the ones that rank highest" I'm assuming you mean the ones with the most traffic?

Keyword research tends to be a bit more complicated than that - but not overly complicated. Basically you want to find a keyword that ticks 3 boxes.

1. It needs to bring in traffic - obviously.

2. It needs to be a relevant keyword that will bring targeted visitors to your site. For example, say you're selling balloons - you want to focus on keywords that will attract visitors wanting to actually buy balloons. It helps to look at a keyword and think, "If I'd just searched for that, what would my intentions be?"

3. It needs to look good from a cost/benefit standpoint - ie, is it a competitive term? is it easy to rank for? How much targeted traffic will I get for the amount of work involved? For this reason, the keywords that get the most traffic are sometimes not the best to go after, because ranking for them can literally take years of hard work in some cases - you have to learn to pick your battles.

I tend to use a combination of Google's Keyword Tool and a program called Market Samurai for keyword research, and I find that this gives me a very accurate and workable picture  of what keywords to target and why.

Possibly. Another possibility is that it doesn't even matter - I recall you said that the URL's from OSE landed you on dead (presumably 404) pages. So if the duplicate content is not actually there in reality (ie, when you visit the page), it might just be an error or an artifact of OSE's crawl procedures meeting with some weird code in Miva.

But yeah if you feel like hiring a "Miva pro" is what you need to do then that could be a good idea too - I'm really not in a position to say either way, with my lack of experience with the software and all.

Best of luck anyway.

This is why it can be frustrating to work with third party platforms that don't afford you a huge level of control or customization at the code level. Assuming it's not canonicalization issues?

I haven't used Miva personally, so I don't know much about that specifically. Have you already taken up the matter with their support department?