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Most directories are not worth your time or money for link building purposes.  Some of them are still good for Local Search.  Most of the time you're better off using a Local Search product like ExpressUpdate, Localeze, UBL, or Axiom for these, since it's not worth your time to go and manually submit to 300+ directories.

It won't give you link juice.  It might give you traffic, but probably not a lot.  There are probably other opportunities that your time/money are better spent on.

Ah, I misunderstood.  In that case, the short answer is that "painter in new york" and "painter new york" are not exactly the same.  However, as far as targeting it with your on-page SEO and your anchor text links, it makes little difference.  "painter new york" and "painter in new york" hits the same 3 keywords either way.  One does look much more natural than the other inside copy & anchor text, though.

I'm going to make a leap and assume that your business & website isn't about art.  If this assumption is correct, then the answer to your question is that it doesn't matter.  Neither of those are money keywords.  Google thinks those keywords are about art.  See the images from Google Insights.

See also the image of a universal search for "new york painters".  Google Organic Search clearly believes that it's about art.  Google Local Search believes it's about painting companies.  This isn't a keyphrase you should be targeting organically.  You should be doing some Local SEO, though.

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You can set up reports in Google Analytics for free.  You can have these reports sent to you or the client automatically every month.  It will probably take you a few hours to set up exactly what reports you want.  After that, it will take no time at all.

I suggest installing a mod for your browser that will easily identify nofollowed links for you.  These extensions don't necessarily catch redirected links, so you'll need to hover your mouse to see exactly where that link is pointing.  If it doesn't simply say the website it's pointed at, it's probably redirected somehow.

Tools here

BOOM!

Nice answer, with an authoritative source no less.

Many of those listings do provide a link, but it's usually nofollowed or redirected somehow, so that it doesn't pass any juice.

They're still valuable listings to have for their citation value alone.  Local Search is critical for any business with a physical location.

I'd recommend using a Local Search product like Localeze, Axiom, ExpressUpdate, or UBL.  It's a lot less time consuming than going out there and manually updating all of your Local listings yourself.

301 redirects don't pass 100% of link juice.  It's more like 60%-80%.  That's the answer.  I'm not sure what else to tell you.

I realize this is probably not the response that you're looking for, but hiring a native of that country is your best bet.  A native who isn't trained in SEO at all is still probably better than an SEO vet who is a non-native non-fluent speaker of the language.

A native who is tech savvy is going to be able to give you insights you would never have as a foreign SEO.  You just need to make sure you hire someone who is tech savvy and teachable.

I hired a French person because I deal with quite a few places in France.  She had no SEO experience at all before, but within her first week she was able to tell me things like "This website is like the TripAdvisor of France."  She's been a fast learner and a huge addition to our team.

It is likely that your domain authority went down because the size of the index used by OSE shrank significantly.  Last month they indexed about 72 billion URLs, compared to 150 billion the month before.  This month they indexed even less, something like 68 billion URLs.

If some of your backlinks weren't indexed this time, you'll lose domain authority.  There's not a lot you can do about the index shrinking, unless you can provide a few million dollars worth of Hardware for SEOmoz to use.

That's understandable.  Just be sure to communicate the realistic chances of out ranking that glamour model on each keyword related to your CEOs name.  I don't know how popular this model is, but it's probably going to be difficult.  Once you've communicated how hard this is going to be, your CEO may be open to more creative solutions.

Unless you're in an industry that requires you to be super "family friendly", I think that your CEO will get more out of embracing the joke than out of denying any connection with the model.

Another fantastic example of the power of exact match domain name.  Nice.

That's going to be a tough one.  Beautiful people are popular on the internet.  It's just a fact.  There's probably quite a bit of anchor text links containing that last name, pointing at pictures of the glamour model.  There's probably also a large volume of searches looking for that glamour model, compared to a fairly small number of searches looking for your CEO.

My advice is to make it a joke, and become part of the joke.  Do your idea of a website with a URL containing the CEOs name, and optimize it for the CEOs name, etc.  On the site, post a pic of the glamour model.  Post some copy that says something like "Apparently, I share my last name with a glamour model.  I don't actually look like that.  If you were looking for the glamour model pictured on the right, and not a CEO with X years of experience in the X industry, click on the picture.  If you want to learn more about X CEO and my insights into the X industry, click here for my blog."

I realize you're probably not going to like this response, but, I would recommend not having separate landing pages for PPC.  Here's a few reasons why:

1.  You don't need it.  You can analyze how organic traffic with the exact same keywords performs against PPC traffic on the same page.

2.  You're now testing/optimizing 2 sites instead of 1.

3. It causes wary users to trust you less when they realize they're landing on different pages of your site when in each case, they've come from Google.

4. There's evidence that having your organic result and your PPC result go to the same page actually increases conversions, although it is hotly debated.

5. You're going to deal with a lot of duplicate content issues.

Edit: to answer your actual question, are you blocking organic traffic from those PPC pages via robots.txt?  Robots.txt only blocks crawling of the content on the page, not the URL itself, so if your PPC page has a keyword rich URL, organic users are still going to find it.

I agree, for the most part, but we're going to do 301 redirects to preserve most of that link juice.  I don't think the client is well enough informed for this to be the issue that he has.

If it were up to me, I'd dump the client, or at least wait until the new site is live.  It's not up to me.

I use GA, SEOmoz Pro, and OSE.  They receive most of the reports that these tools can provide, except for SERPs.  They also receive a comprehensive list of the links I have acquired for them, along with anchor text, domain rank of the linking site, etc.

The problem really isn't the reports they're getting.  The problem is that I've had to spend more time explaining what SEO and Link Building is to this client than I have gotten to spend doing real actual link building for him.

The site has goals.  There aren't specific landing pages that should be targeted with links for fulfilling these goals.

Frankly, the site is an SEO nightmare.  We're working on creating a new one for him.  One of the reasons I'm resistant to providing SERPs is that they don't have a page on the site that has Keyword #1 anywhere on it.  I can make them rank a little bit by pointing anchor text for Keyword #1 to it, but it's never going to rank like it should without that keyword there.

1. He receives this every month along with my reports.

2. He doesn't have any goals for specific pages.

3. I've been reluctant to provide SERPs because of some pressure from above me.  I understand why my superiors don't want to provide SERPs, because it can cause needless worry for the client.  In this clients case, it might be worth doing.

I wasn't involved in the initial planning period, sadly, as I hadn't been hired, yet.

None of the things you listed are statistical.  If you have good insights about statistical measurements that can and should be used for Link Building, I'd love to hear them.

I send monthly reports that have all of the links I've acquired.  They're all high quality links, not spam, not blog or forum comments.  They're all followed.  Many of them are on .edu domains.

He fundamentally does not understand link building.  He is not a smart client.

One of our account managers messaged me today.  Click here to see the conversation:  http://imgur.com/apZ9Z  Does anyone have any tips for dealing with really ignorant clients?

I see people here recommending BOTW all the time.  I don't get it.  As far as I can tell, the one thing they have going for them is a high Domain Authority.  They don't send any referral traffic to my client's sites.  Their customer care is laughable.

I'm up for renewals for several of my clients on BOTW.  I don't want to oversee the decay of my client's back-links, but I also don't want to waste money on crappy directories like this one.

I'm really asking for someone to convince me that BOTW is worthwhile.

I'm probably not adding a lot to the discussion, but this just seems like an all-around terrible idea.

It would be nice if the directory list (http://www.seomoz.org/directories) had an area to discuss each individual directory.  Some of the directories like Internet Library have great domain authority, but have a large number of thumbs-down from users.  I would like to know why.

Personally, I'm very skeptical about directories.  I'd love to prove myself wrong, though.  The SEOmoz directory list in its current form isn't all that helpful.

Amazing answer!

One question, though.  How will this come across on GA?  Will it show as a referral from the site with the iFrame?

1.  I check if any of my other pages or clients pages are already listed on that directory.  I look for referral traffic.  If the directory isn't free, and has only sent a small handful of referrals, I won't list with them again.

2. If we haven't listed with a directory, I will look at their Domain Rank.  If it's 60+, I'll do a free listing.  If it's 70+, I will consider doing a paid listing.