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A 301 redirect causes a link to lose as much as 10% of its link juice so SEOMoz doesn't quite get as much, but they still get the vast majority of it.

Yeah, I think that was me.  I've since backed off of using BMR in my strategy.

That looks like a mess.  If the site only has 50 pages, maybe you'd be better off manually creating a sitemap instead.  This is going to cause you some duplicate content issues.

Looking at your site, it looks like lots of the links are linking to this sitemap, which may be causing some recursive issues or something.  For instance, go to this page:

http://www.1oxygen.com/portableconcentrators/portableconcentrators.htm

Click on the name 'Inongen One G2', or really the name of any of the products on that page, and it goes to the sitemap.

This whole site seems kinda recursive and screwy...

Google has said in the past that they won't penalize sites for links pointing to them, but will they ever change their mind?  What if they were to decide to somehow mark the sites that are pointed to by link farms?  Would I be penalized?  Would I be marked as a questionable webmaster?

My biggest issue with it lately is that it puts me in a bad mentality.  Rather than working on building up the content on my site and making it something special, I end up relying simply on link juice.  My quality suffers because I don't have to ask my peers to essentially review my site and find it nice enough to link to.  Currently I'm focusing exclusively on guest posts from other sites that are both relevant to my topic and are being cared for by their owners.  One of those links seems to get me the similar effect of many BMR links.

I'm paranoid about my site though, and these are issues you may not be worried about.  I'm trying to avoid link farms in my own SEO practices.

Hey Crystal,

I've used BMR in the past somewhat.  I have mixed feelings about it.  It will boost your rankings in the short term certainly, especially if you are using keyword specific anchor text for your links.

On the other hand, this seems like a pretty big red flag for Google - a site called Build My Rank.  Their sites all look the same, so I expect it wouldn't be too hard for Google to go through and knock them all out of commission if they wanted to.  Plus, considering all the Panda changes that have been happening lately, I don't know how effective links from them would be anymore, though that's just speculation.

My current thinking is that I wouldn't want to risk it, though like I said, I have used it before.

I can't imagine how having multiple versions of a URL pointing to the same page could have any seo benefit. I would canonicalize the URLs. It shouldn't cause any problems with your tracking efforts either I'd think.

I've never used blog categories as I've never had a use for a page that just automatically lists all the posts in a topic. Typically I use a plugin to make my category pages noindex, and then I roll my own category page. So I at least say nay.

If you're going to blog, focus on keywords!!  Pick some keyword that gets a tiny bit of traffic to focus your blog entries on!  That way you may end up ranking for long tails without doing any backlinking, but even if that doesn't happen, each page will be keyword targeted for your linkbuilding efforts down the road.

I often like to pick one main keyword to target with the main page and then less popular keywords for the other pages.  Trying to rank one page for multiple different keywords (both [dogs] and [cats] for example) is tough.  I stick to one main keyword per page.

One of my early mentors told me that he sees benefit about a month after the initial link is posted, and that the links seem to get stronger roughly 5-6 months in.  This seems to be true in my own analytics, though perhaps I'm reading into it a bit.  Some rough testing on my part seem to show that it takes about a month for a link to directly affect rankings though, certainly.

You're probably going to need to test to get the answers to these questions.  Those buttons on weddingmountain look good, but that's because they fit into the theme of the site so well.  Once you have a theme set up you can find buttons that match, and then you can play with placement to see what works for you.

Also, nipca doesn't seem to be a site yet.... I got the default GoDaddy page when I visited it.

I would be hesitant to buy a parked domain - what if the previous owner had gotten themselves penalized in some way?  You may end up having to work harder to overcome the effects of the penalty.  I would spend the money on content or linkbuilding.

If you go to fiverr.com you'll see plenty of people offering to like or share your pages for $5.  They may have used a service like that.

I think that 1k Facebook likes number is counting the individual likes on each page of their site - not necessarily the number of likes their page on FB has collected.

According to the mozBar you only have backlinks from 29 different domains.  Perhaps adding more domains to your backlink profile would help?  It looks like everyone on page one either has many more links than you, or more domains linking to them.  Once you match them I would imagine you would see improvement in your rank.

Ryan stated that Open Site Explorer was counting links that Google was devaluing so he was probably right. I would think that if Google identified a link farm and devalued it, mozRank would not have any way of detecting it. Or maybe I'm wrong?

Those keywords you listed look like long tail keywords - none of them even get 100 searches a month in Google's estimates.

I would personally target long tails like this with blog posts.  I don't know what kind of website you're working on, but if it has been around for awhile and has some domain authority, having some solid articles on how your company helps businesses [find employees] for companies that are [looking for staff] members that are reliable and worth their effort, it would probably draw in some of these long tails on its own.

With such long tails, you could probably target several of them with one article.  A series of articles that describe (in generalities) your company's hiring methods would probably allow you space to get lots of these in the text.

Hey Bill, I don't know if this sounds like something too worrisome, but something you could potentially do is look through your analytics, match the keywords getting you traffic with the landing pages, and see if they're optimized.  Are the pages answering the people's questions clearly?  Is it giving them content that would lead them to want to read more?

For keywords that have high bounce rates (besides [tools] of course) you may want to make a page that specifically answers the searcher's questions, and perhaps end the article with a call to action to another page of your site, something that will intrigue them and get them to stick around longer.  But at least make sure the landing pages are optimized for the keywords people are finding them from.

Hi everyone, I've only been a member for a few days but this community is extremely supportive of one another, and I appreciate that very much.  Here's my current project.

I've done IM for awhile but now I'm helping a massage therapist with his personal brand here in Chicago.  I've used the tools here to identify a few of the bigger sites and ten local keywords that he'd like to rank for - things like chicago massage, cheap massage therapy, and chicago reiki, his favorite.

I'm currently getting him set up with Google Places properly so he shows up there.  We have a Facebook and Twitter underway.  We have a blog he can use if he wants - though I'm not sure how insistent he's going to stay.  I'm planning a separate page targeting each of the keywords we're after.

His competitors each have a couple local blogs talking about them, so I'm going to contact some local bloggers and offer them free massages in return for a review.  He also is getting registered in some of the local business directories - mostly the ones I see the other sites already in.

Finally, I was going to use some Build My Rank sites to bulk up his backlinks - maybe focus 10 on each keyword, with 5 going to the main keyword and 5 going to long tails.

How does this sound for a simple, first SEO project?  I'd love to hear some feedback, even if it's just "sounds great".  I've never put one together for a client, and I'm thrilled/nervous.

Thanks!

Philip

Looks like the site submitted an address to Google Places.  Perhaps that, combined with its own authority, has gotten it ranked?