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One of the reasons why keywords in a domain name work so well are because when links and references are made to the website, the keywords are typically the anchor text that are in the links.  So, you get an extra advantage beyond even the semantic benefit of having the keywords in the domain name.  You'll have less worries in the anchor text link building violations because you can build more links similar to the keywords in your domain.

However, it appears in certain verticals, there are more benefits for the exact keywords in a domain.  Check out attorney phrases for example.  Do some research by checking out specific verticals and you might get your answer in terms of how important or how valuable they can be.

Matt Cutts did a video to answer this question that coincidentally we wrote a quick blog post about yesterday.  Interesting timing...

http://seattleorganicseo.com/sosblog/move-multiple-websites-domain-steps/

Hey Gabe,

This first tool might take care of most of your needs:

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/google-sitemap-generator/

Aaron Wall wrote a bit about it here: http://www.seobook.com/review-jim-boykins-free-broken-link-tool-0

Here's another tool taking care of your first need (partially), but doesn't spit out the data into excel from what I can tell: http://www.seo41.com/link-analyzer.php

Good luck in expediting all this!

B

I don't know the link to it, but there's a quick video clip of Distilled's Tom Critchlow pointing out that "it's not about building links, but building relationships."  I'd have to agree to a significant degree.

I'm not talking about buying relationships, but I'm talking about doing everything you can to get to know everyone and everybody in the SEO community who's good.  Go to all the conferences where they "hang" and spend time going to all the "Link Love", "Search Love" and all the other SEO Love type of fests.

Also, find ways to build up "relationships" with everyone in your niche by either spending time where they spend time and get to know their needs.  Cozy up to bloggers that blog in your vertical.  Send them nice presents.  Remember their birthdays.  Build relationships!

With an unlimited budget, I would seriously spend a lot of it building relationships for your client.

I would literally search everything under the sun re: topics I noticed on your homepage.  I.e.:

• training
• certification
• wealth
• hypnosis

There's gotta be tons of bloggers on most of these topics on top of associations or organizations as well.  There's probably even directories and forums specific to all these topics and so I would scour those as well.  Start with the basic searches on the broad topics and then start going down tangents.

You can find some gold in those hills, if you travel far enough...

Backlinks are the foundation of the original algorithm.  Check out the first paragraph in "Design Goals" section 1.3.1 in Brin's and Page's original paper on google: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html  The last couple of lines point to how backlinks are what guide's google to figure out relevance to a significant degree.

However, as people have both witnessed and experienced, google's punishing specific types of links like blog networks right now and also probably taking into consideration notions like what Geoff Kenyon wrote back at the end of January before a lot of the sh*t hit the fan: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization

I think the key is to keep the ratio more heavily weighted towards the brand and the urls of the original website and definitely not having too much of one specific anchor text.  However, some companies still seem to be "under google's radar" like this one I noticed recently: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.autson.com.  I guess if you "make it appear natural", you can still make it under their radar.  At the same time, I would HIGHLY encourage a larger proportion being more naturally built links despite the pain and time it takes.

Google's going to constantly disrupt the business though...how else can they keep their stock price going up by pumping it with all the adwords spends?  

I wouldn't worry about what you call the "google dance."  SEO can be done at any time.  The key is to do it properly.  You can do as much of it as you want as long as it's not creating problems like the recent "over optimization" penalties being leveraged.

Keep building up your on page optimization, keep doing what it takes to get great natural links and if possible, continue to build relationships both offline and on and you should be fine.

We're obviously biased...so we won't say "us."

Keri's message is great, but I would recommend doing the following when you're in the process of evaluating them:

-check out their title tag of their own website; it always confuses me that an SEO company doesn't SEO their own website.  If you need help with evaluating other factors that might point out what they're trying to optimize for their own efforts, let us know (i.e., the h1, h2 tags, meta description, image file names, alt text, etc.)

-if you need reference on pricing, here's a good recent post from Rand about costs: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-pricing-costs-of-services and another post debating/discussing the topic: http://www.seomoz.org/q/2011-sseo-pricing-costs-what-should-you-charge-how-much-should-you-pay

-definitely ask for more than 3 or so case studies, if possible.

-usually a quick answer is a wrong answer in our minds.  Almost every client has different needs.  We always hesitate when someone asks us "how much will it cost?" or "how long will it take?"  While we have standard pricing created because many people do ask for the pricing details right away, I would argue that each case is like taking on a new patient for a doctor.  There's a bit of history with that patient before they see the new doctor.

-thus, they should be asking you guys a lot of questions.  Wouldn't you want a doctor to do that?

DigiJoltMan is right for the most part, but there are also a number of firms that charge a bit more than they potentially should.  So, the reverse is true as well.

Gotta run, but let us know if you need any other questions.  I think it's great you're asking here.  Good luck!

I'd agree with EGOL.  Our goal is always to get more domains.

I would argue that having a domain is like having 1 fan.  Having multiple links from the same domain is like that same fan saying different things about you.  The first complement is usually the best, but after that, you know s/he's a fan and so you listen to the 2nd, 3rd and additional complements less so.

From the looks of it, the links that do have the anchor text "car warranty" aren't the best.  I didn't go through all of them, but you'll want definitely more links that are coming from better sites.

At the same time, do be careful...you joke that you would rather see the warning, but if you do get it, you'll be regretting you asked for it.  Frankly, it's not something you want...if you think ranking 10 or 11 is bad, the warning/penalization will get you much worse.

My other advice would be focusing on more than just one term.  We have a client who does get excited (and rightfully so b/c it has 110,000 mo exact searches) when they go up for one phrase, but we were also able to balance it out with 9 other great terms that frankly kept the same amount of traffic coming in that were related.

Also, I was reading recently someone thought it was bad they overoptimized by having the same exact anchor in the title, h1 and all the main on page tags (like you guys do).  So, maybe you can experiment with that, but frankly, I suspect that whatever links got you to #3 were potentially helping because they were coming from a great site.

You might consider finding other routes/methods in hopefully garnering more natural links from better websites though - for the long term.

I hope you don't take it down Rand.

Frankly, I picked out one of the resources this past month and found the one site had a sister site that literally 10X's my traffic over 2 days.  Of course, it wasn't the best of traffic, but it definitely was a great resource along with providing me some other great SEO benefits.  If you listed just the top 10 and this site wasn't in there, I wouldn't have had as much fun as I did over those few days.

We can make the judgement call or gauge the quality on our end.  You just keep spitting out the ideas like you do and I'll continue to be a follower/subscriber for as long as you do.

We're obviously biased...so we won't say "us."

Keri's message is great, but I would recommend doing the following when you're in the process of evaluating them:

-check out their title tag of their own website; it always confuses me that an SEO company doesn't SEO their own website.  If you need help with evaluating other factors that might point out what they're trying to optimize for their own efforts, let us know (i.e., the h1, h2 tags, meta description, image file names, alt text, etc.)

-if you need reference on pricing, here's a good recent post from Rand about costs: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-pricing-costs-of-services and another post debating/discussing the topic: http://www.seomoz.org/q/2011-sseo-pricing-costs-what-should-you-charge-how-much-should-you-pay

-definitely ask for more than 3 or so case studies, if possible.

-usually a quick answer is a wrong answer in our minds.  Almost every client has different needs.  We always hesitate when someone asks us "how much will it cost?" or "how long will it take?"  While we have standard pricing created because many people do ask for the pricing details right away, I would argue that each case is like taking on a new patient for a doctor.  There's a bit of history with that patient before they see the new doctor.

-thus, they should be asking you guys a lot of questions.  Wouldn't you want a doctor to do that?

DigiJoltMan is right for the most part, but there are also a number of firms that charge a bit more than they potentially should.  So, the reverse is true as well.

Gotta run, but let us know if you need any other questions.  I think it's great you're asking here.  Good luck!

I love Open Site Explorer (SEOMoz's tool), but the data might not always be the most recent.

I subscribe to Majestic SEO, but it will cost you money...somewhere around $75 or so U.S.

Raven has some great tools and probably the best on the market, but is not always the easiest for a first timer to figure out.

Google Webmasters also is a good gauge if you can regularly dive in there and check out what google sees.

There's a number of tools in this list: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/01/24/the-ultimate-list-of-rank-checkers/ that perform the backlink checks and details.

Also, just fyi Pedro, but I think domains is more important of a metric in general from all the work I've done.  Each domain is a unique website and most likely a better vote than 100 links from the same website.  These days there are footer links or sidebar links in a lot of Content Management Systems (cms's) and they replicate multiple links from multiple blog posts or pages on the site.  So, you may seen 1000+ links from one website.  However, in my humble opinion and from what I've seen over many websites, google is counting the domains you're getting links from more than they are all the different links from the individual domains.

For example, let's equate links to fans.  If you had 100 fans, but one of those fans gave you 100 complements, how would an outsider take each of those complements.  I would argue the outsider (i.e., Google) would give credit to the one fan & not necessarily the 99 extra complements.  While it's great to see all the 100 complements from an outsider's perspective, most likely that outsider would give you credit for just the one fan complementing you.  Does that make sense?

I'd agree with EGOL.  Our goal is always to get more domains.

I would argue that having a domain is like having 1 fan.  Having multiple links from the same domain is like that same fan saying different things about you.  The first complement is usually the best, but after that, you know s/he's a fan and so you listen to the 2nd, 3rd and additional complements less so.

Interesting data about the hyphenated domains.  Intuitively for me, people just don't type hyphens between words.  So, outside of the SEO aspect of the domains, the "usability" of the domains has something to do with what I'd argue would get more traffic to the domain withOUT the hyphens.  There's some research that says people type in domains "as is" into the url bar the a .com at the end and I'd argue they never put the hyphens in there.

Like the previous 3 comments, in terms of SEO value, they're the same, but Rob's data is fascinating.  If there are manual raters out there checking out the hyphenated versions of domains, there may be a reluctance to value these domains and frankly, almost every hyphenated domain I've ever seen has "less quality" than the non-hyphenated ones.  Definitely can't be proven via data, but just my gut...

I wouldn't worry about what you call the "google dance."  SEO can be done at any time.  The key is to do it properly.  You can do as much of it as you want as long as it's not creating problems like the recent "over optimization" penalties being leveraged.

Keep building up your on page optimization, keep doing what it takes to get great natural links and if possible, continue to build relationships both offline and on and you should be fine.

Have you checked out blumenthals.com/blog?  Mike's great at local.  Maybe he might be able to answer this question if you get it front of him.

I can't find the other thread where you asked this question before, but found this one when wanting to share this.

Any chance you could be victim of this?  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization  I just thought of you while talking to someone else.  Any chance you're over the 30% for "NLP"  or "NLP Training" specific anchor text?

Hey Gabe,

This first tool might take care of most of your needs:

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/google-sitemap-generator/

Aaron Wall wrote a bit about it here: http://www.seobook.com/review-jim-boykins-free-broken-link-tool-0

Here's another tool taking care of your first need (partially), but doesn't spit out the data into excel from what I can tell: http://www.seo41.com/link-analyzer.php

Good luck in expediting all this!

B