When communicating with clients about progress I avoid talking about their PR/DA directly but talk in terms of improving (or not) in relationship to their competitors.  They really don't care about the NY Times, but about the sites that are directly competing against them.  If I can tell them that we closed the gap between their site and their competitors that is all they want to know. If a new index throws us a curve ball, we soften the blow by following up the bad news with a trend line showing that we are moving in the right direction even though there is an aberration in this indexes numbers..

Chris

There are a number of tools you can use.  SEOmoz offers a rank tracking tool. Spyfu does also.  You can try the Free Firefox add-in Rank Checker. For bulk checking I use Advanced Web Ranking, <cite>www.advancedwebranking.com/</cite>

It's always better to target a page with a single phrase.  However it doesn't mean you can't use your alternate phrases at all.  Just don't try to make it compete with your primary phrases.

"So remember Tom's Painting next time you need a Texas Painter."

I'm going to resist any urge to refer to Tom's Texas sized paint brush"

You touched on a good point here "We set  up our site to utilize a index redirect for all of our sub directories as well, so with this method you simply name your sub directories to match the url path that you desire. Each sub directory has it's own index which you redirect with a variation of the above code. By doing this you can have nice clean url paths like http://www.semclix.com/design/ecommerce/ - and mitigate the duplicate content issue. We hope that this helps."

Too often I see sites where they get the home page right but miss the re-write on the directories.

It is not surprising that attendance is growing.  Last year was my first year attending but I can't imagine the circumstances that would keep me from missing one in the future.

I have attended dozens and dozens of conventions, seminars, training sessions, conferences, etc. over the years, but MozCon 2010 was by far the best event of its kind.

I will be sitting as close to the front as I can. Stop by and say hello.

I like you critical thinking Alan.  Too many times people react without thinking through the consequences of those actions.

Don't forget about the geo searches for people who are not in your area but are looking for information on it.  I am in Florida but will be doing searches to find out what is going on in Seattle during MOZcon at the end of July.  That includes car rental, restaurant, tourist traps (my wife is coming too), maybe even your overnight multi-day pet-sitting service if we bring the dogs as well are heading to Maui for a week to absorb everything the experts can teach me.

By the way. What is that place in Seattle that sells utility kilts?  Think I will Google it.

Quality over quantity always wins in the end.  Make what you have the best you can, then add more quality content on related topics.

I would recommend www.mywebsite.com/hotdogs/.