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The following data is from Link Building Seminar, Scaling White H by Will Critchlow in 2011. The rough number of articles published to gain an addition link from a new domain:

• Cracked.com : 2 articles
• Wikipedia.com:  4 articles
• BBC: 12 articles
• Nytimes.com : 17 articles
• Mahalo.com: 30 articles
• Ehow.com: 50 articles
• Youtube.com: 100 videos
• Faceboo.com 400 new users
• Amazon.com: 500 products
• Answers.yahoo.com: 900 new posts

High quality articles are more likely to generate links the poor quality articles. Other factors also have an effect like humour.

Hope this gives you some ideas, on what is required to produce a link.

As well as following Alan's advice I would also create an xml site map of your site and submit Google & Bing.

In the early years of the internet, tables were the best options for controlling the layout of a webpage.  CSS changed that; layout should be controlled by div & CSS.

Table can be styled like any other html tag.  The problem with tables and more importantly with tables, within tables, within tables eta, is that the order of the content show on the screen is different to the order they are listed in the html.  This can cause problems for search engine bots and with screen readers.

There are still places for tables, when you are displaying tabular data for example.

For Google and Bing the order of links within html is important and the further down the page the less significant they are (with all other factors being equal). The use of tables for design layout may cause important links to be treated less important than you would like.

I hope this answers your question.

There are lots of factors which can affect the loading time of a web page, without a URL I cannot give you an indication of where the performance issue is likely to be.

With a url I can tell you which areas the issues are caused by i.e. creation of page at server, poor css, e.t.a.

It is very unlikely (but I can't rule out completely) that hard coding will cause performance issues. Hard code does cause problems when making changes or updates to a site.

I’m trying to find some long tail phrases for some competitive products, with reasonable number of local searches per month.  I’ve tried using Google Adword/ keyword tool but I’m not having much luck.

Ideally I would like to keep the product name as the first part of the long tail phrase.

Which other tools would you recommend I try?

K