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Hey there: I'm not sure anyone's going to be game to answer this but... I have designed, done on-page optimization for and done ongoing content marketing and linkbuilding for a local fitness site. The site is about nine months old and I am attempting to achieve rank for the keyword "personal trainers in philadelphia." We've made progress; having taken a new site from +100 to 19 in about four or five months worth of content creation and linkbuilding on a very modest budget. I'm not complaining. What has me confused though is that there are one or two sites that are ranking very high for this keyword string with considerably shoddier metrics than our site and I'm wondering how a stock WP theme site with very few inbound links can rank top five for a reasonably competitive keyword? Our site is http://vtrainersinc.com. The site I've noticed that ranks top five and seems to have an inferior SEOMoz profile is bodycrafters.net. Anybody got any ideas as to why these things seem to occur? I have this feeling this site has stumbled upon a magic SEO elixir which I'd like to get my hands on!

Hi there: I own a website development and internet marketing business. We began providing onpage optimization as a natural extension of our website design services for our clients. I'm now personally working on the backlinks for our site, and I have a question for someone with more insight than I currently possess: You folks are probably aware that many web design agencies post footer links in their client's site, with some sort of anchor text to the effect of "website designed by Blankety Blank..." I've read that these types of sitewide footer links are probably a wash, in terms of linkbuilding value. (Thoughts anyone?) My best sense is that they help a little, but not a lot. Which led me to my next stratagem, which I'd like some feedback on the merits of... I'm thinking of offering my clients a slight price reduction in exchange for a dedicated page on their site for attribution. It wouldn't be pure self-promotion in nature; really just a brief description of tools used to build the site and a backlink. It could be part of a pre-existing "partners" page on the site, if client has one, currently. (Some of ours do...) The net result of this would be a single backlink from the main body content of client's page. Is this a smart move? I'm wondering what others think...