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Makes sense! Working on redirecting the URL first -- learning PHP by manner of reverse engineering, so might take me a few moments. Replied to PM -- thanks again!

Whoa -- thanks!

Now, in my defense, I wasn't targeting that page for the LSAT courses at all -- I was actually aiming the /live-course pages towards that... ^_^

That's a pretty noticeable find on the URL though -- I figured keywords in URL wouldn't make that much of a difference, but that's definitely something to look into. I'm thinking I'll get started by creating an /lsat-course subdir instead for use, and 301 the live-course pages towards those...

Regarding the meta description -- I was under the impression that these are just for CTR purposes and the the engines don't actually use those?

Thanks again!

Nope, I agree -- getting that 'A' grade wasn't difficult; just wanted to get it out there that on-page optimization shouldn't be an issue holding me back.

In terms of the context, the keywords I'm looking for are (more or less): "LSAT courses" (or variations thereof, such as "LSAT course"). This is on the google.ca engine.

The site I'm looking to rank is www,harvardready ,com .

Any insight you had would be great!

I'm rather new to this, and while I'm getting some sense of everything I'm trying to figure out what kind of scope of work lays ahead of me.

The keywords I'm looking to rank for are "moderate difficulty" -- somewhere between the 45%-55% "difficulty scale" on seomoz's keyword difficulty report.

Assuming I have a number of "A-grade" (according to SEOmoz's reports) optimized pages for these keywords, how many links of a given quality level should I be looking at building up? I mean, of course, the more the better, but if I'm gunning for high DA/PA pages, am I looking at dozens here or hundreds of such links?

I can imagine that any answer isn't going to come with much specificity, but if there was just an "idea" of the scale of backlinking involved here, that'd be great!

Well, for one, someone mentioned guest-posting. But then, guest-posting where? What if the blog is iffy? Would PA/DA give a solid indication of this kind of thing?

Or, for example, I know to stay away from "buy 40 bajillion backlinks for $3" and such, but what about an offer for an individual backlink from a high PR page, manually added potentially in the context of a guest post? Part of me thinks "okay, seems reasonable", but part of me thinks "if this is being offered then could the fact that it's being offered to others then pose an issue based on the appearance of high volume"?

Also: if there is the potential for "negative" SEO, wouldn't this be easily abusable? What's to stop me from blasting 60000 backlinks to one of my competitors?

That is, it looks like a whole bunch of sites got smacked around the penguin/panda updates, but is this by virtue of actually being hurt by google's algorithms, or by virtue of simply not being helped "as much"?

That is, was it a matter of the sites just not having any 'quality' backlinks, having relied on things google no longer liked, which would result in not having as much to push them to the top? That is, they would have been in the same position had they not had those shoddy practices?

Or was google actively punishing those sites? That is, are they worse off for having those shoddy practices?

I guess the reason I ask is I'm somewhat terrified of going "out there" to get backlinks -- worst case scenario: would it just not do much to help, or would it actually hurt?

Thanks!