I've often wondered if certain positions are better than others, say dead bottom of page is better than 8th or 9th and if 11th is better that 6-10th.

You need not to hurry, sometimes you "feel" the link juice after a while, not instantly when the links are up.

1. Article marketing definitely works for long-tail keywords.
2. Those spam comments you are talking about should be pointed to approved articles (what is called link pyramid)
3. Link diversity, as much as possible.
4. Anchor text diversity.

Good luck!

Thanks guys for give nice info

Re asses your keyword strategy, you may b targeting low traffic keywords.

Originally Posted by moleygunn

I don't know if I'm targeting the wrong keywords, or if I need more links or something else. I think my on-page is pretty good. I've tried everything I can think of. Had an SEOMoz account for 3 months but didn't really use it much.

Currently getting about 3600 visitors a month, and currently dropping by about 14% per month.

• I bought placement in a lot of high PR link directories - €20 a placement and upwards kinda places - should I buy more? Open Site Explorer seems to rate these pretty high.
• Someone mentioned hiring some low cost Indian SEOs for tons of links - a volume over quality approach. I always assumed this was a bad idea.
• I've been getting single link from loads of different domains. Do you guys think I should buy advertising on some forums that'll give 25,000 links from the same domain to balance out the link strategy?
• We aim towards International customers as well as Irish ones, but I think our domain maybe puts people off. I've bought some more International sounding domain names. I'm thinking of setting up a separate site using one of those - I'm a web designer so it's not gonna cost much. Any thoughts?
• Should I just spend a few grand on advertising on a few different community sites? Does this work, or are there better value links?
• Is article submission a complete waste of time? Seems like a wasteland. If not, is there any decent software to automate the process?
• Comment "spam" - I've heard this actually works but it seems pretty sick. Has anyone had any success with it?

The site sells cannabis seeds, which are legal to possess in most European countries. Address is irish seed bank.com (without the spaces). Any help is very much appreciated.

• I think you could be wasting your time with these high placement directories, I wouldn't worry what site explorer thinks, it's what google thinks thats important.
• You assumed correctly, quality over quantity, these spammy links can sometimes hurt your reputation and also your rankings
• 25,000 links from the same domain won't help too much, although having a link from their home page will be beneficial, but once your ad goes so will your back link. Last time I checked Google discounts sitewide links, so having so many links from a site won't help your rankings, although it would help your visibility.
• It would help to know what your domains are or some more information to be sure, if your aiming for international customers if you get like a .co.uk domain that will possibly help you in local searches, but just make sure you have language options, Google translate is possibly a good option.
• Again you could advertise on related niche sites, but if your wanting the links to help you in SERPs then shortly after your ad is removed the pages will be reindexed and your back links will be gone.
• Article submissions aren't a waste of time, but if you submit spammy and obviously spun content it may not work so well, you will get some back links, not much traffic and when your new article is added the page is created as 0 PR, but linkjuice/pr will flow through to it, although not ever so much... but the best way to use article submissions is to write for syndication (so that other people use your content) .. this way people repost your article on their sites along with your anchor text/links - if your looking to automate the process then it's possible, but I won't use automated software for this as some directories are employing new measures to combat against it as there are a large number of individuals who are submitting loads of spammy articles and pretty much ruining it for the rest of us who work hard on their articles if you get what i mean.
• Blog commenting is ok, but again like article submissions it's getting ruined by people with scapebox and other software, all these stupid generic blog comments "oh nice blog" etc or even the more obvious spam comments are causing more and more webmasters to employ harsher moderation for their comments .. although it can work quite well, but don't rely on this for traffic.

The important thing is are you ranking well for your keywords? and also what kind of search volume do they get? you can use google adwords keyword tool for a rough estimate.

If the search volume is high you might want to look at your sites description etc, as these play a big part in conversions.

Reanalyze your keywords.

Content ... content ... content

To get, and remain, in top listings, you need to be constantly adding good content.

Google knows when your pages were created. It knows when your pages were last edited. Why would Google take notice of a site (however many links it has to it) if the content is old?

Having said that. Google also knows when your url was first registered and how old your site is. So many new sites get nothing added to them after the first few months (or worse ... get taken down). So Google gives extra credit to old established sites (above 2 years old).

So ... constant new good quality content AND keep your site going. Doing both of these WILL move you to top 5 in Google for many of your individual pages.