Good to hear from you again. Yes, the links do help. Having a lot of great content focused on the keyword is key, as well.

I don’t agree about “reward those who work the hardest,” however, because Google specifically says in many places not to pay for links. They would prefer counting only “natural” links that were put up by others (not work that you’ve put into it by registering in all those directories).

That said, we’ve found the Directory Submitter software handy to get links from many small directories. I don’t recommend signing up with all of them, but there are about 900 “free” directories on their list of 2500 directories, which do not require a reciprocal link or payment. We offer a service for $600, to register by hand in all those little directories. Feel free to contact me if you want us to register your site in them. (We’ve weeded out the ones that require payment or a reciprocal link, so it is more efficient; we just go directly to the 900 that are “free”.) Although you may have already covered all of them in your work so far.

Good luck!

Jere

There is no need to submit subpages of a website to directories, *unless* the website has some stellar resource that should be listed.

Examples:

• an optin email list resource directory that is provided as a public service on my main website
• Nutrient Chart on a chiropractor’s website.

These are terrific resoures into which a lot of work has been put — so they would make legitimate second entries for a directory.

Forums typically put the rel=”nofollow” code in place on all links going outside their forum. That’s to keep people from spamming their forums to get links. But the links, if relevant, are sometimes clicked by visitors, so it can be helpful to your site to get some links from forums to your site. Just don’t “troll” the forums posting links as your main effort to get links, because it is bad manners.

Of course the main thing is to have content worth linking to!

Make sure you set up the “social follow” buttons on your site from http://www.socialfollow.com, or from http://www.addthis.com, and a “like” button from Facebook — those will make it easy for people to link to your site from their favorite social networking sites.

Good luck in your linking efforts.

You said “Relevant Backlinks” are best. Is google gives any importance to backlinks on Discussions Forums ?

The 301 Permanent Redirect is the Google-preferred way to handle redirects. Never set up a 302 Temporary Redirect unless it truly is temporary and then don’t keep it going for very long.

And you’re right — the Gogle Webmaster area is very important; it pays to know what Google thinks of your website and any problems that Google is having with links to your site, or links within your site, when the Googlebot tries to crawl your site. We’ve seen it make a huge difference for some of our clients. If you’re stumped by why a site isn’t doing well in its rankings at Google, the Google webmaster zone is the place to try to figure it out.

http://www.google.com/webmaster

You sent a link to websitegrader.com in your post, but I removed it as I do not put a whole lot of stock in automated software that tells you to do various things to rank well. IBP (Internet Business Promoter) has one of the best tools, but even that one makes mistakes and gives silly advice about keyword density and other things that don’t work when you apply their advice. IMHO, anyway.