Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am not personally a developer but being an SEO am able to work with most CMS platforms pretty well.

Wordpress for me has been the winner for long time. I have had clients who have used Joomla and it has been a complete nightmare for them. Doesn't help when developers disappear and leave you to try and find another designer at short notice and then find out nobody will touch it with a barge pole!!

Same goes for any kind of bespoke system. What happens when the developers are no longer around??

So word of warning. Make sure that whichever platform you go with, that is well supported and that  there are others on standby if the developers are no longer around to support you.

I use http://gsitecrawler.com/ which is awesome and can be downloaded for free. Does the job for me and doesn't seem to have any limitations such as number of crawled pages.

Really it depends on whether the release is "news worthy" or not.

My personal opinion is that regular and consistent press release distribution should be a part of your overall strategy if of course it is warranted and you can produce something of value.

I had one client who got a call and a write-up from Sky News, although a direct link did not result(completely gutted). I have had other clients who have also been contacted by media companies after viewing their releases.

If it is backlinks you are after, regular press releases may provide this. Remember though, just because your release is syndicated by 1,000 websites, does not mean you will get 1,000 unique backlinks that pass any value as it will be seen as duplicate content for sure.

If you are trying to build your brand and obtain more visibility, for the cost I think it is worth it.

I think Alan has made some really valid points. THE most important step in any marketing campaign is to know what you are selling, to who you are selling to and what your UVP is. If they don't know this then you are probably in for a really bumpy ride. I've experienced this and it's a pain in the butt for sure.

One thing I get them to do initially is to get them to sum up their business in one or two sentences. This will help them to be really specific and should give you a starting point.

Also get them to tell you who they believe to be their top 3 competitors or maybe which site they would like to emulate. This may provide further clarification as to what they are trying to achieve.

As Thomas mentioned, if they use analytics then taking a look at their current traffic and finding the best performing keywords in terms of avg time on site and low bounce rate could also provide you with a clearer picture.

Good luck!

My personal opinion is that it could well be a flop. With the "like" button people are so familiar with this due to so much Facebook usage. The average Facebook user is logged in most of the time, so they know that by clicking on like they will be sharing these with their social circle. With +1? What does it do? You click it, then what? Who see's it?

You and I know that it will show in the SERPS if someone you know has previously +1'd something but does the average joe bloggs know this?

When it comes to the average user on the web I don't think they will  have a clue about +1

As for placing a +1 button in the SERPS I am not sure on this. I mean, you search, get the results and then click on the link. You then going to view the page and then remember to go back and +1 it? I am more likely to click on my Evernote widget and bookmark it or if I want to share use my hootsuite hootlet and share it to FB or Twitter.

Really not convinced on +1 yet, but time will tell.

Submitting to 20 or 30 directories should not have any negative impact at all. Another thing to remember is that the engines will not find these links at the same time anyway. They will be found when each of those pages are crawled which could be days or in some cases weeks and months. So no, no problems at all.

Hi Leigh. This will depend on a number of things. How old is the site? Have you been link building? What else have you done in terms of SEO? If the site is new and you have only recently begun working on the site it may take a month or two for Open Site Explorer/Linkscape to pickup your site.