More open seo questions

1. Three way links by accident. Do my blogs hurt me? I tend to track parents' reviews of my site and list their sites on my blog... Does this appear as a 3 way link to google? Does this?

2. Graphics not counting for links. I hear that a graphical link doesn't count as much as a text one. True? How much less? Does alt text count like anchor text? Why not? Where's the logic in this? Or is just because google prefers a text-based web to a graphical one (easier to spider)

Does this graphic with a link and an alt tag count less than a text one?


3. putting articles on blogs first? I tend to write rough drafts of my pages that I eventually put on my site. I store and work on the rough drafts in my blog. Since google tracks where content appears first, does this hurt my site when I put them up there by making my site look like its reusing stuff from elsewhere?

4. Is my feeder site worth it? In discussing this, I learned two new terms: link bait & social linking.

Advice what it would take to get it to the top for "homeschool" for this page:
on http://www.time4learning.com/homeSchool-curriculum.htm - thanks to Carrie of Abalone Search Engine Optimization services.

Background: that page is now first page for homeschool-curriculum, 23rd for homeschool, and 60th for homeschooling. What would it take to do well on homeschool?
1. Take homeschooling off the page. It should be a different page. More "homeschool", notice the title.
2. Meta description - hold to 250 characters, mine is too long
3. get homeschool 2x into description


Tools Advice - I want an integrated tool that has: number of searches, position on the search engines, and which perhaps integrates with webstats to tell me people who visit from which term/engine and how they convert.

Does anything like that exist? Answer No. Carrie uses.....

- Rank Tracker - MSN, google, yahoo - tells you rank
- Word tracker - for number of searches...