With nearly 150 million domain name websites registered (source: NetCraft) and a phenomenon known as the Google Sandbox, where new sites are placed into a moratorium of sorts until they have proven to be legitimate sites, getting a new site to quickly appear within search engine results is an enormous challenge all webmasters and site owners face when launching a new site. According to Nielsen Netratings, there were approximately 8 billion search queries performed in the month of October 2007 which means search engines are a popular tool to discover websites. Based on the total US population of 303.5 million (US Census), that equates to 26 searches for every single person in the US in October alone.

Leading organic search engine optimization firms suggest that it can take anywhere from three to six months to achieve a top 30 ranking in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN dependent on the competitive online search landscape. Additional statistics from NetCraft indicate there have been over 40 million new sites in 2007 so the search ranking challenge is becoming greater and greater each month.

Recently, I developed a new site (http://radio.smbconsultinginc.com) dedicated to my marketing internet radio show as a sub-domain off of our main company site (http://smbconsultinginc.com). The site went live on Sunday, December 2, 2007 and was indexed by Google and Yahoo within five days. Furthermore, the site ranked within the top 20 search results for “marketing radio show” according to Google (#9) and Yahoo (#16) on December 7, 2007. Taking into consideration the number of competing pages within Google (5.48 million) and Yahoo (112 million) for that particular phrase, this is an accomplishment that many webmasters and site owners would like to duplicate so let’s take a look at how it was achieved.

• Special attention was paid to the title and description tags for each page of the site with the main page getting the lion’s share of keyword focus. The keyword tag wasn’t even utilized for this site as a test to verify its dwindling importance to search engines.

• A link to the new site was placed on our main established website homepage which gets indexed regularly by all crawler based search engines.

• Placing strategic comments on very popular and heavily linked to blogs improved the odds of the site being indexed and created a little awareness.

• Signing up for a directory submission service that submitted the site to nearly 500 online directories for around $100 saved tremendous time. This ploy was implemented to speed up the indexing process while also creating permanent links back to the site which focus on targeted keyword phrases.

• A sitemap was created next and submitted directly to Google in order to improve the odds of getting more pages indexed once their crawler discovered the new site through one of the strategically placed links from any number of sites targeted in the first few steps.

• Since the site’s true purpose is to focus attention on the great guests featured on the show, an e-mail was sent to each guest to alert them of the site and encourage them to promote their own individual page in any way they deemed appropriate.

• The content generated for the site will lend itself well to naturally attracting links as time goes on which will further improve the site’s rankings for various keyword phrases.

Now that the site ranks well for a few keyword phrases within the search engines’ organic rankings, show popularity and guest awareness will increase which help all parties involved better attract their desired target audience which is one of the key values of organic search engine optimization.

The next time you produce a new website and want to improve the odds of your site getting indexed quickly, follow the steps outlined above and hopefully your site will rank well in the process.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Bauer is founder and CEO of SMB Consulting, Inc., a nationally recognized sales and marketing consulting firm specializing in revenue growth programs, search engine optimization and strategic initiatives. To learn more, point your browser to http://smbconsultinginc.com or e-mail info@smbconsultinginc.com

As most of you already know, search engine optimization is one of the hottest marketing techniques out there today. Whereas old school advertising and interruptive marketing methodologies blast out a message in hopes that someone receives it and eventually takes action, SEO helps you strategically go where you anticipate your desired target audience to be in order to market to them in a fashion that suits THEM best.

I hope you'll join Rand and me this Thursday at 2 PM ET for another edition of "The Bauer Pauer Hauer" on VoiceAmerica.com.

I have decided to write this article as a result of numerous emails. It seems more and more people are falling victim to bad SEO. The main complaint is that they are paying entirely too much for little or no results. Additionally, many fall prey to bad SEO practices. If you plan to hire an SEO pro in the future, I suggest you use this article as a set of guidelines.

Before going with any SEO firm or individual, do the following:

A) Find out how established and experienced an SEO firm is before you negotiate.
Do they have a sizeable client list under their belt? Are they published?

B) Scrutinize their portfolio.
What kind of results have they achieved?
Contact a few of their clients. Were they satisfied with the work performed?

C) Consider and confirm their methods?
How will they optimize your site to reach your keywords?
Do they use organic methods? Some individuals or companies use doorway pages, hide text in the background, utilize re-directs and other blacklisted methods. Stay away from these.

D) Get a least three proposals from different SEO firms.
Look at each one carefully. Are there similarities? Proposals will help you see which companies are honest and which are trying to sell you something you don't need.
What is the cost? The cheapest isn't always the best, however, the highest price may not be attached to a comprehensive and viable course of action. Try to find find an individual or organization that will give you what you want within your SEO budget.

E) Contract, Contract, Contract.
Get everything in writing. Look over the document carefully. Be sure it covers everything you have discussed, including methods of achieving your desired results. Have the copies signed by both parties. If the job is a large one you may want to consult a lawyer.

F) Clearly state the terms of payment.
While most SEO firms will not do any work for free or agree to a results based pay scale, many competant SEO professionals will not shy away from a base plus performance incentive package. I am not a firm believer in prepaid contracts.. Most SEO professionals will abide by the 50% up front, 50% upon completion standard. Make sure all financial terms are as clearly defined in your contract as the actual scope of work. This will protect all parties involved in the event that expectations are not met.

All in all, try to do your best to educate yourself on SEO. Have a basic understanding of SEO terminology and SEO methodology. Anyone offering SEO services should not have a problem explaining how they intend to get you results. If they fail gain your confidence or raise a red flag for any reason whatsoever, keep searching. You will eventually find someone who will help you reach your goals for a fair price. Happy hunting.

To read more articles on SEO read Joe's blog http://mr-seo.blogspot.com/ His SEO services can be found at http://www.mr-seo.com For affordable web design visit http://www.jnb-design.com

Just a quick note to let you know I'm in the process of developing a weekly one hour SEO teleseminar series with some of the industry heavyweights that should begin sometime in August. Stay tuned for the lineup and sign-up information. This promises to be a doozy! If you are one of the lucky ones to get signed up and attend the entire series, the knowledge you'll gain will be tremendous and extremely profitable. I hope to "see" you on the calls as they progress.

If there are burning SEO questions you'd like answered, please submit them below in the comments section. We'll be sure to address them pronto!

More to come . . .

PS--I'm also working on some SEO training videos to compliment the book used in the recent training seminars. These will eventually be available for purchase on a site yet to be determined. If you'd be interested in becoming a beta tester for the videos, let me know in the comments section below.

First off, I would like to apologize for not posting much of late. I've got a LOT of coals in the fire at the moment, but that's no excuse not to share something worthwhile every now and again.

Here's the thing: as many of you know, I've been teaching SEO classes here in Louisville while trying to attract some students in other locales, and the feedback has been great thus far. I am in the process of taking the book I wrote for the classes and turning it into an e-book to possibly sell online. I'm at a little crossroads as to how to best go about that in order to:

1) Gain the most exposure for the consulting firm
2) Educate people to the point they could do their own SEO campaign if they so desired or help them realize that SEO is not a one time event or an easy process (it's very time consuming!)
3) Encourage people to spread the word about the book and the firm while also not shorting the consulting firm's long term viability (i.e. don't give away the milk in order to sell the cow)

In order to achieve those objectives, I've been wrestling with the following scenarios:
A) Give the book away and encourage people to pass it around because that would generate the most buzz and increase awareness of the firm rather quickly

B) Develop and/or obtain videos, podcasts, and other material to include with the book to sell online at various price points (each package would be a little different). Currently, I'm thinking price points of:

• $67 for just the book and one or two other related e-books
• $97 for the book and several other related e-books
• $197 for the book, videos, podcasts, and other related e-books

There might be a ten day introductory period at launch for each package where each is $20 off to gain some momentum, but then everything would settle into the price points outlined. If the response is great enough, those price points may increase, too.

It's tough for me NOT to charge something due to the fact that I'm giving away "trade secrets" so to speak. Yes, there are a lot of SEO books sprinkled throughout the market, and some of them are free (even some good ones), but I believe this is a little different from the other stuff out there (it's very hands on and specific about what to do to be successful).

One theory suggests that if you give something of great value away, you get it back two fold. Another theory suggests that it is unlikely the people who would be buying one of the e-book packages would subscribe to one of the SEO subscription packages offered by my firm as they are more interested in doing everything themselves. I see both sides of the coin, and the business side of me says "you HAVE to sell the thing for money somehow," while there is another part of me that says "you'll make more in the long run if you give it away, and the firm will be recognized as a viable resource for many years to come."

My question to you is: what would you do and why?

Please let me know by commenting below or e-mailing info@smbconsultinginc.com, and no reply is a bad reply--I'll share some of the best responses in a week or so and again as the time gets closer to sell or give the book away. I'm going to stew on this for the next month or so. I appreciate your input in advance.

Many potential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) clients come to me stating they don’t have the financial resources to contract my firm for services yet they’d like to get started with the promotion of their site within the search engine sphere. Below I’ve attempted to outline the first steps I might take if I had a new website to promote from the ground up.

Submit Your Site to Directories

Directory submissions are an integral part of basic SEO, and directory listings help to form a foundation of links pointing to your site that generally won’t go anywhere unless the directory disappears or is shutdown for some reason. Many directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory feed search engine results and carry a lot of “weight” with major search engines such as Google, MSN/Live, and Yahoo!

There are hundreds of free directories out there, and my recommendation is to subcontract this service out to an inexpensive submission service (do a search for “directory submission service”). For as little as $30, you can have your website submitted to hundreds of directories in little time. Manually doing this could take countless hours, and it’s very tedious work. One note of caution: directories don’t get indexed overnight. It will take some time for your site to get “credit” for being listed in a lot of the online directories.

Write and Submit Articles about Your Business or Industry

Promoting your business via articles about your industry or the business itself are a great way to build awareness without being over the top or in someone’s face. The more articles you write and submit to online e-zines or article directories, the more your name circulates. Think about it, when you read an informative article that helps you solve a problem, perform a task better, or recaps an event, your guard isn’t as high as it is when you come across an all out advertisement is it?

Be sure to include a byline at the end containing a link to your site along with brief information about you and your company. This will not only generate awareness, it will also help your search engine optimization campaign by building “natural” links back to your website as the article circulates the online community.

Engage in a Free PR Campaign

While print media isn’t as popular as it once was, people still read newspapers, trade journals, and magazines. Local newspapers are always looking for interesting stories on local people to write about in order to increase their readership. Magazines are a bit different in that your story needs to be very compelling and unique in some fashion, but your website and business can get a big jolt if you can land a story in a print publication of some sort. One word of caution: don’t go shooting for the New York Times or Inc. Magazine right out of the chute unless you’re truly prepared to handle a huge influx of site visits, e-mails, phone calls, and unrelated requests about your business.

Involve Yourself in the Blogosphere

Blogs are a great way to show a more human side to a company, and their popularity continues to increase. My advice is to start a blog about your company, industry, or niche that is a sub-domain off of your main website. A sub-domain may look like this: subdomain.domain.com to where your blog may utilize a scheme similar to blog.yourdomain.com. This is a great way to build unique content for your domain while also helping your customers or clients get to know the human side of your business. There are several free blog generators out there that will even host your blog for free, and two of the more popular ones can be found at blogger.com or wordpress.com.

If starting your own blog is too tall a task, visit others’ blogs related to your industry and join in the conversation by posting comments and interacting with the blog owner. Many blog comments are indexed by the name you enter in the name field of the comment form so you can build links to your site this way. One note of caution: there is a lot of debate whether no-follow links such as the ones on most blogs provide any search optimization value, and I have found that they do provided the blog itself ranks well and has a large following.

Promote Your Site Everywhere

Offline optimization is just as important as it is online as you’re simply trying to generate interest in your business or website, right? Consider promoting your website offline just as you would your business. Nobody will know about your site unless you tell them, but you don’t want to be a hound about it either so be subtle. The traffic you generate may result in a huge sale that puts your business on the map.

Basic SEO isn’t that difficult if you think about it in a common sense manner. Promoting your site online is very similar to how you’d promote your business offline—it’s all about positive exposure. Being heavily involved online as well as off is a solid strategy to building awareness for your business and its website.

Another great post over at SEOMoz.org by Scott. This discusses how political candidates need SEO. I couldn't agree more, and I was contacted by a couple of candidates just before the KY gubernatorial primaries went to the polls. It was too late (one or two months isn't enough time for a good SEO Campaign in a political race), but I would strongly suggest the survivors consider SEO as part of their marketing campaign if they haven't incorporated it already.

Whether DNC or RNC, Political Candidates need SEO

By scott@seomoz.org

Posted by great scott!

Due to the first round of Presidential Candidate pre-primary debates occuring recently, I decided to have a poke around and see what the State of the SERPs is like for the major 2008 Presidential hopefuls. I was surprised to find that, despite Howard Dean's major success with online fundraising in 2004, and the vast popularity of political blogs and web-centric PACs like MoveOn.org, many of the 2008 Candidates are committing huge SEO blunders.

I know SEO is a fairly young industry and not everyone is hip to optimization techniques, but considering the reach and importance of the internet to young, vocal, passionate voters, writers and opinion leaders, one would think the masterminds behind these multi-million dollar marketing schemes campaigns would know of and appreciate the importance of search marketing.

Take the mind-boggling case of John McCain, a likely GOP front-runner: McCain's active campaign site currently ranks #68 at Google for "john mccain" and just as abysmally for other terms and iterations of his name. How could this be? Well, behind his senate.gov profile page (which he can't use for campaigning) and his Wikipedia entry, we find www.straighttalkamerica.com, Mr. McCain's campaign site from the 2000 primary.

As you'll notice, the Title Tag directs us to go to his new site, but, since it doesn't rank, we can't click through to it from the same SERP. If we go to his old site, we're not 301'd, but rather instructed to click through to his new site. If ever (EVER!) there was a case for 301-ing a domain, this is it. Granted, McCain's new site has its own problems, most glaring is that every single page uses the same title and meta description tags, and navigation is primarily via drop-down java script menus. As such, most of his pages are likely ending up in the Supplemental Index making his internal links worthless. Let me also point out that even the search "john mccain 2008" puts his new site #3 behind www.stopjohnmccain2008.com and his Wikipedia page. He does, however, have AdWords for his new site on the SERPs for every imaginable incarnation of his name.

On the flip side of this equation is Barack Obama's site which is a redesign of his domain from his 2004 Senate bid. Nicely designed and fairly well optimized, he is the only candidate that ranks for such lofty keywords as "ending iraq war" (#10 on Google) and "2008 election" (#11) [Update: as of this morning, 5/10, Google is showing Dennis Kucinich at #8 for "ending iraq war"]. However, for these and other campaign specific keywords such as "candidate," "2008 election," "united states presidential election," and "democratic candidates" or "republican candidates," none of the current contenders are even in the top 50 at Google. Two notable exceptions are Hillary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich (possibly carrying links and domain strength from his '04 run) who both rank in the top 15 for the term "president".

Fine, it's early, maybe people are still looking for candidates by name only. After all, dark horse candidate Ron Paul (R) and Mike Gravel (D) have gotten tons of attention on the social media sites lately. Unfortunately, the data just doesn't back it up. Despite 12 stories on Digg featuring Ron Paul in the headline, each receiving more than 1000 diggs, since he announced his candidacy on March 12, 2007--Mike Gravel's been featured in nine 1000+ digg stories since announcing on March 9th--the search queries for his name pale in comparison to the big players who, oddly enough, get almost no love from Digg (Obama's headlined in only two 1000+ digg stories since March 9th, same with Clinton).

While "Hillary Clinton" and "Barack Obama" get significant daily numbers as search terms (Clinton currently getting about 50% more volume than Obama), the rest of the candidates don't get much love at all. John Edwards gets about 1/3rd of Clinton's search volume, as does McCain. Even social media darlings Paul and Gravel are averaging only a relative handful of name searches daily. As far as traffic goes, things are pretty much the same, with the exception of a distinct inversion between Obama and Clinton. The chart below shows the relative search volumes for the names of the major candidates (data from Keyword Discovery) as well as their relative Alexa Traffic Rank (3 mos. avg.) to their official campaign sites.

Granted, the search numbers aren't huge for the more general, campaign-related terms, but in most cases they're more popular than candidate names and have a much longer tail.

So what's it come down to? It seems the vast majority of candidates have little to no idea of the importance of keyword research, keyword targeting or even basic, on-page SEO practices. I strongly believe that the Internet is going to play a huge role in the 2008 election. I also believe, after examining the current offerings by the major players, that the candidate that attacks the SERPs now, and positions themselves to rank for campaign-related and issue-related keywords will have a huge advantage in disseminating their beliefs and dominating the conversation.

UPDATE: Jonah Stein has published a great follow-up to this article, Political Search Marketing: Electronic Grass Roots, over at Alchemist Media. He offers an excellent analysis of how political campaigns and operatives could and should use the power of SEO/SEM to market their campaigns, marshal grassroots support and inform voters. Perhaps more importantly, he discusses how the campaigns, the engines, and the public need to be vigilant to avoid the potential for unscrupulous use that could make the internet the most effective catapult for political mudslinging and disinformation.

I found this via SEOMoz.org which directed me to the following on SEOish.com by Patrick Sexton. It's a great article/interview to take into consideration if you're new to SEO or web marketing. Enjoy!

Visit the article here: SEOish.com

I came across this while doing some research for a book I'm writing for a SEO class I am to teach next week and the week after. It's excellent!

66 Ways to Build Links

Step 4: Post Properly Formatted and Relevant Comments

A blog lives on its overall popularity. A popular blog tends to have multiple people contributing to the online “conversation,” therefore the blog owner wants people to participate because that means the blog is effective. A blog with few comments either means the content isn’t interesting or not that many people are reading it. Knowing this, it’s easy to leverage this dynamic to gain an advantage by simply participating. We need something in return for that participation, however—a link back to the site we’re looking to promote or optimize.

A “raw” link, http://yourdomain.com for example, doesn’t do us as much good as a link with our keyword phrase as the anchor text. Anchor text usually gives the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the content of the link's destination. The anchor text may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the link. For example, a hyperlink to the main English Wikipedia page might take this form:

Wikipedia

The anchor text in this example is Wikipedia; the complex URL http://www.wikipedia.org displays on the web page as Wikipedia, contributing to a clean, easy to read text or document.

Popular misuse

Webmasters tend to misuse anchor text quite often this way:

Today our president has signed another treaty. To know more, click here.

The correct way of coding that would be:

Today our president has signed another treaty.

Search engine algorithms

Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps, as the tendency is, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page.

Webmasters may use anchor text to procure high results in search engine results pages. Google's Webmaster Tools facilitate this optimization by letting website owners view the most common words in anchor text linking to their site.^[1]

In the past, Google bombing has been possible through anchor text manipulation; however, in January, 2007, Google announced it had updated its algorithm to minimize the impact of Google bombs.^[2]

When considering commenting on a blog, browse over others’ comments before doing so. See whether their names have been linked back to their websites or not. If they have not, work your link into the comment somehow following the formatting guidelines in our example above. Be sure you comment something relevant to the original blog posting and if you do have to work the link in with the comment section, make it part of a sentence if at all possible. This will reduce the risk of getting the comment rejected by the blog moderator. Some blogs don’t allow links within the comments so beware of them, and simply move onto the next blog if you can’t get a link back for commenting. There are too many blogs out there to get hung up on trying to get one link out of one specific blog.

Step 3: Finding Heavily Linked to Blogs

Once you have search results, it’s time to fine tune the search to deliver only the blogs with a lot of links pointing to it already. To do this, we’ll adjust the “authority” level for our search results.

We wish to focus our attention on the blogs with the greatest number of links (as highlighted above). These often have RSS feeds picked up by other blogs meaning a comment posting on one of these may get duplicated several times if the linking blog picks up the feed for comments, too. This is a great way to build links with minimal time investment. This is the foundation of intelligent, “white hat” SEO.

Either make a listing of the blogs you intend to comment on with the highest number of links pointing to them or open a new browser window or tab for each one as you move your way through the search results. It’s often best to have an estimated number of links you wish to build for each session before you begin posting comments. It takes roughly one hour for every 10 comments if you’re taking the commentary serious and truly reading the blog posting before commenting. Some people will be faster or slower, but it’s a good idea to have a time budget in mind prior to starting a link building session.

Step 2: Searching for Quality

When looking for quality link partners, it’s often best to broadly search the blogosphere in order to return the greatest number of sites. Unlike traditional searches where it’s most desirable to weed out as many sites as possible, the opposite is true when link building. For the purposes of this training, we’re going to focus on the broad term “real estate” since many of our clients tend to be in this field.

Simply enter the term “real estate” in the technorati.com search bar at the top (as highlighted above) and click on search.

Step 1: Identify Good Linking Prospects

Every good linking campaign begins with the identification of potential linking partners which fit the following criteria:

• Content relevant to the site you are optimizing
• In a relevant industry
• Site has a lot of other sites linking to it
• Site has a good PageRank

Sites that search the blogosphere are good tools to use when trying to identify linking partners as blogs don’t require a reciprocal link as many traditional websites do. Blog specific search engines include:

• Icerocket.com
• StumbleUpon.com
  
• Technorati.com
• Blogpulse.com
• Blogsearch.google.com
• 360.yahoo.com

For this particular endeavor, we’ll focus on technorati.com because it provides linking information with its search results. Visit http://technorati.com and you should see a page similar to this:

by Rich Skrenta

Our entire industry is scared witless by Google's dominance in search and advertising. Microsoft and Yahoo have been unsuccessful at staunching the bleeding of their search market share. VCs parrot the Google PR FUD machine that you need giant datacenters next to hydroelectric dams to compete. They spout nonsense about how startups should just use Alexa's crawl and put some ajax on top of it. Ye gods.

Grow a spine people! You have a giant growing market with just one dominant competitor, not even any real #2. You're going to do clean-tech energy saving software to shut off lightbulbs in high-rises instead? Pfft. Get a stick and try to knock G's crown off.

So here are my tips to get started. These are all about competing with Google's search engine. Of course G is big business now and does a lot of different things. Their advertising business is particularly strong, and exhibits some eBay-like network effects that substantially enhance its defensibility. Still, even if you're going to take that on too, you have to start with a strong base of search driven traffic.

1. A conventional attack against Google's search product will fail. They are unassailable in their core domain. If you merely duplicate Google's search engine, you will have nothing. A copy of their product with your brand has no pull against the original product with their brand.

2. Duplicating Google's engine is uninteresting anyway. The design and approach were begun a decade ago. You can do better now.

3. You need both a great product and a strong new brand. Both are hard problems. The lack of either dooms the effort. "Strong new brand" specifically excludes "search.you.com". The branding and positioning are half the battle.

4. You need to position your product to sub-segment the market and carve out a new niche. Or better, define an entirely new category. See Ries on how to launch a new brand into a market owned by a competitor. If it can be done in Ketchup or Shampoo, it can be done in search.

5. Forget interface innovation. The editorial value of search is in the index, not the interface. That's why google's minimalist interface is so appealing. Interface features only get in the way.

6. Forget about asking users to do anything besides typing two words into a box.

7. Users do not click on clusters, or tags, or categories, or directory tabs, or pulldowns. Ever. Extra work from users is going the wrong way. You want to figure out how the user can do even less work.

8. Your results need to be in a single column. UI successes like Google and blogging have shown that we don't want multiple columns. Distractions from the middle with junk on the sides corrupt your thinking and drive users away.

9. Your product must look different than Google in some way that is deliberately incompatible with their UI, for two reasons. One, if you look the same as them, consumers can't tell how you're different, and then you won't pull any users over. Two, if your results are shown in the same form as Google's, they will simply copy whatever innovations you introduce. You need to do something they can't copy, not because they're not technically capable of doing so, but because of the constraints of their legacy interface on Google.com.

10. Your core team will be 2-3 people, not 20. You cannot build something new and different with a big team. Big teams are only capable of duplicating existing technology. The sum of 20 sets of vision is mud.

11. Search is more about systems software than algorithms or relevance tricks. That's why Google has all those OS programmers. You need a strong platform to win, you can't just cobble it together as you go like other big web apps.

12. Do not fear Google's vast CapEx. You should wish maintenance of that monster on your worst enemies. Resource constraints are healthy for innovation. You're building something new and different anyway.

by John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing)

Did your parents ever warn you about "the bad part of town?" Well, the web has those places too. A lot of people understand that links back to a web site can help a web site get better rankings in the search engines.

Problem is, blindly seeking any kind of link may do more harm than good. There are folks out there that will try to lead you to believe that any link, and lots of them, is all that matters. The more the better, the less work to get them, even better. Please don't fall prey to this kind of thinking.

The search engines want to find high quality content and deliver it to people who are searching. Any practice that is set-up to trick them into ranking a site higher will eventually lead to penalties or even banishment from the index all together. Building relevant, high-quality, hand-crafted links is work, but its rewards make it worth it.

There are some powerful tools that can help you find good potential links and practices that will eventually allow you to build great links back to your site, but don't try to short circuit the process with some automated link generating software tool sold by the "Internet Marketing" gurus who don't have to live with the impact on your site.

Stay out of these parts of the web world -
• FFA sites that let you create some sort of free ad in exchange for who knows what
• Link Farms that allow you to create a links in exchange for links
• Link rink schemes that aim to hook a bunch of sites together
• Some directories that exist only for link purposes
• Automatic link swapping software programs

Incoming links will help your site a lot more if they appear to happen naturally, come from other quality content sites and are relevant to your site's primary topic. One of the best ways to get some incoming links fast is to submit well-written articles to high quality article directories. (If you have content relevant to small business, you can add your articles to the Duct Tape Marketing article directory for starters.)

It seems we spend a lot of time talking about lawsuits filed against Google these days, what with Sumner Redstone's $1 billion swing at the Web giant and all.

But it's a smaller suit just dismissed by Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that may have larger implications and is infinitely more interesting.

KinderStart.com, a Norwalk, Connecticut-based company, claiming to be "the largest (and most popular) indexed directory and search engine focused on children zero to seven on the 'net" sued Google in March 2006 alleging it had defamed the site by cutting it from its Web search ranking system. It argued that Google was behaving anticompetitively by skewing its search results to maintain its search industry dominance, reserving its top search placements for those paying premium fees.

But last Friday the judge quietly threw the case out, ruling:

"KinderStart had failed to explain how Google caused injury to it by a provably false statement ... as distinguished from an unfavorable opinion about KinderStart.com's importance."

The ruling seems to be on solid legal ground, but here's the thing: even if Google purposefully bumped a would-be competitor down in its rankings to maintain its global dominance, nobody would be able to prove it.

PageRank, Google's trademarked process where a numeric value represents how important a page is on the Web, in only part of the secret sauce that makes the search engine so tasty.

Much like many recipes in the food world, a Google search is a matter of how much of each ingredient is being used — the "weighting" of each piece, reports Macworld. While there’s a bevy of information on the Web on the primary parts of the algorithm and what marketers or site owners should do to increase their rank, Google remains elusive on most of the 200 factors it uses to score pages and decide which page goes to the top of the results.

Even mathematicians familiar with the equations used to create the PageRank algorithm struggle with other non-numeric factors, Macworld reports. David Austin, a math professor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich., who published a paper on cracking Google's algorithm, says the secret sauce is really a popularity contest wrapped in linear algebra.

"It’s like you’re having a popularity contest and you think everybody gets a vote, so I can vote for as many people as I want to," Austin says. "So if I vote for 10 people, I give everyone 1/10th of a vote. So who wins that popularity contest?"

But then Google goes further. "They take a second pass through it, and look at who voted for who," he explains. Google assigns a value to the importance of the site that casts the vote (or links to a site), and that site can pass on its popularity and importance to the site it linked to.

Gupta chisels away at the PageRank algorithm simply by looking at what the No. 1 ranked sites are doing. "We have identified 250 parameters that Google studies to rank a site," he says. "We’ve got labs where people are constantly monitoring the impact of each. But the birds-eye view is, how can we make a site simply perform well in the natural course?"

The answer is, they don't know, and Google ain't tellin'.

Until somebody masters the Google algorithm it will grow as the most powerful--yet opaque--gatekeeper of information and commerce on the Web. And you know what they say about absolute power...

Google's unofficial motto is "Don't Be Evil," but even if they were being evil--manipulating searches to quash competitors--how would we know?

Posted by Alex Pasquariello at March 21, 2007 10:29 AM

Jan. 29, 2007 at 1:09pm Eastern by Eric Ward

Last summer, I was asked for my personal definition of the term "linkbait." In a column titled Link Bait Kool-Aid, I wrote that linkbait was "more or less anything you create anywhere on the web that inspires other people to link to it." The link to your bait can come from another web page, from a blog, from a social media sharing site (bookmarks, news, videos or whatever), from a tagging site or even from an email newsletter. In a nutshell, anywhere you are with a mouse and a clickable link can be viewed as a potential target venue for link seeking via linkbait.

There are several motivations for seeking links via linkbait creation. The most obvious motivation is improved search rank. Get a bunch of links, and your site's search rank will improve. Not every time, but often enough to inspire a whole new micro-niche in what was already a niche industry.

After search rank, another key motivation for seeking links via linkbait is increased click traffic. Get your link on the front page at Digg, Newsvine, Netscape, Reddit, Technorati or for that matter, any of the sources you find at popurls, and the result can be traffic spikes that cause headaches like these and this for webmasters.

For some sites, there can also be a residual linking effect. Some of the people visiting Digg will learn about your site for the first time, and they might like it so much they link to it from their own site or blog or wherever. Call it trickle-down-linking. Links beget links. The filthy linking rich get filthy linking richer.

There are several rarely discussed fundamental flaws to practice of linkbaiting. The most obvious flaw is that the most valuable IBLs (inbound links) for any given piece of content are completely different. Most linkbait strategies I see ignore this fundamental concept.

An example I've mentioned before is the Diet Coke/Mentos fountain video. Sure it's funny. It's clever, it's fascinating. I've watched it many times. And then I go back to my day. I didn't buy anything, didn't click an ad. I didn't subscribe to anything. I came, I saw. I left.

On the other hand, the flurry of popularity and links the video sparked did actually result in some links that have some residual benefit, as nearly 500 .edu based sites mention or link to it. But not every video goes viral with a scientific angle that inspires links from teachers, and copycats dilute the power of the original.

Whatever your linkbait is, it will appeal to a certain segment of the online population. The rest of us will never see it unless by pure chance. In this regard, there really is no difference between linkbait and other type of online content. You can only expect linkbait to travel so far on its own or via the big buzz venues mentioned earlier. And no matter what steps you take to help ease the sharing of the content, it may never reach the most relevant audience most inclined to link to it.

Some types of content engender links from a wide variety of targets. For me one of the single best example of this is The Weather Channel's Weather On Your Site. Here's my announcement of it, nearly four years ago. We didn't call it linkbait back then, we called it "useful content." The Weather Channel example is also a rarity. After all, anyone with a web site and a zip code can add a weather forecast. The web helped The Weather Channel connect forecasts and zip codes and HTML code, and the rest is linking history. The odds are your linkbait doesn't have the universal appeal and potential of The Weather Channel or Diet Coke / Mentos. What do you do then?

If you are considering implementing a linkbait strategy, do some homework before you spend money creating the bait. What is the goal? Who is the most likely person to link to your content, and where can those people be found? Can they be found online at all? (Hint: if your content is geared towards an academic or librarian audience, Digg is nearly pointless). What types of content will they link to it from? How do you properly reach out to them when seeking a link? What will the effect of any obtained links be?

The answers to these questions is likely to be as different as the content itself. When I was seeking links for the first Times Square Web Cam (what we now call linkbait), I approached the process in a far different way than I did for the Children's Hospital Boston Virtual Stem Cell Laboratory.

The universe of potential linkers to your content often cannot be found hanging out at Digg, Newsvine, Netscape, Reddit, Technorati or any other online popularity contest oriented site. I'm not saying ignore these venues. I'm saying you need to take into consideration that the most useful links of all will come from an online audience that doesn't depend on the collective wisdom of others. These folks must be identified and reached in ways that the linkbaiter usually ignores or misses.

Eric Ward has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994, providing services ranking from linking strategy to a monthly private newsletters on linking for subscribers, The Ward Report. The Link Week column appears on Mondays at Search Engine Land.

Is cloaking evil? It's one of the most heavily debated topics in the SEO industry -- and people often can't even agree on what defines cloaking. In this column, I wanted to look at an example of what even the search engines might consider "good" cloaking, the middle-ground territory that page testing introduces plus revisiting how to detect when "evil" old-school page cloaking is happening.

Back in December 2005, the four major engines went on record at Search Engine Strategies Chicago to define the line between cloaking for good and for evil. From the audience, I asked the panelists if it was acceptable to -- selectively for spiders -- replace search engine unfriendly links (such as those with session IDs and superfluous parameters) with search engine friendly versions. All four panelists responded "No problem." Charles Martin from Google even jumped in again with an enthusiastic, "Please do that!"

URL Rewriting? Not Cloaking!

My understanding is that their positions haven't changed on this. Cloaking -- by its standard definition of serving up different content to your users than to the search engines -- is naughty and should be avoided. Cloaking where all you're doing is cleaning up spider-unfriendly URLs, well that's A-OK. In fact, Google engineers have told me in individual conversations that they don't even consider it to be cloaking.

Because search engines are happy to have you simplify your URLs for their spiders -- eliminating session IDs, user IDs, superfluous flags, stop characters and so on -- it may make sense to do that only for spiders and not for humans. That could be because rewriting the URLs for everyone is too difficult, costly or time intensive to implement. Or more likely, it could be that certain functionality requires these parameters, but that functionality is not of any use to a search engine spider -- such as putting stuff in your shopping cart or wish list or keeping track of your click path in order to customize the breadcrumb navigation.

Many web marketers like to track which link was clicked on when there are multiple links to the same location contained on the page. They add tracking tags to the URL, like "source=topnav" or "source=sidebar." The problem with that is it creates duplicate pages for the search engine spiders to explore and index. This leads to a dilution of link gain or PageRank, because all the votes that you are passing on to that page are being split up because of the different URLs you are using. Ouch.

How about instead you employ "good cloaking" and strip out those tracking codes solely for spiders? Sounds like a good plan to me. Keep your analytics-obsessed web marketers happy, and the search engines too.

I have to mention, you don't have to cloak your pages to simplify your URLs for spiders. There is another option: you could use JavaScript to append your various tracking parameters to the URL upon the click. For example, REI.com used to append a "vcat=" parameter on all brand links on their Shop By Brand page through JavaScript. Thus, none of their vcat containing URLs made it into Google.

Is Testing Bad Cloaking?

Is multivariate testing a form of bad cloaking? This is where services like Offermatica or even Google's own Website Optimizer show different users different versions of the same URL. That could be considered cloaking, because human visitors and search engines are getting different content. Spiders can't participate in the test group, and thus the content of that test is invisible to the spiders; that's because of the requirements of AJAX, JavaScript, DHTML and/or cookies for the test platform to function on the user's browser. Google engineers have told me that they want Googlebot to be part of the test set. Therein lies the rub; the technology isn't built to support that.

Uncovering User Agent Based Cloaking

The "bad" cloaking from a search engine point of view is that deliberate showing to a spider content that might be entirely different than what humans see. Those doing this often try to cover their tracks by making it difficult to examine the version meant only for spiders. They do this with a "noarchive" command embedded within the meta tags. Googlebot and other major spiders will obey that directive and not archive the page, which then causes the "Cached" link in that page's search listing to disappear.

So getting a view behind the curtain to see what is being served to the spider can be a bit tricky. If the type of cloaking is solely user agent based, you can use the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox. Just create a user-agent of:

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

under Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options > User Agents in the menu. Then switch to that user agent and have fun surfing as Googlebot in disguise.

Uncovering IP Based Cloaking

But hard-core cloakers are too clever for this trick. They'll feed content to a spider based on known IP addresses. Unless you're within a search engine -- using one of these known IP addresses -- you can't see the cloaked page, if it also has been hidden by being kept out of the search engine's cache.

Actually, there's still a chance. Sometimes Google Translate can be used to view the cloaked content, because many cloakers don't bother to differentiate between the spider coming in for the purpose of translating or coming in for the purpose of crawling. Either way, it uses the same range of Google IP addresses. Thus, when a cloaker is doing IP delivery they tend to serve up the Googlebot-only version of the page to the Translate tool. This loophole can be plugged, but many cloakers miss this.

And I bet you didn't know that you can actually set the Translation language to English even if the source document is in English! You simply set it in the URL, like so:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=en
&u=URLGOESHERE&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=9&ct=result

In the code above, replace the bolded URLGOESHERE part with the actual URL of the page you want to view. That way, when you are reviewing someone's cloaked page, you can see the page in English instead of having to see the page in a foreign language. You can also sometimes use this trick to view paid content, if you're too cheap to pay for a subscription.

Many SEOs dismiss cloaking out-of-hand as an evil tactic, but in my mind, there is a time and a place for it (the URL simplifying variety, not the content differing variety), even if you are a pearly white hat SEO.

Stephan Spencer is founder and president of Netconcepts, a 12-year-old web agency specializing in search engine optimized ecommerce. He writes for several publications plus blogs at StephanSpencer.com and Natural Search Blog. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Search marketers should rework their content to make it more conversational according to Adam Broitman of Morpheus Media, and I think he's on to something.

Broitman points out that much of marketing is now a conversation, but search marketers have not incorporated the concept into their keyword purchases. Consumers are getting used to hearing about companies through viral marketing, blogs and interactive ads that enable them to participate. But if you look at the ads used by search marketers, they are still one-sided pitches to "buy, buy, buy."

Search ads should be more inviting and use language that offers information and participation. Using terms like "vote, learn, compare, or evaluate" in a search ad could boost click through and differentiate your ad.

Broitman also suggests developing RSS feeds around keywords that relevant to your brand, another good idea. It will take some effort to generate content that doesn't come off as a fake blog, but if done right a feed could considerably raise your natural search ranking.

Posted By John Gartner at 12:36 PM

A lot of people call me about optimizing their site to improve their standing within the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN/Live) for a few to multiple keyword phrases.

Many callers or website visitors are shocked to learn that I ain't cheap, and I make no apologies for that. I prefer to say I'm extremely "cost effective" when compared to radio, television, newspaper, magazine, or billboard advertising. Furthermore, I share my processes and methodologies throughout which means my clients receive valuable educational benefits that will enable them to take over their own optimization campaigns once they feel comfortable enough. I also offer basic plans which allow a client with a good web presence to maintain their rankings with a lesser investement. The truth is most of my clients don't have the time or staff to dedicate to a successful SEO campain so that's where I come in. I can offload some of those tasks for them and provide that peace of mind they are looking for.

With all of that said, I figured now would be a good time to share some basic tips & tricks for those that do have the time to dedicate to improving their website's presence within the search engines. All of these are ethical and time tested. If the search engines change their algorithms, it won't impact you too much.

1) Write content rich articles--this is a common sense approach to growing the popularity of your business online and offline. If you write something that people really want to read, they'll generally want to learn more about the author. That's where your byline at the bottom comes in. You should always include a link to your site in any correspondence you produce. Some of the better online article directories you can submit your articles to in order to gain exposure include:

• http://www.zinos.com
• http://www.ezinearticles.com
• http://www.articlecity.com
• http://www.weeno.com
• http://www.articledashboard.com
• http://www.goarticles.com
• http://www.articlesfactory.com
• http://www.article99.com

2) Include your link everywhere--again, this is another common sense approach that applies offline as well as online. In your e-mail signature, you should have a link to your site. On your letters to potential customers or partners, you should include your web address somewhere on the letter. If you use letterhead for a majority of your letters, make sure you have your web address on there somewhere. Same with envelopes, product packaging, brochures, handouts, giveaways, fillers, company vehicles, etc. Anywhere a potential customer may see something from your company, they should also see a web address. This is another form of marketing that doesn't cost an arm or a leg. If you're looking for some items to brand with your website, visit http://www.cafepress.com for some ideas.

3) Regularly comment on blogs, message boards, and news based sites. Be sure to include a link to your site either in the message body or in the area provided for your link. If you can, use a targeted keyword phrase for the anchor text. Anchor text is the more descriptive text you see to mask the long drawn out website URL as demonstrated below:
If you are interested in SEO Pricing, you may want to visit this page: http://smbconsultinginc.com/seo_pricing.html. Both links point to the exact same page, but one is "optimized" for a targeted keyword (SEO Pricing) whereas one is not. When people search, they are more likely to search for "SEO Pricing" than they are for a URL. Think about it--if someone knew the URL, they'd simply type it in, but most people can't remember a long URL whereas they can usually think of a couple of words to try to find something online. Many blogs and message boards will use your name section as the anchor text so replace your name with a targeted keyword phrase. The best blogs to post comments on have a lot of links pointing to them (often referred to as "authority"). To find a blog that might apply to your particular company, industry, or general interest, visit http://www.technorati.com and do a search for a phrase that you believe applies. Search for sites with a lot of authority, and have fun participating in the conversation. Don't forget to include that link!

One last bit of advice that may generate a lot of buzz around your site. If you post comments on blogs, news sites or social networking sites and include your link, try to find a topic that has a little bit of controversy built into it. Subjects such as religion, politics, and sports have passionate believers and huge followings that will take a side on an issue very quickly. I'm not suggesting you go in there and piss everyone off, but it wouldn't hurt you to contribute something thought provoking or a differing point of view to further stoke the debate. Your objective is to stand out somehow so that people will take notice. The easiest way to accomplish that goal is to contribute something unique to a topic that already has people buzzing.

There you have some very basic SEO tips that are as much marketing tips as they are anything. I hope you'll put some of them to the test and share the results.