It is that time of the year again. You can feel it in the air and see it everywhere you go. The lights are on the neighbors’ houses and the stores are getting more and more crowded as we get closer to the 25th. For children, Christmas is a magical time where they dream every night about that special thing they hope Santa will bring them when he visits on Christmas Eve.

You may also feel some of that Christmas magic hoping for a miracle of your own. Perhaps you are a business owner who has launched a new website this year and that one thing you want for Christmas is to see it rank on page one in Google for some targeted search terms. Here is some advice to help you see that Christmas miracle come true.

Create an XML Sitemap and Submit it to Google Webmaster Tools

Google has given webmasters a great way to tell Google about their website. In Google Webmaster Tools there is a place where you can submit a sitemap in XML format. The sitemap will tell the Google crawlers about the pages on your site and help them to index everything much better. I have seen brand new sites get indexed within a week of submitting an XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. Just be sure to update the XML sitemap whenever you add or remove pages from your site.

Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites

There are several social bookmarking sites on the web that can give your site a quick link and help others discover your website. Create accounts on sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Reddit then submit your website to them. Include a social bookmarking widget on content or product pages of your site so visitors can quickly and easily bookmark the pages of your website on their social bookmarking profiles.

Submit to High Quality Paid and Free Web Directories

Submit your website to DMOZ and a few high quality paid directories like Yahoo, Business.com and Best of the Web. Since these directories have been around for a long time and have established a good reputation, they will give your site some good credible links. When you submit to DMOZ try to find the most relevant category that has an editor. Getting a submission approved in DMOZ can take a long time but the waiting time can be shortened if you submit to a relevant category that has an editor.

Optimize Content Using the Most Relevant Search Terms

Make sure the pages of your site are optimized for the most relevant search terms to the content of each page. Don’t get distracted by high volume search terms that might be partially relevant to the site content. It is the content that will help Google to determine what keywords to rank your site for, so consider the long tail search terms when optimizing the content. The long tail terms are often the ones that are most relevant and will have better conversion rates when the site ranks for them. Include the keywords in the HTML elements like the title, Meta description, heading tags and the content body.

Allow Google to Index the Site

Often people might block Google from indexing their website without knowing they did. Check your robots.txt file and make sure you didn’t disallow the entire site. Check the pages of your site and if you are using noindex Meta tags, make sure they are only on the pages you don’t want to show up in the search results.

Getting more organic search traffic to a website might be the one thing that many business owners are wishing for this year. If you are one of those business owners then this advice will help that wish come true in 2010.

As I write this, I’m fuming about pet peeves. It’s been one of those weeks where it seems fate, the universe, or whatever, is barraging me daily with its pet-peeve arsenal.

And the pet-peeve thing reached its peak this morning when I got my oil changed. They told me it’d take a half hour. Two hours later, I drove away from the garage and was an hour and a half late to work. Needless to say, I won’t go back there for an oil change again. Waiting hours longer than expected is a major pet peeve.

Many websites similarly drive away customers with annoying Internet pet peeves. It’s the kind of thing that kills site traffic and conversion. Many businesses don’t even know their website doesn’t connect with their demographic, much less the human race.

So, in no particular order, here are a few Internet and website pet peeves that will cost you visitors, readers, customers, and, most importantly, money:

• Popups. These make me want to howl and then close my entire browser. It’s amazing to me how many annoying popups still exist. If you want people to stay on your page, please get rid of these.
• Intruding, drop downs, advertisements or graphics. I’m OK with ads – as long as they don’t cover the text, float across the page, or do something else extremely annoying. They often make me think my computer is coming down with a nasty virus.
• “Give us your email, social security card and bank account number to read this.” I hate it when companies hold content for ransom. Companies try to promote their stuff then try to make you give them all your contact information to get it, often in the form of registration log on pages. *However, in some instances I think it’s OK, such as Webinars, etc. For the most part, free content available to anyone is the way to go. If you want to capture emails, have a newsletter sign up box, but don’t twist people’s arms.
• Overly promotional social media updates and press releases. These make me gag a little, especially when I was an editor at a newspaper. With social media and PR, you are providing information and connecting with people. It’s for conversation and news. It’s not for exaggerated fluff.
• Ambiguous home pages. You have just a few seconds before a visitor leaves your site or clicks through it. If your site doesn’t have a clear direction, say, “hasta luego” to your potential customer.
• Confusing Navigation. If it’s confusing, I’m going somewhere else.
• Bad copywriting. Typos, cheesiness, too serious, too long, unclear, un-engaging, exaggerations, etc., will kill your website. A site is often all about the headlines, copy and call to actions. If the writing is bad, you’ll have no chance with a customer.
• “Install extra software to continue.” I hate this one. I fear getting a virus, and I don’t have the time to download new software.
• Slow-loading pages. Not only is this a pet peeve, it’s also going to be big for the future of SEO.
• Dead links. They are dead ends that force me to go somewhere else.
• Bad colors, graphics. Some websites make me want to scratch my eyeballs out. Many designs can be distracting, and the wrong background color can make it difficult to read the text.
• Flash and sparkly stuff. Flash can be pretty cool, but not usually in a conversion sense. Sometimes designers and CEOs like flash, because, it’s cool. But, it can often be flashy without any substance, and as a result, waste the viewers’ time. Some sparkly design stuff will make your site look like a used car sales floor. That is never a good idea.
• Ineffective site tools. Why do people launch websites that don’t work? Why, why why?
• MUSIC! Music on the homepage makes me do a mad scramble for the “X” button like it’s my full-time job to close out browsers. Music, and videos for that matter, that play without my approval, is a bad, bad thing.

Internet marketing is all about two things: (1) getting more traffic and (2) converting that traffic into sales. That involves good SEO services, and a website designed around simplicity, easy flow, clear direction and good content. Everything on the page should propel the user experience. If it doesn’t, it will make my pet peeve list.

Any pet peeves I missed? Please, rant with me below.

The title of this video post might get me in trouble because it might be a little bit misleading; but by purchasing “established” INDUSTRY RELATED websites and setting up a permanent 301 redirect to your main domain, you can quickly build authority and link equity. Enjoy the video!

For those of you who would rather read than watch the video, here is the recap.

This video is about a question that a few of us at SEO.com have received lately. The question is about purchasing websites and 301 redirecting those websites into your main domain to increase search engine rankings and increase link equity for your overall domain.

I’ve mapped out a website about snowboards. Your money site is where you are selling snowboards which is the home page of your domain. You then have your category or sub pages where you go into detail with each brand of snowboards like Burton Snowboards, K2 Snowboards, and Sims Snowboards.

I want to discuss the concept of purchasing brand new domains for the purpose of 301 redirecting those to your site to increase search engine rankings. For instance, I want to purchase a site about Burton Snowboards (www.burton-snowboard-reviews-by-greg.com), a site about snowboard tune ups (www.the-best-snowboard-tune-up-tips-from-greg.com), a site about snowboard boots, and a site about snowboard bindings. Each of these are all brand new sites that your purchased through a domain registrar like GoDaddy.

The question is, If I buy these domains and I permanent 301 redirect them to my main site, will that help boost my rankings? The answer is no. It’s not going to help you whatsoever with your search engine rankings.

This strategy can help you when the sites have been on the internet for awhile, have age, content and back links coming into to them from other external websites. This builds up the reputation and link equity of each of the sites. At that point, this becomes a valuable strategy. For instance, you have site A, or the site about Burton Snowboards that has 800 links coming into it. If you are buying this site solely for the purpose of building links to your money site, you would take that site and 301 redirect it to the home page of your website, thus passing through the 800 back links to your website. (If you didn’t notice in the video, yes, I said client links and looked away because there was a loud noise coming from the SEO floor.) This will help you because you are building up your link equity and the overall reputation of your website.

If you want to purchase the domains and keep the community that is already functioning, continue to work on the site and funnel the established link equity to your website with strategically placed anchor text links pointing to your main website.

Where the sub pages come into play is if site D, or the site about snowboard bindings, has sub pages about Burton Snowboards, K2 Snowboards, and Sims Snowboards and the sub pages have deep links coming into them, you will not want to take those sub pages and 301 redirect them to your home page; instead, 301 redirect them to the related sub pages on your main site. This will pass the appropriate anchor text and link authority to the right pages on your website and help those pages to rank for their keywords.

In conclusion, do not buy brand new websites in hopes to 301 redirect them to your website to achieve higher rankings. If you are going to pursue this strategy, you will want to purchase already established websites that have trust, authority and links coming into them and then 301 redirect.

Not only are we amazing SEOs, we are also singers, songwriters and performers. Enjoy our Broadway production below.

Christmas comes just once a year, but terrible websites can be found all-year long! When it comes to SEO-friendly web design, here are a few practices that will have you asking Santa Claus for a new webmaster this Christmas. Feel free to sing along! (I would be amazed to see someone actually put this to music).

Credit goes to Jeff Call for the fantastic animation.

The 12 Days of Christmas: Website Disaster Style

On the first day of Christmas, my web guy gave to me:

A Website That Isn’t Ranking

The first, and biggest indication that your website isn’t SEO-friendly is a lack of rankings for the keywords that would drive traffic to your site.

2 Spammy Tags

Stuffing your page title tags with keywords may sound logical, but it’s considered misleading by search engines. It’s better to make sure the title contains your top 2-3 keywords and build page content around those words.

3 Dead Links

The quickest way to force someone away from your site is to send them to a page that doesn’t exist. Frequently run an internal link checker to make sure all of your links are valid. Create a custom 404 page so that visitors who do end up on an invalid URL have a quick and easy correction path back to your site.

4 Pop-up Ads

Hosting pop-up ads on your site may be profitable from an advertising standpoint, but they will infuriate your site visitors. There are more effective, less intrusive ways to advertise on your site.

5 Golden Rings

In addition to stuffing title tags with keywords, any similar practice in the body of your page content will also likely get picked up by search engines and will discount your rankings. Oh, and meta keywords are worthless.

6 Pages Flashing

Avoid flash animation on your site if you can. Written content that you would otherwise put in a flash animation should be turned into crawlable HTML text for maximum SEO benefit.

7 Keywords Hiding

Making links the same color as your page background or hiding them behind images is a serious black hat SEO practice that will only get you penalized. If your visitor can’t see the text, you’re better to leave it off the page.

8 Farms A-Linking

Don’t get sucked into massive networks of promised links. While tempting, these link farms are often associated with black hat practices and spammy link building tactics that will penalize your site.

9 Pages Cloaking

Trying to deliver different content to a search engine spider than your visitors is just stupid. Cloaking is considered grounds for delisting by most search engines.

10 Links A-Buying

While some paid directories offer value, most take your money without providing substantial value. Search engines like Google are on the lookout for purchasers of paid links, which are often tied to networks of link farms and other bad SEO practices.

11 Blogs A-Spamming

Blog spamming is one of the least effective ways to build links. Most blog comments use no-follow links anyway, so do yourself a favor and build higher quality backlinks.

12 Sites A-Scraping

Taking content belonging to someone else and putting it on your own website will get your site devalued in the rankings, even if it does provide free content. If you have to use content already found elsewhere on the web, like quotes or technical specifications, make sure you have plenty of unique content to surround it.

The End

I am a blogging expert. There probably isn’t a soul around that knows more about blogging. How did I become so advanced? By starting a “Mommy Blog” a month ago. I figure after posting eleven entries, I probably know all there is to know.

OK, maybe not. But as a new blogger, I have learned a few things. If you are thinking of starting a blog, you may find the following helpful:

• Seriously consider the purpose of your blog. Map out your site before you begin. Is your blog personal, informational, ecommerce, or other? How do you plan on using the blog? Who is your target market? Make sure you have a clear goal in place before you begin.
• Now that you have determined the purpose of your blog, it is time to think of a domain. This process took the longest for me. If you get hung up, solicit suggestions from friends, family, coworkers, and especially your target market. I highly recommend using at least one of your keywords in your domain, if possible. This will assist you in achieving higher rankings for said keyword.
• If you are really serious about blogging, pay the money to host your own domain. For instance, instead of using www.seo.blogspot.com, use www.seo.com.
• Serious blogging takes a lot of creativity. I recommend keeping a pad of paper and a pencil handy. Throughout the day, I jot down little notes for upcoming blogs. That way, when I begin writing, I have something to write about.
• Write to your target market. What do they want to read? Have you asked them? Make sure you are writing in a voice that is familiar and interesting to them.
• Have someone proof-read your blog. You don’t want to go live with a post and then later be embarrassed by typos or grammatical errors.
• Use Google Analytics. It is awesome- seriously addicting. Every time I post a blog, I get excited to see how it was received. Using analytics will help you understand your readers.
• Use social media to promote your blog. I receive a lot of traffic from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, if every time you update your Twitter status it reads, “visit my blog…” people will become disinterested.

Do you have other useful blogging tips? If so, I would love to read them!

The best Internet marketing strategies of 2009 revolved around establishing credibility and targeted exposure. The search engine optimization company says similar tactics will work in 2010.

SALT LAKE CITY — In response to an eMarketer.com study stating that businesses will spend up to 75 percent more on Internet marketing this holiday season, SEO.com – a full-service Internet marketing company in Salt Lake City – announces the top 10 most effective Internet marketing strategies of 2009.

“Businesses want to make sure every penny goes to something that produces results,” said Dave Bascom, chief executive of SEO.com. “For that reason, more and more money is being allocated to Internet marketing because it’s measurable and has proven to increase ROI.”

There are a wide variety of Internet marketing methods, the most effective being the ones that establish credibility, trust and directly target a demographic.

“Credibility is the most important,” said Ash Buckles, SEO.com’s director of search engine optimization. “When people are watching their money closely, they will only buy from companies and Web sites that they trust.”

Credibility, Buckles said, depends on how well a site is architected, how many other sites and networks link back to your site, how much social media and buzz surrounds a domain, how often a site goes down, how unique a site’s content is and how fast a site loads.

The Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies of 2009:

1. Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Web sites in the top of the search results are viewed as the leaders of their industry, and more than 80 percent of Web users click on the first listings. Good SEO services will consistently deliver a huge return on investment.

2. Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn – Social media marketing engages customers on a personal level, and can rapidly create buzz around a product, brand or business. In 2008, Pubcon search conference spent $75,000 to marketing their conference. In 2009, Pubcon saved that money and used strictly social media advertising with great success.

3. Keyword Research – Everything revolves around discovering what words and phrases your customers are searching for online.

4. Video Marketing – This is becoming more important both on-site and off-site. Videos help convert Web site visitors into sales. In the universal search results, people tend to click on links with videos more than those without – even if the video link is ranked lower.

5. Online Public Relations – This builds credibility online, in the mainstream media and for potential customers. Online public relations can help create a lot of buzz about your site through bloggers and industry sites, and can boost organic SEO.

6. Link Building – A key element in search engine optimization. Search engines like “popular sites.” From the search engine’s point of view, a credible and popular site will have a lot of links pointing to it.

7. Blogging – Blogs provide additional site content (which search engines love), graphics and other viral content to disseminate information and tie in with social media. Blogs can build your credibility by establishing your site as the hub for industry information.

8. Conversion Web Design – A good Web design will keep visitors on your site and sell them products or services. In the end, it all comes down to a site that makes money.

9. Paid Search Marketing – Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an extremely targeted strategy with measurable, immediate results. This enables a more efficient spending of marketing dollars.

10. Email Marketing – Nurture relationships and retain existing customers. It’s much easier to keep old customers than to get new ones. Send good offers and valuable information that’s customized to their needs.

“To have success on the Internet, you need a combination of all these strategies to drive traffic to your site, establish credibility of your brand and convert traffic into sales,” Bascom said.

About SEO.com
SEO.com is an SEO firm that makes its clients money by driving traffic to their websites through aggressive search engine optimization, paid search marketing, social media marketing and blogging. SEO.com then turns those visitors into sales through conversion-focused Web design and development and copywriting. Clients range from small startups to Fortune 100 companies. Follow SEO.com on Twitter for the latest SEO industry news.

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As I’ve said in a previous post, SEO can be broken down into a couple of main categories: Content, Architecture, and Links. I think most people understand the importance of building content and getting links, but there are a lot of larger and poorly built sites that struggle with some fundamental problems their URL structure. This can lead to a lot of problems, including many duplicate content issues.

Here are three of the most common URL problems that I have seen on different websites. If your site has one or more of these problems, take a look at these solutions and get them fixed as soon as possible.

Problem #1: Non-www and www Versions of Site URLs

If your site has a non-www and www version of all your URLs, you’re going to be splitting link value for the same content between two URLs. Rather than capturing 100% of the link value on the page you want to rank in the search results, you could be doing a 50/50, 60/40, or some other kind of split between the two URLs.

The Fix

There are a couple of things you need to do to fix this:

1. Decide which URL style you want to use, www or non-www.
2. Set up a 301 redirect so that any links to your non-preferred URL style will go to the right style. This way you don’t waste link value by splitting it between two URLs.
3. Set your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools so your search result listings are consistent with your style preference.
4. Make sure whenever you build links to your site that you use the preferred URL style.

Problem #2: Duplicate Home Page URLs

This is a close cousin to Problem #1, but is especially bad because it’s your home page.

It is possible to have a lot of different URLs that all go to your home page content, especially if you haven’t fixed your www and non-www duplication, which can result in a lot of unnecessary duplication. For example:

• http://www.mysite.com
• http://mysite.com
• http://www.mysite.com/index.html
• http://mysite.com/index.html

These URLs will all lead to the same content. If you have links going to all four of them you will see a four-way split in link value. There are a lot of sites out there that have fixed their non-www and www problems, but I can still find multiple versions of their home page.

I’ve even come across sites with different extensions (.php, .html, .htm, etc.) that bring up the same page as well. This leads to even more duplication and potentially wasted link value.

The Fix

The fix here is very similar to the first one. Here are a few tips:

1. Set your main home page URL to be http://www.mysite.com. 301 redirect everything else to this URL since it is the most basic (If your preferred URL style is non-www, then do http://mysite.com)
2. If you have to set up different versions for tracking purposes or some other reason, set a canonical tag to show the search engines which version you want showing up in the search results.
3. Make sure when you build links to your home page that you link to the correct version.

Problem #3: Dynamic URLs

This is a fun one that a lot of not-so-SEO-friendly shopping cart programs run into. Once you start including all sorts of variables and parameters in your URLs, the opportunities for duplicate content and wasted link value are endless.

Allow me to illustrate. All of the following URLs could lead to the same content:

• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc
• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog
• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111
• http://www.mysite.com/somepage.html?param1=abc&dest=goog&camp=111&id=423

Now what if I start rearranging the parameters? Well, they’ll still show the same content. So, as you might imagine, this can create a lot of wasted link value.

There are other causes for the dynamic URL problem. A lot of companies use these parameter-based URLs for statistical purposes. We just want to make sure that you don’t shoot yourself in the foot from an SEO perspective.

This problem also happens with sites that give their affiliates a unique ID to use in their links. You could have 100 affiliates linking to the same page, but all of the URLs will be different because each affiliate has their own unique ID.

The Fix

1. If possible, make sure that your site is using SEO-friendly base URLs. It’s better to have a base URL that will lead to the content rather than a URL that relies on a parameter. For example: http://www.mysite.com/unique-product.html is much better than http://www.mysite.com/category.php?prod=123 where some generic category page is really the base URL.
2. Set a canonical tag that tells the search engines to use the base version of the URL. That way you can still use parameter URLs like http://www.mysite.com/unique-product.html?param1=123&param2=423 to get your data, but the search engines will consider the basic version as the official one.
3. An even better way to handle this is to capture the data on the server side and then redirect the visitor to the correct URL after you have captured your data. A lot of affiliate networks like ShareASale and CJ do it this way, and you can to. The visit basically goes like this: Visitor clicks on links with parameters -> Visitor goes to site, server records parameter data and 301 redirects them to the right landing page – >Visitor barely notices the switch because it happens fast.This way you can get all the data you need, make sure all of the link value goes to the right page, and your visitor still sees what they were after.

What Problems Does Your Site Have?

URL problems can come in combinations. For example, you could have a non-www and www problem along with dynamic URLs, compounding the problem.

Look over your site and see if you have any of these problems. If you do, decide what fixes you can make. Once you have these structural problems fixed you’ll find that your link building efforts will be much more valuable.

One of the things I have tried time and time again to impress on sales and business development people who have worked for me over the years is this:

Professional communication = credibility!

The other day I had a call come in from an unknown number so I let it go to voice mail. When I got around to the voice mail, I heard the following message:

(In the fastest, mumbled Midwestern accent you can imagine) “Chris (mumbled as his hand moves over the mouth piece of the phone) calling in regards to your inquiry (more mumbled) you can call (mumbled)…Oh, I’m here until five central.”

Will I be calling this person back? No.

Everything you do says a lot about you and the organization you represent. The emails you send, the voice mails you leave, the way you act in face-to-face meetings, the way you communicate over the phone, the knowledge you possess, the way you carry yourself, and even your personal hygiene say a lot about you and the company you work for. Here’s the rest of the formula:

Professional communication = credibility = success!

A critical part of an SEO campaign is the keyword research. It is during this phase that a website owner will determine what keywords are most popular and most relevant to their business. They will generate some form of keyword list and it may or may not include URL mapping of the most relevant keywords. When doing the keyword research, there are two pitfalls that can have an adverse effect on the entire SEO campaign.

Getting Distracted by the Search Volume

When performing keyword research it can be very easy to get caught up in the search volume numbers of all the potential keywords a site could rank for. Focusing on just the high volume search terms can often cause a person to miss the mark on their SEO strategy. While it would be great to have a top ranking for a search term that gets a million or more searches in a month, the reality is that those types of terms tend to be less targeted and much more competitive. As a result, you end up with a very expensive SEO campaign and nothing to show for the money invested. Even if rankings are achieved some months down the road the traffic will not be well targeted and the bounce rate will be very high.

The better option is to choose keyword phrases that are more specifically targeted and include the higher-volume keyword phase inside them. For example: If I was optimizing SEO.com for the search term of “search engine optimization” I would consider targeting terms like “search engine optimization company” or “professional search engine optimization services” since both of those longtail terms contain the search term of “search engine optimization” inside them. By following this strategy a website owner can quickly reach the top rankings that drive more targeted traffic and produce a smaller bounce rate. Since the longer keyword phrases also contain the broader phrase inside them, those higher volume keyword phrases will not get ignored. Several months into the campaign you may even see the website showing up in the top 30 or top 20 for the higher volume phrases. At this point you can take the increased revenue from the longtail search terms and invest it in securing some of those larger-volume search terms. Now, because of your work with the longtail keywords, it will be much easier to move them the rest of the way up the rankings.

Getting Distracted by the Amount of Relevant Keywords

Another mistake that can hinder the progress of an SEO campaign is targeting a large amount of keywords. Depending on the size of the website there could be thousands of keyword phrases that are all relevant to site content. It is a good idea to record all of the relevant terms in some type of chart to keep track of them and make sure the site has optimized pages for each one. However, if the focus of the SEO campaign is spread out across hundreds or thousands of keywords it is going to slow down the time it takes to achieve the top rankings.

A good idea is to generate a smaller group of keywords out of the larger list and to focus on them. Make sure the keywords are clearly mapped to the best pages of the website and set goals for ranking on those keywords. After top rankings are achieved, the list can then be expanded to include additional keywords.

Be sure to keep the original keywords from the smaller list even after it is expanded. It is important to continue monitoring the rankings of your original terms so they don’t slip and lose some of their search engine rankings.

Both small and large budget SEO campaigns can benefit from focusing on a smaller list of highly targeted keywords that still include some of the larger-volume search terms inside them. In the end, the website will be able to achieve top rankings and produce an ROI much quicker.

Posted by great scott!

Looking for a super-powerful tactic to build lots of high-quality links? Well we've got a winner for you! Licensing your content and/or data can be an immensely powerful, highly scalable strategy for building powerful links and brand awareness alike.  It's incredibly effective for folks who have quality content or data and want to leverage that material into a great link building solution. 

Be warned though: there are important rules to consider in order to avoid potential duplicate content issues as well as cannibalization.  You want your content licensing working for you, not against you, so watch this week's WBF to learn how you can manage licensing arrangements to best reap the benefits...

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Content & Technology Licensing from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by great scott!

Ready to upgrade your SEO skills, learn actionable new strategies, and get ready to make 2010 the year you totally rock online? Well, we've got just the thing to help you finish out the year with the latest tactics to take your SEO to the next level.

That's right, the SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series is back with an all new DVD Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics!  Whether you're a fan of the series, or this is your first time experiencing SEOmoz Training DVDs, this new six DVD set is one you won't want to miss. Filmed before a live audience in Seattle, Tips, Trick & Tactics features over a dozen world-class instructors teaching high-level, actionable strategies on 17 advanced topics.

This brand new edition of the Advanced SEO Training Series includes over 10 hours of immediately actionable material designed to really push your SEO skills to the next level. These advanced strategies will help you launch your SEO plan or reinvigorate your existing efforts with fresh tactics that will change the way you think about online marketing.

Don't miss out on your opportunity to get the latest and greatest SEO strategies from the world's top experts. The information you get in Tips, Tricks & Tactics is the sort of in-depth, high-level stuff these pros don't normally share at conferences, or even online. We actively encourage them to share their best advice, and most effective strategies that they use to be at the top of the SEO game...and they really deliver!

Until Sunday, December 6th you can get the Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics 6 DVD Set for just $399 (that’s $100 off the regular price of $499) and we’ll include FREE Shipping.  That's less than 1/3 of what most industry conferences cost, and you can share this among your entire team (no travel expenses either).

Want to save even more?  SEOmoz PRO Members only pay $199 during pre-sale ($249 regularly). Do the math and you’ll see that this is a great opportunity to get the brand new Advanced SEO Training Series, try SEOmoz PRO and save a ton of money at the same time.  Order soon, because the special release pricing will only last until December 6th and these DVD Series' sell out every year (we only do a limited run of each DVD series). Get Tips, Tricks & Tactics now, and rev up your SEO in the new year!

Here's a sneak preview of The Advanced SEO Training Series: Tips, Tricks & Tactics, and what people are saying about it...




What’s covered on Tips, Tricks & Tactics?  Tons!  This series features 15 Instructors (including Rand Fishkin, Todd Malicoat, Vanessa Fox, Ben Jesson, David Mihm, and more) speaking on almost every topic important to the advanced search marketer…

Disk One

• SEO for Content
• Advanced Site Architecture
• Advanced Keyword Research

Disk Two

• Local Search Strategies
• Alternative SEO Tools
• News & Image Search Strategies
• Advanced Linkscape Tactics

Disk Three

• How to Design a Link Building Campaign
• How to Launch a Startup

Disk Four

• History of SEO
• Future of SEO
• High ROI Social Media

Disk Five

• Researching the Algorithms
• How to Win SEO Budget
• Conversion Rate Optimization

Disk Six

• SEO Business Strategies
• Avoiding Search Engine Penalties

Still want more? We have a limited quantity of free passes to SES Chicago ($1,995 value) if you purchase a new 1-year PRO Membership! That means you can get the Tips, Tricks & Tactics DVD Training Series, a full year of SEOmoz PRO, and an all-access pass to SES Chicago for almost $1,000 less than just the conference pass alone! Not going to Chicago? SES will let you exchange your free Chicago pass for any of their other conferences in 2010, including London, West, New York, or any other!

What Did Live Attendees have to Say About Tips, Tricks & Tactics?

"If last year was 'tech school' this year is 'Grad School'! Really powerful presentations."

"I'm the SEO for a $200 million company and I plan to use the knowledge I gained from this Training to radically change the foundations of my company."

"I've seen the future...This is absolutely essential to businesses and did nothing short of blowing me away."

"I'd recommend it to anyone but my competitors."

"I felt like I had a serious wake-up call to remember why I'm optimizing websites in the first place."

"It's nice to hear about theories and logic, but these presentations with examples definitely make the 'putting it into practice' part much easier."

"I've been doing SEO for four years now, and I found a lot of things in here that you just can't find online."

"This is very high-level, actionable stuff!"

"There's a lot of information! It really gives you the edge."

Get Tips, Tricks & Tactics now and get the edge for the new year!

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Posted by Danny Dover

  Psst! Word on the street is that you are a big deal. Some say that working with you is even more fun than changing a co-workers primary Google language to Swahili1. Well now, it is time to put your reputation to the test!



All of us at SEOmoz are proud to announce the brand new Keyword Research Quiz. This lean, mean, question asking machine was designed to test your sugar infused SEO brain by covering all corners of the Keyword Research world. The questions are weighted by difficulty to make the harder questions worth more points than their easier counterparts. The result is that keyword research beginners walk away with their tails between their legs and the true Dark Lords of the SERPs can return to their rightful place at the front of the Star Trek IMAX line. (Well that was rude...)

If you are able to finish the quiz, you'll have the chance to share your triumph by letting your competitors know how long they should cry in angst at night.



1Changing the default language to Swahili is extra funny/mean because it changes the language options in Google's preferences drop down to their Swahili translation. For example: 'English' is changed to 'Kiingereza'. Obviously this makes it very difficult to switch back.

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Posted by great scott!

Happy Wednesday, Whiteboard Friday Fans!  You may have noticed that there was no new Whiteboard Friday on, well, Friday. That's because a sizable battalion of the mozSquad went to Vegas for PubCon and, alas, I didn't bring the camera with me (it's actually prohibited by law--what happens in Vegas, and all that). Nonetheless, Rand and I feel horribly guilty about leaving you sans-WBF last week and wanted to make it up to you. Thus, I present you with this Special Wednesday Edition of WBF.

What makes it "special" other than titular anachronism?  First off, you!  You're special and we love you, so thanks for watching. Second, I'm trying out a new video embed service called Vzaar. They were generous enough to hook me up with an account and let me try them out, so any feedback about audio/video quality, smoothness of streaming, compatibility, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE: I switched the embed back to Vimeo since a lot of people seemed to be having trouble with Vzaar...thanks for the feedback!
So, what is the topic of this week's WBFSWE? Link Growth Patterns!  Rand looks at how some typical link growth patterns tend to be interpreted by the engines.  Did you launch your site with a massive PR blitz and then stop all efforts? The resultant spike and sudden drop-off in link acquisition could cause you some serious problems in the SERPs.  There's got to be a better way, right?  Indeed!  Rand will also show you how to construct a staged link acquisition strategy that will provide a much more natural link-growth curve that the engines will trust and respect.

Have fun, and we'll see you in a couple of days for a good ol' proper Whiteboard Friday.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Link Growth Patterns from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Posted by randfish

I've been connecting with a lot of site owners who are re-entering or ramping up their efforts in the blogosphere. I suspect this has something to do with the focus on content creation + linkbait in the SEO world's dialogue as well as the potential new traffic streams bloggers are feeling from the surge of linking via Twitter. Whatever the case, there's a few critical pieces that can help make for greater SEO value from blogging and feeds in general (and most of these haven't been covered in my previous posts on blog optimization).

#1 - Control Your Own Feed

It's hard to write something better than Danny Sullivan's terrific piece on Staying Master of Your Feed Domain. The concept is that you can utilize services like Feedburner, but you want those feed URLs to originate from your domain (so you keep the link juice you're earning):

To make this work, you need your hosting provider to create a CNAME entry for a new subdomain you’ll create. If they can’t do that easily for you, find a new hosting provider. I highly recommend ours, Tiger Technologies. Cheap, easy for you to do this yourself, plus Digg-tested.

For me, I simply make a subdomain called feeds for any domain I’m dealing with. Since searchengineland.com is our main domain, our feed domain is feeds.searchengineland.com.

Once I’ve created this, the MyBrand magic lets FeedBurner take control of where the domain points to. That let’s me turn the FeedBurner feed address for us into http://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland.

But wait — I thought it was about keeping control? Relax. I’m giving them control because I want to. If they went all evil, I’d just change the CNAME record and point that subdomain to wherever I want. I own the domain. I control where it ultimately points to.

Sadly, SEOmoz doesn't do this, and it's a pain to switch (though at some point, it may be worth that trouble). If you're new to feed publishing or are early in the game, it makes a lot of sense to move now, before it becomes more painful.

#2 - Get Your Feed Listed Across the Web

There are some great directory lists like this one from TopRank Blog and this one from Ari Paparo. However, my advice here would be to go after not just the generic lists, but the more specific feed lists, aggregators, portals and yes, other blogs & news sites that can put your posts in front of an audience that's passionate about your topic.

In the technology field, for example, places like Alltop, Techmeme, PopURLs, even the NYTimes technology page list feeds from a variety of sources. Those are amazing links and incredible sources of traffic, too (Alltop recently entered SEOmoz's top 30 referring domains for traffic to the site). If you're committed to getting the most out of your feed, you need to identify the portals in your niche that command share, traffic and page views, make a feed worthy of being posted and get their attention. Emails are surprisingly effective, but nothing beats an in-person conversation.

#3 - Use Absolute URLs in Your Feed

Scrapers, both good and bad, are going to scoop up your feed and re-publish it, including the links. If you use absolute URLs in your markup (e.g. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rand-loves-the-nfl) rather than relative URLs (e.g. /rand-loves-the-nfl) your chances of getting link equity and PageRank back from those who re-publish goes up significantly. Note that this is a general disagreement with JohnMu (who posted on this topic last year, though not specifically as it relates to feeds).

#4 - Record Feed CTR & Links You Earn as "Conversions"

Through feed tracking, you can determine the posts that received the greatest/fewest clickthroughs. You can also use your web analytics or tools like Linkscape, Yahoo!, Technorati or Blogscape's SMM Prototype to see how many links each post has earned (Backtweets is another good one if you want to record tweets). Treat those links andd clicks like a conversion - write more posts like the ones that have success and shy away from the posts that don't earn much love/attention. Great bloggers don't start out great (I certainly didn't). They learn over time what's successful and effective and get consistently on that track.

#5 - Full Text Feeds are Generally Better for SEO

The argument over partial text vs. full text tends to be about earning the clicks and interactions on your site (full text means people can read off-site and may never click through, while partial text really annoys some subscribers), but from a raw SEO perspective, full text has a few benefits.

• All things being equal, you tend to get more subscribers with full text than partial, which boosts your numbers, gives you wider distribution and increases the liklihood you'll earn a link from those readers.
• Full text feeds get re-published in full, and that means links further down in the content potentially pass value back to you.
• Blog and feed lists are sometimes picky about partial feeds, and may opt not to include your site.
• Potential distribution partners like full text, because it gives them the opportunity to keep the visitor on their site (but if these deals get done, they almost always mean link juice back to you).

Obviously, business goals may overrule this recommendation, but it's wise to be aware of the possible impact.

Since it's a short list, I'd love if anyone in the comments can link to posts or recommendations (yes, even if it's your own stuff!) that can also be helpful on this subject.

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Posted by randfish

Last week at Pubcon Las Vegas, I presented on How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Effort with fellow panelists Roger Montti (Martinibuster), Aaron Wall (SEOBook) and Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl). I was a bit of an odd choice for this discussion, as I'd only recently announced SEOmoz's Stance on Paid Links & Link Ads, but Pubcon's organizers decided it would be interesting to have a divergent point-of-view.

Below is my presentation, which covers the perspective I come from and why I'm so risk-averse as well as strategies I recommend to capture value from investing in link acquisition campaigns:

Pubcon 2009 Paid Links

Not surprisingly I had a lot of people talk to me (and email me) after the presentation and express some really valuable opinions and questions. The presentations started late due to a misfunctioning projector, meaning there was no time for formal Q+A. I thought I'd take the opportunity in this post to address some of those missed questions.

Do you ever recommend link buying for any site? What about hyper-competitive industries?

Because of my distaste for risk of any kind when it comes to Google's webspam team, my answer is consistent - no. I don't ever suggest that businesses buy links from brokers or in the form of link ads that carry the primary intent of boosting a site's ranking. To be fair, many of my colleagues who practice SEO in competitive industries (dating, gaming, pharmaceutical, real estate, e-commerce, etc.) don't agree and do engage in buying links to boost their rank. I even know folks at Fortune 500s who use link brokers successfully for specific pages and targeted keywords (this group is probably in the lowest risk category).

Despite these examples and my respect for my colleagues, whenever I'm asked, I'm going to give the same reply - it's my belief that in the long run, your money will be better spent on link acquisition that runs no risk of being flagged as manipulative by Google. The penalties and problems of link buying simply outweigh the benefits in my mind, so while I have no problem with paid links from a moral, ethical or legal standpoint (nofollow is most definitely not a way to disclose advertising to consumers as per the FTC's guidelines), the pragmatist in me says link buying isn't the way to success at Google.

What about directories that require a payment?

The short answer is - it depends. I'd wager a lot of money that some directories which do require payments pass great link equity. These include sites like:

• The Yahoo! Directory
• The Better Business Bureau Directory
• SEMPO's Member Directory
• Apple's Web Apps Directory

Then there's the opposite end of the spectrum of directories that exist primarily for the purpose of selling PageRank. Google took action against many of these a couple years back and I suspect they continue to identify and discount their links as new ones crop up. In 2007, I wrote a lengthy post on What Makes a Good Directory and I'd still stand by nearly all of that today.

The message here is that just because a site requires payment to get a link doesn't make it a "paid link" that Google will penalize or discount. As with many things in life, SEO and the web, there are shades of gray and nuances that require paying attention. If stuff like this were simple, SEO would be, too, and we know that's not the case.

If I see my competitors engaging in link buying, how can I compete if I don't do it, too?

I think a big misnomer with link analysis comes up when people scroll through a list of their competition's links via something like Yahoo! Site Explorer. There's no metrics indicating whether the link is passing juice, no metric for trustworthiness or quality, just a notation that a link exists on the page. Even if you're using something more advanced like Linkscape, there's nothing to say which links Google counts and which they don't. You can easily get pulled into the idea that paid links are what's propping up the competition's rankings, when in fact, it's a few great natural links that are doing all the heavy lifting.

I remember a site clinic several years back featuring a Google's webspam chief, Matt Cutts. He was reviewing a site's link profile on stage using an internal tool and commented that while Google saw several hundred links to the site, only three (yes 3 out of hundreds!) were passing link equity. Cearly, the search giant does a tremendous amount of filtering on the web's link graph, so don't presume to be sure which links are passing value.

Even if you feel very confident that paid links are winning the battle for your archnemesis, I recommend taking the low-risk road. In the long run, they're likely to get penalized/devalued and you're likely to overtake them with a link profile that's clean and continually increasing in value.

Where do you draw the line between money that's spent to acquire a link indirectly (as with event sponsorship, ads that turn into links, etc.)

This gets at the crux of the issue, but I think I've got a reasonably good methodology for determining which links requiring funds fit with Google's guidelines and which violate them. I like these three questions:

1. Does the organization offering the link tout SEO, PageRank, customizable anchor text or Google rankings as either a portion or the whole of the benefit you'll receive by paying this money?
2. Does the money go towards little else besides the link itself?
3. Does the organization/website provide links via this acquisition methodology (whether that's an event sponsorship, a charitable donation, an advertising relationship, etc.) to the more aggressive side of the SEO/web marketing field (niches like porn, pills, casino, legal, real estate, etc.) often with anchor text heavy links?

If the answer to any of these is a definite "yes," the source is likely to fit into Google's "suspicious" pile and possibly will lose the ability to pass link equity in the future (or already has).

How can you be sure that linkbait and viral content won't be treated the same as paid links by Google in the future?

Just a couple months back, I wrote about Why Linkbait is a Tactic the Search Engines Will Always Value, so it's probably not worth re-hashing here. Certainly, there are ways to be manipulative about virtually anything in the link acquisition world, and Google may well take action against some forms of these, but I believe natural links acquired through great content are going to stand the test of time (and are likely to benefit from future ranking signals, whatever they may be).

This is just Google FUD - we shouldn't let them dictate how to do our jobs!

But we already do! The only reason we try to build these links, research the right keywords, create and submit XML sitemaps, etc. is because Google is dictating the way their crawling, processing and ranking systems work. In their ecosystem - the one that drives 85%+ of all search traffic on the web - there are guidelines, best practices, rules and regulations. If you want to play on their court, you've got to abide by those rules or be ready to face the consequences. I'm not ready for those consequences and thus, have low risk tolerance and the attitude you're reading about.

None of this is to say that a more risk-heavy appetite and more gray-black hat methodologies for link acquisition aren't worth trying; just make sure you do it on sites you're willing to get tossed out of the playground.

As always, I'm looking forward to the conversation in the comments.

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Posted by willcritchlow

Bored of sorting massive lists of links in all kinds of different directions to understand the link profile of a new site?

Struggle to understand how to gather actual insights about link profiles from lists of thousands of links and persuade management of the actions needed?

Don't panic. Help is at hand.

I'm going to share some data visualisation tips today that I reckon I could use to beat up on Rand in a presentation-off (umm, again). We have recently been doing some deep dives into clients' and prospects' link profiles which gave me an excuse to mash up some Linkscape API data in Excel. I've used Linkscape data, but you could use any link analysis tool you like as long as you can get some metric to sort the linking domain by (I have used domain mozTrust in most of the examples below). Equally, I've used Excel, but you can use any data analysis package you like. If you want to use Excel, you will need the Data Analysis Toolpak (for the histogram function).

I'll get into how to make the charts in a minute, but first I'm going to just show you some pretty pictures:

Impress the boss

This one is of questionable use (I think there are better ways of actually visualising the data) but it's pretty, and bosses like pretty (allegedly). This is a surface chart of number of linking domains by domain mozTrust shown across 4 data points - all links, links to the homepage and links to the next two strongest pages:

The bit of insight this does give us at a glance is that the vast majority of the site's very low DmT links go to the homepage and that the most trusted domains linking to the site (DmT >= 8) don't link to the homepage or the next two strongest pages.

The same chart just showing links to the homepage compared to all links which shows the top end a litle more clearly:

Gathering insights

I think this data is actually easier to see as a line chart like this (locations A and B are the top two strongest pages on the site after the homepage):

What we just about see here is some bumps up at the top end of the DmT scale in the light blue line which is the same bit of insight I mentioned above.

Drilling down

Diving into this data to show only the top end of the DmT scale, we get:

And we see that although the homepage and these top two location pages are the most powerful pages on the site, they are not the ones with the links from the biggest / most trusted sites. This is an area for further examination that would be hard to discover by looking at endless lists of links.

This is just an example of the kind of insight you can gather. I'm showing off tools and techniques here rather than specific insights. I'll leave you to do your own playing to discover interesting things about your clients and competitors. I didn't know what I was going to find when I started diving into the data for this site. You likely won't know either, but graphs are great discovery tools. Sometimes, of course you find nothing of interest:

Comparing just the top two pages doesn't give us any very meaningful insights except that the big links out at 6.5-7 DmT to location A probably explain why it's more powerful than B. It might be more insightful at a lower granularity.

Equally, I haven't yet learnt to understand the meaning that I am sure is buried in charts like this one:

This is the number of links to a whole site by the mR of the linking page. Like the mythical guys who can understand network traffic by watching LEDs blink on routers, I'd love to be able to look at this kind of chart and really understand things. The closest I've got so far is that I think these charts should look roughly smooth in the absence of manipulation. If we assume that the difficulty of acquiring a link is roughly correlated to its strength and that we get links at a rate inversely proportional to their difficulty, then I think this chart should look roughly like a Poisson distribution:

Which this one does, so I'm happy.

Persuading management / bosses

The next thing that some of these charts helps with is making the case to management when you know something is true, but they need more persuading. This next example takes two different sites (neither of them is the site above) that are in different industries but have remarkably similar link characteristics at the macro level (don't ask me how I found these sites - I am just that sad). The spider chart shows how similar they are:

However, if we dig in a little further, we find quite a difference behind the scenes:

The red site seems to have loads more decent links (mR 4, 5, 6) than the blue site. So how does the blue site end up with similar domain metrics?

It's all about the relatively small number of very powerful links the blue site has. Zooming in on mR 6 & 7 links:

If you were just to look at this chart, you might imagine that the red site was getting more juice passed via these links than the blue site is. However, you'd be being fooled by the logarithmic scale. In terms of total juice passed by just these mR 6 and 7 links, the actual story is:

In other words, the blue site is competing almost purely on the basis of the big mR 7 links it has that the red site doesn't. That's kinda interesting in terms of strategy generation isn't it?

How do you do this analysis?

Pretty much everything in this post was generated using the histogram function in Excel running over Linkscape API data. It's pretty straightforward with the online help. The only gotchas I noticed that you might need to know about were:

1. Align the 'bins' (which are the x-axis values on most of the charts above) either with mR / mT intervals (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, ...) or go much more granular (e.g. 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, ....). Anything in between tends to generate artifacts
2. The bin range has to be on the same sheet as the data - if you try to pull in a bin range from another sheet, it fails silently
3. If you want to do the surface chart, you need to do some interpolation between your points. In the examples above, I just did a linear interpolation (i.e. drawing a straight line between the different page levels) - so if the homepage has 100 mR 2 links and the next page has 50 mR 2 links, I just created 10 imaginary pages with 55, 60, 65, 70... mR 2 links to spread the surface out far enough to see it. This may not be the best way of doing things. I'd love to hear from anyone who has a better method

Thanks to foliovision for the photo from the ProSEO seminar.Technorati Tagslinkbuilding, analysis, visualisation, visualization, data

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Posted by randfish

Tonight's post comes via the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas and is likely of interest to many in the webmaster and search communities. Today, during the Interactive Site Review Session, Google's head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, along with Vanessa Fox of NinebyBlue and Derrick Wheeler of Microsoft took thorough dives into a number of sites. The session was well coverd on Twitter, and in live form by Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable.

Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox on the Site Review Panel (photo credit: davecolorado.com)

A few points in particular stood out and are worthy of coverage:

• Blocking Internet Archive may be a Negative Signal
  Matt Cutts noted that spammers very frequently block archive.org from crawling/storing their pages and few reputable sites engage in this. Thus, it's a potential spam signal to search engines. SEO Theory has a good writeup on when and why there may be legitimate reasons to do this, but webmasters seeking to avoid scrutiny may want to take heed.
  _
• Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings
  Maile Ohye actually mentioned this at SMX East in New York, but Matt Cutts repeated it again today. In a nutshell - while slow page load times won't negatively impact your rankings, fast load times may have a positive effect. This comes on a day when the Google Chrome blog introduced their new SPDY research project. I'm particularly happy about this news, because it's also true that load times have a positive second-order effect on SEO. Pingomatic recently published some excellent research on load times from Akamai noting the expectations of users for faster web browsing have doubled in the past 2 years. In addition, fast loading pages are, in my opinion, considerably more likely to earn links, retweets and other forms of sharing than their slow-loading peers. This tool from Pingdom is a great place to start testing your own site.
  _
• It May be Easier to Walk Away from Banned Domains
  Sites that Google's webspam team has severely penalized or banned entirely from the index can be very difficult to re-include, and thus, Matt suggested that "walking away" and "starting over" may be a more prudent strategy. In my opinion, this is largely due to link profile issues - if your site has a "spammy" link profile, it's tough to ask an engineer to sort out the wheat from the chaffe manually (or algorithmically) and stop counting only the bad links. Thus, re-consideration requests may not be as effective a use of time as registering a new site and trying to re-build a more trusted presence.
  _
• Repetition of Keywords in Internal Anchor Text (particularly in footers) is Troubling
  During a specific site's review, Matt noted that keyword usage in the anchor text of many internal links, particularly in the footer of a website, is seen as potentially manipulative. Yahoo!'s search engineers have noted this in the past and we at SEOmoz have seen specific cases where removal of keyword-stuffed internal links from a footer had immediate impacts on Google rankings (removing what appeared to be large negative ranking penalties sitewide).
  _
• Having Multiple Sites Targeting Subsections of the Same Niche can be Indicative of Spam
  Matt Cutts today mentioned that "having multiple sites for different areas of the same industry can be a red flag to Google." Though Googlers have mentioned this before, today's site review panel brought renewed attention to both Google's ability and proclivity for carefully considering not only an individual site, but all the other sites owned by that registrant/entity/person. Given Google's tremendous amount of data on web usage behavior, many SEOs suspect that they track beyond simply domain registration records.

I also presented at Pubcon today - on a panel called Linkfluence: How to Buy Links with Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk (live SERoundtable coverage here) - as the counterpoint speaker (on why not to buy links). I'll try to have that presentation in written format early next week on the blog.

p.s. I was asked by a large number of attendees at the conference about our venture capital fundraising experience. I expect to be able to write about that very soon and certainly appreciate all the support. :-)

p.p.s. For those who are interested, my brother, Evan Fishkin (who works at Portent Interactive) had his head shaved by Google's webspam chief. On a personal note, I must say I was particularly impressed with Matt's ability to shave a head without nicks or cuts, and his foresight in bringing proper equipment. Unfortunately, I'm not fully briefed on why this occurred, but I do know that my little brother was in terrible need of a trim (photo of my shocked observance of the event here & more photos/video here).

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Posted by Sam Niccolls

• Google Acquires AdMob for $750 Million:
  Just another day at the office on Monday for Omar Hamoui and the AdMob team who got acquired by Google for $750 million.  
  

• Possible Implications of Google's New Music Search:
  Google will soon launch a new music search allowing searchers to preview songs directly from the SERPs.

• Bing Launches Video Portal with Help from MSN:
  YouTube may still be the 800 lb gorilla, but Bing now provides over 900 TV shows and access to high-quality videos from within a sleek new UI.

• Bing Unveils Wolfram|Alpha Powered Search:
  Whether you want to look up nutrition facts or find out your body mass index (perhaps before the holidays), Bing's Wolfram|Alpha powered results give you the information you want... or don't want, as the case may be.

• Amazon Design Analysis:
  Just copy Amazon for e-commerce, right? Well, there are certainly reasons Amazon brought in 19 billion in revenue in 2008, but before you borrow too heavily, Jared Spool's SlideShare presentation analyzing Amazon design elements is worth a look.
  

• 50 Beautiful & Creative Blog Designs:
  Smashing Magazine shares a list of great blog designs that is great idea fodder for bloggers.

• Deep Links Are Disproportionately Valuable:
  Eric Enge serves up some food for thought... do deep links pass a disproportionately high amount of link juice?     
  

• Win Big by Doing Just a Few Things Well:
  As shown by Chipotle, Pinkberry, and others, simplicity can be an effective path to executing and marketing successful products. It's difficult to do, but as 37 Signals highlights, often times less is more.

• Bill Slawski - How the Engines Might Be Using Query & Click Logs:
  SEO by the Sea looks at Google's recent patent and shares several ways the engines might be using query and click logs to influence rankings.

• AdWords Announces Sitelinks:
  Similar to sitelinks in the organic listings, AdWords now offers richer paid ads with sitelinks.

 

• Heatmaps for Display Ads & Product Pages:
  Hot or not? ... it's a simple enough question, but few marketers use heatmaps to inform display ads or product pages. As Jonathan Mendez and Linda Bustos each point out, heatmaps are a great way to do like Snoop Dogg and "drop, drop it like it's hot." 
  

• Smart E-mail Marketing Tips:
  Shay Howe's blog post full of e-mail tips is a useful hit list for marketing managers in charge of designing and delivering effective e-mails.

• New Google Flu Shot Locator:
  Google moves the local search needle through continued improvements to their flu shot locator, which will soon be added to Flu.gov.
  

• AdSense - Rolls Out New Features:
  From an improved UI to enhanced dashboards, AdSense advertisers now have access to more robust channel and ad unit reporting. 

• Why You Should Use the NoArchive Meta Tag:
  Dave Naylor's stance on Google's cache can be argued, but he provides an interesting point of view, as well as several valid points.

   

• Marissa Mayer Named Glamour Magazine Woman of the Year:
  Google's 34-year-old VP joins Michelle Obama, Maya Angelou, Serena Williams and Rihanna among Glamour Magazine's women of the year. And yes, the Mozzers currently in Vegas are projecting that our very own Sarah Bird will top Glamour's list in 2010.
  

• Monetizing Mobile Content:
  A timely subject on the heels of Google's AdMob acquisition, eMarketer's study sheds light on the growth of U.S. mobile users and ways content owners could monetize mobile users.  

• Using Position Distribution to Manage Branded Keywords in Paid Search:
  Siddharth Shah's Search Engine Land post provides several reasons you might want to use position distribution as a key factor when managing branded paid search ads.   

• You Don't Need Tons of Traffic to Optimize Your Site:
  Brendan Regan, of the now Bryan Eisenberg-less Futurenow Blog, dispels the myth of needing minimum traffic volume to make website optimizations.
  

Top YOUmoz entries:

1. * Web Analytics & Segmentation for Better Conversion Optimization by philou2803

2. * What Make a Link Worthy Post - Part 2 by chenry

3. Dear Generation X: Social Media from the Eyes of Your Successors by trycm
   

4. Google Analytics Alternatives - Measuring Beyond Last Click Wins by John Santangelo

5. AdWords Tracking Proven to be Misleading by William E 
   

6. Case Study: How Building a Site for Users Improved Our Rankings by csaliba

* Indicates blog post was promoted to the SEOmoz Blog

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imriedu: IMRI Digital Marketing News - Yahoo Answers announced Suggested Questions @ http://bit.ly/sLBXX