It should take you no more than 90 seconds to read the last four paragraphs of this interview with Debra Mastaler from Alliance Link. If you want to learn how to build links read this, then read it again. (Copied below for your reading pleasure)

You have a new product and want to use it to build links. Before going public, you do a soft launch to your customers with an invitation to link and incentive (sales.) You then run a national contest (promotions) and announce it via press release (publicity). You also send a release announcing the winner.

While the first part s is going on, you instruct your copywriters to create a humorous piece of link bait which is launched on Digg and a handful of other social media sites (promotions). The linkbait has a tie-in to the contest. (promotions) A blogger outreach program begins and offers free samples of the new product and an invite to review or send rate cards with advertising opportunities (promotions). Once the reviews come in, bundle them, and send release showcasing the successful launch. (publicity).

Based on the success of the launch, have sales and copywriting staff write a case study/white paper referencing the process, reviews and customer feedback. Offer white paper to key journalists before going public, (publicity) and then add the paper to any content source that will take it (promotions).

And so on. By the time this link cycle is complete, you will have touched on almost every facet of marketing without having to purchase a single link or having any one of the tactics stand out. Balance is key.

As you can tell, this blog has been idle for a very long time.  During that time I’ve been working on some independent side projects, blogging over at our company blog and working a ton.  I recently ported this blog over to Thesis as I’m trying to become proficient so I can use it for my other sites.  Will let you know how this goes

You can read some recent posts by me:

Designing for Visibility
Google’s Newish Keyword Tool
Be Prepared for When Yahoo Becomes Bing

I was always under the impression that a 301 redirect would tell all bots that a page has permanently moved and now resides on the destination page, so they should transfer all link/search equity over to that page and remove the old page from the index.  I also believed that a 302 redirect was the opposite, and told the engines that the destination page is only a temporary home and should not be indexed.  Apparently Yahoo does not agree:

Have they always handled redirects in this manner?  Is this why their index is littered with pages that return 404′s, since webmasters who perform 301 redirects from top level pages down to deeper pages may remove those top level pages after awhile?  This article was updated by Yahoo fairly recently (in May 2009), so perhaps this is something new.

Two hours ago I picked up a copy of Hugh MacLeods Ignore Everbody  And 39 Other Keys to be Creative from my local Barnes and Noble, and I just finished it.  The entire book took a little over an hour to read and contains more insight than any ‘self help’ or ‘how to succeed at business’ type book I’ve ever read.

This book should be required reading for everyone.

SEO is a very complex topic.  It takes many hours of reading, experimenting, and analyzing to become proficient.  The hardest part about learning online is figuring out who to trust.  If I had to pick four free resources from which to learn SEO I would choose the following:

1. Google Webmaster Guidelines – This is a pretty comprehensive document outlining how to do SEO the Google approved way.  If you were to stick with only following the rules in this guide your site would be well ahead of much of the competition.

2. Yahoo Search Topics – Particularly the section which discusses their search spider called Slurp and the section about ranking.  It also gives you some information about how to use Site Explorer to look up backlinks, something all SEO’s should learn how to do.

3.  Bing Webmaster Center – Again, pretty similar to the other two where it’s set up into different sections related to technical recommendations, content guidelines, and things to avoid.

Those three are very similar, but if you read through them you will spot similarities and come away with a good understanding of what the search engines deem important.

4.  Once you’ve conquered those three help centers, you’ll want to make your way over to Webmaster World’s Google  Hot Topics section.  This is far more advanced than the other three but provides great insight into the intricacies of creating a succesful site and ranking well in Google.  Definitely a little more advanced than the three listed above, but this resource is well worth the read.  Definitely a place to come to if you have questions about your site or how Google may be treating your site.

Bonus:

5.  Techniques and Failures for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 -  Digesting all of this content would take months or years.  It’s not important to know everything on here, but the more items from this list that you implement within your site the better off your site will be from a conversion aspect and an accessibility aspect.

Was checking into my server logs this weekend after I made a new post to see which spiders would crawl it first.  To probably nobody’s surprise, Googlebot was quick on the scene, followed by MSNBot, and Slurp didn’t roll through until a good 24 hours after it was posted.  Slurp is just not a fan of daveshap.com.

One thing I did find very interesting was that MSNBot always checks robots.txt before crawling any pages, whereas Googlebot only checked it once the whole weekend.  The grand totals were 37 crawls of robots.txt by MSNBot, 8 by Slurp, and 1 by Googlebot.  Seems like Googlebot is a much more efficient crawler than the other two.  For some reason I’m not surprised.

A recent post over at the iCrossing blog (disclaimer: I work there) notes that around 3% of all Bing referrals come from the ‘related searches’ option.   I’d consider that to be a pretty decent initial usage rate, especially for a brand new interface.  But I can’t tell if this should be considered a success or a failure on behalf of Bing.

On one had I can see how it’s successful because a lot of people are utilizing it, meaning it’s aiding users in finding the answer to their query.  But on the other hand it signifies that Bing is not getting it right initially, and users are having to refine their queires in order to find what they’re looking for.

I wonder if Google was more aggressive with their related searches how much more they’d be used.  Or perhaps Google does a much better job of detecting initial query intent and delivers more relevant results so people don’t need related searches?  Google has loads of usage data (significantly more than either Yahoo or MSN) telling them what type of listings people clicked on based on the query entered.  They’ve probably used this to refine their results, which is one of the reasons you probably don’t see as many related results.  I wonder what the percentage of total Google referrals from the small sample set iCrossing used come from related searches.

Might be a good topic for a later post.

Yesterday Google announced you can now notify them via Webmaster Tools that you are moving domains.  In addition they provide some ‘best practices’ so to speak on how to most effectively do this.

Recently Matt Cutts basically announced that PageRank sculpting was dead, saying that links tagged with nofollow don’t pass PageRank to the destination URLs, but do still inherit their share of PageRank from the page they exist on.

They can now also crawl links within Javascript.

Each day/month/year Googlebot is becoming much better at crawling the web and allowing poorly constructed sites to still get indexed and their pages ranked.  Mechanical SEO used to provide sites a significant advantage but that advantage is shrinking each day.

As the web becomes more social, attention and conversations are going to be far more important factors in how your site ranks than anything you can do technically.  As Stephen Spencer pointed out recently the Pinkberry website is friggin awful from an SEO perspective, yet still ranks very well due to it’s popularity.  The best pizza place in Phoenix has an atrocious site, yet amazing pizza, and almost 200 reviews on Yelp discussing how amazing it is (or how it’s not worth the 2+ hour wait, depending on which review you read).  Yet it ranks #1 for Phoenix pizza in Google.

Mintel recently put out a study which concluded word of mouth from friends and family is still the most important factor people consider when looking to buy products or services.

Mintel’s exclusive consumer survey showed most people who bought a product or service based off a recommendation did so on a referral from a friend/relative or husband/wife/partner (34% and 25%, respectively). Only 5% of respondents bought based on the recommendation of a blogger, the same for a chat room.

Word of mouth marketing is not going anywhere and will always be very influential in consumers decision making purchases.

Instead of worrying about PageRank sculpting, send an email to your best customers and give them something of value.  Encourage them to talk about you.  Don’t stress over how many pages you have indexed in the search engines.  Worry about how your business is perceived by those that matter, by those that talk about you offline or online.  Because no matter how good or bad or site is technically, if people are talking about you, the search engines will find you and rank your site.

I’m in the process of starting my first legitimate PPC campaign.  Twice before I’ve set up fly-by-night PPC campaigns and didn’t really take the time to learn the system or become proficient.  I was in ‘set it and forget it’ mode and just let it run.  Not surprisingly my first campaign hemorrhaged money and was one of the main reasons I had to shut down my first ever ecommerce site.  It’s not all bad though considering it was through that site that I learned about SEO and am now making a decent living from it.  Anyway, my second PPC campaign I set up was for an affiliate site I set up and although I received a few clicks on my ads that converted into sales, I still was taking a net loss.  I haven’t touched that site in a long time and recently decided to pick it back up this weekend.

With a copy of Andrew Goodman’s Winning Results with Google Adwords in hand I’m in the process of setting up my campaign.  I’m starting small and hopefully can start turning a profit.  Something was working before, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to it to notice what it was.  Not sure if the paid ads were driving the sales, or the offer was what was working, but these are all things I’m going to find out now.

This leads me to the point of my post, which is that I think it’s becoming increasingly important for internet marketers to expand their skill sets.  In a time of declining budgets, fewer businesses have the budget to hire a PPC specialist, SEO specialist, email marketing guru, etc.  I’m currently helping out a friend of mine on her site and I feel insufficient that all I can offer is advice on SEO, when I know there is so much else that can help her that I can’t provide at this time.  I want to get to the point where I can provide more wholisitic strategy recommendations if called upon, and I think with my current skillset I’m not there yet, but will be eventually.

My biggest weakness as an SEO is handling complex technical issues, an area I’m improving upon right now with an enormously complex site migration I’m currently working on at work.  But Ideally I’d like to learn more about email marketing as relationship building becomes an important part of internet marketing, and conversion rate optimization to improve ROI on traffic generated from SEO efforts.  Hopefully this will all come with time.

Do you think it’s a good idea to become above average at multiple disciplines or an expert in one?

Did I really just say that? Yeesh. Please put away the pitchforks and let me explain.

Every search result is it’s own marketplace with it’s own rules and regulations, Some are more likely to have maps listings while others are more inclined to show recent news articles due to the recency of the topic. Some SERPs are going to contain results that have tons of spammy links and the top players are engaging in risky tactics (as outlined by the engines) but not being penalized, while other SERPs will contain sites that are totally white hat. When optimizing your desired page for a particular search result, I’ve always found it useful to look at the how the other sites in the top 10 use the keyword throughout the site, aka (gasp!) keyword ensity. The things I look for are:

• Do they use the word in the title tag?
• If so, is it in the beginning of the title tag? Do they use modifiers?
• What on-page elements contain the keyword? H1, H2
• How often is it used in the text of the page?
• Do they use the term in their navigation?
• What links do they have containing this term in the anchor texts? More importantly, can I get a link here as well.

This is failry easy to eyeball, but it’s a worthwhile exercise to undertake to figure out what you’re up against. If the sites listed within the top 10 have the keyword at the front of the title tag and are pretty aggressive with placement on the page, you will probably want to utilize similar tactics initially. As you continue to build your link profile and creep up into the top 10, top 5, etc, you can probably ease up on the keyword usage if you feel you were overly aggressive and the content could be improved by using other words, but if you’re just starting off it’s good to be in the same ballpark as your competitors.

For any given search result, if you know how often the top rankings sites are using the keyword, and you can identify the top links with the keyword as the anchor text, you’ve got a pretty good start on what it may take to rank well enough to start receiving traffic from the term.

Here are my two favorite Keyword Density checkers I use.

• Dave Naylor’s KW Density Tool – This is hands down my favorite KW density checker. It has so many additional features such as a server header response info, anchor text for internal and external iinks, and the text that appears in each page element (bold, italic, h1, etc.)
• Ranks.nl Keyword Density & Prominence Analyzer 2.5 – Has many of the same features of Dave Naylor’s plus a nifty graph.

I’m still looking for a tool that can take the top 10 for a given search result, or allows you to manually enter in multiple URL’s for comparison sake. If anybody knows of a tool that does this please let me know.