Online Marketing Blog

Andy Beal comes over to the dark side and launches a new blog design using WordPress.

Rae posts an excellent interview with Brian Prince of BOTW.org.

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro does it again with a great article on search marketing reaching critical mass in a follow-up to his previous “Cross the Chasm” article.

Aaron Wall posts “Trusted vs Untrusted Links” and follows up with another “vs” post, “Tactical SEO vs Strategic SEO“, which is excellent, but has more to do with SEO for sites/blogs whose business model is ad revenue than advice most business web sites can take advantage of. Great advice all the same though.

Directory submissions used to be a very big part of most search marketers traffic and link building efforts. That’s changed a great deal in the past few years or so but some directories are still important and have been consistent in their quality guidelines and ability to offer link/traffic benefit.

A short list of our favorite directories include:

• Yahoo Directory
• DMOZ (albeit grudgingly - just submit and forget about it)
• Business.com
• Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory
• JoeAnt
• BOTW.org (oldest directory on the web)

The PG SEO (pre-Google) and master linker, Eric Ward has recently launched a new newsletter on link building called, The Ward Report.¬† I’ve seen the initial free-trial issue and it’s pretty good with topics including:

• Linking Fact, Fiction and Your Inbound Link Profile (INLP)
• Social Linking and Tagging
• Linking for Search Rank
• Linking and Publicity Opportunity Watch
• RSS To The Rescue

It’s a paid subscription and well worth it. Subscribers will have access to discounted training, how-to Podcasts, video training modules and other resources as well.¬† You can sign up for the Ward Report here or request the trial version.

Unless there’s any doubt, I am a linking fanatic. I appreciate links like they’re gold. When I talk about link building with our team, I can never stress enough the importance of linking for traffic and SEO. To me, the best way to learn about link building is to get out there and do it.

However, if you’re new, you can save quite a bit of time learning from the wisdom of others’ experience. Here are three recent posts and one bonus link on link building I highly recommend:

Rand Fishkin presents his thoughts on why email is still king for link building.

Eric Ward, the mac daddy link master or as Debra likes to call him, “LinkMoses” has published his Linking Commandments (part one). These inspired, toungue in cheek linking tips include pearls of wisdom including:

• II - “Thee who linketh in exchange for gold is Link Whore” *
  (linking in exchange for a return link may be marginally slutty)
• III - “Thou shall not social linketh thyne own site” *
  (nor send a memo to all employees telling them to digg it, or ask your children to link to your site from their MySpace space)

Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans have put up a nice piece of work on the topic of link building. 101 linking tips to be exact.

Our next installment of ongoing ad:tech Chicago 2006 coverage provided by Online Marketing Blog focuses on link building.

This SEO related session was two thirds full, which dispells my earlier suggestion that interest in SEO might be slipping here at ad:tech. What was to be a rounded topic of on-page and off-page optimization turned out to be focused on linking as one of the presenters was not able to attend.

Everyone in the search marketing biz is pretty familiar with automated emails soliciting link requests as well as those for reciprocal link exchanges. Normally, anything that makes it past my spam filter that alludes to some kind of link request just gets the big “D” for delete.

I received one this morning that was pretty interesting though. It was a solicitation to exchange articles, not just links. I guess those reciprocal link schemes are trying to appear more legitimate by using links within content.

Dear Webmaster,
I handle article exchange program for my client, www.spammy-hypenated-domain-name-here.com

Last night a PR manager from the New Yorker emailed me about the Terry Semel interview, so I watched it and put up a link to the actual video. I emailed a few SEO related bloggers about it and thought nothing more. (other than the interview being great insight into Yahoo).

While the bloggers I emailed did not mention the video, a few other sites did link to the blog post I put up about it including Digg.com (front page right now) and the Financial Times.

It looks like the good people over at Best of the Web are celebrating two years of doing monthly promotions by having a “Cinco de Mayo” promo during the month of May. The object of desire is a 10% discount on the directory submission cost, AND an entry into their contest to win an Applie iMac Powerbook:

Am not sure about you, but a 17″ Mac Book Pro would look mighty handy on the desk, on the couch, the deck - where ever your computing takes you. More info at the BOTW blog. If nothing else, getting into a quality directory like BOTW.org at a discount is worthwhile all on it’s own. FYI, they also have a blog directory.

As blogs continue to mature as marketing tools, there are an increasing number of “blog optimization” articles and posts appearing. However, many of these resources underestimate the importance of inbound links.

To think that researching and placing keywords in the “right places” alone with improve a blog’s traffic is only part of the story. Blogs are simply web sites/content management systems with some special features. Getting web sites to rank well and to engage more traffic involves a large number of variables and the same goes for blogs. The difference is that there are unique linking opportunities with blogs that are not common with web sites. These include:

I noticed a little PRWeb press release action from SEOMoz announcing their Web 2.0 Awards today. SEOMoz has pulled together a fantastic collection of Web 2.0 companies in their first SEOMoz Web 2.0 Awards.

Rand, Kat and Matt have put together a great collection of awards in numerous categories ranging from Blog Guides to Mashups to Social Tagging. Plus there are interviews with Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch, Newsweek reporter Brad Stone, Technorati founder Dave Sifry and many more.