PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

Hamlet Batista
As Hamlet Batista notes, a solid link-building strategy involves equal parts link-baiting and link-conquesting–and he delves into the pros and cons of each tactic.

“Chasing links is the traditional way of building links,” Batista says. “This includes things like submitting your site to directories, creating press releases, submitting articles and comments with your site link and anchor text, and other strategies.”

Aggressively pursuing links gives you the ability to pick and choose which kinds of sites you get them from–meaning you can stick to high authority, highly relevant Web sites and reap the benefits. The only con is that it can take hard work–and it isn’t a tactic that you can readily outsource, “because it requires personal rapport,” Batista says. “It necessitates having your own voice and building a connection with representatives of other sites. Clearly, it also takes a whole lot of time and patience.”

On the other hand, getting people to link to you without asking them is the idea behind link-baiting. This tactic is based on developing exciting, interesting content–be it an article, a video, a widget–and enticing the influencers in your niche to pick it up.

“When successful, a good link bait will yield a massive amount of links,” Batista says. Outside of crafting the content, link-baiting is less labor-intensive and more cost effective, and your link profile will be flush with lots of different kinds of anchor text and many different Web sites. The cons stem from the fact that you aren’t in control of where the links come from, or what they’ll look like (you’re aiming for targeted, keyword-rich text, aren’t you?), and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be successful.

PPC Hero
So you’ve reviewed your site’s query and conversion reports, and tried all the keyword research tools–have you exhausted all of your options for sourcing new keywords? Not until you’ve done a thorough site review–with a particular focus on the deeper pages, says Joe Kerschbaum.

Your FAQ pages can offer insight into long-tail keywords that customers may be navigating to, and provide a good source for PPC ad copy. News update and press pages can also offer new keywords, since if your company is appearing at an upcoming conference, you can snag searchers with “PPC summit [company name]” queries, and so on.

And take another look at your product/service pages, this time with an eye for the kinds of problems they offer a solution to. For example, people in need of landscaping may not enter “lawn care” or even “landscaping” during a query–they may be in search of a solution for their “overgrown hedges,” “lawn rehabilitation” or even” dead grass removal.”

AudetteMedia
“There is a golden rule to link building: links reflect value on the Web,” says Adam Audette. Because of their inherent value, link building has become much harder today than it was pre-Google. Links are a commodity, and with that in mind, Audette delivers a detailed reference manual on effective link building.

For example, Audette defines a number of key components that define a valuable link–with the top factors being relevance and context. Beyond those concrete characteristics, the most valuable links are often difficult to obtain, require a human element (two people need to exchange ideas), and involve a significant investment (be it time spent creating content or designing the site itself, developing relationships with influencers, or even the cost of paying for a link).

Audette also offers a list of link-building sources, including social media hubs (blogs and forums related to your niche), email lists and directories, as well as human-powered search engines like ChaCha, Mahalo and Bessed.

Graywolf’s SEO Blog
New Web site owners (or even seasoned pros set to launch a new site) should have SEO in mind from the onset, but Michael Gray argues that the trick is to avoid putting the cart before the horse. “Look for a way to differentiate yourself first and use SEO to promote it, not the other way around,” Gray says.

Without quality content (including text, images and possibly video), or a unique value proposition, all the time spent working on keyword density, meta data and link accumulation could actually lead to a smackdown from the engines.

“At the time when some engineer decides to crawl over your suspected SEO site, if you don’t have the content that makes the grade [or your point of difference], you won’t have the links or on-site material to pass the sniff test,” Gray says. And the prized ranking will go out the window–or worse, the site will get banned.

A sitemap is a little-known secret to enhancing your Web site’s position in the search engine listings. No, it’s not a killer secret that will draw in thousands of new visitors overnight, but it is an important addition to your toolset, and not hard to implement. This article will tell you why you need a sitemap, and how to create one and submit it to the search engines.

The term “sitemap” can refer to two different things. Many large, complex Web sites provide a visual sitemap that visitors can use for quick navigation, if they already know roughly where they want to go. If your site is large or complex, you should provide one of these sitemaps for your visitors.

But this article is about the other kind of sitemap: The kind that is made for the search engines, like Google, to use in indexing your site. There are several forms that these sitemaps can take, but we’ll get to that a little later.

First of all, let’s consider why you even need a sitemap. Google and the other search engines will index your site even if you don’t have a sitemap. However, there are four main advantages to having a sitemap:
1. If your site uses non-HTML links, such as Macromedia Flash menus or JavaScript menus, the search engines will not be able to follow these links, and so they will not find all of your pages. A code-driven site must use a sitemap.

2. A sitemap tells the search engines which pages on your site are more important, and which are less important. This prevents the less important pages from competing with your own pages in the listings.

3. A sitemap tells the search engines which pages on your site are updated more frequently than others. This enables the search engines to ignore your static pages, increasing the likelihood that they will have the most current data on your most dynamic pages.

4. A sitemap enables you to tell the search engines when you have added or updated your site’s content. To some extent, this puts you in control of making the search engines aware of your latest content. Of course, it doesn’t force the search engines to do your bidding, but it tends to make it easier for users to find your new pages more quickly.

GigaOm
In a memo to employees about the Yahoo saga, AOL CEO Randy Falco underlines the problem facing social networks: “But despite drawing large, engaged audiences, other social networks have not been able to make the experiences relevant to users and marketers alike.”

Falco hits the nail on the head: social nets want marketers to foot the bill for content that’s specifically tailored to an experience where the user is completely disengaged from marketing messages. Falco thinks that by combining Platform A and Bebo, AOL could fix the problem.. But lumping another company into AOL’s portal and then using an ad network, even a highly targeted one, to serve it ads won’t solve the social networking question. Someone still needs to come up with a way to make social networks more relevant for advertisers.

It’s more than likely going to be a technology solution from a company like ScanScout, whose technology is able to break up, say, a video into tiny segments that it lumps into advertising categories, making sure the piece of content is both advertising-friendly and relevant. Social media sites need technologies like this to extract ad friendly inventory for reticent advertisers.

Self SEO
If content is king, then upgrading your copywriting skills (or calling in a copywriter) is vital to ensuring your Web site’s success. And according to Lisa Packer, the most effective content is the kind that can spark emotions. “You absolutely must trigger an emotional reaction with your copy if you intend to get response–whether you’re looking for a lead or a sale,” Packer says, and serves up a host of tips for crafting such content.

Try telling a story–one that can convey your sales pitch or lesson without triggering resistance. “A good story captures attention, and draws the reader in. Right away, his emotions are stirred, and he cares about the outcome,” Packer says.

Also, try stimulating all five senses with your copy. If possible, describe how the product or service feels, sounds and possibly even tastes. And Packer recommends using a conversational tone of voice. “Read your copy aloud and see if it passes the ‘barstool test,”‘ she says. “If it sounds like you’re talking to the person on the barstool beside you, it’s good. If any line or sentence makes you stumble, rewrite it.”

Search Engine Land
Some paid search marketing platforms may allow you to bid on a competitor’s branded keywords, but you should steer clear of their trademarks when it comes to organic optimization. As per an 11th circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling, injecting another company’s trademarked terms into your site’s meta tags (be it title, description or any other tag) can cause consumer confusion and thus constitute trademark infringement.

The ruling upheld a district court’s decision that Axiom Worldwide infringed on American Medical Corp.’s trademark when it used the terms “Accu-Spina” and “IDD Therapy” in its meta tags–particularly in its description tag. A Google search that showed the terms highlighted prominently in the company’s description field was offered as evidence.

Axiom doesn’t deny that they used the terms, but as copyright and IP legal expert Eric Goldman notes, the ruling doesn’t take into account the fact that Google (or the other engines) sometimes automatically assembles search result descriptions from third-party resources like DMOZ. The issue also raises the question of whether meta data counts for much more in terms of rankings than the engines have been admitting to. Still, the best way to avoid any kind of confusion (or legal ramifications) is to not use trademarked terms in your meta tags.

Google Webmaster Central
So a hacker or competitor has penetrated your site’s source code and installed malicious scripts or programs. The first step is to get your site offline (temporarily) as fast as possible so that you don’t infect visitors unnecessarily. Speed may be a problem if you’re using a shared hosting service, so try using a 503 status code in the meantime, to keep the engine’s spiders from crawling. The Google Webmaster Tools URL Removal tool can also help with preventing incoming traffic.

The next step is to figure out what the hacker was after. Was it consumer or employee PII? Was it your proprietary shopping cart script? Check your server logs for any modified, uploaded or otherwise suspicious file activities.

Once you’ve assessed the situation, reinstall your OS–preferably from a secure, trusted site or disc. After the fresh reinstallation, use the latest backup you have to restore your site–but make sure that the backup is clean and free of compromised content. Change your passwords, and if your site was offline, take the steps to get it back online and work on getting the engines to start indexing it again.

DM News
A paid search campaign is only as good as the actionable metrics it can provide–and Olivier Silvestre, director of optimization consulting at Omniture’s Visual Sciences, discusses the three areas that marketers should focus on for optimal campaign metrics.

For landing pages, Silvestre says it’s about the “single access visit” ratio, or the percentage of visitors that land on the page and then leave the site without browsing any other pages. “If the ad copy is relevant to what a company offers, and the landing page is consistent with the ad copy message, then the SAV should stay low, as long as the landing page is not a final destination in itself, which is not recommended,” he says.

When it comes to ad copy, the key metrics are CTR and return-on-ad-investment or spend (ROAI or ROAS)–not just sales. “Assessing your SEM campaigns based on sales alone could lead a company to make unsuccessful online campaign decisions as sales transaction is not the sole criterion,” Silvestre says.

And with keywords, Silvestre says that you should start a new campaign by buying broad keywords or phrases on the cheap and using broad match–as the resulting analytics reports provide some of the best, actionable proof of which pricier terms your target audience is actually searching for.