We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Hello, if you are wondering why it’s taking me a bit longer to respond to email, this is because I am at the annual Search Engine Strategies Conference Conference in downtown San Jose California. This is the main event for SEO’s and I’m excited to be going back.

The major search engines, that would be Google, Yahoo & MSN (sorry Ask and AOL) usually announce major products and services during this conference, so I’ll have updated information to share with you as the week progresses.

If anyone would like to meetup and network, please contact me – I love meeting new people in the industry.

Good news for all you linkbaiters, TextLinkAds is offering a 15% discount from all targeted link purchases. For this month you can get free text links with this discount coupon. This coupon is good for all new orders and extends throughout the life of your link buy. This is a great deal.

TextLinkAds has the largest inventory of sponsoring websites and has traditionally commanded the highest link purchase prices, so the 15% discount really helps. Need more links, buy some targeted links from quality, related websites.

Text Link Ads coupon code: august

Pay per click is an excellent strategy to get instant exposure from targeted clients. It seems deceiptively easy to add keywords, write and ad and hand over your credit card number to the PPC engine. This is the reason it is so dangerous – achieving success, or making more than you will spend on PPC, is actually quite difficult. Unfortunately many businesses either give up and stop PPC advertising, or just spend more money and blindly hope some miracle will happen where they somehow beat out all the other competitors in their field.

Unfortunately, when your competitors include ebay.com, amazon.com, buy.com etc. you are facing a long, lonely uphill battle against companies with almost unlimited online ad budgets.

Top mistakes made by inexperienced advertisers:

1. creating a long list of less than targeted keywords
2. failing to identify unique aspects of your product or service
3. a lack of keywords in your ad text
4. directing users solely to your home page
5. creating single ad groups
6. utilizing single campaigns
7. using broad match only
8. failing to optimize ad serving for your ads
9. failing to track results
10. entering the content network without modifying bids

Read full descriptions at Sitepoint.

Making the case for link exchanges – sometimes good old fashioned hard work pays off. Link exchanges are still one effective method to use for link building. In addition to linkbaiting (creating a controversial or compelling article and submitting to digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com etc) and social media marketing, and link buying, link trading continues to be a workable model to acquiring links.

Link exchanges are based upon email exchanges, where you physically email the webmaster of a complementary site and ask them to link back to you. It helps immensely if you have already posted their link on your site. Link trading works best when you compliment the site owner you are proposing, and show good faith in posting their link on your site first. Human nature dictates that a good percentage of the population will return your favor out of obligation by linking back to you, provided you have a quality website and it is related.

In my 7 years of SEO and link building, I have seen about 90% of link exchanges remain active over this time period. This is a huge return on investment for sending out an email requesting a link. Link brokers will typically charge you $20-$50 per month for a link, and some of my links have been up for 84 months so this free link represents a value of $1680-$4200!

The link exchange DO’s

1. send compliments
2. actually view their site, don’t send a form email telling them how wonderful their website is without actually having viewed it
3. provide a backlink first
4. be persistent. Most webmastes will not respond to you until the 2nd or 3rd email.
5. personalize your email request. Instead of addressing your email to ‘Webmaster’ search for a real person’s name. People love to see their own name, and are much more likely to open an email with their real name on it.

The link exchange DON’Ts

1. don’t spam – send 1 email and 3-4 well spaced follow-ups, then leave the poor webmaster alone, as they are unlikely to respond to you.
2. do not focus on Page Rank. Seek link partners in your category – these will provide you better long term value
3. never make demands or require a webmaster link back to you with specific anchor text. You can suggest they use “my keyword phrase” but if they use “yourplainwebsite.com” be gracious, thank them for the link, and continue on.
4. don’t ever tell a webmaster their page is worthless because it has a toolbar PageRank of 1 or the page is more than 2 clicks from the homepage. Relevance is key, and PageRank is at least 6 months outdated – a near worthless indicator of the backlink value.

Another benefit of emailing other website owners in your field is that they will often make a business relationship with you. Below is an example of a response I received ALMOST 5 YEARS later! Yes, this person accepted the link exchange after 5 years. It is very powerful when you can have your email sitting in front of your potential partners inbox for years:

—————– Email Received —————–
Sent: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:21:40 -0400
From: “Site Fair”
To: “cvos@mysite.com”
Subject: Re: link exchange

Hello cvos,

I added your link to our www.—fair.com. Please check out and let me know if you would like to make any changes. This is code for your site:

—Fair Wide selections of top quality, eco-friendly products made from natural organically grown fibers and ingredients Including clothing & footwear for men, women and children, accessories, home items, non-animal tested body care.

I am also interested in your products.

How do I sign for wholesale?

Thank you,

S——–

—–Fair

——————— Original Message ————————

Sent: Monday, October 28, 2002 7:41 PM
From: “the linker”
To: < info@—fair.com>
Subject: link exchange

please consider exchangling links www.———.com

your link is located here: www.———.com/links

thanks, C V

————————————

If you do it right you can make the power or link exchanges work for you. Search Engine Roundtable and Esoteric labs have good writeups of the current state of link exchanges, and misconceptions of google’s public blogger Adam Lasnik.

The mainstream media is chasing social media hard and embracing linkbaiting with gusto! A major newspaper is bending over backwards to get their content featured on the drudgereport.com

This is the title of the article that appeared on the LA Times FRONT PAGE on August 4, 2007:

Hot links served up daily

So the MSM really wants a piece of the online action.

Here is the title that started everything:

Overwhelmingly, they arrived after spotting this titillating link on a news site called the Drudge Report: “L.A. Times Shock: ‘I am a Transsexual Sportswriter.’ “

Hard not to click on that one.

And they reveal how much traffic this linkbait brought in:

By day’s end, the link to the column accounted for nearly 25% of visits to latimes.com

It goes on to describe Journalist’s lusting after Mr. Drudge:

Every day, journalists and media executives in newsrooms across the land hope they’ll have something that catches Drudge’s fancy … most keep their fingers crossed that he’ll discover their articles on his own and link to them.

And you thought Digg was powerful:

Drudge’s following is so large and loyal that he routinely can drive hundreds of thousands of readers to a single story, photo or video through a link on his lively compendium of the news.

Even the color of Drudge’s hat is exposed:

there’s a lot of irony that Matt Drudge was a black-hat villain, and now a lot of those same journalists realize that getting a link on his website is crucial to their stories getting wider attention… That’s the way the Web works. We’re all trying to make sure our journalism is discovered.

Another revelation, our society reflected in our news consumption, again printed on the front page:

Gossip has become so much a part of journalism that what he does doesn’t stand out.

The idea is to get reporters, who might throw away a self-serving network publicity release, to chase the item on the Drudge Report because it has “more of a news aura” … Some journalists, the executive said, might write the story simply to avoid getting beaten by someone else.

Comparing the traffic of Drudge and major newspaper websites:

the Drudge Report received 3 million unique visits in June, with visitors spending an average of 1 hour and 6 minutes on the site… visitors return an average of 20 times a month. Most newspaper websites would be fortunate to draw a quarter as many return visits.

This directly affects online newspapers profits:

links from Drudge skew readership numbers — up one day, down the next — making it difficult to determine ad rates

How well does Drudge make out:

he regularly links to a website that provides up-to-the-minute wire-service stories — a website he created to cash in on Drudge’s legions

I know Alexa is for entertainment purposes only, but Alexa users clearly favor Drudge:

How cool is it that a multi million dollar media company is begging for recognition from a one blogger? The Drudge Report is a more in depth version of the Daily Show.

Read the full article.

Get a $100 coupon for Microsoft Adcenter. This coupon is good for $100 in free clicks from MSN Adcenter. I have used this adcenter coupon and it works.

coupon code: DMB13-jul12
url: Startadcenter.com

Free clicks offer expires 8/31

Update – there is a new free MSN Live adcenter coupon that doesn’t expire until 2008!

use this Ad Center discount code: ADD0907V1

The only way to get this Microsoft Adcenter discount is to use this link to login. When you do click on the above link you will be sent to a signup page where you can enter the code to receive $50 in free clicks.

The deal is valid for unlimited uses, but only one per customer.

Here is an adcenter  offer code for $150 off pay per click advertising

offer code: 8F3C2NLCFXYV8TS2