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Following the success of the custom search engine for SEM blogs released earlier this month and sharing some handy ideas from the SEORoundtable, I thought that a worthy SEM resource of the month would be to have a custom search engine for the top SEM blogs and forums in one place.
Search SEORoundtable’s recommended Search Marketing Forums
As posted earlier in the month, here is the search engine for Lee Odden’s must read Search Marketing Blogs:
I thought I had missed out on the quarterly PageRank update, with most updates occurring two or three weeks ago.
SearchEngineLand, a site a little younger than mine, with massive PageRank potential also appeared to miss out. A few days ago I noticed SearchEngineLand was up to the might of PR 7 from PR 0 – which is pretty much unheard of from a site which is purely a news resource. So I swiftly checked my site which previously had a PR of 0 and joy joy, it had gone zero to hero… Well from PR 0 to PR 4 to be more accurate – but I’d be happy if that sticks!
PageRank can be good in giving a quick snapshot of how much authority a site has, but this by itself is not highly accurate and in many cases misleading.
Aaron Wall over at SEOBook believes that the cache date of a page is a far better measure of authority.
What Google frequently visits (and spends significant resources to keep updated) is what they consider important.
Aaron’s take on PageRank and cache date.
He also shares a cool tool to check the cache date of any given page, courtesy of Jim Boykin of WeBuildPages.
You can check your PageRank over various Google Data Centres with this neat tool.
Yesterday I had the displeasure of receiving a phone call from a pushy SEO salesman named John from Internet Advancement regarding a client’s site that I am currently consulting for.
Before I begin, you may be wandering who exactly is Internet Advancement?
Meta Keywords are the Key to Good Rankings ~ 2 mins
Before John had properly introduced himself or I had time to ask, he began to proceed and tell me that my client’s site was in immediate need of attention for online success. He then went onto to say rather loudly that many of the meta keywords tags on the site had errors and rectyfying this was the key to getting ranked well in Google.
(Sneakily ) Find Clients at Yahoo Directory - via new submissions ~ 4 mins
I calmly asked John to slow down and let me know a bit more about his company and where he had found my client’s site. He gave their url and informed me that he found the site on Yahoo! Directory – What’s New and then went back to telling me that keywords is where it’s at!
My naturally calm nature was being severely tested and I politely notified John that I thought he was old school and that cold calling from America was not appreciated. He then yelled back that meta keywords tags were not old school and that he had success with helping over 6000 sites to prove it!!!
Selectively Cold Call Clients… it’s better than SEO! ~ 6 mins
I then asked for examples of keywords that Internet Advancement ranked for. John then angrily asked me whether I was listening to him earlier when he mentioned that they carefully select their clients from paces like Yahoo! Directory and do not need rankings to acquire customers. Evidently rude and an SEO Jackass to boot! But wait there’s more stupidity…
Submit Repeatedly to all Search Engines… get ranked in 108 days! ~ 8 mins
After some strong disagreement, John ups the anti and goes all out for the hard sale. He becomes even more vocal and confidently informs me that they have the ability to submit the site to all the search engines several times a month. I replied that the site was already indexed and that we preferred building up inbound links to get crawled frequently. He then let me know that I had got it all wrong and re-submitting would help with rankings and not just how often a website got crawled.
I could not take anymore, it had gone from being humorous to quite disturbing – hanging up was the only way out.
Offer to Call back in 108 days whilst being hung-up on ~ 10 mins
John, pleeease don’t call back!
Update:heaps more linkbait ideas!
January has been a great month for forward-thinking linkbaiting ideas. Two posts that really stood out for me are Todd Malicoat’s Linkbaiting Playbook and Nick Wilson’s 2007 Guide to Linkbaiting.
Todd opens up and expands in some detail to Nick’s original five linkbaiting hooks and adds two more gems of his own:
Todd illustrates some excellent ideas and examples. Although, it was Nick’s 2007 Guide to Linkbaiting coupled with Aaron Wall’s SEM & Lateral Thinking Skills that really struck a chord for the need to be creative, think laterally and to take calculated risks in the drive for link love.
Nick goes on to say:
The linkbait way of link building is a mindset. To do it well, you need to put thoughts of manipulating the system to one side and focus entirely on providing value to your clients users and making that value easy to link to.
I agree that valuable content is the key, however I would go a little further in suggesting that the mindset for truly remarkable content that provides the highest rewards in links, is having the ability to think laterally.
In any competitive market it helps to think a little outside the box for new ideas. A savvy linkbaiter will then analyse the risks to link aggregation and have the confidence to take the most appropriate action.
Lateral Th(L)ink(bait)ing is where it is at for 2007 and lets finish off with Nick’s final and inspiring thoughts from his post:
Those of you already working on linkbaiting services are the rockstars of the industry, the pioneers of change, and you have a responsibility to yourselves and the industry as a whole to not let a wonderful win-win service gain an undeserved, shady reputation.
Well at my desk, it’s a definite YES! The freebie MSN Adcenter mobile phone stand looks like it was built for nothing else than to supply search engine love to my Google Christmas pressie.
Lee Odden has supplied the search community with an awesome list of search marketing blogs. Over 250 in fact! As great as the list is, I was a little bewildered as where best to start – there are the usual household names, but also heaps of cool new ones.
You could load them all into your favourite RSS reader, use a social bookmarking site or even create a custom search engine to plough through all the news. A custom search engine, isn’t that what Google does anyway you might ask?
Well sort of, although I think it holds value as the list has been filtered (customised) under the careful eye of Lee & co. Plus acronyms such as SEM, SMM & SMO are not that well represented for search marketing in search engines, eeek!
Search All Search Marketing Blogs
Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal has been taking votes for the best Search Marketing Blog in various categories. The votes are in and congratulations to all the winners! This gave me the idea to categorise Lee’s Search Marketing blogs into custom search engines using Google Co-op. So here goes:
Category list can be found here.
Link Building
SEO
Paid Search
Blog Marketing & PR
Web Design & Analytics
Search (Engine) News
Miscellaneous Search Marketing
For simplicity I have limited each blog to only one category. Maybe I will expand it later on.
These categories are my interpretation of Lee’s descriptions and also some of my own judgments. With over 250 blogs and the quick nature that I put the search engines together, I am sure that a few blogs may have fallen into the wrong areas (or even worse, completely omitted).
So I apologise in advance if this is the case and to those that I have put into the miscellaneous list – they are all important, but time was the real issue!
Please let me know if I missed any blogs or if I am way off the mark and I will happily add or move them.
I hope this is of some use to someone, even if it’s just for a couple of playful minutes. As always, feedback welcomed.
Earlier last week my Christmas present from Google finally arrived. It’s a digital photo frame capable of displaying/playing photo, video & audio. It’s rather neat and very GEEKY– me likes!
Generous, perhaps not – I think the AdWords spend to get one of these bad boys is about £15k per annum or otherwise you are entitled to one if you are super high earning AdSense publisher.
User generated content is becoming a big part of search. And its progression is sure to continue with the announcement of Wikia launching their very own social search engine for the first quarter of this year. Could this be the change of search as we know it?
Checkout Danny Sullivan�s Q&As with Jimmy Wales from Wikia.
Update 19-01-07: Wikiseek has arrived!
Some would say that 2006 has been the year of the linkbait. And as I have not really mentioned it too much, I could not think of a better way to wrap of the year than a logical walkthrough to Linkbaiting.
Linkbaiting is really nothing more than a well thought out piece of viral marketing. Back in the day, word of mouth provided the vehicle for nearly all successful viral marketing campaigns. These days, online viral marketing is beginning to be driven by social media with the main purpose in attracting more links and more visitors.
At first, the term linkbait, may seem a little uneasy to swallow. Ok it does sound a little like a trap, however it’s perfectly ethical from a search engine’s perspective and in most cases from a human point too.
I think the controversy of its name has only added to the overall success and rapid adoption in the SEO world. Come on, isn’t the term itself an intriguing and alluring pull to find out more? And that’s the start to any great source of linkbait, right?
Ok, let’s have a quick gander at the various parts that make up linkbaiting:
The Linkbaiter
The first step to being an artful linkbaiter is being extremely knowledgeable and/or passionate about the content you writing about.
After that, it’s all about being creative! Think of ways to grab the reader’s attention, provide something of true value and make it easy for visitors to link and discuss your content. Make your bait really juicy and the ~ fishes >-)));> ~ are sure to follow 
.
Linkbait Goals
Every linkbaiter should have an idea for their linkbait goals! Yes, linkbaiting is great for (cheap) inbound links, but it is also useful for increasing visitors, branding, subscribers, registrations and of course customers. Does your linkbait have a persuasive goal?
Where possible, it is sometimes best to avoid diluting your goals. Oftentimes linkbait goals just don’t mix. Bloggers can provide heaps of lush inbound links and customers is where the money is at!
Both are important for business, but linkbait is all about going viral, so it’s often best to target links, visitors and subscribers as separate entities to customers. Customers can result from linkbait, but they are rarely the catalyst for viral success.
Linkbait Audience
Identifying your Linkbaiting audience or as Rand nicely puts it, your ‘Linkerati‘ should be high on the agenda in your linkbaiting strategy. Rand breaks these down into seven suitable areas: bloggers, forum posters, web news writers, content creators, resource editors, social taggers and viral connectors. Know who you are targeting!
The Linkbait
If links are the objective, what is the bait? Linkbait can come in all shapes, and sizes, all with the end result of increased traffic, brand exposure and oodles of links back to your site or brand. Nick Wilson separates his thoughts of linkbait into 5 broad, but neat hooks:
Add one of these with a magnetic headline to arouse interest and if you can, be quotable! Remember, more often than not, links come from small citations or remarks from others which may only be a few words rather than chunks of paragraphs.
Linkbaiting Portals
There are lots of web 2.0 friendly portals like digg and del.icio.us which act a little like a linkbaiter’s playground. That’s right, a fun playground where many of the readers are bloggers or news reporters of some kind, and are all itching and possibly anticipating for a piece of your fresh linkbait!
You can seed your linkbait in such portals and also learn what’s hot, newsy and most importantly what’s baity!
The Search Engine’s Perspective on Linkbaiting
What better perspective about a search engine’s view to linkbaiting/link building, than that of Danny Sullivan’s recent take on a Google’s discussion regarding link building?
Here’s a summary of what’s covered:
The key area mentioned is that Google is only really interested in giving credit for links that you have earned and that it can trust. This seems straightforward and obvious, but it’s easy to fool yourself and believe that any link you receive, you have earnt. Oh, and it also covers that you should ‘have good content‘. And linkbaiting is fine – phew!
And finally a look at the Top Linkbaiters in SEO
Let’s finish things off by looking at the bright stars of linkbaiting and their best posts for 2006. Here you will see their most popular articles and it should also illustrate some rather fat juicy linkbait.
And not forgetting some of the other greats like Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall on their collaboration of the mighty linkbaicious 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006.
Basically, it all really boils down to having compelling valuable content that folks go crazy about and can’t resist in sharing and discussing further. Easy, isn’t it???