This morning a read a LinkedIn discussion on titled “What types of sites tend to generate the most valuable links for search rank?” The discussion was posted in the LinkedSEO group and was started by Tom Shivers. The discussion was moderately popular – 18 comments in 16 days.

While there were no surprises among the responses, I found the discussion interesting and therefore wanted to share… Here is a summary of the points made the group relating to the most valuable links:

• high trust, pagerank, authority links
• .gov, .edu, .org links
• links from aged domains
• links from pages containing relevant content
• links from sites in the same geographic area as your site – helps with geo-modified terms
• links from pages generating substantial search engine traffic
• deep links – directly to an internal page
• blog links – comments or through a guest post

Want to learn more about the types of sites that generate the most valuable links, join LinkedSEO and follow Tom’s discussion.

Have a great day!

@ssiBrian

Last night I received a direct Twitter message which read “Lol. this you??” and included the below link (included here as an image for your protection).

Twitter BZPharma LOL Phishing Attack

Well it was late and I fell for it. I followed the link and entered my Twitter account information. The result was that everyone within my Twitter network received the same direct message only this time it was from me.

In my defense and thanks to a few Site-Seeker die hard Macaholics (Dan and Carl), I have not once thought about viruses or spam of any sort since switching to a Mac about a year ago. Weak excuse I know.

Enough blah, blah, blah… To correct the problem, login in to Twitter and change your password.

Check out this video for more information.

Sorry for any inconvenience. Help your Tweeps and Pass this along – click the green tweet button in the upper right of this post.

Does Yahoo! have multiple personality disorder?

Since 2000, when I entered the search engine marketing business, Yahoo! has changed organic and paid search results providers more often than most people change their mind.

Who is Yahoo! anyway? I guess that depends when you ask the question. Yahoo! has switched paid and non-paid search results provider/technology numerous times in the past decade.

Yahoo! started out as a human edited directory and added algorithmic search when it couldn’t keep up with the explosive expansion of Internet content. Over the years, Inktomi, Google, and its own search engine (based largely on Inktomi, which Yahoo! bought in 2002) have all provided organic search results to Yahoo!. Now with this latest deal, Yahoo! will receive its organic search results from bing.

On the pay per click front, Yahoo! first partnered with Overture (formally goto.com) and bought the service in 2003.  After a little tweaking and rebranding, Yahoo! Search Marketing was born. In 2007, Yahoo! introduced its Panama upgrade which added a quality scoring system to its pay per click ranking algorithm. This change mimicked Google’s approach and supported a better user experience. The Microsoft-Yahoo! deal requires that Yahoo! abandon all this work and serve up Microsoft’s adCenter ads.

The Microsoft-Yahoo! deal.

On Thursday, the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal was given the green light. See “US and European regulators have cleared the way for Microsoft and Yahoo! to blaze on with a planned tie-up aimed at taking on Internet search king Google.” Yahoo!’s switch to bing and adCenter will likely occur in late 2010 or early 2011, with care taken not to disrupt the lucrative holiday advertising season.

So what’s next?

All of this turmoil was caused by Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s inability to compete effectively with Google. In fact, it is Yahoo!’s decade long hemorrhaging of search market share that has placed its head on the chopping block. As for me, while I’m a big Google fan, I can’t help but pull for the underdogs – Yahoo! and Microsoft. In any case, the face of search is changing and we at Site-Seeker will react accordingly.

Twitter Goddess @Katiehoke wins award.

I’m so excited to tell you about @katiehoke’s latest achievement. Kathy Hokunson, who runs our Bloomfield, CT office, won the B2B Twitterer of the Year award for Local/Regional B2B Companies. What are the B2B Twitterer of the Year awards?

@Katiehoke (Kathy Hokunson) Twitter Goddess... and a really nice person!

“B2B Twitterer of the Year (B2BTOTY) Award recognizes B2B organizations for outstanding contributions in practicing, promoting, and/or enhancing business via the micro-blogging sensation Twitter.”

If you’ve been following @katiehoke on Twitter or reading Kathy’s blog, you’ll understand how committed she is to helping her clients succeed online. We at Site-Seeker are always impressed with Kathy’s achievements and are proud to have her on our team!

CONGRATULATIONS @Katiehoke! You are a Twitter Goddess!

Use of social media in the industrial b2b sector is a touchy subject. Companies either love it or hate it. The below post is a comment I left in response to a LinkedIn discussion within the Manufacturers of Upstate NY group.

Social Media and Industrial Companies

Great Discussion!

Mike’s comment is similar to my own experience. I too have found it difficult to persuade industrial clients to further engage, or engage at all, in social media. Most just do not see the value.

However, like Ken, I have seen some incredible successes using Twitter, blogging, LinkedIn, YouTube and even the B2C centric Facebook.

As has happened time and time again over the past two decades, I predict that industrial companies will adopt what other verticals have already embraced – social media.

When I started selling online marketing solutions to industrial clients back in 2000, we had trouble convincing companies that a good website would generate leads. When Site-Seeker started promoting search engine marketing in 2003, clients would retort “industrial buyers don’t use search engines”.

Today this sounds ridiculous. Yet try to convince any industrial company that they should take down their website or remove webpages ranking in Google and you’d be lucky to escape with your life.

Well guess what. The early adopters, the companies that have improved their website and engaged in search engine marketing, now have a huge head start and competitive advantage over their competition.

So here we are, the next great technological advancement on Al Gore’s Internet highway is right in front of us. Is it possible that this new concept, social media (already a decade old), is so different from websites or search engine marketing that it will fad away? Could it be that the generation of 20 somethings that spent their tween and teen years on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube will abandon their old habits and ignore social media as they progress through their working careers? And what about the droves of 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds that are have recently found Facebook? Will the skills they develop and benefits they realize from participation in the social media craze be only applied to their personal lives?

Maybe we should ignore all this social media stuff and stick with raditional media venues like the search engines. Sounds funny right! Oh wait, YouTube is now the second most popular search engine!

Anyone want to place a friendly wager that in five years, social media in the industrial sector will be as common as websites and search engine marketing?

Tinurl.com here and biy.ly there, everywhere you look more people using URL Shorteners. But why?

URL shorteners are used for two primary purposes (and one secondary reason below).

1. To reduce the number of characters in a URL. For example, my recent post titled PageRank Sculpting is not Unethical has an actual URL of http://www.site-seeker.com/briansblog/?p=337. Using bit.ly I was able to redirect this URL to http://bit.ly/6vuLoR, a character reduction of 20 (44 to 24). Pretty cool and very important in the world of Twitter where each Tweet is allotted only 140 characters.
2. Access to tracking data. Bit.ly, my URL shortener of choice, allows tracking of several key metrics including clicks over time, referring site, and location (country). Site-Seeker’s Kathy Hokunson published a popular post, My Social Media ROI – The Top 10 List on 7 December, 2009. Using bit.ly’s tracking service you can see that Kathy’s article has generate 579 bit.ly clicks, 438 of which came through the bit.ly URL I created.

   

   Bit.ly allows you to see the total clicks on all bit.ly URLs pointing to a specific page and, a subset, the clicks that were originated via your bit.ly URL. This is very helpful when monitoring the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.

   With bit.ly, I can also see where visitors came from by country.

   

   Bit.ly provides user location data. Useful information if you are targeting a specific country.

An important secondary reason to use a URL shortener is to improve the visual appeal of a URL. For example, if I wanted to share a Google search engine results page for the search “Internet marketing Syracuse NY” (Sorry couldn’t help but sculpt a little link love off this page – refer to my post PageRank Sculpting is Not Unethical – damn, I did it again ), the following Google URL would be generated: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=internet+marketing+syracuse+ny&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS312US313&ie=UTF-8.

I don’t know about you, but this 123 character URL is plain old scary. Using bit.ly, I shortened this URL to http://bit.ly/89BGsK which contains 20 characters. Much better – less intimidating, and easier to Tweet, insert into blog posts and include in an email.

So how does URL shortening effect SEO and PageRank?

Summary of URL shorteners and SEO - for your scanning pleasure.

• Some URL shorteners, like bit.ly, 301 redirect the shortened URL to the original, longer, URL.
• In these cases PageRank is passed.
• Impact on SEO = none.

If you’re a glutton for SEO technobabble, read on…

I spent part of this past Saturday brainstorming a b2b blogging strategy with my friend Luke. Luke has implemented a pretty cool article marketing process as a way to develop links to his site and ultimately achieve ranking for targeted keywords. He is using a shortened URL to link from his articles, placed on article directory sites, to his blog posts. Our discussion quickly turned to the impact of URL shorteners on SEO and specifically, the passing of PageRank through shortened URLs.

Why URL Shorteners DON’T hurt SEO and DO pass PageRank. The two most popular URL shorteners, tinyurl.com and bit.ly, 301 redirect the shortened URLs to the original longer URL. A 301 redirect is a web severer code telling the search engines that the shortened URL has been permanently moved to the longer URL. Accordingly, the link credit established each time your shortened URL is tweeted (or otherwise linked to) is passed back to the original longer URL.

Matt Cutts weights in on the ability of URL shorteners to pass PageRank in this video. The bottom line is that if your selected service 301 redirects to the original URL, then PageRank will be passed.

Link rot and URL shorteners – potential SEO danger. Suppose sometime in the future, your URL shortener ceases to exists or reverts all 301 redirects to 302 (temporary) redirects? Then what? If this happens, your screwed! Plain and simple.

What are the chances of this happening? It’s not that far fetched actually. Tr.im announced last August that they would be discontinuing service. Zi.ma similarly stopped offering it’s service. Fortunately in the latter case, Kl.am stepped in and has kept those links working (see reference to Danny Sullivan’s article below).

My recommendation is to stick with one of the bigboys to lessen the chances of losing all of your hard earned link juice.

Other URL shortener References.

• Wilipedia on URL shortening.
• URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? by Danny Sullivan.
• Why use a URL shortener – by yours truly – will be published on Friday 29 January, 2010.

I recently had a conversation about PageRank sculpting with a SEO pro for which I have a lot of respect. I was reminded that Google does not view PageRank sculpting as unethical. As proof, see Matt Cutts’ video on the subject.

In this video, Matt makes the following points:

1. PageRank sculpting is not unethical!
2. You are allowed to control how PageRank flows within your site.
3. PageRank sculpting should not be your highest SEO priority. Consider building links to your site and developing more high quality content. High quality content will attract more links, which will attract more PageRank.
4. Nofollow links (rel=nofollow) are not the most effective way to sculpt PageRank. If you follow Matt’s blog, you’ll remember his 15 June, 2009 post titled PageRank Sculpting in which Matt clarifies how PageRank scultping is (or is not) impacted by the use nofollow attribute.
5. A better way to control the flow of PageRank within your site is to limit the number of outbound (internal or external) links form a page.

Here’s what you should takeaway.

Every website should be built and managed with the anticipation that it will someday possess significant PageRank. Even a newer website, or a website with low PageRank, may potentially someday possess a good amount. Creating your website today without taking this into consideration is foolish. Doing so means that all your efforts to create great content and attract internal links will return less than optimal results.

So what should you do?

When creating or managing your website, be careful to understand how linking between pages can impact ranking and traffic to your site. Develop a site-wide linking plan and stick to it.

Let me know if you need help.

brian

Q: What happens when you combine a band, a restaurant, and lunch in Utica, NY?

A: Relaxation, good food, good friends, a bit of business, and a great start to your afternoon.

Did you ever have one of those crazy weeks when it seems like you’ll never catch up no matter how long you work? Well that’s how I felt until about 11:59a on Friday of this week. What happened to change my outlook? I had the good fortune of being invited, and the smarts (perhaps luck) to attend, a lunch-time show by gr6 at the Tramontane Cafe (the “Tram”) Cafe in Utica, NY.

gr6, a 3 piece acoustic band, plays all of the best songs from my younger days. Rick Short (website, blog, Twitter) (guitar, vocals), Rich Nasbe (guitar, vocals), and Conrad (mandolin, vocals) exude a relaxing and inviting atmosphere while playing some really great music. The best part is that you can still carry on a conversation.

The Tramontane, is a small cafe in Utica, NY (1105 Lincoln Ave Utica, New York) that offers a totally unique experience. Most of the furniture, no two pieces alike, looks like it came straight out of some 1970’s movie.  If you need a shot of adrenaline to get through your afternoon, then this is not the spot for you. On the other hand, if your want a relaxing break with no pressure, good people, and great food, then the Tram is a great choice.

Next time you Google “bands Utica, NY”, “restaurants Utica, NY”, or “cafes Utica, NY” look for a listing for gr6 or the Tram.

Corporate blogging Tips (7-10).

This is the third and final part in a three part series on my top 10 corporate blogging tips.

• Business Blogging Tip 1-3 (Part 1)
• Blogging for Business Tips 4-6 (Part 2)

Corporate Blogging Tip 7 (Fully Utilize the Advanced Features of Your Blogging Platform)

There are a lot of blogging platforms and each had its pros and cons. I’m a Wordpress.org fan, but the other blogging platforms are also very good. The point is to select a platform and learn it. In Wordpress.org, the version of Wordpress that you download and host yourself, there are several useful plugins including pretty permalinks and the all in one SEO pack. There are many more, but as I mentioned in Corporate Blogging Tip 5, I need to stay on message.

Pretty premalinks create a static URL for each post and place the words in your post title in the URL. This is great for SEO. Depending on when you read this post you may notice that we are not using pretty premalinks. This is a limitation of our current host and one that we are in the process of resolving.

The all in on SEO pack allows you to edit the title (the title within the <head> of your document, not the blog post title), meta description, and meta keyword tags. Only the title currently impacts ranking. However, the description often appears on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and can influence searchers to click on your listing. Adding meta keywords is just a good practice.

Corporate Blogging Tip 8 (Publish Frequently)

You should post at least once a week. This is easier said than done. Your efforts will be rewarded if you post regularly.

Corporate Blogging Tip 9 (Distribute/Re-purpose Blog Content)

One of the benefits corporations get from blogging is that they can leverage their investment in the creation of blog posts over and over again. Corporate blog posts can be the subject of white papers, presentations (as this post will be), seminars, and webinars (which this post is).

Social media is an important aspect of corporate blogging. Twitter, LinkedIn, facebook, YouTube, podcasts and social bookmarking are great ways to distribute posts and develop a following.

• Twitter – Tweet blog titles and include a link back your post. I use bit.ly to shorten my URLs.
• LinkedIn
  • Use the LinkedIn Wordpress application (or similar application if you are not using Wordpress)  to integrate snippets from your blog posts into your profile.
  • Join LinkedIn groups that are interesting to your customers. When on the main page of a group, you can start a discussion by clicking on the “start a discussion” link and adding the title, an excerpt, and a link to your post (again use a shortener like bit.ly). If you post compelling titles and good content, you will earn the right to engage with group members.
• Facebook – Similar to LinkedIn.
• YouTube/Podcasts – Film/Record someone “presenting” your post and publish your this content to YouTube/iTunes and other video and podcast sites.
• Social Bookmarking – Encourage readers to bookmark your posts by integrating one of the many bookmarking icons/tools in your blog.

Corporate Blogging Tip 10 (Create Buzz by Posting Comments on Other blogs)

Go to Google Blog search and search for your selected keywords. In the case of this post, I would search for corporate blogging and corporate blogging tips. Post a minimum of three comments per post. For really important (competitive keywords) posts add as many as 20 comments to popular blogs. Don’t spam other bloggers. Take the time to leave valuable comments. You don’t have to agree with the other blogger, just be genuine.

Use Google Blog Search to find related blogs. Post meaningful comments and link back to your post. If you provide value, other bloggers will start to comment on your posts.

This concludes part three. Click on one of the below links to view Business Blogging Tips – Part 1, or the Blogging for Business Tips – Part 2.

• Business Blogging Tips 1-3
• Blogging for Business Tips 4-6