Color Blind

This is pretty cool. These 2 objects are the same color...or are they?

Brand Awareness..huh?

Working for a larger .com, I get to see variations in ways to establish incoming links. Their are a ton. From building tools people link to, to comment/trackback spamming, to reciprocal linking.

One of our competitors has been a 'player' in the online world for a little bit longer then we have. At one point, they were doing a good amount of outside marketing: TV, print, endorsements, etc... This is an excellent way to get links.

Why, you may ask. Well, while checking the backlinks on their "mothership" site, I noticed they had a ton of incoming links from sites just linking to them, because they were a resource they wanted to let their visitors know about and they (the webmaster) were familiar with already.

Building your brand outside the online world can have huge effects on how your site attain's links. No matter how many links you've purchased, how many reciprocal links you've filled, or one-way links you've brokered, having people link to your site because they're familiar with your "brand" is priceless. It follows Mike Grehan's Filthy Linking Rich theory.

How can this apply to someone that is trying to market locally? You can

- advertise your site to local newspapers
- make flyers and put on people's windshields
- talk with your local Chamber of Commerce
- go to local merchants and see if they can add a link on their website
- ask local family and friends if they have a website or if their business can add a link from their website
- donate to a local event; surely newspapers will link to you, if not the organize the is hosting will on their site

Continue to think outside the box with attaining links and you'll start to see that those interconnectivity buttons that surround the web aren't that hard to get. :)

Reciprocal Linking

When doing reciprocal linking, there are many ways to find other sites to exchange links with. One way is to do specialized searches in Google. Here's a good list of searches to do in Google for linking partners:

"Suggest link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"favorite links" +"your keyword(s)"
"recommended links" +"your keyword(s)"
"cool sites" +"your keyword(s)"
"cool places" +"your keyword(s)"
reciprocal +"your keyword(s)"
directory +"your keyword(s)"
directorys +"your keyword(s)"
directories +"your keyword(s)"
exchange +"your keyword(s)"
resources +"your keyword(s)"
links +"your keyword(s)"
"your location" +"add url"
"your location" +"suggest a site"
"your location" +"submit site"
"your location" +links
"your location" +"reciprocal links"
"your location" +directory

Dashes or Underscores?

If you didn't know already, dashes in your URLs is going to help your rankings in Google. Matt breaks down why you should use dashes instead of underscores in Google.

This has been explained by GoogleGuy on a couple occasions, so it's not necessarily new news, but good to actually hear it from a "real" employee of big G.

Wow...nice tool!

Aaron Wall has outdone himself. I mean really. He has created a very nice and feature rich backlink checker that sits on your desktop...for FREE! Amazing.

Download link here

You have to go pick it up and check it out if you seriously want to see where you're competitor is achieving links. This is a great tool in conjunction with Hub Finder.

Couple of New Blogs

Matt Cutts of Google has started a blog. I've heard several people say they think Matt Cutts is responsible for the postings of "GoogleGuy". I'm not too sure about that. None-the-less, this should be a good blog to keep an eye on.

Another Google blog that just got underway is the Adsense blog. They mention optimization tips will be blogged in future posts. That would be great to hear how G thinks we should optimize Adsense on our pages.

Forums I Visit Daily

Nothing too exciting happening in the search community, so I thought I'd post some of the awesome forums I visit almost on a daily visit.

Warrior Forum
DP Forum
WMW
ThreadWatch
AssociatePrograms
SEW Forums
WebProWorld

Now, don't spend too much time on these or you'll never get anything done...too much good stuff on these forums! :)

SES over, Marketing Tactics and Rumors

SES San Jose is over. I heard a lot of good times were had. I will have to go to it next year.

My personal favorote session was the Advanced Linking Strategies. These tactics can be fun to use. Being creative is key to gaining a decent amount of authority links.

Adsense Test
Over at the Warrior Forum, dhernando does a little test with one of the "$1.95 gets you 1,000 visitors" traffic generators. Good little case study and other chime in and do their own tests. This type of stuff is great for squashing theories.

Yahoo! Buying Technorati
I've been hearing rumors that Y! is purchasing Technorati. It seems like Y! has been purchasing a lot of web properties lately.

What have you purchased?

Over at DP forums, freshprince poses the question, "Most Expensive item purchased with Adsense Check?". I like threads like this one. You get to see a glimmer of what others are spending their hard-earned Adsense cash on.

These types of posts are priceless

Honestly, when bloggers open up like this, it's just spectacular. There is a lot of good stuff that Randfish post on his blog regarding the SES he's currently attaining. Definitely have a look.

San Jose SES

Barry has been covering the San Jose Search Engine Strategies live. He's been doing a great job this year, as he's always done in previous years. My personally favorite so far.

Concert Last Night

I had the pleasure of seeing Jack Johnson last night with bunch of my friends at the Irvine/Verizon Amphitheatre. The place was jam-packed with as many teenie's and a-like. About a middle way through the show, I was waiting in line to use the restroom. A 18 year old kid stands in line right behind me and asks me were I go to school. I quickly responded to: "Read Rich Dad Poor Dad".

That book has changed my perception on a lot of aspects our society, the US society, treats young adults on money management and micro-management.

I just thought I'd share that with you.

Aaron Wall Does it Again
I have to say, I have been really enjoying all these interviews Aarons been doing. Some major players you see all over the forum are sitting down and discussing with him. He recently spoke with Lots0.

Hubba Hubba

Aaron Wall's Hubfinder is finally back online, with a bunch of cool features. Hubfinder finds related linking patterns between sites that you input into it. When linking, you want to find authoritative sites that the top sites within your keyword are receiving links from. This is a great tool to find those links. I personally like that you can export to a CSV file now. That is nice for saving and coming back to at a later date.

Ebay Advertising Offers
I ran across a link over at Threadwatch about a guy who's selling advertising space on his corpse. Ya...I said it...on his corpse! This guy thinks ahead! :) Anyway, I looked at some of the other interesting opportunties in this section of Ebay. I was surprised to find so many crazy ways to advertising, a lot of tatoo-ing goin on. Maybe you'd like to tatoo your company logo on someone's butt.

Update: ArticleCity.com Live again

Just got my "something happened on this page" e-mail from ChangeDetect. ArticleCity is back in business again! Starting as of Aug. 1st by the looks of it. I see article dates starting at Aug. 1st.

This is great to see. ArticleCity was one of the first article directories on the scene. This is also excellent for my scripts that pull articles from it...good times! :)

Looked at it a little closer; looks like they made the left side navigation more search engine friendly. It use to be images. Also, they added a "Submit Press Release" link, which links to PRwebDirect.

$14,000 a month in Adsense

Who says you can't make money with Adsense? Inspiring thread.

Yahoo! "Adsense" Now Available

It's official as of last night. Yahoo! has launched the YPN network, which is their version of Google Adsense. I'm really excited to see the relevency their network has to on-topic content compared to Adsense. Jensense talked about the new network and, lucky her, was given privileges to test out the beta YPN network. You can see a couple of examples of the ads here and here.

Where to buy links?

As there are more and more auto-generation and scraper sites, it's getting exceedingly difficult to find quality sites to exchange links with. A question I get asked a lot is: Where can I buy text links? Text-Link-Ads.com and TextLinkBrokers.com are to big namers in the link buying industry.

I've also been experimenting with LinkWorth.com. Not the quality as the other two, but a decent amount of advertisers are listed there. LinkWorth as also started pre-sell pages, where you can purchase a "page" on the advertisers site. You format what you want on that page. This is a great idea.

Another method that is often over-looked is doing manual digging. I recommend going through your DMOZ category and do some lateral searches as well. Find websites with good incoming links to their site. Look up their WHOis info and give the site owner a call and negotiate advertising on their site. I've used this method on several occasions and its good for a number of reasons.

Firstly, you find nuggets that your competitors haven't found. More often then not, these sites don't do any advertising, so you'll be the only one. Second, since you'll be the first advertiser on the site, you'll be "setting the bar" as far as price for the outbound link. This is great because the site owner usually has no idea of 'site worth' so you can get great links for relatively cheap.

CashPageBUilder v.2

I recently purchased the new CashPageBuilder. For some reason, the install.cgi script wasn't installing the software, but I hope to have that fixed this week. It's a neat little script that builds pages automatically and adds your adsense code along with all the pages.

These types of "auto-generation" scripts might not do so well in Google, but Yahoo! and MSN don't care and I've been wanting to try one of these applications out. I was thinking about purchasing NPB or TE, but I went to the Warrior Forum and saw this discount. If you're interested, their giving a $30 discount for Warrior members. The application seems to work just as well as NPB or TE, but I haven't had a chance to use it yet. I'll give you an update and a test site I build once the app. is up and running.