Working in the search engine optimization and online marketing industries, I have to keep up with the latest ways in which people use the Internet and its search engines to find things online, then figure out a way to manipulate those results or at least be able to influence them in a manner that is beneficial to my clients who have hired me to help them be found online.

I was a bit disappointed after trying out Bing’s new Visual Search because it turns out that you can only search from their list of predetermined categories which only include:

1. Entertainment
2. Famous People
3. Reference
4. Shopping
5. Sports

In addition, the Bing’s Visual Search requires that you install it on your PC first, which you must first download from this link.  Overall, I wasn’t impressed with it enough to say it’s something that I’d be using on a daily basis, yet.

However, if I can search for ANYTHING, then I definitely think this could be something I could get used to, but until then, I’ll stick to GYB!

That’s Google, Yahoo and Bing (using web search, NOT visual search!)

LinkWorth is proud to announce we will be exhibiting at both events next month and are making available registration discount codes for both events!

A select few from the LinkWorth team will be exhibiting again at this year’s SMX East in New York on October 5-7.  The event is being held at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center on West 34th Street.

If the West Coast is more of your thing, a second LinkWorth team will be exhibiting later that month at the DMA 2009  event in San Diego on October 17-22.

If you planned on registering for either event but had not done so, LinkWorth is offering discount codes to both events:

• Discount code for  SMX East
• Discount code for DMA ‘09 San Diego

When you get there, please DO stop by our booth and say hello and grab some Schwag – who couldn’t use another LinkWorth T?!

While some are worried about privacy issues from Google crawling all of their personal Google Docs, we’re already thinking of ways in which this can be used for search engine optimization. Find out how to keep your private Google Docs private and how to use them for SEO once the big update takes place -

There’s an interesting post in the Google Docs help forum that indicates your Google Docs will soon be crawlable by the Googlebot and possibly all other search engines.  Googler “Marie” says that in about two weeks, Google will be launching the change to make this happen.

What this means is that it will allow your published documents to appear in the search engine result pages as long as the document is linked from a publicly crawled webpage.  As a result, your documents can now reach a much wider audience of people.  Does this mean that you can now optimize your webpages through published Google Docs?  With a little creativity, we certainly think so!

This approach of SEO is very similar to some of our existing products which we use to ‘blanket’ the search result pages for our advertisers through hosted article pages.  With these, we can essentially create mini sites about our advertiser’s websites and get them ranking as well for all of their keyword phrases.  The end result is that our advertiser’s website doesn’t only show up on a top 3 spot of Google, but lots of smaller mini sites about our advertiser can show up and cover the rest of the search result listings on page 1 of the Google results.

Although this seems like good news to most, others are still confused by it and are under the impression that all of their private documents from Google Docs will now be visible online.  For example, user ‘byronl’ commented on the post with:

In two weeks?? That seems incredibly short notice for such a big change. IMO, users who have “private” but published documents are going to be quite upset to find they are suddenly being indexed by Google! It would be much better if I could CHOOSE whether or not my documents should be indexed.

While the above statement may be incorrect since Google requires you to have an inbound link coming to your document before it can be crawlable by Googlebot, user ‘Uncle Bob’ commented that even with this requirement, his documents could be exploited and published by anyone who knows the URL of his published documents by pointing an inbound link from any publicly crawled webpage:

If someone who knows the URL for my published document, they can link to it from their own publicly crawled webpage, thwarting my attempts to avoid having it crawled.  That means that I’m at the mercy of anyone who gets their hands on the URL for my published Doc.

Would be far better if I, the creator of the Google Doc I’ve published, could explicitly choose  a “don’t crawl” setting.

Your plan, as I understand it, leaves it open to malicious people – maybe someone who I think is a “friend” is not and exposes my Doc to crawling.

The same concern was expressed by a writer on the web.

So you’ve closed the front door of the cage and left the back door wide open.  The lion could soon be on the loose.

- U Bob

If you’d like to find out how we can have your website listed at the top of the search engine results you can contact us.  To read more about Google Docs being crawlable online, you can follow the post here.

I’m finally caught up from being gone for a week to Silicon Valley exhibiting with the LinkWorth team at SES West in San Jose. On my way there, I decided to take the weekend before the event for some R & R in San Francisco with my boy, Dawson. San Francisco is one of my favorite cities to visit and definitely a place I would consider moving to if ‘the price was right’. I have been there four times this year and there’s just always so much to do there it seems like there’s just never enough time to do it all. I uploaded a few pics of that segment of the trip to Facebook here.

On Monday, I finally made my way down to San Jose and met up with the rest of the LinkWorth team to set up the booth and get everything ready for the show. We had a nice corner booth next to our friends from SEO Inc. It’s always great seeing Jay Dunigan – there’s no telling what he’s going to say or do next and is always fun to hang out with.

Although the event didn’t seem as busy as last year’s, we all agreed that the quality of the attendees was definitely as good as they could have been.  It seemed that people had more time to talk in detail about our search marketing services and genuinely had a profound interest on how text link advertising can help their website’s visibility online.

Monday night after setting up we hit the bar for a few drinks and met up with the guys from Best Of The Web followed by a ‘pre-party’ party with the Webmater Radio team and a few others that showed me how they relax in the West Coast!  I must say, I don’t remember much of that night…  To many drinks too fast I guess but that’s part of ‘work’ on the road.  Thank you Ron Wicker, thank you Matt Stoddart – thank you LinkWorth!

Although there was no Google Dance this year, Daron Babin of WebmasterRadio.FM pulled off the best Search Bash yet… no complaints here! As a matter of fact, I must say I’d rather go to Search Bash than Google Dance any day. The picture below is me at Search Bash with a girl painted, not dressed, like the cat from Alice in Wonderland – she even had a tail – can you say M e o w !?

Although we were only in San Jose until Wednesday night, we definitely enjoyed ourselves at night and worked our butts off during the day.  Our team came back to Dallas with more than enough new contacts to keep us busy for a while, or at least until the next show… some of us are headed to New York, Vegas and San Diego in the next few months.

I’m already working a few deals with other SEO agencies that are interested in reselling our online marketing products to their existing clientele and I’m hoping that a few of these will close in the next few weeks.  If you are a Search Marketing professional and would like more info on this, let us know.  Creating a white label agency relationship with us at LinkWorth will create another revenue stream for your SEO agency without having to do any additional work.

Upcoming conferences and workshops by Search Engine Strategies include SES Berlin, Nov. 24-25 in Berlin Germay, SES Chicago, Dec. 7-10 and SES London Feb. 16-18 2010.  For more info on these, you can visit their official site here.

This is from a thread called ‘Am I the only one with a Link Addiction? on highrankings.com – being a text link broker myself, I often deal with many of our clients that in fact do seem to have an addiction to link building, or at least a definite obsession with out linking their competitors.

It’s pretty weird… if their rankings slip by just one spot, they’ll often call me up and will want to go over every single link in their campaign to see which links need to be cut and how many more they need to get, and how fast I can get them built! – although it may be comical to me as an outsider, these clients depend on their text link ads for the success of their entire business.

I have seen clients fight their way to the front page of Google, then to a top 5 position, then a top 3 and lastly, to the #1 spot for their keywords and let me tell you, the amount of traffic and business they generate changes drastically from level to level.  These are my favorite type of clients because it is them that understand the value of a text link ad campaign fully, and how much the right kind of text links can impact their organic rankings in the SERPS.

Check it out -

• Take the poll on How Addicted To Link Acquisitions Are You? from SEORoundTable.com
• Read the complete post:  Am I the only one with a link addiction? from highrankings.com

Get help! Let the PROS handle your link acquisitions – just contact us.  We have over 50,000 partner sites and Blogs from which we can find quality, relevant links for your site.  Link building is what we do, all day – every day!

So, before you go out and start buying up AdWords inventory for your PPC campaigns with your target brands in your AdWords campaigns just because Google says you can now, keep in mind that affiliates should always check their partner’s guidelines first.  Each company’s terms of use and affiliate marketing partner guidelines should detail keywords and brand phrases that may not be purchased or contained within your AdWords campaign and respective ad creative.

After a lot of research to his website’s code, his host, his server and IP address, I found out that…

• His previous webmaster had embedded links on his site for the benefit of the webmaster, not our mutual client.  The wrong kind of outbound links can hurt you in the Google rankings if you’re linking out to unrelated websites which offer no value to your visitors. However, having the right kind of outbound and inbound text links can help you rank higher in the SERPS drastically.
• His webmaster was hosting the site on a shared server using a shared IP address with thousands of low quality, under performing or at least less than professional sites. As a result of the shared server and shared IP address, Google associated my client’s site as being part of the same ‘bad neighborhood’ group of sites, and was definitely penalizing his site with  ‘Minus 60′, which by the way, Google denies it’s existence – it is the Area 51 of the SEO world.
• His webmaster had not done any kind of search engine optimization to the site – ever.  AS if that wasn’t bad enough, the actual site architecture was not search engine friendly at all.  There was no regard to internal linking structure and there was no strategy or concept on how a search engine should be able to easily crawl the site and index all of it’s content.

When finding a professional and reliable website designer, make sure you choose one that has at least some basic idea of how SEO works and why a great site needs to have at least the basics of  SEO incorporated into the code from the ground up.

Either way, none of this was good at all… and I knew this would be one of the most challnging campaigns I had ever managed.

The ‘Game Plan’ -

1. Clean up all of the code, remove any unrelated outbound links, and optimize the code for his target keyword phrases.  So, I followed up by optimizing the site for his target phrase when applicable and in moderation. When working on the internal SEO aspect of a site, it is important to avoid over optimization of the code as over optimization can often be considered spamming of the search engines with black hat techniques such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, etc… An over optimized site can be worse than having a site not optimized at all.
2. Switch hosting to a reliable hosting company, and upgrade the account to include a dedicated IP address.  The majority of our clients have no idea what a big part the hosting company they’re using and the location of those servers play as the search engines analyze the thousands of pages in their index and decide what order they should be listed in.
3. Add a blog and merge it with his site, allowing the client or anyone one of his employees to add new content to his previously static site without having the need to know any programming language or HTML.  Search engines love fresh, keyword rich content that is unique, which links out to quality, relevant sources found in your own site or on other relevant, external, authority sites – they will use that page of content or hosted article and the ‘in-text links‘ to evaluate what keywords your site should rank higher for.
4. Continue to improve his website’s link profile by acquiring lots of quality inbound links from as many relevant sources as I could find while using his target keyword phrases as anchor text for those links.  Lucky for me, our inventory of partner sites includes more than 50,000 quality sites and I don’t know how many more thousands of blogs (the number grows by 50 to 100 per day)… As a link broker at LinkWorth, finding quality sites for just about any topic is not a problem!
5. Monitor progress weekly and make adjustments as needed twice a month.  On any SEO campaign, you do the changes, you monitor the results, then you adjust to keep it going.  SEO techniques are always changing, and what worked six month’s ago may not work today.  Also, some SEO agencies will charge you by the hour – not good considering SEO is a full time job.  When hiring an SEO agency to help your website rank higher or if you’re considering outsourcing SEO, make sure and ask all the right questions first.

The Results – After executing the above plan I am happy to say that my MD client has sent me several emails in the last few months saying that his site is (and has been ranking at #1 in Google) for his keywords.  However,  anytime I check Google for his keyword I see him at #3 – although he’s getting more business than he can handle being listed at #3 is great (and much better than the 70 to 80 spot he was at when he first hired me) – it’s still not #1 and by all means, his site should be!  I’m a bit of a perfectionist and couldn’t really help but think about why he had climbed to #3 but not to #1 and today, it finally hit me!

Google knows I’m in the DFW area based on my IP address, my client and his site are in Minnesotta.  When I search using his keyword, the first two results are major hospitals that are nationally known, then his clinic is on the #3 spot.  However, when he searches, Google knows he’s in the same area as his clinic is (Minnesotta) and therefore Google IS showing his site at #1 as I thought they should all this time!

So, although I guess I wont be seeing his site at #1, and instead will have to be happy seeing it at #3 in the Dallas area, I’m happy to know his site climbed up to the top spot as a result of all of my hard work and dedication to his website’s success over the past year.  Nothing generates more referrals and loyal clients than when they get results that meet or exceed their expectations!

To get your own website ranking at the top of the Google Search results, send me a quick email or give me a call directly at my LinkWorth office at 214.440.3911 – We don’t charge hourly fees, we provide unlimited support via email and phone, and even if you don’t end up hiring us, we’ll be glad to answer any questions on SEO you may have: free of charge!

• custom made website template of 3 to 5 different pages
• coding must be in html using CSS, no tables
• might include small flash section to enhance appearance
• template pages must allow for client to easily add content to page body
• website design needs to be of high quality and professional appearance

I’ve currently submitted about 5 to 8 proposal requests to different web design agencies and their proposals have started trickling in.  So far, the prices quoted have been from $400 to $15,000.

Although this is a project I could do myself, I simply don’t have the time to do so and have therefore decide to outsource the project to a full time web designer.

There is a possibility of additional work we could refer the chosen web design as our SEO / SEM agency handles thousands of advertisers who frequently are in need of website updates and redesigns.  For this project, the client has set a budget of about $500 which is more than reasonable as they’re not looking for database integration, forums, ecommerce functionality or anything else requiring custom programming – just a professional, custom template which they can expand and grow from there.

Anyone who is interested in getting additonal information on the project so they can submit a bid, please contact Enrique Armand at 214.440.3911 or send us your info.

The LinkWorth team that attended the show with me consisted of Christine Cadena, Amanda Dickson and Jeffrey Marek, Account Managers at LinkWorth, as well as our CSO, Matt Stoddart and CEO, Ron Wicker.

This event was a bit different than all the others I’ve been to because it was on a three story building, with conference space on the first and second floors and classes on the third floor.  The food at the show wasn’t the greatest but we certainly more than made up for it afterwards – thanks LinkWorth!!

Although I didn’t have a chance to make a shwag run while I was there, I did score a $200 Best Buy gift card from the booth across the hall from us – fun fun fun! Can’t wait to go shopping…