Today I stumbled across a comment made by someone I thought was well educated in the SEO industry. After reading this comment, I might need to re-think my opinion on this guy due to his biased suggestions. It appears that LinkWorth is “unknown” and “untrustworthy”. Hmmm. . .I wonder why we have so many customers and why no one complains of our untrusting business. I do want to thank him for the good chuckle I got after reading it.

It all boils down to the “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch my back” system. He says this because they all know each other. So it gave me the idea of educating people in how to differentiate between a biased and an unbiased referral. If you really want to know how to trust suggestions made by anyone in any industry, here are a few tips and tricks to use:

• First check for an affiliate link. If you put your mouse over a link where a webmaster is suggesting another service, look in the status bar in the lower left corner of your browser. Some webmasters get tricky and even make the status say something different, so I usually put my mouse over the link and click my mouse button and hold it down. That usually shows you exactly where you are going. If the link is a simple static link without all kinds of tricky variables (Ex: /?afid=2342&page=34&product=2523422) on the end, then it’s a good link. If it has variables, then it’s an affiliate link and they are suggesting it because they’ll make some cash if you buy or signup.
• Once you visit the referenced site, do a little research and see if you can find a link on the site that points back to the site that referred you. A simple little site search will tell you all you want to know. Just search for the site name or url that referred you. If you find any reference, then it’s a biased suggestion. The comments I spoke of above fall into this bullet point. The guy that said we’re unknown is chum’s with the places he suggested. There is always the possibility of a genuine reference, but when it’s this over the top, highly unlikely.
• Always check for similarities on both sites. There is always the possibility that both sites are owned by the same person. It’s a common practice these days where people create many websites that rate or rank services in their market and put their own on the top as the best ranked to drive business their way. It’s a pretty effective method, but it’s unfair to the customer. Usually you can find similar content on both sites and very familiar grammar.

These are 3 techniques I use on a daily basis. It’s surprising how few true unbiased referrals there really are. These days people don’t like to link unless there is something in it for them. Oddly enough, if you look at our links in our blogroll to the right, the first link is simply to our homepage and the “Need A Good Laugh” link is to a fun blog I’m involved in. The rest of the links are to sites we have zero relationship with. You will find no advertisements on their sites for LinkWorth, nor will you find any reciprocated links. These are examples of good referral links. The “Need a Good Laugh” you will find a reciprocated link, which makes this a biased referral link.

Just be sure to not believe everything you read. Especially if someone says we are unknown and/or untrustworthy!! HA 😀

If you are in the business world at all, this phenomenon should rear it’s ugly head on a daily basis. Any sort of sales pitch or presentation almost cannot be done effectively without it. It’s the art of “generic business talk“.

• Let’s move our best foot forward.
• We need to implement innovative action-items.
• Brainstorm and maximize synergies.
• Target our out-of-the-box core competencies.

And the list goes on and on. This subject is one discussed on another blog I am part of where I included a generic business talk joke email sent to a LinkWorth customer/friend of ours. Once you are made aware of this unusual way of speaking, it’s impossible to not hold back laughter when it happens around you.

There’s no doubt that Facebook’s paid advertising feature is one of the best ways to advertise a business today along with professional packaging design services. Over the past several years the paid advert model has evolved to help businesses target exactly the audience they want so if you hire employees to run your advertising knowing about this can be helpful, and you can also use a software like paystub to manage the payroll as well.

With Facebook’s paid advertising, it’s possible for business to choose who they want to market to, as you can understand if you go to the website, based on demographics, behaviors, and location. According to most reports, an ad will cost somewhere between $0.31 to $0.61 per click. This will help businesses generate valuable traffic to their website at an affordable price, you can also promote your business on TikTok. We recommend using InventHelp which include researchers, illustrators, writers as well as customer service representatives and other staff that can help you at anytime.

Do you have any good generic business talk or business cliche’s? Leave us a comment with your favorite(s).

Ever since Google realized that people are smarter than they think and began helping their SERP rankings by building their link popularity, the debate has been on about how dedicated they are to controlling it. It’s also a question we deal with quite a bit with people wondering, “Will it affect my relationship with the search engines?”. As you might expect, here at LinkWorth, we are constantly monitoring the topic and making sure everything we do is as effective for the Advertiser as possible, but staying within the guidelines set forth by the search companies.

As I was thinking about the topic today and doing a little net searching, I happened across the main story that broke Google’s ranking system out to the public. The story that bred the term “Google Bombing“. . .Miserable Failure. In case you have yet to hear about this story, bloggers began sharing the same blogroll links which included a link to George W’s bio on whitehouse.gov’s website, with the anchor text of “Miserable Failure”. As more and more bloggers added it to their sites, people began to notice if you searched for the phrase “miserable failure“, the top listing was in fact George W’s bio page. The very page people were linking to. Once people caught on to the trick, the Google Bombing era took off. Here are a few other popular Google bombing campaigns and see where they fair today:

• Internet Rock Star – The true original found Google bomb for Ben Barnes site.
• Talentless Hack – A guy named Mathes tried to make his friends site, Andy Pressman, number one.
• More Evil Than Satan – When searched, Microsoft was number one.

One BIG difference between Google Bombing and text link advertising is relevance. Google bombing happens when there is an indiscriminate number of non-relevant websites with relation to the target site that links to it. Text link advertising is on topic and in some way relevant to the target site linked to. In addition, it’s done to assist advertisers in promoting their website on other similar, relevant websites.

Now back to the question at hand, just how worried is Google about linking? The reason I prefaced the answer with the miserable failure example is, it was one of the first examples of someone manipulating the Google results with links. The search term is completely non-relevant to the top listing, yet, look at the first listing in the Google results for “miserable failure“. If this was such a concern to Google, don’t you think they would have taken care of the single most important leak to their algorithm in their history? So my response is, Google has more important fish to fry in their world. “Sure” they talk about changing algorithm’s to spot paid links, but I think text link advertising is the least of their worries right now.

One of the most common issues we come across are websites that search engines seem to not cache/index for whatever reason. During our initial research of any new customer, we first make sure the advertiser has not been penalized and/or banned from the search engines. I thought it would be good to share how we go about determining if a website is in trouble with a search engine or just needs help being found.

The first step is to visit the website in question and pull some quick stats on it. We use our free SEO Toolbar to pull stats initially which will show pages indexed and backlinks on Yahoo, Google & MSN. Another great toolbar to have is the Google toolbar so you can see the PageRank and also have quick links to Google stats including Google cache.

The next step is to review the cache of the website on Google, Yahoo and MSN. This is a very important step because a website that has a recent cache is a website that search engines know about. If there is no cache, you must then look for reasons why the site has no cache on the search engine(s). With the cache comes the cache date, which tells you the last day that search engine visited the website to take a quick snap shot of that page. If the date is older than 30 days, finding why the robots have stopped visiting the site is a must.

Next depends on what you’ve found. If there is no cache, no backlinks or no pages indexed, you need to see if the site is in trouble. If you go to the search engine in question, enter the website url in their search box and enter, this will tell you quite a bit.

• If the results show nothing, it could be a result of a website that needs help being found or a site that is banned.
• If the results show a listing or many listings, which includes the url in question, a title and description, then the site is a good site.
• If the results show only a hyperlinked url with no title or description, this can usually be a sign of a penalized website. It’s not always the case, but this has always been a good indication of things to come.

Next step depends on if you suspect a penalized or banned website. If you do, you must begin looking for signs of black hat techniques on the website. This also means you must be familiar with search engine “no-no’s”. We begin looking for hidden text on pages, text filler pages, directory style pages with cookie cutter content, doorway pages, redirects, relationships with other sites and many other common reasons a site is penalized and/or banned.

Another important step is to review the backward links, or otherwise known as inbound links. The sites that link to a given website are where strength could really be received. If there are links coming in from .edu or .gov sites, then you know it’s a powerhouse. If the inbound links are coming from links pages where there are hundreds of other links, you know it’s not so strong. If there are 10’s of thousands of inbound links, you know it’s a very popular site. So look for a site that is strong or popular because this tells you search robots will visit often.

These are the most basic steps of researching a website. There are many additional things one can look for to determine the reliability of the website. One of the most important factors in any research is relevance. If you can find a website that is within your demographic, the benefits are the best you can get. So be smart and do the leg work. You can also ask us for help if needed.

The Science Channel has been running a show from 2005 through the beginning of 2006 called “Survivorman“. This show first grabbed my attention because of his (Les Stroud) knowledge of living off of the land for up to seven (7) days. It’s a great educational show that teaches anyone watching how to survive with only the natural things our Earth has to provide. The show has actually taught me many neat tricks I’ve used that really do work.

You may ask what this has to do with LinkWorth. It’s a goofy comparison, but it makes me think of the internet and search survival. Just like Les resorts to surviving off of the most basic forms of survival, online marketers must resort to the basic forms of the internet and search; text links as per digital marketing agency in Sydney. Text links are what makes the internet what it is, which is why search portals make their ranking systems so dependent on them.

As the internet advances into the future, users of the internet have become smarter and have trained their minds to rarely notice typical advertising mediums. This is why advertisers have retracted to text link advertising. It is the most basic form of the internet and internet users will still follow text links. So if you are looking to better your online marketing presence, become your own Survivorman and resort back to the basic form of the internet and get on board with text link advertising.

If you are any type of statistician, then this topic is something you already know. If you are a novice to analytics, or know nothing at all, then this might be of some interest to you, especially if you pay for marketing like CPC or CPM. Now this info is a generalized statement, but depending on your market, it could be completely different. The best thing to do is study your server logs to see trends on daily visits/sales/leads.

In several markets that I personally have been in charge of online marketing over the past 10 years, all had very similar “big days” in which sales/visits/leads were the highest. I have gathered data still in my possession to get a breakdown of biggest to smallest days with regard to the best days to push your marketing dollar to its limit. Again, if you sell a product that only works on Saturday, then this will not work for you, so please use this as a general guide for the typical type service or product. Everyone should do a good 3-5 month study of your own logs to determine the best for your website.

The breakdown of best to worst days of the week are as follows:

1. Thursday – The best day for sales
2. Wednesday – A close second
3. Tuesday – Big swings from really bad to really good
4. Friday – Averages really close to Tuesday
5. Monday – Weekend hangover, people still asleep.
6. Saturday – People are busy, but the evenings can be big.
7. Sunday – Can be really good, but for the most part this day is the worst on average.

How this information can help you is by suggesting you put more of your budget into the better days rather than the lesser days. When it comes to Pay-Per-Click, your market may take quite a bit to be in the top 3 positions. If you pull your bid down on the off days, it will allow you to push it to the top on big days, giving you a much better ROI (return on investment).

The last tip would be to be careful of click fraud. If your market is a high dollar per click, more than likely it’s a target for click fraud. In this situation, you will need to monitor your traffic to make sure it’s not some sort of automated traffic making some search engine affiliate’s pocket thicker. I strongly suggest using some sort of web analytics tracking software so if click fraud is occurring, you have

Anyone that runs a message forum can understand the pain in the ass fun of forum spam. There is nothing worse than going through your forum to only to find one or a few “new” users that have littered your forum with posts that contain links back to whatever it is they are promoting. Used to, people did this to acquire inbound links. Now I have no idea why people do it, other than maybe to get traffic. So I thought I would blog all the reasons forum spam is a waste of your time.

My TOP TEN REASONS why forum spam is not good:

10. It does absolutely no good at all to build your link popularity. Think of it this way, a link counts for 1, a forum link counts for 1 MILLIONth of 1. (Join LinkWorth 😀 )

9. All it does is piss people off. Even the forum users can spot spam and they hate it as much as the forum owners.

8. If it’s a forum that has any activity and moderation at all, the spam will not last for more than 24-48 hours.

7. Very few people will follow the link and those who do, have zero thoughts of giving you a penny.

6. You run the risk of getting reported to spam reporting services which could really backfire on you.

5. If reported to your registrar, 99.99% of registrars prohibit any type of spam and can rip your domain out from underneath you. Then you sit with no site, no business and no friends.

4. If you are spamming your ability to offer SEO services or marketing services, all it does is tell people that the only thing you know how to do is SPAM, therefore resulting in zero sales. Along with making you look like a clown.

3. Your hosting provider will drop you quicker than a bad habit to prevent their own company from getting in trouble.

2. Since you are promoting one of your url’s, those who are having to put up with your crap can easily visit your website, acquire any and all email addresses pertaining to your company, then submit them to lots of opt-in porn, gambling and pharmacy mailing lists. 😀

1. If you are stupid enough to have a picture of yourself on your website, the end result could turn into a big laugh for others at your expense.

So the point of this post is . . . DON’T SPAM OUR FORUM OR ANY OTHER FORUM ! ! ! (our blog either. We have filters that sort out spam. Blog spam comments are never even seen by us)

As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, the SES is currently underway in New York City. My previous entry discussed the art of not putting a target on your forehead if attending and how to ask questions smartly.

Upon reading about our industry reps giving a session, it made me wonder about another thought. These sessions involve many search engine employees talking about what is good and what is not so good, including the business of buying and selling text ads. Is it a good idea for certain companies to get up and talk about exactly what they are saying not to do in the next room? I am all for spreading the word of our industry, but it seems like you would bring undue attention to your business. Chances are, they know all about us. . .well I know they know about LinkWorth, but it just makes sense to run low key and focus on helping your customers rather than networking yourself within the search community.

I need to follow up the paragraph above with our stance with the buying and selling of text ads. No matter what search employees say at conferences, blogs and/or forums, it is your choice to monetize your website or promote it. Search engines say “don’t buy or sell links”, but then they tell you to do so in their terms. If you market online, you have to do what you have to do to get a leg up on your competition. The buying and selling of links is not against their terms of service . . . read them here. It says not to participate in “schemes” or “trickery”, but what LinkWorth offers is not a scheme or trickery. We place text ads for apples on an apple website. Everything is relevant and all about improving your name recognition and traffic. Just so happens, the buying and selling of links helps this.

The last thing I’ll say about this is search engines themselves live off of text ads. It’s a little different model, but there is a common denominator in all of these methods, to make money. They do it, we do it and we help you do it. As long as you do it the right way, which LinkWorth does, everything will be fine. We’ve been doing this for a couple of years and are professionals about it.

Off that rant :D, the point of this entry is to give props to Patrick, Eric and the others who represented the text linking community well today at the SES NYC.

One thing I’ve learned over the past year or so is there are good and bad way’s of going about things in the search world. “What do you mean?” you may ask. . . let me explain.

If you market online, more than likely you’re going to run into a situation where you have several paths which you can take. Some people take the 100% white hat route, some people take the full on black hat route and some people may take a “grey” route. Obviously, white hat refers to straight and narrow, black hat is going directly against search engine terms of service and the grey route might consist of methods that are not listed in search engine terms, seem harmless, but a few people may have a different take on if it is right or not. Even if you think you practice only white hat techniques for promoting and optimizing your site, you still need to drop the target from your forehead because there might be one simple thing you do that you think is fine, but a certain someone reviews your site and dings you with a penalty unbeknownst to you.

What I’m referring to is the people that go to these conferences that the major search engine’s go to. There is a right way and a wrong way of attending these things. They can be an absolute gold mine of information and a great way to network with others in your industry, but they can also be a sure way to magnify the target you’re putting on your forehead.

Lets say you attend one of the sessions/classes and they’re discussing duplicate content. They open the floor for a little Q&A session and you decide to ask a question regarding your companies website, giving the url and hoping for some free helpful advice. Maybe you get some good advice, maybe you don’t, but one thing does happen that you are unaware of. A certain search employee is sitting in the crowd and starts digging through your site finding a thing or two he doesn’t like but has always seemed ok to your company, along with not being against the terms of service. With the click of a mouse, your site has been wiped from the search results. All because you threw your company url out for some helpful advice.

This is something that does happen and it can easily happen to you if you visit these conferences or even post your site url on popular forums. If you have questions, don’t offer your site url so all can hear. What is a complete disaster to the business/site owner is a mere game and fun to the search engine employees. They are really not up for giving advice (typically) or making constructive suggestions, they will just wipe you right out of their results. Google has talked about notifying webmasters when they penalize or ban their site from their results, but the truth of the matter is, it doesn’t happen at this point, so you only know when you disappear. Even then, it’s next to impossible to get an answer of what happened.

How you attend the conferences and/or popular message forums without jeopardizing you and/or your companies website with search engines, is simple; remain as anonymous as you can. The only people you or your company is interested in seeing your site are potential customers. If help is needed where the site is necessary to review, hire a specialized company that is on your side and will provide constructive and helpful answers.

If you have enough time to keep up with the constant new additions to the search giants, you will see each have near identical new features. Both have satellite mapping, image, video & audio searching, pay per click advertising surrounding natural search results, desktop searching and the list goes on and on.

Both have their own toolbars and each have their own nice features. I use both toolbars because each have tools that I use on a daily basis. Google is now offering their beta test of version 4 of their toolbar, which I installed and started reviewing the new features. Granted the beta version is for IE only, I’m sure a Firefox version will soon follow, the new features are so nice, I’ve been using IE more often since I installed it.

The new Google toolbar now includes many features that Yahoo’s toolbar offers and then some. One of the new inclusions in the crazy algorithms is ranking that includes bookmarking of websites. Guess what the new toolbar has? ? ? Yep, you guessed it, bookmarks. When you go to manage your bookmarks with Google, it presents a layout very similar to Google search results. Be sure to add that “BOOKMARK US” mention on your site!

Back to the new features, one of the coolest addition to V.4 is the ability to add your own customized buttons. You can manually add your own through the options tab or you can right click on any form field and select “generate customized search”. It will present you with a question or two and it appears in your toolbar. The icon will be the websites favicon, if it exists. Once the button is installed, you can edit the button and customize the button further.

If a particular website offers a SEO tool where you are to enter a website url, you can customize a button for that tool and while on any website, click your custom button and it will run the tool for whichever website you are sitting on. There is a better explanation with visual aid to help understand it.

So in summary, the new toolbar v.4 Google’s set to release, is a must have.