While Facebook may be a hot marketing tool right now, there is danger in putting too much effort into making it the center of your marketing efforts.

In a recent post I spoke about publishing paths and tailoring your content and selectively publishing it to different websites. It can be dangerous, though, if you take it too far and focus only on building your content on one website (particularly one you don’t have absolute control over) because you leave yourself and your business open to whims and decisions of others…

In the past I’ve spoken about why I turned off blog comments, but it was mostly from a time/labor perspective. Now I have another reason, one that affects everyone from an SEO Perspective. In some cases. leaving comments on will negatively impact your rankings and traffic.In case you missed it, in yesterday’s post I spoke about how Google is being more aggressive in trying to figure out the proper date for a post and displaying it in the SERP’s…

In recent weeks I’ve noticed a disturbing new trend in Google SERP’s: Google has become much more aggressive at trying to reverse engineer the publication date of a post/page.First let’s be clear about what we’re discussing. In some cases, when you do a search, Google will show a date in the listing. See the example below:

Initially, Google only looked at the date that was near the H1/Title of the page and, if it found something, it used that as the date in the SERP’s…

Today’s post is answer to a question from Curedream:

Is there really any value in getting links from the Yahoo directory

I’m going to move that up a bit and tackle directories in general.  In my opinion, yes, there is value in getting your website listed in some directories–but not all. The trick is figuring out which ones matter most.

IMHO there are four directories that every website should try to be listed in: Yahoo, Business…

The following is a sponsored post.

When I announced I was doing sponsored posts/reviews again, one of the first people to contact me was Jim Boykin of  WeBuildPages. He let me know he was interested in getting a review of his link building services. To be honest, I had some concern about reviewing another SEO’s services. I told Jim that, if things didn’t work I didn’t want to give him a bad review and would just cancel the review…

Today’s post is a question from Max Capener, who wants to know what’s the best way to handle old sites that you buy?

Ok so that’s a question that has a lot of different aspects, and I’ll try to go over a few of them. First, let’s talk about why you bought the website. Was it the competition? Were you looking to re-purpose/redirect some link equity? Or is it just a good domain name? If it’s the competition, you have few options you can leave it in place and try and secure two spots in the SERP’s…

Today’s post is a question from Jason who asks the following question:

Are all links really the same? If a link statistically according to SEOMOZ or other tools, PR, trust, rank, etc, are the same, are they really the same in the eyes of Google?

The easy answer is no. The explanation is bit more involved. Any tool or service that is not put out by Google  is going to fall somewhere between a really good approximation and an educated guess because, at the very least, Google has access to a lot of information…

The following is a sponsored post

For this post we’re going to be talking to Nick Stamoulis of Brick Marketing, for my readers who might not know you can you tell us a little about yourself, and your company.

Thanks Michael, I really appreciate you taking the time to ask me these questions. I am the President and Founder of the full service boutique search engine marketing company, Brick Marketing and the writer of the Search Engine Optimization Journal…

For websites that are going to participate in social media in a big way along multiple channels, I find it helpful to set up what I call publishing paths. These publishing paths require you to think about your content before you publish it, what is the best channel for it, and how to cross promote it.Some publishers take a different approach. No matter where something is published, it gets cross promoted across all channels…

Sometime when you write a blog you need some ideas of what people want to hear you talk about or questions they want to have answered, and that’s what this post is about. Got a topic you want  applyto have covered here’s your chance. Got a question you need answered step u to p to the plate. Drop your thoughts in the comment box below and I’ll try answer them. Topics or subjects that will have wider appeal will have a greater shot at being answered than topics that aply only to your website … unless of course it’s really interesting…

Today’s post is another answer to a question–this time from Nathan Schubert, who wants to know what you should do with old links from directories and websites that still drive traffic if you’ve changed the content on your website.
OK. First off, you never want to have links to your site removed, even if it’s from a really bad website.  Truth be told, there are some things you need to watch out for, but (generally speaking) it’s really pretty hard for someone to screw you up by linking to you (I said hard–but not impossible)…

Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…

Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff…

When your blog or website becomes successful and starts to get traffic, if you don’t make direct sales yourself or commissions via affiliate traffic, you almost always look for other revenue streams. The most common revenue stream is CPM based advertising or something like adsense. However, once many publishers start down that path, they almost always end up chasing off topic traffic…

This is the second time I’ve encountered this technique in the past few months so I thought I’d spend some time explaing what it is, what to watch out for, and how it could be problematic for you.

Lets start at the beginning with sponsored themes. A sponsored theme is where you have a designer create a wordpress theme for you and give it away to others to use for free with the provision they leave the link intact in the footer…

Late last week as we where all recovering from balloon boy, another minor kefuffle percolated to the top involving a mother and her child being separated during a TSA checkpoint screening. This story provides some interesting insight from a reputation management and social media perspective, so I’d like to delve a little deeper.So last week a post went viral titled “TSA Agents Took My Son” it was an emotion filled post that culminated with this gut wrenching moment:

The male TSA agent repeated, “I’m going to have to pick him up to inspect him…

If you’ve been involved in SEO for a while chances are you’ve heard the term google whacking. For those of you that haven’t basically it was coming up with a search term for a real word that had exactly one result. Due to the way Google does things now it’s nearly impossible, and hardly any fun to try and find one anymore. However with bing it’s entirely possible, and in some cases it looks intentional…

I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

Efficiently manage your SEO and Social Media campaigns with Raven’s powerful suite of Internet Marketing Tools

Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available find out more information…

Today’s post deals with a much more harmless form of SEO Outting, accidental outting and invalidating testing. To teach this lesson I’m going to use a story …

Let’s assume for a minute your at a ball game or party and your friend comes back from the bathroom, and you notice their zipper is down. Because they are your friend you want to help them out, so in a normal voice you point at their crotch and say “excuse me but your zipper is down” … kudo’s to you for being a good friend right?

Well not really, because while your intentions may have been knoble, your execution had the opposite effect, as you just embarrassed your friend unnecessarily in public…

If you watched any of the congressional hearings about the newspaper industry where Marissa Mayer testified one of the concepts she brought up is Living URL’s. Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on it on Search Engine Land. The basic concept is a story lives at a single URL and gets added to/edited/updated over time (the way wikipedia articles currently do). I took a stab at how to get from here to there in the comments, but after putting a little more thought behind it I’ve got another idea…

For this post we’re going to be taking  look at the optimal permalink and URL structures for wordpress. There are a lot of different options, and there isn’t a one size fits all answer, however there are definitely better and worse choices you can make.

Out of the box wordpress is configured like this

http://example.com?p=123

This really isn’t a permalink structure, it’s a parameter based format with “123″ being the post number…

When you run wordpress or any other blog for that matter, chances are your blog is getting scraped, and re-used without your permission. In this post I’ll show you how you can use this to your advantage to build links with the anchor text of your choice.

The first step you need to take is to make sure you are publishing a full feed. I know this sounds counterintuitive, as publishing a full feed will actually encourage more people to scrape your feed, but that’s exactly what you want to happen…

In recent weeks wordpress security, or more correctly the lack of wordpress security has been getting a lot of attention. While most people consider this a site maintenance issue, it has implications that affect your SEO efforts, in this post I’ll explain why, and look at some things you can do to protect yourself, and reduce the damage.

From a security standpoint wordpress has always been a piece of swiss cheese, with lots of security holes in it…

I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

Clasione Directory – Quality directory for listing your business

Efficiently manage your SEO and Social Media campaigns with Raven’s powerful suite of Internet Marketing Tools

Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available find out more information…

While I don’t make my use of  Google products like Google Apps and Google Reader secret it still continues to amuse some people when I do.  However a few weeks ago when I went to SES San Jose, I encountered a new “feature” that occurs when you change time zones, and it didn’t do me any favors.

Before SES San Jose I got emails from Vanessa Zamora of  WebmasterWorld and Abby Prince of  Web Pro News to schedule some interviews, and I set them up for local time on the west coast…

So last week I was at SES San Jose and thought I’d share a few thoughts …

I’ve got no idea what the actual attendance for the show was, but it seemed a little bit lighter than previous shows, which I would mostly attribute to to the weakened US economy, but the show was well attended. The keynote from Clay Shirky was awesome, and really enjoyed it. As I’ve been to a few shows over the years, I tend to avoid the beginner and introductory panels, and stay with some of the more advanced panels, such as “igniting viral campaigns” and the “Advanced SEO Roundtable”…

With the impending arrival of Google OS I’ve been spending more time in Google Chrome, and figuring out how to customize things to my liking. Here’s a tip on how to turn off personalized search in Google Chrome.

First thing you want to do is click the wrench icon on the Google Chrome toolbar and select options, when the dialog box pops up, select the manage button next to search engine listings

When the list of search engine pops up choose Google, you’ll see there are three values listed the third one is the one you’re concerned with copy and paste it to your favorite text editor

You should have a text line that looks like this

{google:baseURL}search{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}
sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

That’s the code that google uses to form your search query…

If you happen to know anyone who has been building and publishing affiliate websites before 2000, chances are pretty good they operate with a different set of rules than affiliates today. Number one, they build and develop isolated little pockets on the web, they do very little interconnecting of websites, and they try really hard to keep google from knowing they are associated with those websites…

He’re’s a little secret, I’ve slowly and steadily been unsubscribing from SEO blogs for the past few months, and last week the total number of  marketing blogs I read dropped below 10, and I think the time has come for an intervention. For a lot of you the time has come to ask yourselves does your blog suck … and what are you doing to change it?

What are your metrics for success? Is it traffic, page views, user engagement, links, comments, rss subscribers? It’s ok if one or two of them flatlines or drops, but if most of them have turned south, you have a problem…

If you’re involved with social media sites like Digg, Facebbok or Reddit, you’ve probably seen stories with images next to them. If you’ve submitted stories there, you may have seen it present you with a few image choices, sometimes the one you want is there sometimes it isn’t. Then there’s the the case where the social media site chooses the image on it’s own, and it’s a crappy image or worse yet an ad … dooming your story to failure…

While I may have some level of notoriety within the SEO community and internet marketing space, once you step out of that area, I’m a nobody as writer Paul Carr so eloquently pointed out last week. Robert Scoble the original poster boy of blogging, is known far and wide by the tech community, but who gets more traffic, me or him?

Below is a screen shot from Compete.com of my traffic compared to Rober Scoble’s…