<p>Honestly, I'm not in favour of this technique. It's what we were doing early on with guest posts, but it's too similar to copycat linkbuilding, where you end up riding on someone else's coat-tails. In the context of this article (beginner guest posting) it's a good place for someone to start learning how to use content for links, though it can lead to the wrong kind of expectations when dealing with blog owners who've never considered guest posts in the past, that requires an entirely different approach.</p>

<p>I've been seeing this happening, for the last few months, when doing searches related to one of my clients (a jewelry retailer). In most&nbsp;cases&nbsp;it's just as you showed, they put huge effort into getting spammy&nbsp;contextually&nbsp;targeted anchor text in a very short&nbsp;amount&nbsp;of time, and somehow manage to rank.</p> <p>We've been investigating this at our company. Our theory is that the sudden surge of backlinks temporarily tricks Google's&nbsp;algorithm&nbsp;into associating the anchor-text surge as breaking news, giving it a temporary ranking boost. But your case seems to be different, the sites we were monitoring only got a boost for a few&nbsp;weeks&nbsp;before plummeting, yours still seem to be going strong.</p>

<p>I don&#39;t mean to be picky, but the &quot;alt&quot; tag is not a tag.... it is an attribute.&nbsp; It is therefore the &quot;alt&quot; attribute.</p><p>A tag is surrounded by &quot;&lt;&quot; &quot;&gt;&quot; symbols.&nbsp; an attribute is an element within the tag.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Sorry, but all SEO&#39;s call it that and it makes me cringe. </p>

<p>Because I&#39;m French and this blog is English ;)</p><p>But I appreciate ur French irony :) </p>

<p>Hey everyone. For myself, two things: </p><p>&nbsp;1- I&#39;ve been really busy too so this is the main reason why I haven&#39;t been posting at all lately... NVI has grown from a 8 ppl team in 2006 to a 28 ppl team in 2007... so life has been a great nightmare to go through</p><p>2- I knew I never was the best writer, because I&#39;m French, and sometimes I felt the mozzers would have left my post under the YouMoz and not the main page, and it would make me shy. I guess I&#39;m just stupid :)&nbsp; But I&#39;ll definetely try to get a few post under YouMoz to get promoted to the homepage - we&#39;ve done cool things recently, including 8x homepage of Digg and Netscape and Stumble and 4x Reddit for a client, and the results are amazing - so why not share a bit of all of this :)</p><p>I do miss blogging - I really miss it... I hate growth sometimes - it makes you focus on a lot of things you don&#39;t truly care about!</p><p>I miss you all!</p>

<p>You&#39;re just a mean girl...</p><p>&nbsp;you all miss my Frenchy accent now that I&#39;ve left SEOmoz office; you don&#39;t have 2 Rands anymore</p>

Yeah, French Canadians are THRULY GREEAT ANGLISH RITERS :)

<p>Hey. Thanks for all that great feedback for the site. We truly believe that the look and feel of the site should look like Nascar or something similar, although we were starting with a 2-3months of simply social community as the tournaments were not planned to launch before July 2nd, so we had to appeal a bit more to the community crowd. There is a nice ticker coming and the tournamet section will be very cool. </p><p>The site is an ongoing project and will have the main advantage of having people caring about it on every level of decision: the marketing team, the BountyFishing team, and the users.&nbsp; </p><p>It&#39;s rare that I got the chance to get such great teamwork with companies we work with, and I have to say that I don&#39;t believe this is going to be an easy task, but a very enjoyable one if we succeed to become the partypoker.net of fishing!</p><p>How about you guys? Do you fish? What is your biggest catch? ;)</p><p>My dream is to get a swordfish :D&nbsp;</p>

<p>That conference was a blast. Thanks for spending the night with all of us, it was great :D</p><p>Going to bed at 7-8am on Wednesday morning and driving back 5hours to Montreal was awesome... especially Toronto&#39;s traffic.</p><p>And I lost my SES virginty :D</p>

<p>That was just a great night...&nbsp;I&#39;d be curious how many drinks did we get altogether? 1000++?</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

<p>The machine is Us/ing us ;) I like the video&#39;s title :)</p>

<p>Hey Andy. Thanks for your reply. </p><p>Just a quick question: let&#39;s say those 16 1-pager </p>

<p>Well, there is a 30pages home site on a very precise niche, and 16 other domains which are 1 pager on the vertical niche as well, just theme targeted pages. I think this is a whole mess, but I&#39;m not sure that redirecting 1pager domains (especially since all of them are on different C IP blocks) to only 16 new content page on the homesite would really help.</p><p>I also have another issue: the pay per click campaign had like 16 adgroups, one of them going to EACH micro-site, and none to the home site... </p><p>I suspect the last person was trying to send traffic to those &quot;1 pager site&quot; to then get tons of referrals to the home site with great anchor text. Although, most of them just have PPC traffic, very little inbound links and are more on steroids than anything else.</p><p>My call would be to build one mighty site and send all Adwords traffic to the homesite as I&#39;m doing the redirects, but I fear losing alot of the acquired SERPs... </p><p>What do you guys think, Rand, Andy and&nbsp;maybe Peter or any other?&nbsp;Have you ever had a situation like this? The traffic is rather low as it is a very precise niche...</p><p>Thanks for any feedback on this</p>

<p>I am actually considering doing EXACTLY that... I have a client in real estate that has 1 main site scoring awesome for its keywords and 15 micro-sites scoring fairly well for its keywords...</p><p>Since I just took on the project, I also realized he was doing reciprocal linking with all of its micro-sites...</p><p>Anybody, like Peter, Rand or Andy, or any other great soul around, would recommend that we take all the blows now, build a powerhouse main site with 100-150+ page of content instead of the mere 30 we have now, and redirect all links while losing some SERPs in the top10 from the micro-sites? Any help is more than appreciated!</p>

<p>Way to find a way so we&#39;re not doing any duplicate content ;)</p><p>I like it: share it the most you can :)</p>

<p>Hum, I am not sure as to what 3 steps you are referring in my post. Help me there, and I&#39;ll help you in return :)</p>

<p>Well Glad... I agree but disagree ;)</p><p>In fact, Rand talked about that in another post... Some of the companies we have do not allow that, but we bring incentives for them... like some free press releases or great links for our network...</p><p>It&#39;s a givers game... some won&#39;t buy in, some will. And, honestly, I&#39;m proud of the work we do, and most of our customers are pleased with it, and it does bring me more business, which in the ends allows me to give better service to my customers because I get a bigger team...</p><p>It&#39;s just an opportunity that you can leave on the table. I don&#39;t!</p>

<p>I have not seen any problems (someone correct me if I&#39;m wrong) with using duped description tags, besides lower conversion on organic listings (you really should think about that, it&#39;s one of the few things you can impact organically, so you should plan it better than duping it). I have not seen this generate any &quot;supplemental results&quot;.</p><p>Make sure your Title tag is unique, or your doomed... Actually, you can &quot;dupe&quot; a Title tag to try to create domains collapsing (2 results on the page)... I have done that quite a lot (often with just 1 word changed) and it works very well...</p>

<p>Basically, the quick steps to get the best idea of the number of searches for every keywords you generated through multiple keywords generators are:</p><p>1. Get a list of keywords from your customers and its clientele, from your competitors and from your head</p><p>2. Spin that in 3-4 keywords generators</p><p>3. Take all of those keywords and run a crappy Adwords campaign just to measure the number of impressions for each of your keywords in your targeted area</p><p>4. Build your themes of keywords considering the potential traffic each keyword, well optimized organically, could bring</p><p>5. Pick the toughest terms, usually the ones with the most impressions, on your keypages, and make sure there is attractive content for those pages</p><p>There you go! Hope it helps :)</p>

I think this makes a lot of sense. I had never thought about it that way. Is it possible for you to explain a little bit more about how you do that, I think some of us would be glad to know :)

I do have to agree that SEO, to my eye, is alot more about focusing on the global concept of marketing a website with synergy between offline and online tactics.Our blog, Go-Ref, tries to define &quot;Referencement&quot; (which is the french word for SEO) more as a holistic approach to transmitting a message than just ranking on top of the SERPs for a few dozen keywords.That&#39;s where, as Rand said, that you draw a line between the expert and the novice, although I still consider myself far from being an expert!

<p>I have to agree with you VanGogh... The directory is a bit overkill, and I actually have never done one myself, but it is a way to offer themed webpages in return and could be useful, although I do have to agree that it brings little value to the end user...</p><p>Thanks for your criticism, it&#39;s greatly appreciated!</p>

You beat me jeez!

<p>Hey, for all Frenchies looking&nbsp;for the French translation of this, you can get it here: <a href="https://www.go-referencement.org/design-web/les-10-secrets-dun-web-designer-productif.html" rel="nofollow">10 secrets d&#39;un web designer productif</a>.</p><p>I&#39;ll be doing a post soon enough about the last few posts that we translated from SEOmoz.org to Go-Referencement.org.</p>

<p>Suggestion for Google Webmaster Central:</p><p>Please give me the option to show me more than 100 links at at&nbsp;time&nbsp;and / or allow me to scroll through pages faster... when I get a sitewide link from X website and it takes 23 pages to see the next incoming links, I think its a little bit tough on the nerves and on the click / minute ratio.</p>

<p>I&#39;ll look silly, but I think you&#39;re overacting to the fame related to SEOmoz ranking... I mean, I was 14 when he launched, now I&#39;m 13th, and I might get 12th if I post enough tonight... or I could send a quick email to my viral list to &quot;affect the results&quot;. I ain&#39;t cheating, I promise ;)</p><p>Honestly, I&#39;m here to have fun, and the most lethal / brutal I can get is Aaron Pratt with its twisted comments, although I like his attitude...</p><p>I think its a kingdom of peace here, so peace shall be maintained.</p><p>Oh and besides Rand and Oatmeal (they already abused it before launch !!!!), I got the best ratio of thumbs up / blog comments.</p><p>I love it&nbsp;- it helps to flag the best posts</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

<p>Part 2 and 3 are coming... you&#39;ll have 100+ links to read from the oldest posts :)</p>

<p>that&#39;s why I&#39;ve been doing this monk job - I was tired or searching.</p><p>&nbsp;&quot;Two thumbs up&quot; for the thumbs / personal bookmark ide</p>

<p>I will be &quot;digging&quot; through them next 1200 ones in a near future... this was Part 1 of 3 ;)</p><p>talk to you soon</p>

damn you&#39;re faster than ever tonite!

<p>great spacing creation guys, but in IE it is not perfectly aligned ;)</p><p>&nbsp;thanks</p>

Yeah but im changing the look as well - I hated how I posted it... But thanks

<p>working on it - didn&#39;t thought I&#39;d get into such trouble ;)</p><p>&nbsp;Thanks for your patience all -</p>

<p>EGOL you&#39;re just so funny ;):D</p><p>You forgot one:</p><p>The RANDIZER: Can do all the positive aspects of the 9 types of bloggers without the disavantages, and still he has time to revamp its website 3 times in a few years while reinventing himself every time. This is a tough breed!</p>

Exactly - Most of French digg-like offers REDIRECTS and no direct link power... Without even mentionning the fact they drive 50-100x less traffic for a homepage hit... The best french Platform, Scoopeo, will get you 800-1000 visits over 3 days, and that is a GREAT, global audience oriented scoop.

Éric - je suis 100% daccord avec toi! Branding at the end is a killer

Spending 2 seconds on Nielsen makes you think you in 1993. Wonder why?

Peace and love is what this blog is all about. Thanks for the fierce discussion ;) It distracted me :D

Changes in the old Yahoo system take at least 15-20x more time to accomplish in Yahoo than in Adwords (example: changing bid prices, creating an ad, moving ads, duplicating, etc.) For that, I have nothing to complain about.

Rebecca - this has happened to us for numerous customers... I even had several keywords start at 0,15$ / click ending up at 6,51$ / click because of inactivity - moved from 0,15$ to 0,61$ to 1,21$ to 3,20$ to 6,51$. WAIT... that's 45 times the initial price... Damn, inflation is tough on you sometimes. The way to approach and trick Google CPC system (although it takes a bit longer to implement) would be to split generic keywords (the one who will get tons of impressions) into separate groups, because the CTR affects SO MUCH the CPC in Adwords. As an example: You have 10 keywords (let's name them #1 to #10): #1 has 50% of the impressions and a CTR of 0,5% (generic term) #2 has 30% of the impressions and a CTR of 0,75% (still generic term) #3 through #10 all have 2,5% of the impressions each and a CTR of 15,00% (your most targeted keywords). As a smart kid, you believe that those are really going to lower your CPC... That's where you're totally wrong about it! The results of such an Ad campaign will be a nightmare ROI/CPC wise. Since 2 keywords rack up 80% of the impressions, most of your "CPC rate" will be based on the CTR of those 2 keywords, ruining your efforts of lowering the CPC to increase the ROI. This is simply rigged - As an example, I had 2 campaigns running simultaneously for the same keywords for 2 mortgage companies of the same branch... And one had the keyword "loan" in it, and the other didn't have it... and that "loan" keyword was generating 40-45% of all the impressions of my keywords... Well, believe it or not, if I removed the keyword "loan" in the 1st campaign and compare the average CPC paid for all keywords, I was paying 50% extra on the first campaign because my CTR was so low because of the "loan" keyword. Imagine... this customer of mine spends tens of thousands a month for its PPC. Should we call that a professional service, or just another slightly over the edge technique? Can someone tell me who thought about this system? Hope it helps - take care

That's it - they won! 21-20... I was the first to spam it! (congratulates himself)

Salut à toi chez Ressac! I think that the fact French Quebeckers is 30x of a smaller market than English in North America makes it very difficult for us to give great predictions considering we get very low keywords impressions for small niches and also most of the keywords tools are simply ENGLISHLINGLY rigged... On our personal side at NVI, we've seen alot of Quebeckers who search Brands related keywords (a great example is Multi-Prêts, a mortgage firm, which has so much more searches for the brand itself than all "industry related keywords" put altogether). My call for this is that verticals data for keywords will greatly vary, depending on the "demographic/behaviors" of the databases queried for each keyword tool. I'm more than willing to be a part of this though ;)

Wow Scott. Thanks for your long feedback. I agree 100% with you about hosting / antispam and other issues - and this is precisely what we are doing: we have reseller accounts for hosting, antispam, and any other thing that we can't hire people full time to manage and get a great ROI. Companies just want you to take ownership and be the first on the front line to defend their interests - and I think that is where the low hanging fruits are. And for that client, tell him 18,4k will be enough. I think he will understand how silly he is ;) Great comment again - thanks!

No - I was kinda expecting that the published article would get Randvised ;) It was quite long - so thanks for keeping the essential! ++

Please, Scott, Look at the next post, and please give me your feedback!

Deserving its own post Rand? Heheh, I beat you on this one, mine is already out and is 2 pages long ;)

I agree with the biased thing, but that's where your transparency pays off; if people know you are transparent, you put your reputation at stake every time you refer a company to a customer, so it is an ethical OBLIGATION to refer them to the best company for that, no matter the kickback or the close rate.

Heheh... Why is there such thing as EVIL. :P

RAND, I'm going to give you the best advice I can (coming from my heart and from my business head as a young entrepreneur), and it's one I would really like you to consider: Although we never discussed about any sort of sales commission, if NVI just had 25% of the reputation you guys have for the niche market you are targeting and would have that kind of "HUB" you have, I would really, really, really try to keep EVERYTHING ACCESSIBLE and FREE to any visitors, which are the HEART of your business model along with the transparency, which I can say we are on the same page there. Instead, using your hub and offer some sort of a "reference service" that would earn you so much more revenues while offering 100% of your content to the HEART of your site and not move out of your unique branding niche market. I think I admire you because you are willing to share everything with everyone. I think crossing the dollar bridge with your visitors (which are more a community than visitors, to my opinion) of your site is a mistake because it is not in SEOmoz vision (well, to the vision I personnaly have of SEOmoz) to create different content for "members" and "non-members". Since your business is all about transparency, I don't think you are really monetizing it with the creation of a members / non-members area. It does not relate very well. In fact, to be honest, I was kinda expecting that I was going to give you some sort of payback for the jobs you referred to me. I think referring customers with some sort of a one timer 5% reference cost (I give 8% usually, and as much as 15-20% to my business development director) would be something clients would use, for this reason: -You share everything with everyone, so anyone asking for your referring services should/would be willing to pay 5% to have someone like you take care of finding the right person. You can even mention it on the page, people are still going to use it, especially if you say 300 people already did so... imagine 2007... probably around/over 1000. Some might want to find the right person themselves with your recommended list, but you can offer the service of choosing the right people for them - as it is what usually make it or kill it for a project: who will contribute to it. -Since you are transparent, you already are some sort of a reviewer of directly competing companies. You put your reputation at stake with this and I think this is where the monetization is: this is consulting babe, and very hot consulting not to have to find the proper person... 5% "safety bet" is a joke compared to a provider who can't deliver the proper job and you have to start all over. SEOmoz can be a wonderful "linking to great people hub company" by referring to potential customers / clients the best provider possible to help them achieve new heights. This takes some of your time and also greatly help other companies, but you don't have to worry about members / non-members stuff. I'd really like your feedback on this... Selling 19-34$ 1 timer report to thousands of people is great and totally doable (like SEOBook does), but I think the strength and value of your company relies alot more in helping customers picking the best people to work with, as you have a very deep understanding of the market right now while having a contributing / active community to feed you. That's my 2 cents and I wish you the best for 2007.

I've outsourced some work to Rand this year and he outsourced work to me on some national and local levels (some national level co-work and direct local references which generated, to NVI, 20k+ in revenues in 2006 and should turn in recurring seo/sem/smo projects of 50k+ next year). And I got the chance to have him give us the best advices I could hope to help of my client, which also greatly improved the way we build website now. I look forward using alot more of his services next year as our company expand from Canada to the US and in France in 2007. The working experience with SEOmoz was one of the best I've ever had with a friend / colleague. The beauty of SEO is really that the more we share, the stronger we will be, since most of great companies always have that "magic" to have the greatest people to stick around and build enduring greatness. NVI business model is almost an image of SEOmoz for 2006. Roughly, the numbers match one another although they are slightly lower in revenues and our salary are way higher (60% since we do development as well). I never thought that was the case!

Thanks Rand. This is super cheesy, but xmas allows such cheesiness: I have to say your are the external person of NVI who had the most influence on our existing business model and the way we approach web marketing as a whole. Finding your blog was like finally finding somewhere you always felt you had to find but wouldn't believe it really exist. Having the chance to contribute to it was just gravvy and a unique opportunity. Thanks for this awesome year - and I look forward posting more and more blog entries as 2007 kicks in. And make sure you note Montreal to your 2007 agenda! Say hi to Mystery Guest and Gillian for me, and happy xmas to all of your family

Great story - I had seen keycompete yesterday and was wondering how they were managing to do that. Rebecca, I'm transfering that over to Sarah at NVI - she will give it a ride too~

Yeah you're right... It was NEW to me ;)

This is a tough one for you Aaron (and I really don't know you well, so excuse my frenchy impoliteness): Why are you always playing the devil's advocate on every blog post I see on SEOmoz and SEObook... I mean, it just feels you bash everything ;) I still love you, don't worry.

Well, if you include popcorn, a coke and a sour patch candy, you are at least at 50$ / couple at the theater... WHAT A BARGAIN :D

I'll have a chat with Rand about all of this. Thanks for all your replies, didn't think it would arise that much!

Hey Aaron, please accuse me, don't accuse Rand, I didn't have his "ok" on this. Although I really like the charity thing that we could do on our own! Let's do a pixelotto for charity but with a nicer concept! P.S. Rand: Do you still love me?

2 points granted for the inevitable rjonesx ;) Thanks - good feedback

I have to agree with you here. The all beautiful contest could turn out to be a antiblackhat contest.

You got a point! But whoever wants it the most can pay for it and we'll give the money to the charity cause.

Just thought I'd be funny to work on a project that all the community of SEOmoz can participate and learn through it; I think it would be interesting to do some sort of a sandbox test study with all competing sites + ours (since they will all be new domains launching on January 15th 2007), and to look at statistics by looking closely at the top20 or top50 contendors on a weekly basis and seeing if any of the sites get sandboxed. Just my 2 cents :D

I will definitely create some sort of "Golden Rules to apply" to ensure we pull this through!

And I wouldn't mind at all doing so Joost! Then it's easier to have it sold if the charity group don't want the car!

Do you think we can pull this out? I think so!

I plan on launching a public petition to force SEOmoz to write it and spell their brand "seoMOZ". I mean yes, since MOZ is more personal and related to their company, I recommend the petition forces them to switch to seoMOZ, ending the confusion.

And just so you know Cailean, I haven't succeeded in getting one ad to display for a Sympatico user out of the 10-12 IPs we've tested in different cities. Another example is Montreal stockmarket building (Tour de la Bourse of Montreal). It has more than 3 000 people in it, and I can't get the ads to show to them, no matter if I select Quebec, Ontario or Canada. Maybe they're IPs are from New York ;)

Hey Ghoti - Nice post. I think you know a little bit more than I do on how all of this GeoTargeting works, but keep in mind we have tried this scenario in all top5 major cities of Quebec province, and it always lead to the same results. Also, when I toggle Ontario with my French keywords, I get a 50-60% Impressions extra, which makes me think this issue isn't solved. And, just for your information, this has been going on for more than 6 months... P.S. Can you explain the what PTR means and maybe give a more detailed explanation of what you say? I think this would be a great post, or at least help me and the community deal better with this issue! Thanks

Hey Rand - if you want to work together on this project, I might be interested. I do need some links... + it's true Web Ceo is kinda slow with huge systems! ttys

I signed up - emailed both of you with 3 potential website. Contact me asap - I want to be in!!! gbouchard at nvisolutions dot com

100% agreed... been there done that... WASTE OF TIME!

I haven't read other comments so sorry, but an MBA here, in Montreal (Canada), would mean absolutely nothing to our SEO field. If you had done a e-commerce master or something similar, that'd be an awesome killer! And come study here at HEC; you'll learn French (so you'll cover North America) + the classes are really really cheap + you can work for SEOmoz at NVI offices ;) Think about it... I mean... really (no offense rand!)

Hey Tom! Main points we've learned through the process: 1- uploading module needs to be redone completely and optimized for massive upload / download. We hired extreme programmers to correct the situation and offer a more stable / viable solution for all users. 2- although we already knew it and were about to do a newer / bolder setup, we need a robust server structure to be able to server thousands of downloads simultaneously. Some great folks just got hired to get us the network we need! 3- as Rand said, the goal wasn't to monetize with AdSense; ads are there right now more as a "meanwhile we get something that really fits our needs"... maybe Federated Media when we get enough visitors 4- bandwidth stability: we are considering switching from CoGent to Cachefly or another similar company to ensure a more stable environment 5- last lesson: be cautious about what you do in early versions; you can get good / bad press pretty quick!

Yeah I know, I got 2 customers in France and it is ridiculous: PPC are at 0,05 - 0,10$ / average, like 10x cheaper than here, most SEO are using tactics that are old fashioned, and the biggest brands do not care. The only company that is doing a great job at SEO is BRIOURDE INTERNET; they score first on the keyword "Référencement" (translation of SEO in French). Those guys have hounds of links and huge platforms... but guess what... I'm going after them in a couple months ;)

Hey Kilroy. I used www.google.com... I agree that various testings (french on google.ca, direct on google.fr, french on google.fr and direct on google.ca will deliver other results, but google.com tells me a generic idea of how I'm scoring through most of those French Google (.be also and others). Basically, what matters to me is google.com and google.ca since many people in North America use google.ca or google.com (even if they force a redirect on google.ca when you type in google.com when you're in Canada) "Création site web" and "Création web" and also "création site internet" = we are on the first page of Google and yeah, we're looking at those but not as much because I've noticed that French from France use more "Création" and French from Quebec use more "Conception" as a generic term. And it's normal French are mainly there since France = 25 times more people / firms than in Quebec :D

Bookworm: Invite me! I have heard of this but haven't been to any yet! And yes, NVI has been competing for those words with white hat techniques since 9 months now... and I want to be 1st legitally speaking, so I get somehow upset when low-skill cheating is used and still work. P.S. I'm not saying black hat is bad, just saying abuse of search engine can be frustrating sometimes ;)

OK Rand, here's the deal: let's merge NVI and SEOMoz, I'll do the dev and generic SEO, you'll do all the magic, I'll take care of East Coast and Europe, you of West Coast and Asia, we'll have 2 offices, and then we can become the next leading multimedia company in the world.

Sarah did the same here at NVI... Too hilarious to comment :D

good point. either text-ad-links operates from the GooglePlex or he is on Google VIP Guestlist (Google VIP = the websites who can do whatever they want without ever getting banned)

I've been trying it for a while now and I can tell that if you do those kind of maneuvers on a website that already have at least some basic link love and some different anchor text pointing to various pages on your site, it can dramatically increase your SERPs. I usually use them on the toughest keywords of my main page. And another tip that I could throw in is that I often look at the client competitor inbound links and try to identify the 2-3 websites that he gets most of its link from and get the same links (to balance it out). And then, I add my own white recipe so I usually end up with great results... Although I have to say that this is on steroids; it is no "lifetime warranty", but guess what, nothing is nowadays so a few hundred dollars to speed up the process gets the job done, especially when you're David against Goliath. But, let's all show respect to Rand, it will never compare to true linkbaiting ideas (and it seems like greyish seo tactics or controversial posts lead to great linkbaiting nowadays ;)

Yeah, now she's getting some backfire... :D

I have to totally agree with that. I had a great bunch of inbound links from .CA for our website, and I recently bought a paid link on www.topdesignfirms.com, and it added like 100 000 links to my MSN total (good job MSN...)... And guess what? I vanished from Sympatico.ca and went on top ranking on MSN.com for my French keywords... Should we call that stupid geotargeting? YES!

It was a real pleasure to have you here with Geraldine. Montreal has a lot to offer, and we'll make sure that we get you a full trip planned next time you pass by ;) Thanks for coming, we had a blast, and my VC's too!

Blackbeard, I think you resume it all. That's how I use it too! But for other languages, this strategy is really great because there isn't that much portals for exposure.

Tip: make sure you vote only once from your office ;) Oh well, that's why this is grey :D

Come on Chad, don't say I only use simple stuff. I like to be recognized as a complex seo guru (sarcasm). Good comment though :D

And, caveat or not Marios, whoever reads our articles knew exactly what they were going to read when they clicked on the Title (with no misleading title + a relevant description), and articles with resources to help everyone. I promote a blog which is about sharing the knowledge we have about SEO/SEM/2.0 community for free. I guess that wouldn't be the same if the blog was a poker site.

Issues with Digg is that it mostly push mainstream ideas into the 1st page...

I support Cameron general state of mind, although we need to look at a couple things here: -I think tons of articles simply don't make it to the front page because the person who wrote it isn't an authority / known among the community. Just the fact that you can advertize your own post by writing an appealing description makes it weird. -I also realized that most non-branded news hardly make it to the first page, making it difficult for SME's or personal bloggers to get any attention from those social tagging systems (and we don't even talk about results if our website isn't English based... someone made fun of me the first time I posted a French post on digg.com... I felt bad about it and didn't feel I wanted to participate in the website seeing all this hate from the digg community! -Writing a news to Digg, Scoopeo, Fuzz or any digg-like platform is all about having an attractive title. As we know, an attractive/almost misleading title (which we see very often) do help in getting on Front page -Keep in mind that even if you have your little viral marketing team, if you do write useless / poor content, people are going to "hit and run" from your site, so you won't generate any real benefit for the efforts you put into it.

I'd say businesses are never the same. They attack the same verticals, but they don't have the same niche... Every brand is unique, so there is room to work for multiple competing customers. They just have to understand that you are being transparent to all of them. Might be a little bit too philosophical, but that's how we sell it here: we share everything.

Let them follow your footsteps... I mean, if they're following you, they are <b>FOLLOWING</b> you!!! This means you never have to worry about what lies ahead, because all your competitors will be behind you looking at what you do... But by the time they realize it and start to understand how you work, you already moved to another level... This is like the virus / anti-virus war: as long as search engines will change, it doesn't matter if you share ALL OF YOUR SECRETS with everyone since those tips won't be as accurate 3 months down the road. Oh well, I would say it matters: you will get more in return if you do than if you don't. Hard to believe, but so great to live.

I say: believe in the future. First of all, you'll get your 4th "public" firm soon, so there's light at the end of the tunnel. Personally, I think this is sad. I think it has to go beyond the "pre-formatted protocol". I mean, was Internet pre-formatted? NO! My participation into the SEO-share-it-to-the-world is at an early stage, but it changed so much our way of conducting business + our vision of Internet + the kind of projects we get to work on that I couldn't think of going back to a classic web design firm. SEO/SEM/WEB 2.0 is a bridge between technology and customers. And public, open-minded, open source technology / techniques / knowledge is the key to succeed. For us, it brought us so much. Never underestimate the kickback of sharing!

And I love their page design. It's rare you get huge pictures that really mean something and that you actually read the text in the pictures... I did!

2K - You are to Finland what I am to Quebec: we think the same. Those are the 2 main issues with this great opportunity... I think that if you're a startup and don't really know a lot of advertizers from past experiences, this might be a risky solution... But hey, if you earn 10x the amount of money than with Adsense, down the road it might be worth the effort! I hope that our VC's have enough plugs to pull this one out :D

thanks. I owe you one :D

Since our project is open to the public (suggestions, comments, anything you think should be on a videoblog platform --> suggest it to me), I can say that Yodivi want the users to be paid for their energy and efforts, but accordingly. There will be some sort of a reward system, allowing you to generate points everytime someone looks at your video. With those points, you'll be able to exchange them for some goodies or certificates. We've also been thinking about offering a "pro version" where we could create some sort of marketplace where major TV companies could go there and buy some content; any kind of amateur-pro level video they think they can use for their flicks. I mean, as video becomes mainstream and TV/Internet merge together, what difference will there be between CNN and "John Smith Channel"? <b>Rich is the man who can foresee this near future</b>. We shall see.

Great post Lerosia! It's funny, our company, NVI, feels more like a school than a real business. We train businesses to earn new benefits / better ROI through Internet as a global media and "synergy provider". For SME, it seems somehow impossible to generate leads through Internet as they think the major companies are taking most of the space... This statement is false in many ways, as Internet is probably one of the last media where major companies do not tap it 95% of the revenues. Internet saved many SME's that would just have ceased to exist if they could only advertize through offline media. I'll be keeping an eye on more data for Canada in the near future. Now, my vlog post and project is keeping me really busy :D

You're right. As a matter of a fact, we've just done a website for elderly people at <a href="https://www.directalert.ca" rel="nofollow">DirectAlert</a> and there was no way I was going to force 20-25% of the population to use an horizontal nagivation bar to be able to see the website to its full extent. Also, we added some text site button into the design to help for people which have a hard time reading.

Analytics provides way more than just the resolution. Also, we are not talking about "pleasing" 70-90% of the people; those people will still be able to navigate no problem... And I do think that some "air" on the left/right side of a website (like seomoz.org) helps to focus our eyes on the content. If you want a free 3rd party, I recommend "TraceICS"; simple, slick, effective, free, and it is public!

I wouldn't jump on 1024x768 too fast unless your website requires more room. Major platform still use 800x600, and there are at least 15% people still on the 800x600. We monitor ~50 websites here, including 20 closely, and the % of 800x600 varies from 10% up to 31%. The best suggestion I could give you is to build your site in CSS and detect what resolution they have and then offer the proper design having done 2 layouts ;) But seriously, NVI is trying to stick with 800x600... Some 1024x768 websites lack content and they look terrible. My 2 cents.

It goes down to the fact that you need links which are hard to get. I've been buying a couple paid links for our website in the past weeks like www.TopDesignFirms.com. To be frankly honest, every time I pay for a link, I just feel I'm playing with the devil...I never know when I'm gonna get burned to the core. And just so you guys know, so far, Google and Yahoo were not really affected, although MSN just bashed me hard for my massive inbound link variation. We'll see ;) But heh, the website said it would bring me 1 000 000 hits so I believed it :)