Warning: Opinionated post which contains no web tool links, no web trend news, no amazing search marketing discoveries, and zero insight into ranking algorithms. What this post is about is the flagrant and unoriginal content that people pepper within their blog posts in order to rank for current trends and gain residual traffic.

The utopian and idealistic purpose of the internet is to deliver relevant content to those who seek it, accurately matching user query with quality content. Those who blog solely for the purpose of earning ad revenue are more often than not contributing to what the internet isn’t.

This post will in no way deter those from exploiting search trends but I hope to somewhat reiterate what’s important. The web should be our chalkboard, documenting the pursuit of knowledge and providing the most collectively accurate answers to those who seek them. Adding junk, trash, and spam to our environment seems to be an unfortunately human characteristic that not only muddies the waters of useful information but also permeates past this digital realm.

I’m tired of unoriginal content, of thoughtless spammy online fodder, and anything antithetical of the internet’s intent. I’m already an environmental advocate (as are most people these days) but how about we start greening the online world too?

We should blog to help others find useful resources, bring to light industry news, introduce new ways of thinking, and collaboratively test our theories. We should stop thinking about how we can benefit from the internet and start contributing to its positive and collective pursuit of knowledge and discovery.

UPDATE: This post was written and published about 3 years ago so the information contained within may be outdated. -Brendan 04/06/09

I knew it could be done, just really hadn’t had a stab at it yet. My inspiration came from an article today over at Mashable where Jawad Shuaib says, “my own source of income on Facebook is generated through Amazon’s affiliate marketing.” I thought, ok…let’s give this a go. Facebook doesn’t let you insert HTML or Javascript normally though the ‘Wall’ application or anywhere else really. We’ll have to go third party to find an app that’s going to let us do exactly this. Thanks to Chris Ridenour and Chris Lamping, we now have the HTML Box application (6,098 users) that essentially allows you to “display text, video, music, pictures and more with minimal HTML knowledge.” After adding this app, I then went to one of my affiliate marketing partners, added my facebook profile as a website and potential source of traffic within my affiliate profile, grabbed an advertiser’s code and pasted it in the HTML Box app. Done! I can now potentially earn some ad dollars from Facebook networking, promoting a service I believe in.

P.S. Your Facebook profile traffic will be greater the more groups and networks your involved with.

Yesterday I added one of my blog posts to the StumbleUpon network. Tagged it with ‘marketing, seo, sem, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing. I went over to my traffic stats Wordpress dashboard as I do daily and noticed that my traffic had spiked about 500%! I at first thought that something was wrong, that maybe I accidentally logged into someone else’s Wordpress account. Once I looked at the referring URL I was corrected. A single StumbleUpon submission has garnered over 600 visitors and climbing! Now I just have to fine tune my content to keep these visitors.

While the search volume for ‘search engine optimization’ has been declining since 2005 the volume for ‘search engine marketing’ has been relatively steady. I can only surmise from this data that people everywhere are becoming savvier about optimizing their websites for optimal search engine performance but that they are still in constant need of search marketing ideas, strategies, and effective campaigning. Conversely, the news volume of ‘search engine optimization’ and ‘search engine marketing’ has risen since the middle of 2003. So this seems to be telling us that the overall publication of SEO and SEM topics has continually increased yet the individual search volume has decreased. Is this telling us that searchers are becoming less interested in search engine optimization because they’re becoming savvier or since the amount of news about this topic is so prevalent that with the advent of starter pages and the proliferation of SEO/SEM sites, those interested go straight to their favorite sources for this information instead of searching for it? It’s probably a bit of both.

If the search volume for ‘search engine optimization’ is in decline then from my standpoint I’ll need to focus/blog less on topics pertaining to site optimization and more on search marketing strategies. I personally find myself leaning towards this more in my work these days anyway. If we now add social networking to the volume search we can see where overall interest is. We know that social networking is the now de facto vertical of our industry. Coupling search marketing efforts with social networking is where it’s at. We don’t really need graphs and charts to tell us as we all have our collective ears to the industry rail.

The question is…how do we leverage these trends for our clients when they sometimes can in no way really gain much traction from participation in social networks? How is an equipment leasing company going to participate it social networking? What about a septic cleaning service or someone who sells air conditioners online? Unfortunately these industries don’t really seem to have any social networking inclinations.

Choosing a random keyword phrase, I decided to play with some Google SERPs and stats therein to see if I could find any correlation. I did find something pretty interesting. Google seems to favor and rank sites based on keyword density within the URL, title, description, and keywords, and places less importance on backlink stats. If we look at weddingpaperdivas.com (ranking 1st for ‘wedding invitations’) and partypop.com (ranking 2nd for ‘wedding invitations’) we notice that partypop’s backlink numbers are significantly higher than weddingpaperdivas’ but their keyword density for ‘wedding invitations’ is less that 03%. With weddingpaperdivas’, their keyword density for ‘wedding invitations’ is just under 50%. Even though weddingpaperdivas has less backlink power, their keyword density seems to be playing a huge part in pushing them to the top of the SERPS for this particular keyword phrase.

I used the FireFox LinkChecker extension to compile some domain age and Yahoo! backlink data. I created a list of five press release outlets, 25 social bookmarking sites, and 17 social news sites. Enjoy!

Utilizing answering services is a great way to diversify your link building strategy. Most services utilize nofollows or strip content of any HTML tags before posting. However, there are some services that allow linking and even if they don’t, the traffic can be well worth it.

There are four services that I’ll talk about today but not it great detail. We’ll just get to the meat…do they allow linking or do they not. My all-time personal favorite and relatively new contender in this arena is Fluther. Fluther has a great GUI and is easy to navigate. All links can be followed and since this service is relatively new, the odds of establishing yourself as an authority within your chosen topic are pretty good. My second favorite is LinkedIn Answers. LinkedIn Answers has a great question and answers section where the links are again followable. Of course the subject matter is more career oriented but sometimes there are questions that can benefit from a response that both answers the question and helps to promote your marketing efforts. Thirdly there’s Yahoo! Answers. A massive collection of questions and answers on just about any topic. Unfortunately all links are nofollowed so you’ll just have to rely on the link juice from this service. Fourth is Say-So. Say-so is a weird little Q&A service where you can vote on an answer to a question and then add your two cents about it. All comments are stripped of any HTML but you can textually represent links resulting in a direct visit.

Recap:
Fluther: links followed
LinkedIn Answers: links followed
Yahoo! Answers: nofollow
Say-so: no links period

If anyone knows of other good answering services please let the community know!

I love little statistical services like these. Especially when they can help SEO-wise. Barry Schwartz sent us over to Techcrunch to get the skinny on the Xinu service. However by the time I arrived at Techcruch to click the Xinu link, Xinu was kaput due to high server load. Xinu creator Miquel Camps Orteza has licensed this under the Creative Commons Atribución 2.5 España License and in return for his efforts is simply asking that you buy him a coffee. Thankfully Moving Labs has offered to host Xinu Returns, which was brought to my attention this morning via Rand Fishkin’s viral marketing post over at SEOmoz. Moving Labs specializes in building web applications and has 7 interesting little apps on their site that look pretty useful.

PeekYou.com, a people search engine dedicated to finding people online, has emerged in Beta today. Apparently the site has been in stealth mode since October of 2006. Since that time PeekYou.com has successfully compiled 50 million profiles piecing together information from various social networking sites and other online outlets.

After RateMyFace.com, RateMyProfessors.com, and RateMyTeachers.com, founder Michael Hussey is aiming to create the first open source directory of every individual online.

“People searching is one of the most popular online exercises, but until now it has been a largely inefficient and often confusing experience,” said Michael Hussey, founder of PeekYou. “PeekYou is a true Web 2.0 ‘people search’ – we discover and map where people exist online, almost like writing a biography about your life on the net. In doing so, we are building the ideal engine for individuals to monitor their own online identity.”

PeekYou.com is privately funded by Duggal Dimensions, LLC. Baldev Duggal has been involved in the photo a computer imaging field for over 25 years.

Some friends of mine have created a new website called SiteCardio that allows visitors to run a free website performance check. You’re asked to enter your URL, related keywords, competing websites (optional), and email address. It generates a report calculating several different factors into your overall score like Whois information, del.icio.us links, technorati, SE specific back links, potential link fragmentation problems, etc.

Check it out and let us know what you think: SiteCardio