SEO Question: When people talk about buying links and how they don't help you, does this mean if I were to buy a link on cnn.com it wouldn't help me. Or are they talking about the pages that have nothing but 1,000+ links?

SEO Answer: Most of the paid links on major news sites that are sold are probably discounted in Google as far as their direct effect on SEO.

Many link buyers buy from multiple sites that are obviously selling links. They further compound their problem by not doing things like mixing anchor text and not also building up a wide variety of link types.

Many link sellers sell many outbound links on the same page in a small block. Others sell links to anyone willing to buy them, perhaps even selling highly off topic.

Most people do not try to stay below the radar when buying links, and those link buys that are not below radar attract other link buyers and link selling activity. The end result is that many of the links will still be devalued.

Much like how you can compare hubs and authorities many paid links might be easy to view as a network.

Keep in mind that I do not think MSN and Yahoo! are as good at detecting paid links as Google is.

If you listen to Matt Cutts talk long enough you might want to avoid doing press releases, syndicating articles, submitting to too many directories, and buying links, but his posts are sometimes more about in an ideal world than in all actuality.

Keep in mind that all major large scale search engines sell links. Google proudly sells off topic links, links on WAREZ sites and links on sites they banned for being spam. On top of selling links in the Yahoo! Directory, for a great deal of time Yahoo!'s Yahoo! Shopping channel looked like it was one of the largest link buyers as well. You have to take their opinions and statements with a grain of salt.

Many smart link buys and marketing efforts drive direct traffic and have a viral effect to them as well, so you have to consider that something that may not provide much SEO value may still provide good value from direct traffic or social connections they create. Some of my press releases, articles, and ad buys have helped lead to further organic natural coverage. I also have recieved free secondary marketing worth thousands of dollars based on aggressive or creative ad buying techniques.

Those editorial links that may be created are hard for competing sites to reproduce, and help augment the value created in an ad spend.

One of my theories is that people are going to talk about someone or something. To the extent within my abilities I may as well make that someone be me. Exposure leads to more exposure. Keep in mind if you are doing things like buying hidden links on the Financial Times someone is going to find it.

Some link buys may also be great at hiding why you are ranking. If you are already ranking great and profitable in huge markets like online flowers, mortgages, or insurance those markets may provide enough profit margin that it may be worth buying links that you know will be discounted just to cloud up your backlink profile to make it harder for competitors to do competitive research. The Internet.com partner network does a great job of making competitive research hard.

SEO Question: Do you know of any tools that would let me check all the ranking of my site by just givin my url? I mean, I want to know where I am rank right now, even for keywords I have not intended to rank for, any ideas?

SEO Answer: Rule #1: It really only matters that you rank if people are actively searching for a topic.

Most sites probably rank for hundreds or thousands of phrases that might be searched for once a year, so it is not important just to get the data, but also look for ways to make it useful.

Log Files and Analytics Data:
Using analytics tools or log file analysis tools can help you see what are your most common search terms that drive traffic toward your site. Analytics software packages can even show you how well you are converting for various phrases.

Most analytics software programs run from $50 to $150 a month. Stuff like Omniture is far more expensive. On the low end there are free tracking scripts like SiteMeter. Google Analytics is also free, but some webmasters do not like sharing all their conversion and traffic data with Google.

Automatically cross referencing sites and rankings:
There are some tools that automate cross referencing common search terms and rankings across a wide variety of sites.

GoogSpy allows you to cross reference terms and sites. GoogSpy is free, but their data is a bit shallow and may be dated.

Companies such as HitWise and AdGooroo sample search data, but searchers that tend to participate in those tracking programs tend to skew data toward lower end surfers (missing out on much of the B2B traffic).

Value vs Perceived value:
Many top keyword lists tend to point out the same search queries to many webmasters, which creates an artificially hyper saturated markets. [Mesothelioma] is a great example of a keyword market polluted by too many unoriginal me to websites.

Quickly responding to market changes and thinking creatively to create content about whatever news is in fashion or will be in fashion will help you find more unclaimed gold than any widely promoted list of keywords.

I know what keyword phrases I want to track:
If you already know what keywords you want to check your rankings for DigitalPoint has a cool free keyword ranking monitor tool.

SEO Question: I wish I had a list of free good directories that I could auto submit to, and the paid inclusion list as two separate tools or checkboxes or something. Do you still update your directory list and do you offer anything like this?

SEO Answer: I don't update my directory list very often for a few main reasons:

1. most general directories are pure garbage

2. I believe in many ways many search algorithms are moving beyond the level of valuing many of those links since they are surrounded by many low quality outbound links, have much of their link popularity come from overlapping low trust sites, and general directories typically do not drive too much traffic.
3. the return on my time in trying to track what is generally a fairly sleazy quick buck no value add business model with maybe only a dozen or two dozen legitimate players would be better spent studying and learning other stuff
4. a few others I will mention below

Generally the auto submit it bad stuff. If you believe that there are good link vs bad link algorithms (as I do: see my review of the link spam mass research paper or my article about directories and trustrank) then listing a site next to a bunch of other spammy autosubmitted sites likely has at least as great of a chance of hurting as helping.

Also imagine that search engines get better at doing duplication detection during crawl time and look closer at the context of a link. Is it a natural pattern for many links to have the same anchor AND same description right next to them? Nope.

I use Roboform to help save time with directory submissions, but I still mix the anchor text and descriptions when I can.

Editorial Quality Votes Are Key:
Many directories list any site that has $20 to pay for submission, and thus links from those types of sites are not legitimate editorial votes of quality.

Sure everyone ends up with some spammy links, but I think it is only probably worth getting links from around 10 to 50 directories depending on your niche. Beyond that you want to look for other links that are serious votes of editorial quality.

If your site can't get those sorts of links then eventually you are going to need to change the site profile if you want to compete in Google in a competitive marketplace.

I recently interviewed Greg from BOTW (a directory owner) and he said he believe for most sites directories should only be a small part of your link profile. Directories can carry sites in uncompetitive industries, but they are typically easy links for your competitors to get, and if you ever think your industry might get competitive you should spend some time digging around elsewhere as well to do like Stuntdubl says, Balance the Link Equation.

SEO Question: Aaron, In you opinion, what is the best resource to obtain for learning how to developing landing pages? SEO Answer: An area of limited experience here, but here are my thoughts...

1. When Jason Lexell releases his landing page guide it will be good. You may want to shoot him an email and say Aaron Wall sent ya...will help motivate him to finish publishing it and I promise it will be good.

2. I have yet to read them, but I am certain the offerings from WilsonWeb
   and MarketingSherpa are good as well.

3. Future Now is good stuff for conversion marketing tips. They have a couple great books for sale and offer a free newsletter at Grok dot com.
4. Usability consultants are good. you can get a custom review at an
   exceptionally affordable rate from Usability Effect.

5. The Big Red Fez is a decent quick cheap book that may give you a few ideas.
6. Some marketers selling software and electronic information that push affiliate marketing hard have landing pages that convert well.

   Looking at the top selling Clickbank products will help you find many great sales letters / conversion techniques for different selling products at different price points.

For expensive items it may work best to capture the lead via email before selling too hard and then pound away at them with an auto-responder system.

A couple basic landing page tips:

• Be sensitive to the audiences needs with the tone of your content.

• Landing pages that seem like self help pages which fixed problems the writer also had convert well.
• People like to see pictures of other people near testimonials and the like. If you can get audio testimonials those will likely help out quite a bit.
• Limiting options by doing things like striping out site navigation can improve conversion rates.

Outside of Danny Sullivan few people have probably read and wrote about SEO as much as I have the past couple years, but I think I am going to tune it back a bit.

I like reading the feed reader maybe once or twice a week, and just get bored / burned out if I do it much more frequently than that. I also find that trying to be the first with the news ends up meaning that I end up not reading as many books and it surely crosses beyond the point of diminishing returns.

I plan to post less often, but on average it should be better or less shitty, depending on how critical you are of my posts.

Lots0, one of my true mentors in this field, recently announced he is stopping publicly discussing SEO:

I wonder why some people think that they should receive premium service when they contact a "well known SEO" out of the blue and then ask for "FREE" advice and help.

Then, if you do give them "free" advice, then they always want to argue with you about your findings and how whatever you found can not be the problem (see above posts in this thread).

Time should have a price and a value on it. You can only help people so much before it starts to be at your own expense. Want an example?

I get pissed off when I know that people who were once friends write sales letters full of sleaze and lies to sell more bullshit, even if they are hurting the people buying their products. I have not thought of how I am going to change my sales letter yet, but it says this:

I have spent thousands of dollars developing free custom made SEO tools which are better than tools other people sell for $150 to $300 - saving you way more than the price of the book.

In SEO the tools are as important as the methodology. I hold nothing back. You get access to every SEO Tool I use and all my SEO tips and tricks.

Up until the middle of December that statement was entirely true. I spent well over $10,000 dollars creating tools that I give away. I get feature requests and lots of questions, but at least personally I can create better value for me if I don't make EVERYTHING entirely open. Some ideas just don't scale. Does that make me a bad person? No. It just means I may need to rewrite my sales letter. The only thing that is pure is ignorance.

While supporting open source and helping newbies get up to gear is cool, I am nothing but an asshole if I teach people how to make 6 or 7 figures a year and then consume all my time learning how to teach the topic without stocking away a large large nest egg myself.

I am not all about money per say, but I want it to not matter. If a sleazy company sues me I want to have enough money to be able to do nothing but laugh at them. Being as opinionated and honest as I am means that likely many sleazy or dishonest companies will end up suing me throughout the next couple years.

I may start selling SEO services to high end clients soon. I may also spend a bit more time working with friends on creating content sites. So far I have only completed two content related joint ventures, and the second one was so beautiful that it well paid beyond the losses created by the first one.

EGOL recently stated that SEO has limited value for most people:

SEO by itself is not worth a pile of beans. To have an effecive website you must have more, and that "more" is content, product, salesmanship, etc. SEO has zero value without these things.

I see SEO as a single course in a larger program such as "internet marketing". At present there are very few of these programs but the importance of them is enormous to many businesses.

I have had the chance to speak at an internet marketing MBA class, and SEO was nothing more than part of a larger course. Could it be extended? Sure. But the reality is that as search technology advances, it will get better at displaying various versions of exceptionally popular or exceptionally unpopular opinions in the results. Most people will not need to learn what will eventually become the uber complex SEO field. It will become far easier to directly manipulate people rather than trying to manipulate the algorithms.

Over at Gapingvoid Hugh recently posted tell the truth and the brand builds itself and in that spirit I thought I would post why I perhaps have overinvested so much into SEO. When I first started SEO I was:

• nearly bankrupt

• unemployed
• told that I deserved to be a failure for life by the largest US employer, which even ripped up some of my work records
• spiritually empty

After a while I got another real job, and while I liked my boss and many of the co workers there I realized that the way I am programmed means that whatever I did I was going to do far beyond what most people would consider normal, and that eventually overworking myself was going to lead to an early death due to wreckless living.

Having said all that, SEO was (and perhaps still is) my escape from all of that. But it does not make sense for me to hold onto something for too long.

If I wanted to paint a more accurate picture of reality blogging has probably made me more money than being an SEO has. I still plan on regularly updating my ebook and posting to this site, but would love to shift more toward posting what I find interesting when I feel like looking instead of trying to catch almost everything and read ALL the news.

Need an example of why knowing SEO may not be as important as some of the other things we pick up along the way?

NickW ran what was my favorite SEO site. While he did he frequently posted about how bad the blogpuppy fucktwits were. He later launched another site about blogging and sold his original site. If you look at the growth of Performancing I would guess that it will probably end up being far more successful than Threadwatch was for him because there are far more bloggers than SEOs, blogging is far more viral, and they will be easier to monetize than some of the members of ThreadWatch are.

I am going to launch a few free open source beginer level SEO tools soon. I also am going to start answering many questions I get via email publicly so that I create value for myself when I answer email questions. I am not certain if I should make a separate answers feed for that or if it should be part of the original SEO Book feed.

While some of the readers will tell you that they don't want certain things sometimes the things that are quickly rejected grow to be the most popular, so answering SEO questions right in the main feed may not be adding any noise to the SEO Book brand.

Wishing you a happy-safe-warm-fun new year full of friendship and joy,
Aaron