The game changed September 15, 2008.

As world markets came tumbling down, the future of many internet start-ups also turned to dust. The message from the financiers is clear - they will be no more money. Web watchers, such as TechCrunch, feature a deadpool of failed internet start-ups. That list is going to grow exponentially in the new year as company after company runs out of cash.

Not good.

However, history tells us that where there is chaos, there is opportunity.

After all, we’ve been here before.

Take, for example, this memo by Ron Conway, founder and managing partner of the Angel Investors LP funds who backed Google, PayPal, and more.

“….I was an active investor in 2000 when the “bubble burst” and remember it vividly and want to give you the SAME EXACT advice I gave to my portfolio company CEOs back then.I have pasted in the e-mails I sent on April 17th 2000 and May 10th 2000 and every word applies today. Unfortunately history DOES repeat itself but I hope we can learn from history and prevent the turmoil from occurring again. The message is simple. Raising capital will be much more difficult now”.

Once of the benefits of market cycles is that history often repeats itself. This allows us to learn the lessons of the past, and apply them to the present.

I’d recommend you watch this presentation by Sequoia Capital, entitled RIP:Good Times.

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn )

So the good times are over. Now what? Sequoia recommends managing spending, revising growth and earnings assumptions, to focus on quality. lower risk, and reduce debt.

In 2000, Google was still a struggling start-up. The tech bubble had just burst. One year later, hijacked jets hit the Twin Towers, sending markets, and our collective notion of global security, into a tailspin.

Yet, it was during these seemingly turbulent times that Google rose to become the powerhouse it is today.

Part of that success was due to a focus on quality, careful spending (Google never spent a lot on advertising), network effects, and failure of the competition to grasp opportunities. Everyone else was distracted. Google remained focused on building value.

Research shows that companies that spend money on marketing during a recession tend to benefit the most.

Over the years hundreds of studies have been conducted to prove companies should maintain advertising during a recession. In the 1920’s advertising executive Roland S. Vaile tracked 200 companies through the recession of 1923. He reported in the April 1927 issue of the Harvard Business Review that the biggest sales increases throughout the period were rung up by companies that advertised the most. ….The findings of six more recession studies to date by the group present formidable evidence that cutting advertising in times of economic downturns can result in both immediate and long-term negative effects on sales and profit levels. Meldrum & Fewsmith’s former Senior VP, J. Welsey Rosberg reports “ I have yet to see any study that proves timidity is the route to success. Studies consistently have proven that companies that have the intelligence and guts to maintain or increase their overall marketing and advertising efforts in times of business downturns will get the edge on their timid competitors.

Marketing is an investment, not just an expense. And just like in the stock market, that investment can pay the biggest dividends when assets are under-priced, because everyone else is selling, not buying.

Let’s look at a few features of a down market that you can turn to your advantage.

Down Market = Cheaper Ads

Advertising markets are cracking. One of the first casualties in an economic downturn is marketing spend. Not great if you sell advertising, but great if you buy it.

In down markets, you can get a lot more advertising reach for a lot less money than during boom times.If your strategy involves building brand awareness, then now might be a good time focus on this aspect. Being visible creates a sense of familiarity, and that’s much easier to do when your competition isn’t flooding the channel with noise.

Note: A lot of advertising spend will shift from traditional channels to the internet as people seek value.

We forecast that the Internet advertising market will continue to expand at a strong pace in the immediate future (with a predicted 31.4% increase in expenditure in the UK in 2008), and that it will experience a less steep but steady momentum thereafter, to 2012.

Fight In Short Bursts

One idea, often used by offline marketers on television and radio, is to bombard an advertising channel with short bursts of intensive advertising and then go off the air completely for a few weeks. It is a lot cheaper than maintaining a constant advertising presence, and with fewer advertisers to compete with, you costs should be lower, and your impact higher.

It’s a high impact strategy that will fit well with sites looking to build brand.

Follow Warren Buffett

Warren Buffet is the worlds most successful investor. And what is Buffett doing at the moment?

He’s buying assets while everyone else is selling.

Might now be a good time to buy up websites, too?

Competitors Cutting Costs And Losing Focus

One of the problems during the 1930s depression was that government cut spending. When government started spending again, the economy picked up. Governments have learned from this mistake, which is why we’re seeing government making cash injections.

It’s more complex that this, but the takeaway point here is that cutting costs and losing focus on the goal might also ensure you never reach it. Going into hands-off cruise mode could be costly.

If you have the cash, then sowing the seeds of growth now, whilst everyone else is navel gazing and slashing their costs, makes it hard for them to catch up with you again when they do start spending.

Diversify Marketing Spend

Take a strategic approach. Spending aggressively in a down market doesn’t mean throwing your money at everything.

In this article, Recession Marketing, Amanda Stock outlines how you can diversify within a search marketing strategy:

It is also important to take a strategic approach when you diversify your marketing budget. For example, if you are currently investing the majority of your marketing efforts in a Pay-Per-Click campaign, you may want to allocated half of that budget to an SEO campaign which, in the long term, can increase the return on investment and decrease dependency on paid search.

Key Tips: Advertisers with a solid PPC track-record have an incredible advantage for venturing into organic search (SEO) because the PPC data such as which keywords converted best and which led to the highest volume of sales or average ticket price can now be a major factor in prioritizing the SEO targets. Since SEO is long term you want to be absolutely sure you’re targeting the right keywords long before you reach the first page for them.

Build Network Effect Advantages Into Your Work

But what if you’re cash strapped?

Try to build network effects into your strategy. A network effect is the effect one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other users. An example is the telephone. The more people who own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner. Similarly, auction and social network sites become more valuable the more people use them.

One marketing advantage of a network effect is good word of mouth. Word of mouth is the cheapest and most effective form of marketing there is. Again, because the channels are quieter during a down market, chances are you’ll be heard more easily if you’re one of the few outfits making noise.

In this article on Forbes, Roelof Botha, the venture capitalist who backed PayPal & YouTube, advocates taking word of mouth one step further, using viral strategies to boost consumer adoption:

A truly viral business is “like a disease,” says Botha. “It needs to be transmitted from one person to another”–and the other person has to catch it. Once the next person catches it, he or she becomes a carrier too. Here are some good examples:

– PayPal. If Bob sends Mary $25, Mary has to join PayPal in order to claim her money.

– Evite. John e-mails you an invitation to his bachelor party but in order to read the details such as when and where, and to RSVP, you have to log onto Evite. E-card vendors work the same way.

– Plaxo. A friend or business associate sends you an e-mail asking you to update your contact information. Once you log onto Plaxo to correct your phone number, you’ve caught the virus. Other services such as Birthday Alarm use the same strategy.

– Skype. In the beginning, the only way you could make a free phone call over Skype’s Internet voice service was if the person you were calling was also a Skype member.

PayPal & YouTube also made it a strategy to be part of other networks. In so doing, they grabbed those networks audience share, and without the need to go into partnership.

eBay had an open software platform, which meant sellers could insert their own HTML code such as icons and visitor counters onto their auction pages. So PayPal built a tiny piece of code that allowed eBay merchants to include a PayPal payment button. By the time eBay got around to buying its own payment service, PayPal had infiltrated its business so deeply that eBay’s customers wouldn’t hear of using anything else….YouTube similarly benefited by becoming an insidious element on MySpace and other social networks and blogs.

Focus On Quality

Word of mouth comes about when you focus on being remarkable.

Learn the lesson of Google and PayPal, both of whom flourished during economic downturns. Provide a quality service, and people will use it, and talk about it.

Go back to basics. What is your value proposition? It needs to be compelling. When people are short of cash, they focus their spending on the the essentials, not the frivolous. Are you solving a real problem for people? Do you really know your customer? Ask not what they want, ask what do they need.

Focus On Essentials And Value

People who are worried about where their next dollar is coming from are going to be hesitant about signing up for expensive items, or long term deals. If you’re selling an essential service or product, as opposed to a desirable product, you’re going to find it easier. When the buyer has less discretionary spend, they’re unlikely to be talked into non-essential deals.

Instead, focus on building relationships. This can be as simple as communicating well, showing integrity, and being passionate about what you do. When people do have more money to spend in the future, they’ll remember you.

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I couldn’t pick three, so I went with four winners. I learned a lot from the hundred or so comments that came in, and I am busy preparing for the show next week. It was hard to narrow them down, but I had to. If you won, congrats! I’ll…



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One of the criticisms of scientists, engineers, and programmers has always been just because you can build something, doesn’t mean you should. While the Ralph Lauren iPhone app is much more benign than any piece of industrial or military hardware, it is equally as pointless.
The screen shot on the left is of the new […]
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When initially doing keyword research and competition research we’re looking at the numbers. We want to know how much traffic potential the keyword has, how much competition it has, what the AdSense CPC is if we’re doing AdSense but rarely do people think ahead to the content creation part. Some keywords are naturally more difficult […]
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Google will allow Gambling keywords on UK AdWords from Tomorrow.

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aimClear Blog’s homepage Toolbar PR ticked from PR5 to PR4 overnight. Also, TB PR seems to be distributed with more power & deeper within the blog. Imagine that… I happened to be reading Sphinn about Matt Cutt’s blog comment on the impending update, checked aimClear and noted the change. Upon a cursory glance several other […]
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Just a quick note to let you know that Chris Pearson and I (ok… Chris) has added significant new power and flexibility to the Thesis Theme for WordPress. There’s also a special offer that runs through the weekend (at least you can thank me for that).
Here’s what’s new with this latest update to Thesis (which […]
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Today’s search engine marketing news and opinion: Landing Page Optimization — Insource or Outsource?; Rehabilitating SEO; Google AdWords Releases New Editor Guide; and more.
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A Google Groups thread asks if Google can crawl and index UTF-8 encoded URLs. The quick answer is yes, Google can crawl and index these URLs.

Google’s JohnMu provided a link to the Google search results as proof, showing Google indexed and displayed the results:

John explains that in some cases Google won’t crawl them. He recommends “that you
also use escaped URLs in your links, to make sure that your site is compatible with older browsers that don’t understand straight UTF-8 URLs.”

John added that he has seen issues with Google when “the URL uses non-ASCII characters but the server is expecting an encoding other than UTF-8.”

There are plenty of URL encoding tools you can use to properly link to UTF-8 encoded URLs.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

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With banks struggling with rising mortgage and credit card defaults it is not a big surprise that some of them have turned to social networks as a way to attract attract younger consumers.
Information Week recently mentioned how Netherlands-based bank ING Direct has created their own social networking site called  MoveOutMoveUp.com , aimed at first-time homebuyers, […]
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Last week Giovanni Gallucci sent me a link to Viewzi which has some interesting search UI’s that I think advanced users might actually use. Unlike Cuil I don’t think they spent 30 million and ended up with a product that thinks the best picture for me is a picture of Elliot Spitzer.

One of the search […]
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Never has the opinion of the individual been as powerful as it is today. One negative blog post or product review can spread online in a flash and change the direction of a company. Reputation management isn’t just for big companies and brands — it

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Posted by MattRoberts

My team and I have spent a lot of time, like most of the industry, doing the ‘hard yards’ finding potential back links to our clients’ sites. We use some great tools. These include:

• The Juicy Link Finder: http://www.seomoz.org/link-finder
• Yahoo Site Explorer: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
• Backlink Watch: http://www.backlinkwatch.com/
• Link Hound: http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php
• Web CEO: http://www.webceo.com/online-promotion-new/link-exchange-tool.htm

I would be really interested to know whether anyone else has found better tools than these?

But knowing where your competitors are getting their links from, looking through hundreds of sites, and finding an angle to get what you want is very very time consuming. This has led many SEO teams to outsource this part of the link building mix to countries where manpower is cheaper.

The Paid For’s

If the budgets there, there are lots of ways to supplement the ‘hard yard’ links with paid for links. They include:

Blog post link providers:

• Pay Per Post: http://payperpost.com/
• Blogvertise: http://www.blogsvertise.com/
• Sponsored Reviews: http://www.sponsoredreviews.com/
• Buy Blog Review: http://www.buyblogreviews.com/

Text Link providers:

• Text Link Ads: http://www.text-link-ads.com/
• Link Worth: http://www.linkworth.com/
• Link Adage: http://www.linkadage.com/
• Back Links: http://www.backlinks.com/

And, of course, Direct To Source. Lots of bloggers are happy to quote you for providing you with posts or links from within their site.

Sustainability & Nature

Throwing money at the problem is great, but it is expensive to sustain.  It is also risky if you do it in a clumsy way, as I strongly believe Google’s ability to spot suspicious unnatural linking patterns is getting better all the time. For example:

1. PageRank Range - What is the ‘normal’ PageRank distribution of links to a domain, meaning how many PR 0, 1, 2, 3 ,4 , 5, etc. links would a site get naturally? Too many PR 5’s would get picked up, in my opinion. I read a research document Yahoo published that said they know what normal is and can detect link spammers.
2. Growth Rate - What is natural link growth? We know too many, too quick can hurt you.
3. Target Page Distribution - What is natural link target distribution between optimised pages, the homepage, and other relevant pages?
4. Anchor Spread – What is the natural spread of anchors used (the URL to keyword and the keyword anchor spread)? If the only keyword going to your site is ‘Credit Card’ plus a handful of others, surely this raises suspicion.

So what’s a more evolved approach?

It has been talked about for a while but never really got there, but I think PR and SEO are beginning to enter a mash-up phase. PR agencies distribute great press releases with no thought to anchor text. SEO companies distribute average content with no thought to REAL PR. How we form closer bonds between these two disciplines is really key for me whilst taking into account the ‘what is natural’ part of the process.

I think this also feeds into on-site optimisation becoming more important. A site needs great content that is worth linking to. Call it link bait if you like, I call it plain useful. We’re increasingly finding that good internal linking strategies deliver us increasingly good results with much lighter weight linking. Has anyone else noticed this? Is the industry going full circle – onsite becoming as important as off-site?

A great way to check out how your internal links are structured is to use Xenu’s Link Sleuth: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html . If you look at your SEO optimised pages and what proportion of internal links are going to them, you more often than not find them being of relatively low importance to the site as a whole.

Whilst Google, the SEO industry, and our techniques evolve we have to get our clients ROI positive, which may mean using a wide portfolio or techniques.  But aspiring to work smarter and more naturally is a good objective worth focusing a decent amount of your brain power on.

Comments and shared know-how are welcome!

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Crime scene by Cati Kaoe. Web designers & developers often focus on web standards, table-less layouts or CSS effects like styled lists or sidebars e.g. All these things are perfectly OK unless they are executed at the expense of findability.
Yes, findability is the orphan of the web design industry and thus often forgotten, overlooked […]
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Today’s search engine marketing news and opinion: Creative Messaging in a Direct Response World; SEO Basics: Effective Iterative Keyword Research in 2008; Local Advertisers Shifting Dollars to Internet; and more.
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Today’s search engine marketing news and opinion: Google Mobile Advertising on the Content Network; SEO Baseline: U.S. Presidential Election 2008; Agency Leadership — Imparting Your Vision; and more.
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Posted by mystery_guest

Intro from Rand: Despite Mystery Guest having misgivings about contributing to SEOmoz, I was able (after months of pitiful pleading) to cajole her into one more post. This is a topic close to my heart as well, and one that doesn’t deserve to be buried just because it’s uncomfortable.

I kind of hate reddit.

And yet, I keep visiting, in hopes that things will improve. But it’s like pushing a bowling ball uphill with a feather. It’s not happening. Reddit is not for me. It’s sexist and hateful. It’s becoming more and more apparent each day – from the photo montage of Russian school girls that makes the front page, to the commenters who feel that the word “cunt” is an acceptable term for a woman they dislike.

I don’t submit stories. Maybe that’s part of the problem. But honestly, if I did submit women-friendly stories, I don’t think they’d get modded up. Several months back someone posted a photo essay about a young girl undergoing genital mutilation. Most of the commenters talked about how it wasn’t that big a deal – how  it’s the same thing as a man getting circumsized. They called out the so-called hypocrisy of many of the members of reddit’s female community (myself included) for getting upset about “female circumcision” but not male circumcision.

Needless to say, I didn’t leave the conversation feeling happy. I didn’t leave it feeling that I should return, either. I left it thinking that a women’s voice and opinions are not welcome on reddit. It’s something I’ve felt time and again.

But, for reasons that still escape me (I’m stubborn? I refuse to look for other sites that offer good aggregations of content? I think that all social media sites will pose the same problem?) I did return to reddit, and I encountered more of the same. Here’s a lovely interaction I had, regarding an article that, most unusually, pertained to women’s issues. The comments however, were not so enlightening:

rio517:

She can’t come out and say "In short, learn to control your emotions."

In my experience, most women hate being told their being overly emotional. My mom was 50 before she finally accepted that women are more emotional than men.

mystery_guest:

Christ, could you be more offensive? Maybe we just all had our periods that day. Yeah. That must have been it.

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the most mature response I could come up with. But my comments don’t actually do anything.  They either get buried, or ridiculed, or ignored. I’m not the only one this happens to – whether you express a pro-woman viewpoint, or heck – if you just are a woman you have to deal with negativity. Some female redditers even lament picking usernames that aren’t gender neutral as the harassment and comments are so bad (apparently, she has thicker skin that I do, and feels that most of the users on reddit are cool. I respectfully disagree). Even attempts to open up a dialog about the sexism on reddit are met with sexist comments. Some have even admitted to avoiding comments fields on posts that could lead to a feminist discussion, because those threads are the most upsetting.

I even tried to take a cue from the guys – I figured, I can objectify men as well as they can women. And if I can’t beat them, I might as well join them. So, after seeing submission after submission of some scantily clad starlet on the homepage, and reading the comments about what some redditers would hypothetically do to them should the restraining orders even get lifted, I decided to try for myself.  – I responded to a posted image of Matt Damon with “I’d still hit it.” Clearly, I confused the locals. And the comments are only half of the problem.

As I noted earlier, the content isn’t women friendly, either. Check out some of the quality submissions that have been voted up recently:

• Yay! A bunch of Russian girls in short dresses hugging each other. (I commented here. It didn’t go over so well.)
• Clearly, this is less the article itself and more the way it’s framed in the submission title. I wonder if the submitter was really close to writing: BIRD MITES CRAWL OUT OF WOMAN’S VAGINA!.  
• The content itself isn’t too bad on this, but it quickly turned into a “women are materialistic whores” discussion in the comment thread.
• Yes, these girls are awful. How this is at all positive and relevant is beyond me. (That didn’t stop me from commenting, of course.)
• As a woman, I often wonder when the opportunity will arise for me to put on a skimpy bikini and hug some guy at what is apparently computer camp.

If this is the sort of thing that’s popular, I don’t think that stories that interest me are going to go over well with the rest of the reddit community. Frankly, I have neither the energy nor the thick skin to submit women-friendly stories where they aren’t wanted. It’s impossible to change a broken system from within the framework. It’s impossible to fix a broken reddit from within reddit itself. And honestly – if the community doesn’t want it, what right do I (or does anyone else have) to force enlightenment upon them?

Besides, to be fair, even if we somehow managed to clean up reddit, there would still be other sexist sites out there. Even SEOmoz, which strives to create an open, friendly community, has the occasional hiccup - whether it’s a comment that could be offensive or an avatar that objectifies women. But those instances are few and far between, and often quite funny – they don’t dominate the entire landscape to create a hostile environment towards women. And I’m pretty sure that, unlike reddit, if I voiced serious objection to something on this site (which I am not doing, by the way), it wouldn’t be met with the hostility or harassment that I’ve encountered on reddit. (By the way, I want to make two things clear in citing those examples: one, is that I love Danny Dover. He’s like, my favorite intern ever. Way cooler than the fat kid on Letterman. And two, while I think the photo that Rishil posted of herself is a little provocative, it’s her own choice. I mean, that’s what feminism is about, right? Besides that, Rishil is awesome, too, and totally changed her avatar to Dale Midkiff for a day at my request. Plus, she’s newly single, so I suggest all of you send her a personal message, since she explicitly said her turns ons are WOW enthusiasts and SEOs who wear free conference t-shirts.)

Even the search engine themselves aren’t infallible. A few of you might remember how, last year, I jokingly complained to Rand that a search for Vanessa’s name on Yahoo! also yielded the suggested search phrase “Vanessa Fox Fishkin.” Rand mentioned it on the blog (and how I had teased him about it) and Yahoo’s blog issued an apology to Rand, but not to Vanessa. I think that simple act actually spoke volumes. Essentially, Vanessa and Rand were in the same boat but only Rand received an apology. Granted, the whole thing was a joke, but still.

So what the heck can be done? If even well-meaning and women-friendly sites end up being sort of sexist, are women who use the internet just … screwed? (See? I can do it too.) Is the internet inherently sexist? Rand asked me this today and I wasn’t sure how to answer. I don’t know if it’s a blanket statement that I can make – clearly some of it is, and some of it isn’t. If I were to look at all the sites out there, I’d probably find more anti-women material than pro-women. But that’s probably true of most media. More importantly, if the web is sexist, what am I going to do about it? I’m certainly not going to stop going online. It’s not like there’s another internet that I can choose as opposed to this one.  One solution, of course, is start visiting women-friendly sites, to spend my time and money in places where I feel I’m treated fairly.

Interestingly, Rand and I had been talking about a women’s alternative to reddit a few months back – we were actually considering embarking on the project together. Of course, Lorna Sullivan beat me to it by about, oh, a year – she launched Boudica.com, a social networking site for women this week. Clearly it’s stating that the time has come. And I couldn’t be happier.

Lorna mentioned to me that the site wasn’t necessarily feminist but rather that it was women-friendly. (I see them as one and the same, but there’s such a stigma against feminism that I think a lot of people don’t like to use the term. Which, if you think about it, really sucks.) Considering how overtly hostile to women other sites are, I’d say that a site that was even slightly women-friendly, or for that matter, gender-neutral, is going to land on the list of feminist websites simply by comparison.

So, it’s a start. And opening up a dialogue about the issue itself is yet another way to combat sexism on the web and social media sites. As for reddit, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll finally throw in the towel, put down my feather, and let the bowling ball roll back down the hill. Then again, I really don’t think I should let them get away with crap like this.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

A couple months ago we reported on an SEOMoz post that was debated at Sphinn on the topic of which anchor text counts? Is it only the first anchor text on the page linking to a specific URL or is it all the anchor texts that are linking to that specific URL count.

Let me explain. Let’s say I first link to my Big Blue Pineapple Chair with the anchor text Big Blue Pineapple Chair and then the second time I link to that exact URL, I use the anchor text Small Red Cantaloupe Chair, would Google count the second link? Hmm, so far, it doesn’t seem that way - but that was not a full or thorough test.

A new Sphinn discussion revolves around a post named Debunked: Only The 1st Anchor Text Counts With Google. The discussion basically agrees that the this theory was not debunked and requires more testing. There are several SEOs currently testing the first-anchor text theory and I will keep you posted on those findings as they come out.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Interesting note from eMarketer that they are downward revising their US social network ad spending projections for 2008. They reduced their estimate of ad spend from $1.6 billion to $1.4 billion.
They also reduced their projections going forward. Their crystal ball projects that 2012 social networks ad spending to be $2.6 billion down from $2.7 billion.

The […]
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.

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SEO 2.0 is by now known as the best possible combination of using search, social media and blogging to achieve prominence online. Now how does Twitter microblogging fit in there? In the last two weeks I tried to use Twitter in a SEO 2.0 manner that means both to the advantage of the community/ medium […]
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.

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