It never gets any easier.

Competition, that is.

Competition for customers.  Competition for search-engine return position.  Competition for clickthroughs. Competition for the most important item of all, dollars.

If you’re a local or regional-based professional, tradesperson or retailer who depends on your website to help generate business, competition has just gotten tougher thanks to Google’s decision to increase the number of listings shown in each Local OneBox from two or three to nine or ten.

The Local OneBox, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the mini Google Map with names and locations of businesses that pops up in the number one position on an ever-increasing number of returns for search queries which specify a geographic location — “Chicago plumbing”, for example.

What makes the Local OneBox particularly tough competition for brick-and-mortar businesspeople with a strong web presence is the bizarre fact that companies don’t need a website to get in it.  Thanks to the Local OneBox, a “Chicago plumber” without a single web page or even an email addy can get his name, address, phone number and a map to his location listed at the top of Google’s so-called natural returns ahead of dozens of competitors with robust sites detailing what services they offer, what rates they charge and other extremely useful and (to steal one of Google’s favorite words) relevant factoids.

Only Google can explain why — among the more than 100 factors it claims go into determining search-engine return positions — having a Yellow Pages listing is better than having a Yellow Pages listing and a website.  But the fact is that it must be:  Many businesses with OneBox (aka “Ten Pack”) listings are in the phone book, but not on the web.

There are at least two theories about this.  One states that Google is trying to drive traffic to Google Maps by encouraging people to click the OneBox map to see a bigger image that will steer them to the listed businesses more precisely.  The other says the OneBox expansion (a recent search for “Chicago plumbers” found paid listings and the OneBox covering over half the opening screen) is a tacky attempt to make returns less useful and force webmasters to buy more Adwords.

Whatever the reason, and we should stress that we have no evidence that either of the two theories cited above are either true or untrue, the OneBox Ten Pack is a reality and so is the growing importance of local search.

How important?  According to respected web metrics analysts like the Kelsey Group and comScore, between 15 and 20 percent of all search queries now include geographic modifiers such as city, state, region (i.e. Southern California), zip code, or area code.  In Google terms, that percentage translates to more than 1.5 billion searches a month.  And in much of the U.S., the first return those 1.5 billion searchers will see is OnePage.

The upshot of all this is obvious: If you have a business that relies on local customers, you should do everything you can to optimize your site to either get into the OneBox or onto the return list as close to it as possible.

First, we would suggest making sure your Yellow Pages listing is under the most likely web search term for your business.  Logic — if such a concept is ever applicable to the black art of SEO — says that when Googlebot is looking at the Yellow Pages to decide which “Chicago plumbers” to reward with a OneBox position, a listing under “plumbers” would rank ahead of one under “plumbing contractors.” (The number one OneBox return for “Chicago plumbers,” falls to number 8 in the “plumbing contractor” OneBox.)

Also, there is some circumstantial evidence that OneBox is biased toward urban businesses.  If you’re on Chicago’s far north side, for example, you might consider buying a one-line listing in the downtown directory if the price is right.

(Note: We have tried, and utterly failed, to determine whether businesses which buy listings in unofficial Yellow Page directories get more OneBox play than those which only list in their local phone company’s book.)

Next, pay attention to the amount of localization on your site, particularly your home page.  Six of the ten OnePage listees on our recent (late-April 2008) search for “Chicago plumbers” did have websites.  Clearly, there must have been something that separated them from the dozens of other Chicago plumbers with both phone numbers and websites.

Again, we don’t pretend to know what Google is looking for, but these are all things that can’t hurt and may help.

– Change phrases like “expert plumbing services since 1988″ to “expert Chicago and Chicagoland (insert your city name here) plumbing services since 1988.”

– List your full address, including your zip code, on your home page.

– List your full phone number, including area code, on your home page.

– Make sure your site’s metatags — keywords, title and description — contain geographic descriptors.

– Expand the geographic references in your text.  For example, “one-hour drain clearing throughout the North Side” could become “one-hour drain clearing throughout the Chicago North Side including North Town, etc. etc.” (Just to prove OnePage hasn’t yet conquered the universe, a search for “Chicago North Town Plumbers” produced only natural returns.)

Last, but definitely not least, if you haven’t already done so, localize your links.  Add more local businesses and advise them to include the fact that they are local in their anchor text.  To go back to our plumbing example … a reciprocal link from:

A1 Contracting
We stay wired for Chicago

is better than:

A1 Contractor
We stay wired for you

It also goes without saying that you should include localization in all your anchor text.

Even better, consider using LinkManager’s exclusive LinkBlog’s to add references to the cities and communities you service and keywords that might help your localization efforts.  Such as: “Chicago’s oldest and most reliable plumbers, serving all Chicagoland, including downtown, the near north side, south Chicago and the Chicago suburbs. We also sell fixtures, click here for a map to our showroom.”

(With LinkBlogs you can easily offer a map just like Google does.)

Unlike the God of all creation, Google — at least as far as any of us know — does not watch every sparrow. But it does weigh, analyze and tabulate every metatag, body copy and link word. To improve your odds of getting a fair share of hits from those 1.5 billion monthly geographic searches, you’re well advised to localize, localize and localize some more.

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Today’s subject is a repellent linking strategy that’s being pimped around a few dark and dingy SEO hangouts.

The scenario starts reasonably enough with this:  You don’t just want anyone linking into your site, you want the right kind of site with the right type of link.

So far, so good.  As we’ve been saying endlessly for over ten years, the last thing you want is “just anyone” linking to your site.  What you want — the only links you want — are with high-quality, relevant sites.

But wait, there’s more.  The same seriously confused and vague, self-proclaimed SEO expert who made the above rational statement thae spins off into the twilight zone by telling webmasters not to try and get “the right kind of site with the right type of link” through reciprocation.

No, no, this expert and her fellow cultists say, reciprocation is dead … the only good links are back links which — according to this expert — you can easily get by Googling your top keyword and ordering or begging the operators of the first 100 returned sites to link to your site.

“You’ll want,” she says, “to get as many of these to link to you as possible.”

Unfortunately, for readers of this particular pundit’s blog, you apparently have to sign up for her hyper-dollar consulting services before you’re allowed to ask the obvious question: How?

How do you get a site which shows up in the first 20, 30 or 50 returns for any popular keyword to link to you without offering them anything beyond “thanks?”

Why should they link to you without getting a reciprocal link in return?

Think about this carefully, because everyone peddling the BS that reciprocal linking is dead, that reciprocal links “cancel each other out” is urinating up a rope and trying to convince you to void your bladder into the wind.

How dare we say that so many SEO voodoo gurus are full of it?

For one thing, we’re not accusing them of being full of anything except self-serving greed. They know very well that people utterly consumed with FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) are the most likely customers for their multi-hundred-dollar-an-hour “services.”  So they use their blogs, conference panel appearances, newsletters and websites to spread as much disinformation and FUD as possible.

We also quite confidently assert that these conceited idiots are full of it because their house-of-card arguments against respectable, ethical, relevant reciprocal linking collapse of their own weight under even cursory examination.

Take the “you don’t need to offer reciprocation to get great links” assertion.

Let’s cursorily examine that claim.

Ready?  Seatbelts on?  Let’s roll.

Wait, not quite yet.

Let’s get our definitions straight first.  You’ve probably read a lot about “back links” and “forward links.”  Guess what?  They’re the same links.  The only difference is what end of the telescope you’re looking in.  A link from Site A To Site B is a forward link on Site A and a back link on Site B.

(An easily graspable concept for anyone who grew up in L.A. County, where the identical slab of concrete is named the “Ventura Freeway” if you’re driving one way and the “Hollywood Freeway” if the hood of your car is pointed the opposite way.)

That understood, let’s rock.

To follow the SEO quack’s script, we should Google our most important keyword to get backlinks from “as many” of the top 100 returns as possible.

But, gee, about 50 of those hundred for most keywords will be either directory sites — which charge for links — or sites which compete with ours.  OK, that gets the possibles down to 50.

For sure the bulk of those site operators will be delighted to give us a one-way link.

Not!  Why should they?  What’s in it for them?

Watch the SEO consultants’ hands carefully now, this is where they make the pea disappear from under the walnut shell.

They’ve already told you that the only links with any search engine ranking value are back links — one-way links that your site RECEIVES from another site.  In their scenario, forward links — one-way links FROM your site to another site won’t help search engine rankings or returns in the slightest.

That being the case, why should any of the keyword-related sites you found on Google give you a back link — which is, from THEIR end, a totally non-productive forward link?  If Googlebot doesn’t count forward links, why should they give you one just because you ask for it?

OK, the guru might admit, there isn’t any compelling reason for them to give you that link, but everyone who runs a site is a really nice person so they’ll give it to you anyway.

Oh, really?  If they gave out links that promiscuously they’d have to double their server capacity just to hold the hundreds of link pages they’d have.  And what about the potential negative effects of giving you a one-way link without any reciprocation?

Yeah, what about that, Ms. SEO pontificator?

According to you, a one-way link from a site that is top ranked for an operator’s keyword will improve the back-linked site’s ranking.  But here’s the thing.  If you and I are fighting for hits on the same keyword and I give you a free link so that you can improve your return position on that keyword aren’t I running a risk that your site will start returning higher than mine?  The chance might be slim, but why — why on earth — should I risk it?

You also, my dear expert, seem to have forgotten what links really do.  Here’s a reminder:  They give people a one-click, hypersonic ticket away from one website to another website.  To restate the question we’ve been asking all along:  Why should any sane webmaster give away a non-reciprocated link THAT WILL TAKE A POTENTIAL CUSTOMER AWAY FROM HIS SITE?

To answer that your site isn’t directly competitive with his isn’t good enough.  Not nearly good enough. Once Elvis has left the building he’s unlikely to keep hitting the back button to return.  Someone leaving a website — regardless of the reason — is like a person who walks off a car lot, he’s unlike to come back and shop at that location ten minutes later.

Which is why reciprocal linking, and only reciprocal linking, really works as a way for commercial sites to benefit from the beauty of the global hyperlinked community.

With a reciprocal link, potential customers travel in both directions between the linked sites.  A reciprocal link provides both of the linked sites with a forward AND a back link — and the search engines do tabulate ALL back links, one-way or reciprocal.

There’s another major difference between reciprocal linking and back linking strategies:  The former is almost universally possible, the latter almost always impossible.

The person blogging and blathering about harvesting one-way links from highly ranked sites is postulating a world — a business world, at that — that doesn’t exist.  A world comprised entirely of greedheads who want something for nothing and selfless suckers who are willing to give it to them.

Reciprocal linking successfully doesn’t require recoding the genetics of the human race.  It is not a cyber-welfare system where the haves graciously give their customers and search engine positions to the have nots.

Reciprocal linking is based on honest, mutual benefit.  Which is why it works and utopian linking schemes don’t.

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Was it in the ’90s? Or perhaps the ’80s. Maybe even all the way back in the ’70s.

Whatever the exact decade the phrase “control freak” was invented in, it didn’t take long for those two simple, common words to acquire a really bad rep, a terribly, and largely underserved, negative connotation.

You’re tooling your Lincoln Navigator down Lombard St. in San Francisco. The “crookedest street in the world,” according to the Guinness Book of World Records, and a pretty darn steep one as well. You’re slaloming left, right, left, left, right again like a Formula One driver entered in a slow race. Suddenly, from somewhere way in the back of your ultra-elegant, jet black barge, the kids start shrieking “Faster! Faster!” You set your jaw and keep your right foot exactly where it is — poised a quarter of an inch above the brake pedal.

Does wanting to drive the car yourself instead of allowing the passengers to dictate the speed make you a control freak? Of course it does. Is that bad? Not if you want to survive the trip down Lombard with your fenders and bones intact.

As it is in driving a car, piloting a plane or deciding where to invest your money, being a control freak is particularly important in operating your website. Cyberspace is full of virtual Klingons dedicated to wresting control of your site — or at least substantial parts of it — away from you.

Most of us are aware of the obvious hardcore criminal threats — viruses, hijacks, data theft, malware, denial of service attacks and other hacking attempts of all types — and take all reasonable precautions to combat them. Unfortunately, many of us are less vigilant about repelling white-collar criminals attempting to steal elements of our websites and use them for their own purposes.

Not only do we often voluntarily allow people running internet con games to put dangerous content on our sites, we sometimes even pay them for the privilege of having them exploit and compromise our business … because that’s what our websites, in most cases, are, our businesses. The way we earn our living. The instruments for paying our rent, buying our food, putting our children through college, providing for our old age.

If, in all the reading you ever do on this blog, on LinksManager.com, in the Linking School, you only remember one thing, make it this one: Your website is your business. Its success plays a major role in keeping your family fed and off the street. Remember that and consider it every time you’re tempted to allow something you haven’t personally examined and approved to go up on that site.

Remember that and consider it before buying into an automated full-duplex linking scheme, a flaky pre-packaged article posting service, or a “free” blog advertising exchange program.

This last deserves special mention because it’s a relatively new “miracle” traffic builder than can leave you gasping “How did that %#@*&! thing get on my site!”

Free blog ad exchanges work like this. The exchange service operator offers to put ads for your blogs onto other blogs in exchange for you hosting ads for other blogs on yours. The operator makes his money by putting up an ad or two for his own businesses on your blog page.

This would be a good deal if you retained control of the ads that appeared next to your blog. But you don’t. A blog for a church site could wind up with ads from a site selling bibles, which would be good. Or it could wind up with ads for porno videos, which would be somewhat — or considerably, depending on the congregation’s sense of humor — less good.

Could happen. And if it did it would, sorry to say, serve the operators of the church site right. Nothing in the scriptures says you should invite strangers into your home without asking them to state their business first.

At this point in the early history of blog ad exchanges such egregious abuses are uncommon. What is very common, however, is the exchange operators putting ads for direct competitors on subscribers’ sites. In other words, if you sell sporting goods and write a blog about carbon-fiber tennis racquets you might find a competitor’s ad touting “Web’s lowest prices on carbon-fiber racquets” right next to it on your site.

The upshot? Your blog, which is supposed to be promoting your site, instead drives customers away from your site to a competitor’s. How intelligent is that?

Is there a better way to leverage the power of your blog than blind ad exchanges? A safe, effective, ethical LinksManager way?

Not quite yet, but we’re working on it full bore.

Watch this blog for progress reports.

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In marketing, there’s no such thing as a one-size fits all solution.

Every legitimate marketing method — advertising, public relations, word-of-mouth, hiring somebody in a clown suit to stand on the sidewalk and jump up and down — works for some businesses.  And no marketing method works for all of them.  (Imagine a firm of Washington lobbyists for prescription drug companies using a prancing clown next to the Beltway to solicit new clients.)

One approach that almost never works is putting all your eggs into one marketing bag.  Variety is the spice of life and one person’s “happy, bouncy clown” may be another’s most least-treasured childhood nightmare.  Therefore, virtually all successful businesses use a variety of approaches in attempting to deliver positive messages to potential customers.

Taking a broad approach to marketing is especially important in e-commerce, where word-of-mouth “advertising” usually plays a much less significant role in generating sales than it does in traditional retailing.

Why?

Because when someone tells a friend who’s admiring his new television that he “got a great deal at WalMart” he’s making an active recommendation:  If the friend is looking for a new TV and wants a good deal he should check out WalMart.

On the other hand, a person who bought his new big screen through an e-tailer is much more likely to say “I got a great deal online.” A passive recommendation which doesn’t help the website owner who sold him the set one iota.

(The major exceptions to this are eBay and Amazon.  The phrases “I found it on eBay” and “I bought it from Amazon” have become as common as “I got a great deal at WalMart” and constitute great word-of-mouth endorsements.  The problem is that very few of us operate WalMart and Amazon-level websites.)

With most websites, word-of-mouth endorsements only flex their undeniably powerful muscles from within the site, via user testimonials regarding the products, services and user-friendliness offered there.  Which is a very good thing in increasing a site’s sales conversion ratio; i.e. turning “shoppers” into “buyers.”  Unfortunately, this type of word of mouth is a non-factor in attracting shoppers to a site, which is a mandatory step along the path to the checkout lane.

For this reason, it’s extremely important that website operators consider more than one promotional avenue.  Depending on the type of business and budget, these avenues can include search-engine advertising via programs like Google’s AdWords, banner ads, targeted email blasts to opt-in prospects, link-bait articles, postings in relevant forums where the use of a commercial URL signature is allowed and various other methods — up to and including print or broadcast ads (think of the recent Super Bowl with its plethora of ads for virtual businesses like GoDaddy, eTrade, Careers.com and SalesGenie.)

And then there’s relevant reciprocal links (also called link exchange).  An essential part of successful websites’ marketing arsenal since the beginning of cyber-time.

There are dozens — if not hundreds — of reasons why relevant reciprocal linking works to drive people to a website and predisposes them to buy something when they get there, but the most important one is this:  A quality reciprocal link from a relevant and respected website is the closest thing to a real, live, powerful word-of-mouth endorsement a typical, non-Amazon/eBay-level website will ever get.

What a reciprocal link managed properly by an editor-based program like LinksManager does is tell people who click your link on a link partner’s site that your business has been evaluated by that site’s operator and found to be worthy of a recommendation.

Don’t kid yourself into thinking this kind of word-of-mouth recommendation doesn’t mean much.  As you may be finding out if you’re new to the web — or as you probably remember from when you were a newbie — webmasters of superior sites are very particular about whose link requests they approve.  They recognize that if they send their customers to a poor site it will reflect badly on them and might cost them that customer’s repeat business.

Consider: Your friend Charlie says “if you ever need a new couch go to ABCDEF Furniture, they’re the best.”

So you go there and you order a couch. It’s supposed to arrive in two weeks and be delivered free.  It arrives in five weeks and the driver refuses to unload it until you pay a $65 delivery charge.  Even better — or worse, depending on how you look at things — it’s the wrong fabric.

You say, “Charlie’s a great guy, but I wouldn’t trust his opinion on where to buy something any further than I could throw this lousy couch.”

That’s what happens when a website operator links to bad sites.  It’s also one of the reasons you should only link to good ones, sites that provide honest, useful information and fair values to the people you send there.

As is often the case with all kinds of situations, the opposite scenario is equally true.

Charleyssite.com sells venetian blinds and exchanges a link with Customcouchesdirect.com.  And Customcouchesdirect.com delivers on time, at the agreed price, and in the right fabric.  The end result is that customers who followed the link on Charleyssite.com end up happy with both Customcouches and Charlie.  And happy customers are also satisfied customers, loyal customers, repeat customers.

Reciprocal linking, the one tried-and-proven web-marketing technique every webmaster can afford to do and few can afford to do without.

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Is there ever anything really new in the world?

Of course there is.  Powered flight was definitely a new thing in 1903.

And even though our own sun and untold others had been performing it since time began, nuclear fission, in 1945, was new in the sense that man had never been able to trigger and control it before.

And flat-screen, wall-hanging televisons, despite having been promoted as “just around the corner” for over half a century, were a very new thing just a few short years ago.

Still, the number of old things “rediscovered” and put to use in new ways has always dwarfed the number of truly new inventions and discoveries.

Unfortunately, particularly in the high-tech world of computer technology, it’s easy to mistake tried-and-true business processes and marketing techniques as something revolutionary and scary.

For one example consider display advertising on the web.  According to the highly respected market research firm Yankee Group, the web accounts for over 20 percent of U.S. media viewing but draws only 7.5 percent of corporate America’s total gross advertising spending.

That’s an amazing disparity and the reason is pure FUD — Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Many advertisers and agencies who have no problem committing hundreds of millions of dollars on massive television, radio and print campaigns think the web is too big a gamble, something new, unpredictable, intimidating even.  Of course, display advertising on the web isn’t really anything new at all.  It’s exactly like every other form of display advertising, a means of putting a message in front of an audience.  But, thanks to FUD, the ad income earned by web publishers is vastly out of sync with the size of their audience.

Reciprocal linking is another highly effective internet marketing tool whose “newness” scares a lot of people.  In one sense, this is even more absurd than the fear engendered by web display advertising which, after all, hasn’t been around all that long.  Linking, on the other hand, isn’t even “new” by web standards.  As the essential building blocks on which the web was created, links have been around since day one.

But linking goes back much further than that.  Reciprocal linking has its roots in the earliest days of commerce when spice vendors and gold traders would steer customers to each other’s Casbah stalls for the greater profit of both.

When you start a reciprocal linking camapign, you’re not bolding going where few people have gone before, you’re traveling a commercial path created by literally millions of feet.

Reciprocal linking is as simple as a doctor handing a patient a prescription and casually mentioning “you can fill that at the pharmacy downstairs.”  The reciprocation comes when you hand the pharmacist the script and he looks at, smiles, and says, “Oh, you’re seeing Dr. Brown, he’s great isn’t he?”

Reciprocal linking is a restaurant owner rewarding business people who bring clients to his beanery for lunch by allowing them to put their business cards on a bulletin board in the entryway.

It’s a car rental agent with a rack of brochures from a local body shop and the body shop manager recommending that particular car rental agency to people who’ve hit a deer or otherwise put their car out of action for a few weeks.

It’s a real estate agent referring new home owners to a contractor for remodeling work and the contractor referring customers who are bringing their “home improvements” up to code so they can sell their house to that Realtor.

It’s a tax attorney and an accountant sending each other clients.

That’s reciprocal linking.  One of the most effective and efficient marketing tools in either world — virtual or brick and mortar.

How effective?  How efficient?  Well, think about it.  What did you do the last time you needed a new dentist or mechanic?  Chances are, what you did was ask someone who they used.  And what did the person you asked do?  They gave you a link, probably verbal, but possibly written in the form of a business card or a phone number scrawled on a scrap of paper.

Everything else being equal and the mechanic or dentist being able to “fit you in” when you needed service, the odds are good that you followed that “link.”  And what did it cost that dentist or mechanic to acquire you as a new customer?  Zero.  Nothing.  Merely returning the favor to whoever referred you if and when the opportunity happened to arise.

Which is also the beauty of reciprocal links on the web.  They are entirely free (though we do recommend you spend a few dollars a month to use LinksManager to optimize and manage them) and they bring you new customers.

Now how scary is that?

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About those wonderful, essentially unattainable, one-way links from .edu and .gov sites that all the pundits say are so much more crucial to a good Google ranking than traditional natural affinity links.

Apparently Google, even the post-Jagger/Bigdaddy Google doesn’t agree.  The truth is that backlinks from such non-commercial domains “generally do not get additional credibility from Google.”

And that’s not our “truth.” That’s Google’s truth as annunciated by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller in response to a post to Google’s official Webmaster Help Group.

In fact, Mueller added, “the whole topic of working especially hard to talk webmasters of these domains into linking to your sites seems a bit problematic.”

One aspect of link ranking that has changed since pre-Jagger days is an increased emphasis on the informational quality of links.  In the past, all links that were naturally obtained, relevant and appropriate, living in “good neighborhoods” and considered of more or less equal importance by Google’s PageRank algorithm offered roughly the same return-position benefit.

Today this is no longer the case.  Googlebot now seems far more sensitive to the actual content of a link — any kind of link, reciprocal or one-way.

If anyone is surprised by this, they shouldn’t be.  The whole thrust of recent Google search-engine development has been to try and get Googlebot to mimic — as close as inhumanly possible — a flesh-and-blood end user.

The key challenge in matching computer-think to people-think is getting the machine to reason in human language rather than machine language.  This is especially true with search-engine bots since they get their data entirely from words and links. (Googlebot — at least as far as anyone outside Googleworld knows — doesn’t really recognize all those clever international symbols that tell us which restroom to use and where the high-occupancy lanes on the freeway are.)

Therefore, taking Googlebot to the next level required its developers to increase its ability to understand language.  Not just language as in vocabulary, but language as in context, phrases, punctuation, spelling, and completeness of sentences.

Scary as it is to contemplate, Google, a mere one or two generations down the road, may be factoring missing or inappropriately placed commas into its return position placements. (And won’t virtually all of us be in big trouble than.)

Prior to Jagger (the most recent update to Google’s ranking algorithm) and Bigdaddy (the data storage infrastructure upgrade which followed Jagger), the obsession with language was pretty much limited to a site’s non-linked content, elements such as home page copy, product descriptions, articles, etc.

Today the evidence seems to indicate that a link’s headline and anchor text and context are also becoming important considerations in evaluating link quality.

Specifically, headline and anchor text is now — more than ever — expected to make sense.

For example, Google now seems, based on web operator reports, to like singular references rather than plural ones and specific information better than general. As in:

Buyers guide to sports apparel

Visit Youwearit.com for unbiased reports on active wear and team uniforms.

As opposed to:

Sportswear, uniforms, Speedos, snowpants, etc. etc. etc.

Youwearit.com reviews products used by sports participants.

The first headline contains specific information about the nature of the linked site.  It is a buyer’s guide.  The anchor text tells the end user — and Googlebot — exactly what types of products are in the guide.  If Youwearit.com also reviewed things like bats and balls, that line could read something like ” Visit Youwearit.com for unbiased reports on active wear , team uniforms and equipment.”

The second link, however, features a “laundry list” headline and generic anchor text.  The problem with the generic anchor text is that Googlebot has also gotten more diligent about checking the content of linked sites.  If it notices that Youwearit.com is strictly about active wear and uniforms, it may shave a bit off a point of its score because of the non- specific text.

Fortunately, LinksManager makes it easy for webmasters to modify their listing on LinksManager powered websites without having to contact and send the updated information to each webmaster via email.  Just look for the hyperlink “modify my listing” on the links menu of any LinksManager powered website.

LinksManager, and only LinksManager of all the link-management programs in the world, can also help you seamlessly build a regularly updated, relevant contextual framework around your link.

LinksManager’s exclusive LinkBlogs tool frees you from the limited world of anchor text and gives your links the ability to tell end-users and SE robots alike what’s new and exciting on your site.

Consider a standard link:

Great deals on team uniforms

Youbuyuniforms.com always offers top prices on uniforms for all seasons.

Against a link with a LinkBlog:

Great deals on team uniforms

Spring training is right around the corner. Get ready for a great baseball season by taking advantage of Youbuyuniforms.com’s February sale on baseball gear. Caps, 25 percent off; cleats, 15 percent off; warmup jackets, 20 percent off; uniforms in all colors, 10 percent off. Remember orders must be placed before midnight (EST) February 28 to receive these discounts.

What the LinkBlog does is place the headline phrase “great deals” in the context of a specific season, sport and sales event. It provides the detailed, logical, relevant structure that Google seems more and more to be looking for.

Of course, you could, in theory, do the same thing with standard anchor text pretty easily — provided you only had one or two link partners.  But imagine the work and hassle of swapping out ten or twenty or 200 links by hand between the night of February 28 and the morning of March 1.  With LinkBlogs, just change the text in your LinksManager Control Panel and all your blogged links are automatically updated.

One last observation about Google’s new emphasis on link language and context.  As each new generation of its ranking software tries — sometimes successfully, sometimes less so — to more closely think and reason like a human web surfer, it becomes ever more clear that Google isn’t kidding when it tells webmasters — as it has for years — to design their entire sites, including their link pages, from the perspective of end users rather than search engines.

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In one word, “no.”

Search-engine marketing (SEM) is not making search-engine optimization obsolete.  But in changing and expanding both the concepts behind getting a high search-engine return position and the methodology employed to achieve that position, full-service search-engine marketing providers are gradually putting increasing pressure on traditional search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners to broaden their skill sets and increase the amount of time, effort and ability they spend on research.

Things weren’t always this way.  Until relatively recently, most webmasters and search-engine optimizers considered “search-engine marketing” a very small tail hanging off the back of a relatively large dog.  SEM, they felt, was the relatively “easy” process of determining the correct keywords for a given page.  The hard part, in this view, was integrating those keywords into a site’s visible and meta copy in a way that would most effectively influence search-engine ranking algorithms.

But there were problems with this approach even before Google turned the search-engine world on its head by largely abandoning the keyword-centric ranking algorithms driving first-gen search engines like Brian Pinkerton’s Webcrawler in favor of search engine models that calculate a page’s popularity based on the number and quality of its links.

For one thing, most SEO gurus weren’t paying enough attention to sweating the details.  Keywords were “cherry picked” from obvious contenders rather than selected based on scientific consumer research.  This, too, worked for a brief while … but only until thousands upon thousands of sites richly keyworded for things like “travel,” “cars,” and “DVDs” started vying with each other for the space in the engines’ first two return pages.

So much for ancient history.  Today’s web creators and search-engine optimizers have access to the services of a full-blown and highly developed industry devoted to providing data detailing exactly which search terms are most commonly used for virtually every type of search-engine query.  And, by and large, those analytics are not at all based on guess, intuition or even opinion research.  They’re based on the actual terms entered into millions of search boxes.

Which solves all the problems inherent in the old “seat-of-the-pants” method for selecting keywords and search terms, right?

Not quite. Since everybody who can afford to spend a few bucks has access to the same analytics, there are still — in most cases — infinitely more sites using the same vocabulary to describe their content as there are top ten return positions.  That’s one of the main reasons why even a relatively detailed Google search — 1967 Ford Mustang Accessories, for example — can result in over 400,000 hits.

But wait, won’t intelligent web surfers narrow those 400,000-plus hits down by using quotation marks, as in “1967 Ford Mustang accessories”.  Yes, they will try to.  And they will be terribly, terribly disappointed.  Because what they will get — or what they would have gotten as of 01/19/08 — is five Bizrate directory pages containing numerous Mustang parts for second-generation ’80s and ’90s models and not one for the classic ’60’s Mustang editions.

Enter search-engine marketing companies like iProspect and DoubleClick’s Performics division, which provide full-service traffic and sales improvement packages that combine traditional SEO keyword and metatag tweaking, content analysis and repositioning, paid-ad bidding and monitoring management, and conversion-optimization (re-engineering websites to reduce the number of navigation paths and clicks between the site’s opening page and making a sale).

Unfortunately, demand for true SEM optimization — which seeks to increase sales per hit ratio as well as return position — is currently far greater than supply.  In other words, it’s an option only site operators with Fortune 1000 marketing budgets can afford.

Until such time as more companies enter the SEM field and prices come down, the best way to maximize your chance at a good search engine return position and a healthy sell-through is to follow Google’s oft-stated recommendations to “provide high-quality content on your pages” and “make sure that other sites link to yours” via “natural links” such as those facilitated by an editor-based link-management system like LinksManager.

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Things Your Site’s Mother Never Told You: Part 1 viewed from a somewhat metaphysical point of view, search-engine optimization consultants are just like mom, they tell you — endlessly — all kinds of things they want you to know and they studiously avoid ever telling you anything they don’t want you to know.

Just as the average soccer mom aspires to appear hip and informed about America’s least popular professional sport, the SEO “mom” professes to vast amounts of intimate knowledge about search engines. Some of them, the top echelon who generally work exclusively for major web enterprises and make so much money that they never have to peddle their services to mere mortals like us, actually have this knowledge. The majority do not and, in all too many cases, attempt to “earn” their hourly fees by dispensing wisdom available free simply by visiting the Google Webmaster Help Center.

Mirroring most mom’s discussing any number of topics — say the birds and the bees — with their eight year olds, SEO mothers only share those bits and pieces of Google’s online guidelines and recommendations that, taken out of context, seem to bolster the claim that they alone possess the supernatural powers necessary to battle the Great God G in your behalf.

Perhaps the most second glaring omissions from the laundry list of Google do’s and don’ts provided by most search-engine optimizers are the revelations that Google a.) doesn’t find their services in any way essential in obtaining a high page rank or return position and b.) specifically warns webmasters that many, many SEO practitioners employ tactics “that will ONLY IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES OF BEING DROPPED FROM SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS ALTOGETHER.” Those of you who are skeptical about what you read in blogs, as well you should be, can find the statement “don’t feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service” under “Things To Avoid” on Google’s How can I create a Google-friendly site page. (For the record, there is no reference to reciprocal linking in the “Things To Avoid” section.”

Likewise a visit to Google’s What’s an SEO page reveals no less than 1037 words describing ways in which unscrupulous SEO companies may endanger your rankings and loot your bank account.

The truth about the SEO industry and Google’s relationship seems to be that Google finds SEO abuses so pervasive that the What’s an SEO page even provides a hotlink to the Federal Trade Commission specifically for web operators who, in Google’s words, feel they “were deceived by an SEO in some way.” Suggestion: Next time some SEO “expert” tells you Google wants you to get rid of your links, challenge him or her to show you where Google recommends reporting link-management facilitators to the FTC, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security or any other government agency charged with prosecuting vendors for fraud or deception. (For the record, there is no such recommendation anywhere on Google.)

Moving right along, here in Google’s own directly quoted words, is a Top Ten list of the SEO “worst practices” Google cautions webmasters interested in high PageRanks and good return positions to beware of:

1. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

2. Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue… reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

3. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you.

4. Some SEOs may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar. Evaluate such proposals with extreme care and be skeptical …

5. Be sure to understand where the money goes … some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. This scam doesn’t work with Google.

6. One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf.

7. Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false .

8. Doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

9. Feel free to walk away if the SEO owns shadow domains … operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info … gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware …

10. When you consider whether to go with an SEO … be careful.

Of all Google’s SEO cautions, the most important is arguably #10 since it applies to all aspects of any business.

You should be careful, very careful, before allowing anyone — regardless of the number of medical diplomas hanging on his or her wall — to operate on your website.  This warning is just as true when choosing a link-management system as it is when selecting an SEO provider.  Only an application like LinksManager which, with its patented editor-based technology makes absolutely no changes to your site without your express approval, provides the safety and security required of a search-engine guideline-compliant link-management solution.

Coming Soon: Is Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Rendering SEO Obsolete?

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OK, maybe Matt Cutts isn’t exactly a Magi in the biblical sense of the word.  But he’s definitely a wise man.  A very wise man.  A well-educated wise man with summa cum laude bachelor’s degrees in math and computer science and a master’s degree (also summa cum laude) in science.

Exactly how wise is Matt Cutts?  Wise enough to join Google in January of 2000 when it had less than 100 employees and was no bigger than a fly on Yahoo’s Figgy Pudding. And while we have no clue what, if any, stock options and other inducements Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to entice wise guys like Matt Cutts to quit established tech companies and stake their careers on a shaky startup, we have no doubt that Matt, in his wisdom, took max advantage of whatever was offered.

Whatever the bonus it took to sign Cutts, Page and Brin bought themselves a bargain.  Beginning as a generalist software engineer, Matt wrote many of Google’s early content filters — including their highly regarded SafeSearch pornography blocker.

By 2004, Matt Cutts had moved up the career ladder to become Senior Staff Software Engineer and head of the Webspam group, which serves as the prosecuting attorney, judge, jury and parole board for web pages accused of violating Google guidelines by the Webspam group’s URL police.

Equally important, and the real reason he’s worth more to Google than whatever it cost to get him and keep him, is his role as corporate lightning rod.  Whether it’s in the responses to his own blog posts or on the pages of hundreds of other blogs, Matt Cutts is the guy who gets flamed for whatever real and imaginary indignities Google and its assorted bots and algorithms are accused of.

If a webmaster whose scammy, spammy site has just landed in the sandbox wants to get in somebody’s face about, he’ll find Matt Cutts — live and in-person — at just about any halfway major internet expo or web conference.

And while many of us, if we were Matt Cutts, would attend such an event wearing at least a mask, if not a full disguise, he doesn’t.  His convention name tag always says “Hi, I’m Matt” just as bold as brass and his company affiliation is always given as “Google.”

It was at one such gathering of the webmaster tribes held earlier this month (Pubcon 2007) that Matt gave individual web entrepreneurs, professional webmasters, legitimate SEO practitioners and everyone else who understands and utilizes the power of reciprocal linking, an early — and greatly appreciated — Christmas present.

The gift was small — only 11 words — but it may just be the best present under many web professionals’ Christmas trees this year.

What Matt Cutts said was this: Trading links is natural and it’s natural to have reciprocal links.

At first glance, that doesn’t seem like such an earth-shattering pronouncement.  After all, Google has never said anything bad about legitimate, relevant, natural reciprocal links ethically established and maintained.  Their guidelines warn against scams like excessive link exchange via link-farming, automated bulk linking and pay-for-play links, but what honest web businessperson lives that far on the dark side?

What makes Matt’s words such a sudden, unexpected, and powerful gift is that they provide the ultimate repudiation of the anti-linking FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) sown by legions of competency-challenged search engine optimization “consultants” whose incomes depend on finding scapegoats for their own ineptitude.

In the world according to the FUD mongers, reciprocal links that provide useful information to your customers and drive non-search-engine-dependent traffic to your site will somehow get you in trouble with Google even though neither Google as an entity nor any of its key executives has ever said anything of the kind.

Matt Cutts has a different world view.  He says enhancing your site with reciprocal links in a deliberate, ethical manner is just plain “natural.”

So the question is “who ya gonna trust?”

The FUD suckers sullenly hoofing it through the Sinai with holes in the bottom of their sandals or the Wise Man from Google serenely riding atop the Webspam Group camel?

And a merry Christmas to you, too, Matt.

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Lead, follow or get out of the way.

Where else has that old saw ever cut as deeply as it does on the Internet?  Think of all the auction sites that used to jockey for customers.  Where are they now?  A few are still around, dismally following eBay as they fall more and more laps behind in the race.  Most, the great majority, have simply gotten out of the way — even Yahoo pulled its auction site off the track earlier this year.

There’s also all those mall sites.  Oh, my goodness … legions of sites like ValueAmerica.com, WorldBestBuy.com, and Boo.com whose black-framed plaques are mounted next to Webvan’s in the WWW Hall of Shame.  They all quickly got out of the way of companies — like Amazon — which really understood the realities of Electronic Age marketing and technology.

And, lest we all forget, there are the search engines.  Dozens and dozens and dozens of them which stood still until the winds of change blew competitors past them.  Some (Lycos, Alta Vista and, yes, we do dare to include Ask and even MSN) are still doggedly sniffing along behind Google and Yahoo, most others have joined such former contenders as Go.com, Magellan.com, and Infoseek.com in getting out of the way.

At LinksManager, we are very proud to have remained the leader in effective, ethical link-management technology continuously since we virtually invented the industry over ten years ago.  During this decade we have had many competitors.  The majority — particularly those illegally ripping off our patent — have gotten out of the way, others stagger on offering half-cooked workarounds for a complex issue that requires a fully baked solution.

That said, we’re most definitely not resting on our laurels.  The phrase is lead , follow or get out of the way and we are well aware that “lead” is not the same word as “leader.”  The first, lead, is a verb.  Leader is a noun.  To lead requires action, you must DO something.

To put that in perspective, leaders who don’t lead almost inevitably morph into followers.  If that statement immediately brings to mind Yahoo and MSN, you’ve passed the test.  It should.  They were “leaders,” secure in the mistaken belief that what they were doing, what they’d always done, was still good enough, would always be good enough.  So they stopped doing, they refused to innovate, they didn’t lead so now they follow Google, which is continuing to lead (think of all their new products like GMail, Google books, Google checkout, Google word processing and spreadsheet, etc.) from its position as top dog on the pile.

LinksManager, like Google, is an industry leader determined to continue to lead.

We are dedicated to retaining our dominance in the link-management field through constantly adding new product features, refining old ones, and increasing the user friendliness of our system.

The latest example of this is a complete redesign of LinksManager’s Home Page intended to make everything you need to know about LinksManager faster to access, easier to comprehend, and more tightly focused around the three primary forms of link strategy: Linking for Small Business, Linking for Mid- and Large-Sized Enterprises and Linking for Search-Engine Optimization.

Looking back on 2007, we’re happy to say that reinventing our website is just the latest in a series of exciting LinksManager enhancements, improvements and embellishments in the last 12 months.

Among dozens of improvements large and small, three major program additions stand out:

– LinkBlogs, our exclusive technology combining the power of linking and blogging.

– The LinksManager Browser Toolbar, which enables you to micro-manage many aspects of your link program without ever clicking away from your web browser.

– ResponseRank, which calculates how long it takes webmasters to accept or decline link requests.

As LinksManager enters our second decade, we feel honestly justified in believing that we have fulfilled our obligation to you, our customers, to keep moving forward rather than stand still, to remain a leader in the link-management industry we helped create, to advance the state of the art in a critical component of the World Wide Web infrastructure.

Most of all, we feel re-invigorated and re-motivated to move even faster and extend our lead even further.  So if you think we’ve put a lot of new presents under the tree this year, hang onto your stocking … 2008 is going to be even better.

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