For SEO veterans, probably not really something new you will learn here. But for people with novice to intermediate knowledge SEO may appreciate the podcast. Lon Safko is an authority in the Social Media space and co-author of the upcoming book The Social Media Bible.

I apologize to Lon for probably having a hard time to just get the common time to setup this podcast schedule but thankful as well to give me the opportunity to be interviewed in this Insights’ podcast.

I have no problems speaking in public for presentations but putting me on the spot with some questions sound to casual to me. But I guess it also sounds more real as well.

Lon has some very interesting questions like what was my secret to winning the 2007 SEO World Championship. The answer I gave is in the podcast. Listen to it here.

At any rate, according to a Marketing Daily survey, 80% of Americans are blogging it up. Half of all Americans actually frequent blogs of all sorts. Some people are surprised at this due to the fact that blogging is quite the neophyte when it comes to media conduits. However, this writer is not in any way dumbfounded.

It’s been coming along for some time now and it’s about time that advertisers notice the power and potential that a blog carries. Just look below at how you can use blogs in your internet media campaigns cheaply and effectively (as compared to other media).

Buy links using text links ads, text link brokers and backlinks.com

Paid links are for the internet what advertisements are for TV. Basically, you pay a link brokerage firm like Text Link Brokers, TLA  or Backlinks.com to put up links to your site from a number of blogs and websites containing related material.

Ok, ok, ok. I know, Matt Cutts said that paid links shouldn’t be used as a method of doing SEO. But it’s not an SEO tactic – its an advertising decision. You won’t be buying text links for getting PR or even SERPs. You are buying links for getting people who are actually looking for or are interested in your service. It’s an ad. Blog visitors will see them as clearly marked ads, and click on them if they are interested. Besides, as Matt Cutts said buying links for the purpose of advertising is not frowned upon by Google – you can still use them to generate buzz, get traffic and support other sites (as long as you use rel=nofollow). Check with your link broker about how they comply with limitations set by search engines just so you feel better about it.

Buy review opportunities on reviewme.com and payperpost.com and a similar service offered by textlink brokers

Here is another marketing tactic that evolved when it entered the internet: free trials and word-of-mouth advertising! You get a company to find decent bloggers with the traffic and credibility, then ask them to review your products and services. They get paid, you get your products/services pushed to the masses complete with its strengths and advantages exposed for all the world to see. They aren’t even forced to give you good reviews because if they do not like your product or service, they can simply decide not to accept the review offer.

We all know how effective word-of-mouth advertising is. People often feel better about taking what you have to sell if they know someone who has already done so and liked it.

Bubble ads

Another method of maketing online is using bubble ads. This blog uses Kontera.com but there are a lot more of them out there. How does it work? The bubble ad code searches the site for relevancy and then finds keywords related to your site. It will then replace those words with a link to your site. Multiply this a few hundred times over (depending on your advertising budget) and you will have a lot of blogs pointing interested readers to you.

Adwords for Content Publishers

Perhaps the main path taken by everybody – after all, it is the safest bet in an SEO point of view. Get a free account at Google Adwords  , Yahoo Publisher or and start advertising via the search engines. This is basically the same as the text link ads mentioned above with the big difference that a search engine is sponsoring it and thus a lot safer from search engine wrath (i.e. penalties).

So how about it? The Marketing Daily survey said that 8 out of 10 Americans are visiting blogs. More than 43% of those notice the ads and 30% of them actually click!  As the age group goes nearer the 18-24 year old demographic, however, the ones who click go up to a whopping 61%. 

If there are approximately 300 million Americans as of July 2007, that means there are 240 million blog readers.  103 million of whom notice ads on them. And get this … 30 million of them who actually click per day! This on a medium that will keep your links up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Blogs, they are the “in” thing now. If you don’t start getting in on the act, you may find your business soon “out of it”.

Source: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=66471&Nid=33725&p=421131

Anita talk about several link building techniques which was a pretty good comprehensive talk on several link building techniques. One thing I did not hear from here link baiting titles/topics you can target were the top/best list. Top 10 whatever, Best 5 something, Best 8 something, The top 11 people doing whatever. These list sometimes still get some link love, but overall it was all cool. Well done, thanks Anita.

Here are some random photos taken at the San Diego SEO Meetup.

Thanks to Rob for the Chipotle Hot Sauce, De Arbol Hot Sauce and Avocado Hot Sauce. Thanks to Dr. Lawrence for assisting me in installing Opera on my Old Palm Treo 600. I will probably get the new Palm Treo 750 sometime by the end of the year. Thanks again to everyon that attended. It was nice knowing everyone.

Although I don’t know the people attending, after reading about it, I simply IM’ed a few friends and I think I have pulled 1/3 of the people attending. *LOL* But it would be nice to see everyone again: Clint, Aron, Camron, Ivan, Marko, Jessie, Shawn, Gilda, John, Mishon.

Uh oh… do I have any calling cards? I still got time to prepare some. See you all there!

Even if this page says DarkSEO Team, hmmm I don’t think someone that will hack them will actually say they hacked them. Thus I don’t believe the Dark SEO Team did this. And it’s funny how they place in some names there trying to point out some names of some popular SEO people. Although I can’t quite decipher them all.

• Dan “the man” – Referring to Danny Sullivan?
• pentazilla – After quad, penta. So this is quadzilla
• Daxster – Referring to Dax
• davenator – Dave Naylor
• monkeyboy – Webguerrilla, Greg Boser
• the canadian crew – Todd Friesen
• RandomFish – Rand Fishkin
• Shchoeoe+npMMo – Shoemoney

I can’t guess who are the rest. But still I do not see that success had these hackers done? I see no good purpose at all in doing this.

*The “it’s like baking a cake” seemed to have evolved in the discussion about David Pasternack among SEO people where I guess I am not 100% sure where it originated from. As confirmed by Mr. David Pasternack in his comments below. He did not say “it’s like baking a cake.” Nevertheless, you can continue on to the link above and have a fun time reading David Temple’s post.

I decided to go with WebCEO‘s certification program next after the ExpertTraining test since I am a paid user of WebCEO. (check my review of WebCEO) And if you are a paid user, along comes with it is the certification program for free. At first I expected this program to be useless and it will be more about selling you on the product even more, to get you more hooked up with it and use it forever. Well one thing I can say that does still exist, but their certification program is still overall good for overall SEO knowledge even is you use WebCEO or not. And I was personally impressed with the following:

• Comprehensiveness of the course
• Does not only teach how to do SEO and SEM effectively, but also give tips on how to run your SEO operations and even run your own SEO business.
• Has some insights on how to sell your SEO services, how to promote and market.
• Will give insights into problem areas as the last lessons and how to possible tackle problem websites with frames, Flash and other websites that make have indexing problems with the search engines.

I personally know almost everything said in the course, but I like it since I know many beginners may like the course. Use this course and read Aaron Wall’s SEOBook, and this is the perfect beginner course. I believe if I would have some employees starting out in SEO and need some training. I think this is a good teacher, SEOBook plus WebCEO certification.

The WebCEO courseware was composed of 6 course stages. And each stage differs in number of steps with different numbers of lessons per step. As I feel a bit strained staring at monitors reading long bodies of text, I print out each lesson that is usually 2 to 5 pages and the whole course was a total of 71 lessons. It had online assessment exams after every step and after every stage. It took quite some time to finish 71 lessons, but since I print them out, I bring them along with me where ever I go and read them during any idle time. Most of the time in the rest room! :p The course was good generally.

Right now, I am trying out the Search Engine Workshops Certification program and right now I find it kind of slow and dragging and a bit conservative in its ways, but still valuable for the less knowledgeable in SEO.