I’ve been a big fan of SEO elite for quite some time now and use it almost exclusively across my network of sites for search engine optimization.  However, I’m very interested in trying out SEO Spyglass 2.

SEO Spyglass 2, much like SEO Elite, allows you to analyze your competitors success by seeing who links to them, how they’re doing it and most importantly how those links are affecting the search engine rankings.  It also allows you to identify competitors from a keyword research too.

Price?  A meager $87.00.  Compare that to SEO Elites pricetag of $167.00 and it looks like a pretty good deal to me.  It becomes an even better deal when you take into consideration SEO Spyglass 2 also enables you to:

• Receive And Organize Emails From Your Link Partners
• Generate Link Pages That Are Fully Customizable
• Display The Status Of A Link Partner And Manage Statuses
• Update Multiple Link Partners’ Properties At Once
• View Websites And Generated Links Pages With A Built-In Browser
• Find And Autocomple Link Submission Forms (LinkMachine.net, LinksManager.com, AutoLinksPro.com, LinkMetro.com, etc)
• Customize Your Workspace
• Make Your Links Page Available Online via FTP

Ohh yeah, did I mention there is a FREE version of SEO Spyglass 2 as well?!  I’ll be testing SEO SpyGlass 2 out in the immediate future and will post my feedback on its performance.

In addition, be on the lookout for another slick little tool that looks like it will rock the online marketing community on 25 Jul 07.  You can find out more about this SECRET WEAPON on Heather Paulsons blog.  VERY COOL STUFF HERE FOLKS for all of you die hard PPC marketers.

Take care and God Bless!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

On-site search engine optimization is a necessity but one way link building is your bread and butter for higher search engine positioning.  All too often many webmasters (including me) get caught up continuously tweaking their on-site optimization instead of focusing the majority of their online marketing efforts on acquiring more one way links for link popularity.

Link popularity is simply determined by the number and quality of external incoming links to your site. External incoming links are links on other sites that point to yours.  Search engines consider link popularity important because they see links from other sites to yours as a kind of recommendation or guarantee of the worth of your site.

So how do we get them….and a lot of them…All without losing our shirts buying up text link ads?

The most productive way to increase your one way links is to quite simply BUILD GOOD CONTENT SITES.  Up go the groans.  We all know you’re not going to get an abundance of natural links to your scraper sites or blogs.  That free hand-out era is long over but I still see many "slick" new scraper type products released all the time.

The most important ingredient to obtaining the most links possible to your web sites is giving your users something significant to actually link to.

Typically speaking informative/review blog posts and articles such as "Top 15 FireFox Extensions", "Best Web Hosting Sites", etc. will get more one-way links than "Peter Pan Chunky Peanut Butter".  Just look how many backlinks Robin Good has gotten to his info packed post "RSSTop55 Best Blog Directory and RSS Submission Sites" over the past few years.

One easy way to get a feel what people would link to is simply doing a broad keyword search through the tool of your choice for "top", "best", etc.  Sometimes the most basic and simple solutions are the best solutions.

Here are a number of additional ways to get one way links from other sites back to yours.

• Natural links given from topic-related websites that like your website
• Providing free content, such as access to articles, e-books, FAQ’s and white papers
• Directory links, listed under the category related to your topic
• Business directory links, listed under the category related to your topic
• Blogs, submitted to a blog directory and archived online
• Business associations, listed under the category related to your topic
• Newsletter text ads promoting your business, archived online at topic-related websites
• Original articles, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
• Original press releases, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
• Original newsletters, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
• White papers, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
• E-books, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
• Free software tools provided with required link back to website

Now get to work!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]one way link building, one way links, search engine positioning, link popularity, off site optimization, search engine optimization, online marketing, link building, incoming links, text link ads, external incoming links, natural links[/tags]

Understandably it took the Bloggy Network staff 35 hours to merge their two authority sites: Blog Top Sites and Blog Flux.  The end result of http://topsites.blogflux.com looks pretty good though and will be well worth the trouble.

-Ahmed, David, and Jacob, from the Bloggy Network state:

I would like to thank everyone for their patience – it was a rather complicated task, but I think we pulled it off well. We’ve grown 100% in the last 4 months, and look forward to generating a lot more traffic for your blogs (we just crossed 3 million hits out in the last month).

The integration of these two authority sites should significantly increase the speed of approval of the blogs you submit.  In addition,  if you are a current BlogTopSites.com webmaster, you DO NOT need to update the tracking code.

With over 77,000 blogs listed in their directory and growing it would be a good idea to submit your blog(s) today.  Sure, many people nowadays prefer not to sort through directories to find what they want….but the search engines do.  Using numerous free blog directories such as http://topsites.blogflux.com can dramatically increase your inbound one-way links and promote rapid search engine indexing. 

For additional blog directory sites please visit: Blog Directory and RSS Directory Submission

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]bloggy network, authority sites, blog flux, blog top sites, blog directories, search engine indexing, one-way links[/tags]

Text Link Ads recently rolled out a slick new improvement to their already robust text link advertising platform: Single Post or Post Level Advertising.  Single post advertising allows you (the web publisher) to monetize your WordPress blog even further by allowing advertisers to purchase links on your individual blog posts.

This deep linking capability is an excellent addition to an already proven advertising system.  I’m sure most advertisers would prefer deep links over generic links since they specifically relate to what the end user is searching the NET for.  This makes for some highly targeted advertising which is what we all want.

Installation is a snap too.  If you’re already a publisher simply re-download your WordPress TLA plugin and upload it to your website.  If you’re a new publisher looking to monetize your website, blog and RSS feeds join Text Link Ads ASAP!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

[tags]text link ads, single post advertising, post level advertising, deep linking, wordpress, TLA, highly targted advertising[/tags]

You hear about it everywhere.  You hear tales of marketers effortlessly "earning" $10-20K per day.  And yes…you may have even checked out a few forums about it.  You wanted to know…what is it…

Black Hat SEO.

If you’re new to the shady world of Black Hat SEO here’s a quick run down of what it is.

Black Hat SEO, in it’s most basic form, is Spamdexing.  This means using any of the various below methods to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine.  These methods are predominantly, if not always, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

Although technology changes at an exponential rate the basic forms of Black Hat SEO are:

1. Content Spam
2. Link Spam
3. Mirror Sites
4. URL Redirection
5. Cloaking
6. Doorway Pages
7. Link Farms

Content Spam and Link Spam represent the two major groups of Black Hat SEO.  If you own you any website with a forum or blog I’m sure you’ve been bombarded with adult, gambling or pharmaceutical link spam…Annoying right?  Yep, but unfortunately it is very effective.

The kicker is Google may be the one to blame for this epidemic surge in Black Hat SEO over the past few years.  Earl Grey from Syndk8 states:

Back in 2003 you could launch a site, put some nice content on it and then get some traffic.  In 2003 Google decided to punish the content builders and white hat seo`s by creating something that has commonly being known as the sandbox.

I joined an seo forum to find out why I was having problems getting traffic and it turned out that Google decided to screw the white hat seo that was making the internet clean and full of content by putting a penalty on new domains, content and links.

The option to build content rich sites was no longer there for most people unless you had a real fat wallet or you were prepared to eat bread and water while the sandbox released you.

Well now it appears the Black Hat SEO underworld feels confident enough they can come public on how they rip-off the Top Dog in contextual advertising, Google Adsense.  While reading through my e-mail today I came across a product launch promoting "the seedy world of black hat Adsense".  Let’s be clear right off the jump people…

There Is No Such Thing As Black Hat Adsense.  Period. 

I don’t care what any "guru" may tell you or recommend to you.  So called Black Hat Adsense is ADSENSE FRAUD and is not a Black Hat SEO method.  I strongly urge you not to promote these Adsense Whiz Kid type of programs unless you possibly wouldn’t mind getting your precious Adsense account banned.

What’s the deal here?  Is it just me or does there seem to be a growing acceptance of Black Hat SEO among the online marketing community?  I’m even seeing some of the more recognized online marketers publicly come forward with their approval of Black Hat SEO. 

What ever happened to integrity, hard work and ethics?   Have we traded them in for higher CTRS, eCPM’s, and EPC’s?

Stephen Ralph
Top-Affiliate.com

[tags]black hat seo, black hat, seo, black hat adsense, google adsense, spamdexing, search engine optimization[/tags]

Like many of you I’m seeing a Google Page Rank increase across most of my websites with this last update.  I’m noticing many of my WhyPark websites also gaining some PR.  But you know what? 

I really don’t stress over PR as the end all be all like a did back in the day when it was launched.  It sure is nice to get another site listed in Text Link Ads though. 

SEO professional Andy Hagans stated in a previous article

With each new Google update, it is apparent that PageRank counts for less, while other factors (trust, age, authority links) count for more.  "Really, the importance of the green pixels is now negligible, aside from a very rough indication of a site’s link popularity and assurance that it isn’t banned in Google. But as long as Google continues to show PageRank in the toolbar, it will never ‘die’ in the public consciousness.

I couldn’t agree with him more.

However, if PR does keep you awake at night, for some strange reason, then here’s the most productive White Hat link building methods:

1. Shift your linking focus to getting links from relevant sites that are in DMOZ and Yahoo! directories.  Some may argue and that’s their perogative but Google does still place a fair amount of weight on these links because they are generally of higher quality.

2. Focus on unique content building.  No brainer on that one right!  Build a solid relationship with reporters, writers, press release firms and above all write some unique articles.

3. SEARCH WITH ALL YOUR POWER for the highly prized .gov and .edu links.  Hmm…maybe you should go back to school and take one college night class somewhere in something you always wanted to learn about.  Besides enhancing your education you’ll also usually get a free web page under the .edu domain upon registration.  I wonder how many enterprising college kids are selling links off their websites to make some weekend money?  =)

Whatever you do please don’t set up a link exchange on your site that’s focused on real estate and exchange links with a site themed on antique cars.  This really seems like a no brainer but I still see many webmasters exchanging links with every site on the planet.  That’s backwards, it’s quality over quantity so be selective.  Remember, Google only wants to see your site linking to other websites if they truly offer something of value to web surfers.

Best of luck to you in your link building campaign in 2007!

[tags]google page rank, page rank, link building, link exchange, pr, text link ads, content building[/tags]

I’ve been doing some SEO tweeks here and there on Top-Affiliate.com for the past week and it appears my efforts are paying off.  Although the ALEXA ranking constantly fluctuates from day to day Top-Affiliate.com is currently ranked at 19,207.  Not a bad way to start your Saturday!

A rumor from TechCrunch shows that Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) is thinking about bidding for YouTube.  An article in the Wall Street Journal indicates Google is in talks to acquire YouTube Inc. for roughly $1.6 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. There’s nothing solid yet and this could all dissolve overnight…but there’s talks.

YouTube was only launched in Feb 2005 and commands more than 46% of the total U.S. online video site traffic.  Pretty impressive numbers for a site still in it’s infancy.

YouTube has a been a brilliant viral marketing platform for many savvy marketers.  It also is a search engine optimization machine.  With thousands of people posting videos a day the search engines crawl through the site regularly and index almost everything. 

No doubt Google wants to break into the social networking scene.  Not too long ago Google was prepared to pay $900 million for MySpace but that never panned out.  If they acquire YouTube they will have some well established web real estate that will put them far ahead of their rivals (i.i MSN, Yahoo! etc.).  In addition, Google will be able to effectively monetize YouTube, which is something the current owners have had difficulty conceptualizing.

Well, StomperNet was launched today at 12 noon EST to the masses.  During the prelaunch of this system the two Internet Marketing professionals behind StomperNet, Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon, added over 33,099 people to their priority waiting list and had over 420,090 people watch their  viral videos.  Pretty impressive numbers by anyones standards.

These two guys have been around for a while and really do know their stuff backwards and forwards.  They also practice what they preach and are not regurgitating information you already know. 

So what are their credentials?

Brad Fallon is the guy behind My Wedding Favors, which became a multi-million dollar business it’s very first year online.  Andy Jenkins, is the mastermind behind the wildly successful and popular Yahoo! Store Profits system.

Their StomperNet system will pretty much show you EXACTLY how to run every aspect of your business online.  It’s the same exact practices and marketing techniques they use to net over $19,000,000+ each and every year online.

So what’s the cost to learn how to undoubtedly become successful online?……..$797.00…….per month.

Now from a business perspective that’s honestly not an astronomical amount to skyrocket your business and rank in the top positions of the search engines in any market you target.  However, this price really only targets entrepreneurs who:

A.  Already have an established business that earns them a decent monthly income
B.  Are coming into online marketing from a higher socio-economic strata

Less than 1000 entrepreneurs will be allowed to join the StomperNet system, which does come with a 100% money back gurantee.  I am interested to see how fast they sell out though at $797.00 per month.