Excellent article by Dave Harry on the nuances of link building and keeping a diverse yet strategic keyword expansion plan in focus from the ground floor up on a link building campaign. Using Keyword research to diversify link profiles Crafting link profiles is all about related diversity. What I mean by that is we want to have a diversified link text collection that is made of up related phrasings and creates a 'theme' in the eyes of a search engine.

If you're going to openly sell crap links on the footer of your site to Mesothelioma Lawyers, Ticket Scalpers, Personal Injury Law Firms and other blatant spam related and irrelevant sites )sites which are not relevant to your own(, Google is going to find you out and probably penalize you. Such is the case of NewsDay.com, which was slapped with a Google Penalty for openly selling spam links throughout their high profile site.

A reader left this comment today on Search Engine Journal and seriously, this is the greatest feedback and payback I can imagine from our 5 years of search marketing and SEO coverage : Mendy Ouzillou I have been an avid fan of SEJ for about 2 years and my natural search rankings for my glass jewelry and art glass website have truly benefited from your content. I am not a professional in the SEO industry but with the help of SEJ, I have been able to get my rankings up to #1,

Like Yahoo , Google has become a target for talent acquisition over the past years, especially with employee perks deteriorating , and now this movement has spread abroad. Ex-Google UK Managing Director Kate Burns, who was at Dailymotion for 4 months after leaving Google, has been hired by AOL's social networking giant Bebo, to help head Bebo Europe as its new Vice President and Managing Director. Why is AOL hiring an ex-Google employee of any importance? Well for one,

Link building is a dynamic art form, which is constantly redefining itself and coming up with new techniques which may be more efficient, and more powerful, than the old fashioned manual link request emails. In link building, sometimes marketers lose their focus or get over aggressive, and spend too much time contacting every single site within their niche, hoping to get a link or a buzz generating blog post about their product or service.

Today marks the celebration of the birthday of the United States of America; Independence Day, the Fourth of July. While many Americans are enjoying their day off, the three day weekend, fireworks and backyard bbq's, the search engines are also showing their love for our independence, with their celebratory logos. Google's Fireworks over the lake logo : Yahoo also brings fireworks into their 4th of July logo,

Google has developed a new version of their Google Talk messaging service for the Apple iPhone, in an announcement just in time for the launch today of the 3G iPhone. From Talkabout, the Google Talk Blog : Our new version of Google Talk is designed specifically for the iPhone and runs in the iPhone's browser, so you don't need to download or install anything. Just visit www.google.com/talk on your iPhone, sign in, and start chatting.

Google Street View, which photographs the streets and lanes within cities and other destinations via a continuous panoramic camera placed on the top of cars, has now gone live for France .

The power of excellent public relations and positioning a company as an alternative t the technological norm has paid off for Powerset, the semantics oriented search technology which launched its limited public testing application in May which lends a new way to semantically navigate Wikipedia . Rumors began spinning around the blogosphere last week that Microsoft was looking to acquire Powerset , and it looks like the inevitable has happened.

A Microsoft Engineer leaves Microsoft to work at Google, and then decides to head back to Microsoft after spending time in the Google development system. Sergey Solyanik puts together an interesting read and comparison between the two companies, including how the perks at Google and social governance by peers lend to stronger teams and interaction but also result in questions over who is really in a management role.

LinkedIn is putting together a smarter way to monetize itself with the launch of LinkedIn DirectAds )currently under limited testing(, which lets advertisers target ads by several demographic metrics such as age, gender, region, education or major, career industry and position. LinkedIn DirectAds is a grownup and more professional version of Facebook Ads, with a CPM )cost per impression( model instead of the cost per click.

The results of the $10,000 Search Engine Journal Guest Blogging competition are finally in after the great SEJ Blog Off between John Carcutt and Richard Burckhardt, two excellent SEO's who have contributed incredible content to Search Engine Journal for this competition and also on various occasions. The Guest Blogging Competition The first $10,000 SEJ Guest Blogging was a huge success,

Twellow is a new Twitter Directory which has been launched by the folks at iEntry/WebProNews and looks like it will be quite a piece of work. Taking elements from Twitter, web directories, search engines and the Yellow Pages, Twellow.com lets Twitter users add their Twitter profile to the vertically categorized directory; along with basic personal info, their web site and amount of followers )all taken from a Twitter account, I'd like to see the option to login,

Google is the target of a one billion dollar lawsuit by LimitNone, a software company which claims Google has taken trade secrets from the company and violated consumer fraud law. Apparently, LimitNone developed a tool which allows users to move Microsoft Office calendar info and email to the Google GMail application. LimitNone, according to a report in Wired , says that they presented the software to Google in 2007 and worked with Google on developing the software.

Google has topped the Harris Interactive Reputation Quotient which asks US consumers to first identify the 60 most visible companies and then to rank these companies based on their reputation in six different categories: Emotional Appeal, Products & Services, Social Responsibility, Vision & Leadership, Workplace Environment, and Financial Performance .

In preparation for a presentation this week on the importance of link building and steps to an efficient and effective link building strategy, I am putting together blog posts this week which reflect my philosophy on link building, and what I have learned over the years. Is it all too often that a company embarks on a link building campaign before making sure their web site is ready for the influx of links which will assist with search engine rankings. Many companies expect,

Jeremy Zawodny left Yahoo last week but the hacking & coding aviator is not going to be flying solo for very long, as it looks like Zawodny has found an open nest to land in at Craigslist . I realized that craigslist is a pretty unique combination of things: a small company with a solid financial base, a great service that I use myself, a focused groups of people who really care about doing things well, and an open-source friendly environment.

Another critical piece of the Yahoo machine has left the garage, as Joshua Schachter, who Yahoo brought in when they acquired Del.icio.us back in 2005 , is resigning from his post. Schachter joins the founders of Flickr , Jeremy Zawodny who was the semi-reluctant voice of Yahoo in the blogosphere, and Yahoo VP Jeff Weiner ; who have all moved on from the company over the past week. Yahoo, given its internal troubles, exodus of multiple high level executives,

In an effort to boost its webmail usage or delay the exodus of free mail users from Yahoo to Google GMail, Yahoo has introduced the ymail.com email domain and reintroduced RocketMail.com. Yahoo.com email addresses are currently used )or claimed( by over 260 million global users, and chances are, if you're new to Yahoo Mail, your name is taken and you probably have to register some ridiculous email address, like LBakerFireUSA185302@yahoo.

Putting a very thin silver lining on the dark cloud of petroleum dependency, Google's Vint Cerf )who is commonly referred to as the father of the Internet(, made a statement at the 2008 OECD Ministerial Meeting in Korea about how high oil prices could be seen as beneficial to the Internet. "Although I'm not happy with increased oil prices, the Internet )industry( may actually benefit from that as people turn to it as an aid to improve their efficiency,