So Eric Enge does a post over on Search Engine Land, riffing on my Dot EDU link hunting presentation from SMX Advanced in Seattle )Hey Eric, where's a fucking link to my blog? Thanks for nothing, Pthhhhh! LOL(. It's a good post and worth reading, although he should have linked to my blog from my name like everyone else does, but that's a different story.

Just a note that I've been added to the June 3rd schedule for the Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques session at SMX Advanced. I'm going to discuss obtaining dot edu links, and if there's time I will cover other interesting techniques that will be sure to fire up your link building effort. As is my custome, the most important parts of my session will not be on the PowerPoint.

Need more ways to monetize your site? Have a feeling there's more to site monetization than AdSense? Here are some suggestions: If you're in the U.S. try http://publisher.yahoo.com/ If you're outside the U.S. try http://www.casalemedia.com/ If you have an extraordinary site, try http://www.gorillanation.com/ Is your site less than extraordinary but you have a desirable demographic?

Tune in... A common complaint is that no one will link to a site if it's brand new. That's not unreasonable because after all, if your site is in it's own linkless little corner how is anybody going to find it to link to it? At this point of link building the challenge is to bring the site into view of those who do the linking. Get them to tune in to your site.

Top of the Page Ad Unit Imo, if you put an ad unit near the top, you will have a fighting chance to monetize site visitors who would otherwise abandon that web page. This refers to the abandonment rate or Bounce Away stats noted in your traffic stats. If your stats don't show bounce rates, then you need to upgrade to something better. Bounce rates are not an insignificant data point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Video is on its own track, running parallel to text search, not on the same track with text search the way local and image search is. What Google is to text search, YouTube is to video. This is an important concept to grasp. YouTube is it's own thing. Go to Alexa.com and compare YouTube to Google.com. While Google has more reach than YouTube, YouTube has more pageviews than Google,

Thanks Wiep for inspiring this post. Most of what was listed in that post will technically get links to a crappy site, but they're not likely going to help a site rank. So what I want to do is take the subject to the next level and discuss obtaining quality links to crap sites for the express purpose of making it rank. Focus on improving ranks,

Ever play peek-a-boo with a toddler? It's cute how they hide behind their palms and act like we can't see them. SEOs play the same game, too. The other day someone asked what a Pre-Sell page is and I thought, it's a paid link, what's so hard about understanding that. But I couldn't blame them for asking.

Outsourcing the entire link development project is potentially dangerous, especially if you don't exactly know what the linkers are doing. An alternative way to develop links is to outsource the manual part of the work while keeping control of the strategy and vigorously monitoring for quality. While there are a few decent link builders, as far as I know, in my opinion,

My father in law started a site to support his business and called me up to discuss. His first idea was to submit to directories and exchange links... and that's where he became a bug on the Internet Highway Splat! and hit a windshield. Welcome to the Internet... now move aside Hitting the windshield is not uncommon but you don't have to end up there.

Someone mentioned that his competitor had rock solid rankings because of a couple dot edu links. However, in my experience, a couple dot edu links aren't going to make that much of a difference. What stands betweeen you and more dot edu links The downside to dot edu links is that you can't request specific anchors without sounding spammy and possibly increasing the rejection rate.

Someone was disputing whether links from blogs were efficient for ranking purposes. In his opinion, blog links were pretty much dead. In his opinion, blogs were burned out as a link source and were being discounted by Google, this year's version of the guestbook link. That point of view is not without foundation, there are solid reasons for arriving at that conclusion.

In a recent WebmasterWorld thread about link strategies, ken_b stated he was inclined to think of link building in terms high and low risk rather than colors of hats. I agree with him. Discussions tethered to colored hats are really about what Google prefers and not about the efficacy of any particular link building strategy. The moment someone invokes hats,

I found webmasterworld by web related queries. I kept bumping into it. I find many forums this way, including researching products, places to stay, services for my child, etc. That's no surprise because some of the best content is in forums. How well forum posts rank depends, imo, on several factors: Moderation Your moderators must pay attention to post titles and edit them for clarity.

Re video ads of the near future, someone in a WebmasterWorld thread assumed they would be contextual. I don't think that's the type of advertising market that represents a new growth sector. Check out what Joost is up to for a sample of what's coming down the line in the next few years. This is bigger than YouTube and video ads on a website publishers website.

Crush made a post the other day asking if the hype about link baiting was ove. Greg Hartnett of Best of the Web in his blog asked, to put words in his mouth, if the hype over Digg was over. Both posts are related because the link bait technique is used on Digg, and link bait has become synonymous with Digg.

Let's trash the neighborhood One of the dumbest metrics for judging a backlink is neighborhood. By bad neighborhood, most people mean the industry, like pills, porn, and gambling. That's the lazy way to do it, even though following the conventional practice will generally keep you out of trouble. But it's incorrect because a bad neighborhood has nothing to do with the industry niche.

I don't normally publicize these but... For the last two years the local band of San Francisco Bay Area SEOs, SEMs, Web Workers and Affiliate Crack Heads have been getting together every three or four months at a different Irish Pub in the City and in Oakland/Berkeley. The core group consists of a number of well known web workers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Great conversation, networking,

Don't use the toolbar as a guide. The toolbar is not a useful metric. Never under any circumstance use it to measure quality. Just go to Yahoo and do a linkdomain search, you'll get far better information. I'm a fan of backlink analysis linkdomain:example.com site:.info linkdomain:example.com site:.edu linkdomain:example.com site:.us linkdomain:example.com site:.gov linkdomain:example.