Yahoo! has entered some new agreements that will prove to make its ad empire grow.

I think it’s safe to say that Google has wrapped up the PPC market. But that’s not to say that the No. 1 search engine has a corner on online advertising in general. It is perfectly conceivable that Yahoo! will take the prize in banner advertising in the same way that Google has taken it in PPC. Both can compete in each arena, but it’s hard to be No. 1 in every area. Usually, whenever a front runner leaves the pack and gets as big a head start as Google has in the area of search and PPC then that front runner has an edge that is difficult to strip away. It looks like Yahoo! has figured out where it’s strength lies.

Google has not, and never has been, big on banner advertising. You go to their search page and you see no ads. You go to Yahoo!s search page and all you see are ads. Different websites, different values. People go to Google to search. They go to Yahoo! to be marketed to. MSN was competing, but I think Yahoo! has left MSN in the dust. Relegated to third place forever, all Microsoft can do is sit in the corner and sulk. But Yahoo! is into taking No. 1 in banner advertising and I think it will surely happen - in a big way.

“Follow me and I will make you fishers of men,” said a famous religious leader. But if you are going fishing then you need the right bait. Online, that bait is link bait.

What exactly is link bait?

Link bait is anything that you have on your website that entices other webmasters to link to you without an invitation. In other words, you snag them like an unsuspecting catfish. Whiskers and all.

Link bait works because it provides webmasters with a benefit - information for their site visitors. Yes, it means visitors will leave their website, but savvy webmasters know that if they provide useful services and information for their visitors then their visitors will return for more of it. That’s why link bait works. It provides other webmasters with a benefit that they may not get anywhere else.

Looking for links? Get some link bait. Put something on your website that says you are worth linking to. A service or product, an offering, information that can’t be found anywhere else … these are all ideas that you can use. Make it enticing. Ask yourself, “Why would someone link to this?” If you have the answer then you’ll enjoy the links. Isn’t fishing fun?

Read a great article this morning on Gooruze. It was written by Andy Beal so you know it’s got to be good, right?

The essence of the article, and I agree, is that there is no excuse for an SEO not to share with you what he is doing to improve your site. If he is vague and unresponsive to your requests for information then you should think about going elsewhere.

Many inexperienced SEOs or blackhat SEOs will simply stop talking to you when they hit a roadblock or start using tactics that will get you banned. One businesswoman I spoke with said a former SEO advised her to get two websites and put the same content on both websites. She ended up with duplicate content and that hurt her reputation at the search engines. She suffered for a long time and still has a lower than desirable PR even though her website has been live for 4 years.

I like Andy’s suggestions:

• Ask for periodic reports - preferably weekly or monthly
• Get explanations for what the SEO is doing and why
• Insist on accountability
• Ensure that you get the best service available

I learned about it from Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim. Gooruze is a new online community for Internet marketers. And it looks pretty cool. This is the part that I like:

Using the same robust platform that already powers the successful Minti.com network, Gooruze brings a blend of Digg, Sphinn, Webmaster World, and SEOmoz. The community launches with a fine group of “Founding Gooruze” (of which I am one of them) but offers a level playing field for all members.

Those are Andy’s words. Now you can’t beat the services mentioned above - from Minti to SEOmoz. And if there is another service that utilizes the same platform as these then that service has built in merit. Gooruze, however, is more than just a nameless platform behind a cool new website. The great thing about it you can actually network with industry leaders like Andy Beal, who seem all too willing to spend a little time to help those a little further down on the social scale. That alone is a benefit worth any amount of time or money.

I’m heading over to Gooruze right now to set up my profile and start networking today.

And don’t even bother collecting $200, or the $2 million you would have made.

Spammers are now getting jail sentences, which is pretty serious:

(Source) Jeffrey Kilbride, 41, of Venice California, and James Schaffer, also 41, of Paradise Alley, Arizona, were sentenced to 72 months and 63 months in prison, respectively, fined $100,000 and were ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL. They also were ordered to forfeit over $1.1 million in commissions they made spamming inboxes with pornographic emails.

This is pretty wild. It makes me wonder who will go down in history as the biggest cyber criminal - you know, the Al Capone of cyberspace. Instead of bootlegging, it’ll be spam.

Some of the co-conspirators in this case actually turned state evidence against Kilbride and Schaffer in exchange for lighter sentences. Not a bad deal. Break the law, tell me who helped you, and we’ll go easy on you. I guess that makes spam just like any other crime.

The spammers went so far as to set up shell corporations in other countries and send spam from Phoenix, Arizona through a redirect as if it was coming from Amsterdam. I guess they were really serious about sending out those spam notices. And they had to pay AOL for damages.

I can see a day when spam will be prosecuted multiple times for the same crime. Since every nation has its own laws, a spammer or other cyber criminal who breaks laws in more than one nation could potentially face charges in every nation affected by the crime. That would effectively be the end of double jeopardy, a protection for criminals so that they aren’t charged with the same crime twice. But since there is no international government agency or laws in place to protect criminals from being charged with the same crime more than once … well, it’s just a matter of time.

Kind of makes you think twice before breaking the law, huh?

Building a website without doing keyword research is like skinning a rabbit without a knife, or building a house without a hammer. Bottom line: If you want to succeed you’ve got to your homework - you have to do the research.

There are many tools for conducting keyword research. Some are free and some are not. But one of the best keyword research tools that I’ve found is the WordTracker Keywords tool. You can’t go wrong with this one.

You can join WordTracker with a free trial, but I know you’re going to love it so much you might as well just go ahead and buy the subscription. WordTracker has two keyword research categories, both an indispensable aid to getting to the right keywords fast. The two aids are Keyword Universe and Keyword Researcher. One (Keyword Universe) is the perfect tool for brainstorming, giving you the broadest range possible for choosing keywords related to your niche. The (Keyword Researcher) other takes you deeper into your keywords to explore the long tail.

WordTracker’s reports are nowhere to be matched. They have a list of great keywords related to various niches, which show you the most popular keywords searched for online. You can also run several keyword research campaigns at one time. That alone is worth the subscription fee. And you can all your results in one place - thousands of keywords in one single report.

WordTracker Keywords will save you time. You’ll find the most profitable keywords related to your niche, get a head start on the competition, and even be able to find new niches within your industry - that’s a thousand time selling benefit for true-blue Internet marketers! WordTracker Keywords is such a valuable tool you’ll be able to call yourself a keyword research expert in no time. This is one tool you can’t live without.

Just so there’s no confusion, I thought I’d revisit the search engine spam issue. You know, of course, that there are different kinds of spam. Let’s count the ways:

1. E-mail spam
2. Search engine spam
3. Blog spam
4. Forum spam
5. Canned spam

OK, that last one was a joke. But suffice it to say that spam can appear almost anywhere. But some people are referring to spam in ways that a bit out of order, as mentioned in this previous post. I just wanted to set the record straight.

Not everything that is called spam is spam. But there are some things that are obviously spam and should never be done. Here’s your checklist:

• Hidden links - spam
• Hidden keywords - yes, it’s spam
• Squeeze pages - spam
• Violating search engine policies - oops, that’s spam
• Content scraping - bet you didn’t think that was spam, did you?
• Keyword fluffing
• Link laundering

There is a long list of things can be considered spam. Some people say do it; some people say don’t. I say reap the consequences of what you sow. Pay attention to the search engine guidelines. That’s the best way to avoid the label of spam.

When you have multiple offers on the table at one time, it isn’t enough just to engage in conversion tracking. Yes, you want to track where your traffic coming from and where it is going. But you also want to know where your sales are coming from, not just overall but for every offer that you have.

So when you do your conversion tracking be sure that you are tracking every offer. It is best if you have special tracking codes for each offer that you make. That will make your conversion tracking a lot easier. Then when you install Google Analytics - by far, the best conversion tracking system on the planet - you can track every code, every offer you have.

The great thing about Google’s conversion tracking tools is that you can track the results of any of your advertising campaigns, even if they are being run on a platform of a Google competitor. Yahoo! Search Marketing, for instance. You install the proper codes on your website and Google will track your conversions for you, giving you one source where you can keep track of all of your conversions at one time. There truly is no tool better for tracking conversions than Google Analytics. Give it a try.

The question comes up often, “What’s the best SEO tool?” I suppose that depends on how you define tool. In my book, a keyword research tool is an SEO tool. So are keywords themselves. And hyperlinks. As can be bullet lists and h2 tags. In all, there are literally hundreds of SEO tools in the SEOs tool chest. Which is the best one is a question that doesn’t have an easy answer.

I think the answer to the question largely has to do with what your goals are. Are you targeting the search engines for a specific keyword to rank a particular page one time or are you trying to boost your overall trust factor or targeting the search engines for long term? Each goal has a different strategy and therefore a different tool.

For instance, if you want to rank a particular web page your website for a long tail keyword phrase related to your niche then I would suggest using your keyword phrase frequently, optimizing your meta tags, emplace your keyword phrase in the page title and description, use an h1 tag for your page head, etc. If you’ve been in SEO circles for very long then that’s pretty simple, though not an altogether easy task.

But what if you want to fight your way to the top for a particular keyword phrase and snag the No. 1 position for that phrase? Well, that requires an entirely different strategy. In that case I would say start a blog and use that keyword phrase in every page of your blog, optimizing each page as you would a web page. Then you market the blog by bookmarking your blog posts at several social bookmarking sites and distributing articles to as many article directories as you can to promote the blog. You could even write press releases and distribute them online as well. In a word, there are a number of ways to target your key phrase, but whenever you do so, be sure to point all of your anchor text to your blog so that your blog rises with the tide.

You could do the same thing with a page of your website, but I think it’s easier to do with a blog. The point here is that every SEO strategy requires a different tool. The key to good SEO is knowing which tool to use for each occasion.

If you’re looking for a keyword research tool that won’t let you down, I highly recommend Keyword Discovery.

The reason I like Keyword Discovery is, simply put, because it is the best keyword research tool on the market. This keyword research tool is so advanced it takes information from 32 billion search queries from more than 200 search engines worldwide. Through Keyword Discovery, you also have access to third-party research tools like Google AdWords Selector Tool and Yahoo/Overture Keyword Selector Tool.

One of the great features that I’ve found is the Keyword Discovery has a list of popular search terms in several categories already available for its subscribers. You’ll have no problem finding the long tail of your niche with Keyword Discovery.

Among the many features of Keyword Discovery include:

• Industry-Specific Keyword Research Tools
• Spelling Mistake Research
• Seasonal Search Trends
• Related Keyword Research
• KEI Analysis
• Keyword Density Analysis
• Domain Research Tool
• WordTracker Comparison

You also get great reports from Keyword Discovery:

• Top Search Term Reports
• Exhaustive Keyword Lists
• Industry Keyword Lists

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Some of the best and brightest people in the search industry have reviewed Keyword Discovery and walked away with the same opinion. Here are a few of their voices:

When you need a keyword research tool that is reliable and dependent, that offers great tools you can’t get anywhere else, and that provides the fullest, most complete information to go on, then try Keyword Discovery.

This is true, not only of your blog content, but of all of your content. In other words, you can encourage comments on your website as much as on your blog and this is especially true of your forum content.

In essence, comments on your blog, forum, or website help you to optimize your content for the search engines in a number of ways. Just as each blog post on your blog is a separate web page, so too is each thread on a forum considered a separate web page. This is a prime example of how you can turn any website into a social marketing tool. And it is something I highly encourage you to consider.

What it boils down to is conversation. If you write a blog post about XYZ and someone comments on it then it is highly likely that they will use the same keyword or a similar keyword in their comment. The same is true in a forum thread. Related comments continue the optimization process that you started with your original comment. That’s why you should encourage comments as often as possible. You can get your site visitors and visitor/readers to contribute to your SEO. In other words, don’t turn off the comment feature on your blogs and don’t make it too difficult for people to join your community. Otherwise, you’ll discourage participation and lose out on the most important benefits you can gain.

If you really want to put your link building on steroids then I highly suggest the use of the following tools in good measure:

• An off site blog
• Articles
• Forum posts
• Directories
• Bookmarks
• Social Networking
• Photo sharing

A blog is great for link building because every post you make is a separate web page. Link to your website and you’ve got some good links building.

Articles are good long term. Every article you submit has the potential to build thousands of links for you over time.

Forum posts. Great for traffic and links. Some forums use nofollow links, but if you use the forums that allow you to build links to your website then every post you make becomes an inbound link - you have to use your signature link or it doesn’t work right.

Directories are usually a one shot deal. The more directories you list your website with then the more inbound links you have.

Every time you bookmark an article, you are linking back to your website.

With social networking you get to make friends and drive traffic to your website. The link building comes in when you set up your profile.

As with social networking, the photo sharing sites allow you to set up a profile and link back to your website. It’s another way to establish your presence on the Internet.

Talk to some people and you are a spammer the moment you use your keywords, or link to another website, especially if it yours. Some of the crazy things people call spam truly amaze me. I mean, it’s SEO. You would think that everyone would want to learn it and get good at it. But some people would rather just call you a spammer and hang you in town square. If these people are right, what’s so special about SEO? Are you sure that what you are doing is legitimate SEO and not spam?

Here’s a short list of some of the things I’ve heard people call spam despite it the obvious SEO benefits:

• Linking to your own website from an off site blog
• Using keyword-rich content that is above a certain keyword density threshold
• Selling links
• Linking to or from unrelated websites
• Using special effects like bold or italicized text in conjunction with keywords to increase the SEO benefits
• Owning more than one website or blog in a niche

I understand not everyone agrees with all of these tactics, but does that make them spam? The definition of spam includes an attribute of non-solicitation. In the case of e-mail spam, for instance, spam would be unsolicited commercial e-mail. If you are simply targeting keywords using websites, blogs, and other legitimate web marketing tools then that can’t be spam since the entities being targeted are the search engines, which encourage these practices through their policies and algorithms. If they reward you for using them, it isn’t spam. If they penalize you then it might be spam. The last time I looked, each of these strategies were legitimate internet marketing tactics, hence not spam.

You tell me: What’s so special about SEO?

Do you know what an URL is? You should. It stands for Uniform Resource Locator. In simple terms, your URL is your web address, but it’s more than just www.mydomain.com.

An URL can also be the individual pages within your website. For example: www.mydomain.com/this-is-a-new-page. For SEO purposes, short URLs are better than long URLs. In other words, if you have a chance to create an URL that is one or two words rather than ten words then go with the shorter URL. www.mydomain.com/new-page is a lot better than www.mydomain.com/this-is-a-new-page-i-created-just-for-this-purpose, for instance.

Another form that URLs may take is with numbers and special characters. The search engines are getting better at crawling URLs that contain special characters, but they used to not crawl them at all. They’ve realized, however, that people use special characters to track results of their sales campaigns. That is a legitimate purpose, by the way.

I wouldn’t use numbers in most URLs, however. You’re much better off creating a keyword-rich URL. It will be crawled better and it will provide you with better search engine benefits. But there are times when you might dispense with the keyword-rich URL altogether. If you are targeting a special promotion to different market segments and you want to track the results you get for each market segment then you might create your generic web page, which does contain your keyword-rich URL - www.mydomain.com/special-promotion.

Then, you’ll want to take the same page and change the second half of that URL to include your tracking code:

Each target market will be sent, using your advertising sources, to the appropriate page for tracking purposes. Each web page will appear exactly the same, but the URL will be different. If you use this strategy, however, you’ll want to make each page containing a tracking code a nofollow page. Otherwise, you’ll be penalized by the search engines for creating duplicate pages. The purpose, after all, is to track your advertising results so you really don’t want the search engines crawling those pages.

There is a lot more that could be said for URLs. But the main point I want you to walk away from with this lesson is to create a short URL whenever possible. Take out the excessive dashes and long names that lead to nowhere.

I’ve written about BlogRush before, here and here. What I didn’t tell you is that I decided to give it a try on a blog or two (you know, just to hedge my bets).

One of the blogs I tried it on was Blog Marketing Journal and today at BMJ we gave an update on the results we’ve received. As a sort of a teaser, I’d like to highlight just a few of the comments that others have made about BlogRush. For a larger list of comments, go to Blog Marketing Journal. Here’s your teaser:

Some people just realize that you cant put cr@p up and expect blogrush to accept it. If you want to get noticed build a big blog with great content, not some piddly lil advertising place full of advertising spam and adsense.

Blog Rush is the best thing thats happened to the blogging world sine it was invented!

Not sure about the strong attitude towards widget-placement. Not only is it too wide for me, but I find it a little garish.

I’ll have to agree with the garish part. John Reese, the creator of BlogRush, wants everyone to place the widget as high up on their blog as possible. Supposedly, this produces better results. It’s likely true, if there are any results at all. Whether you use BlogRush or not is up to you, but I’m not sold yet.