Everyone wants links. There’s a good reason. They are sustenance for your web business. But not every link in the world is a good link.

There has been so much hype around link building that many new webmasters don’t fully grasp the purpose and the power behind good quality links. They are willing to sell their souls for a little link love that doesn’t provide the promised benefits. They’ll drink the link juice of the most persuasive cult leader they can find and when their website falls into the pit of link hell they don’t know quite to do. It’s a long climb up from the bottom of under the belly of Below.

So what makes a good link? What should a webmaster look for? Below are the qualities of a good link and then I’ll talk about some sources for those links that won’t hurt your business, but will prime the pump and get you started:

• A good link comes from a site that is relative to your site - That means, it is on the same topic as yours.
• A good link connects to a page on your site from a page on another site that is relevant and related in subject matter - In other words, two web pages on vastly different subject matter sites can still pass the relevancy test in some cases.
• A good link comes from a strong authority site - That doesn’t necessarily mean high PR; it could mean a mediocre PR site where the webmaster has taken the time to maintain good, clean content and establish himself as a relevant site with good information.
• A good link includes relevant anchor text - This is very important. Make sure the anchor text of a link is an important keyword phrase for the specific web page to which it links.
• A good link DOES NOT link from a bad neighborhood - If a linking site sits on a server or IP block where a lot of known spam originates then its link value will diminish.

So where can you get these types of links? First, understand that quantity is not the issue. I’d rather have 5 or 10 high quality inbound links than 100 lousy links. And you should too. Quality link building takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Here are some sources of good, quality links:

• Other webmasters related to your topic (contact them directly)
• Article directories (but not all of them)
• Blogs that write about your topic
• Forums related to your topic
• The best links usually come from people who link to your on their own without your requesting it

Link building isn’t hard. It is essential. But if you get the wrong kinds of links from the wrong kinds of people then it could kill your business. One final rule: Accept no links from spammers.

Jane Copland at SEOmoz doesn’t like seeing Diggs in the SERPs. I’m actually of two minds on this one.

On the one hand, I can see her point. If I, as a searcher, find information that has been Dugg then I have to click on the Digg page in the SERP then click on the source link in Digg to get to the original source. It’s two steps. On the other hand, my experience has been that those Digg results are for Diggs that are popular and not just Dugg once or twice. That means that either they are older Diggs or recent Diggs that are very popular. If they are older and just hanging around then I don’t want to see them because they likely are not relevant, or at least not recent enough to be good sources of information. On the other hand, if it is a recent Digg that is very popular then I could be finding information that is a good source of information that I likely would not find otherwise because the original source was not SEOd well.

OK, so there are two hands of the first hand. Now there are two hands of the second hand, which makes for four hands.

Second hand: From an SEO perspective, I’d like to see my original page ranking above Digg. Who wouldn’t? I worked hard to SEO it and now I’ve got an aggregated source beating me in the rankings for my own content. That’s not good. On the other hand (Hand No. 4), this could be telling me that I didn’t do a good enough job SEOing my content. I really should take another look at it and see if I can improve the SEO of the original content. But then (Hand No. 5?), maybe the search engines do need to tweak their algorithms. If Digg outranking a lot of sites for useful content then maybe the algorithms are weighted toward age factors and authority sites too much. If that is the case then Jane’s argument of canonical sources vs. aggregators is right on.

OK, now how many fingers am I holding behind my back (on all hands).

I’ve read in several places that the best SEO advice for putting your company name in the title tag is not a good idea. I’ll have to agree. This is just sound, solid wisdom.

If you look at the top of your browser, in the blue bar at the very top, you’ll see the title tag of the page you are looking at. Sometimes, many times in fact, you’ll see a word or phrase followed by a hyphen and another word or phrase. That first word or phrase, before the hyphen, should be a keyword-rich phrase that you want that page to rank for. Most people are not going to search for your company name, unless you are a big branded company that is well known, like Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. In that case, you might want your company name first, but otherwise not.

If you absolutely must put your company name in the title tag, put it at the end, after the hyphen. You might still rank for that name, but what you really want to do is rank for the keywords associated with your company name. That’s branding through your title tag. It works and you might as well just stick to conventional wisdom.

SEO and SEO specialists have a bad rep. The problem isn’t that SEO is a wicked science. The problem is more that it is a legitimate science and that’s why it’s so easy and so popular to game.

Because search engine optimization works, scammers, spammers, and other wild creatures try to use it to game the search engines and the entire Web community. They’re actually pretty good at it. Since blogging has become popular, a new kind of search engine spam has risen to popularity as well. I don’t if it has a name other than Spam, but it isn’t any less destructive and no less a nuisance.

What spammers are doing is using your RSS feeds to scrape your content and have it conveniently reloaded to their own blogs. They even so go far as to give you an attribution link. Hey, they’re following the rules! Or so it seems. But they also put those AdSense ads right next to your content in hopes that they’ll earn a buck or two off of your content. They’ll also link to another website where they attempt to sell services or affiliate programs. Are they successful? I don’t know. I suspect some of them may be, but others may not be. It depends on how well their spam sites are designed. I do know this: They rely a lot on the traffic from your blog when you approve their trackbacks. That’s why I am trying not to approve those comments when I see them. I don’t want my good readers being taken in by destructive spam. And if these sites get most of their traffic from the trackbacks to the sites where they are stealing content from, well it just makes sense that the way to shut them down is to stop approving their trackbacks. Then they’ll get no traffic.

WebProNews suggests 10 ways to increase your search engine saturation. Actually, they called it Number of Pages Indexed. Whatever you call it, there is hope.

Here’s the list:

• PageRank
• Links
• Sitemap
• Speed
• Google’s Crawl Caching Proxy
• Verify
• Content, Content, Content
• Staggard Launch
• Size Matters
• Know How Your Site Is Found, And Tell Google

PageRank

From WebProNews:

It depends a lot on PageRank. The higher your PageRank the more pages that will be indexed. PageRank isn’t a blanket number for all your pages. Each page has its own PageRank. A high PageRank gives the Googlebot more of a reason to return. Matt Cutts confirms, too, that a higher PageRank means a deeper crawl.

I concur. This is proof that persistence pays off. New webmasters often wonder how to increase their PageRank. Well, it doesn’t happen overnight. You’ve got to keep building pages. Don’t worry about stats in the first 30 pages of your website. Just build. Eventually, your PageRank will rise. I’ve seen websites start off at a PageRank of 3 before they even have one page of content on them. That happens because of the website owner’s Whois data, I’m sure. If you have several sites with PageRank then your reputation will help you. If you are on your first website then you have to build your reputation. Be patient and be persistent.

Links

Links and PageRank go hand in hand. The more quality, relevant inbound links you build to your site then the more likely you are build your PageRank. If you have a good internal link structure then that will help your PageRank as well. One of the best strategies I’ve seen for websites is to start an external blog - a standalone blog with its own domain name on the same topic as your website - and build links from the blog to the website every day. Consistency in this will help you establish quality inbound links from a relevant source.

Speed

I can’t tell you how important this is. Too many beginning webmasters start off wanting to build massive sites with huge files that take a long time to load. Start small. Learn the ropes before you go Web 2.0. Huge files with low bandwidth will load slowly and that will hurt your indexing mojo. Again, from WebProNews:

This could involve simplifying the structures and/or navigation of the site. The spiders have difficulty with Flash and Ajax. A text version should be added in those instances.

Bingo! If you’re a newbie, stay away from Flash and Ajax. They are speed killers and you’ll struggle with indexing and PageRank.

Content, Content, Content

There is no substitute for quality, original content. Frequent updating of your websites will keep them fresh. Take static pages of your website that have not been updated in a while and change them up a little bit. It doesn’t have to be much; just a small change will let the search engines know that you’ve changed the page. Then re-upload it and you’ll get crawled again. Work on building inbound links to those pages as well.

Staggered Launch

Here’s another big one. New and inexperienced webmasters want to build Rome in a day. Don’t build your entire website off line then try to upload it all at once. Do it in stages. Plan your website so that it is usable while you work on your long range goals. Staggered launch will build your PageRank and indexability a lot more quickly and reputably.

Size Matters

Bigger, better, faster, and more (thanks to 4 Non Blondes) should be your motto. The bigger your love handles - uhm, I mean website - then the more pages you’ll have indexed. Kind of a no-brainer, huh?

Know How Your Site Is Found, And Tell Google

Track your stats and understand what is going on with your website. Work with the search engines, not against them. One last time from WebProNews:

Find the top queries that lead to your site and remember that anchor text helps in links. Use Google’s tools to see which of your pages are indexed, and if there are violations of some kind. Specify your preferred domain so Google knows what to index.

All of this matters. Anchor text, verification, and Webmaster Tools. Use them. That’s what they’re there for. You can have a world class website with a little work and persistence. Did I mention persistence?

It was incredible. A comment on a blog post about search engine rankings said something like this:

(paraphrase) Google is broke. They spent too much time trying to make themselves the best search engine and employed a strategy of secrecy about what their algorithm entailed. That killed them.

When you’re done picking yourself up off the floor, consider this: That is not an unpopular opinion.

It’s true. This anti-Google bias is all over the place. For some reason, some SEOs have decided that Google is broke because the search engine sets its own rules. Secrecy and excellence killed it. Funny, huh?

I paraphrased the quote to save face with the blogger on whose blog the quote appears and with the commentator as well. No need to embarrass any one just to make a point. But it does deserve a carefully thought out response.

Here it is (somewhat carefully): Google isn’t broke. Google is secretive about its algorithms (as all the search engines are) because they don’t want people gaming them for personal and monetary gain at the expense of relevant search results. This already happening, you say? I agree; but imagine how much more so it would be happening if everyone in the world knew every bit about how those algorithms worked. My bet is you’d never see a relevant result.

It’s true that Google isn’t perfect. None of the search engines are perfect. But the reason Google holds the majority of the search market is because it has proven itself to be more accurate than the other search engines more often.

Google was an innovator at a time when no one dominated search. They were able to develop an algorithm that proved successful in delivering relevant results most of the time. That made a lot of people happy. In the excitement, Google grew. Webmasters began running tests on all the search engines to see which search engines were good at measuring certain ranking factors. Through these experiments, the search engine optimization field was developed, people began sharing their findings, and some of those people were able to demonstrate that they could achieve top results in Google time and time again by employing certain techniques. They, in essence, discovered the secrets to Google’s algorithms.

This didn’t sit well with Google execs so they changed their algorithms. It didn’t matter. The SEO gurus figured them out again. Google responded with other changes. More tests were run and the same guys were able to beat them. And this game continued, and still continues, and will likely always continue. Some of those SEO gurus are not bad people, though Google would prefer that no one learn the secret to their algorithms and just focus on creating content. But that won’t happen.

What has killed Google results - admittedly, Google’s accuracy rating has slid - is that some of the SEO gurus not really playing fair. It always happens in any business where people are free to research, create, build, and do what they do best. Some people use their skills for good and some for not-so-good pursuits. The bad SEOs began spamming the search engines and exploiting the algorithms for uncanny gain. That’s not Google’s fault. It just happened.

I believe Google is trying hard to fix the problems it has, but they really are fighting an uphill battle. The reason for secrecy to begin with was to prevent the kind of situation we have right now. If the search results at Google have declined in relevance and accuracy it’s because spammers - not Google - have broke the system. There are too many of them and they are too good at it. Couple that with the fact that Google only has so many resources at their disposal to combat the spam and you have a decline in SERP values. The bright side is that Google is still trying to fight the spam and will never give up.

Before you register a new domain name there are a few tests you should run before you just jump in. These domain testing strategies should help prevent you from making a huge mistake you’ll regret later:

• Look for singular and plural versions of the domain name you are interested in
• See if hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions are available
• Google your desired domain name to see if there are potential misspellings that might hinder your brand
• Check for popular misspellings and look to see if those domain names are available as well

Any domain name is close to the one you actually want that could be a landing place for a visitor trying to find you should be purchased along with your primary domain name and redirected to the actual site your content will live on. This is a precautionary measure. Many people do type URLs directly into the browser. Misspellings, plural versions, and other “close-but-no-cigar” URLs will frustrate visitors trying to find your website and they may not realize that they’ve made an error. You could lose a customer for life and it’s such a relatively small expense that it could cost you more not to do it.

Most webmasters don’t think about AdSense as an SEO tool, but it can be. Once you’ve established your website’s keyword focus and you’ve built enough pages to run your test, place a test ad or two on a couple of pages and let them sit for a week. Go back and take a look at your ads at various times of the day to see if they “match up” with your website’s content. If they don’t then it could be that you are not using the right keywords for your website.

To make this work, you have to sign up for AdSense and set it up for the right keywords. Make sure that your are AdSense ads target the right keywords because if they don’t then you’ll be running the wrong test and you won’t have any accuracy. The test works best on information publishing websites, but it can be done on just about any type of website. If you plan to use it as a test on your service-oriented website, don’t leave the ads up for too long because you’ll send your customers off to other places on the web and they’ll never do business with you again.

Remember, when you set up your AdSense, configure it to optimize with your content. You can opt to allow any type of ad to run on your site, but that won’t help you optimize your site for the type of visitors that you want. After you have determined whether your site is optimized properly, you can take your AdSense ads down and move on to the next project.

Early bird Aaron Wall started the day telling Yahoo! how to run its business. He actually made some pretty suggestions on ways that Yahoo! can improve its brand and take back some of that market share it has lost to Google over the years. But one point stood out to me - in fact, it stepped up and kicked me right between the legs.

Let users comment on search results AND on listings in search results. Controversy surrounding this will lead to more people talking about and evaluating Yahoo! Search for quality.

I can’t help but think what an explosive buzz that would create to allow searchers to comment on search results. There have already been search engines, or aggregators, that allow people to vote on results. Aftervote comes to mind. I wonder if that is where Aaron Wall got his idea from?

Anyway, while Yahoo! wouldn’t be the first search engine to implement commenting on search (Aftervote also includes this feature), they would be the first major search engine to have that feature should they implement it. I doubt that they will. Yahoo! has never been an innovator. They have always been a market follower, even in the days when they told Google founders that they search technology wasn’t good enough for Yahoo! That proved to be the biggest mistake in search history.

I liked Yahoo! as a directory. These days it’s hard to tell they even own a directory. It isn’t all that prominent. But neither is their search feature, which is prominent in the usual sense of the word, but it isn’t prominent in practice - and that’s what matters.

If any of the major search engines actually went social - I mean, really social - then it would be all over. Social media is where the game is at right now. Nearly all of the top sites online these days are some kind of social media. All a search engine would need to do is add a comments feature and a voting system to their search results and all the others would, by the rules of survival, have to follow. But will it be Yahoo!? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

It seems that everyone is becoming an SEO expert these days. Go online, read an e-book, and you can be an expert. So the mindset seems to be.

I hate to bust bubbles (actually, I quite like it ), but it does take some time to get proficient in search engine optimization. There’s no magic pill. No secret formula. No cool little trick or secret handshake. Almost anyone can do it.

I say “almost,” because you do need the time to read up on the subject and perform your own experiments. Can you succeed online if you are not an Aaron Wall or Danny Sullivan? Of course. Lots of people have done well online. And many more will continue to do well. But doing well online entails more than just SEO. You can have the best search engine optimization of your website in the entire world and still not make a dime. Because there is more to building a Web business or making a successful foray into Internet marketing than the right set of keywords and inbound links.

So what is the big secret? Betcha didn’t think you’d find that cat getting out of the bag on a search engine optimization blog. Did you?

Well, I have no axe to grind. No secrets to keep. No magic to protect. I just want to help people who can’t help themselves or who don’t have to time to do it themselves. But I digress.

If SEO isn’t the golden hammer than beat the nail in then what is? Truth be told, there is no formula for online success. You can make friends and influence people without making a dime. You can spend all kinds of money and never make a return. You can pay your days and still have your membership canceled.

OK, I’m getting silly. But you understand. When it comes to building a website and doing business online, it’s pretty much like doing business off line. You’ve got to have a plan and you’ve got to work your plan. It helps to understand sales and be able to close a few. You should probably build up a good team of professionals who help you with their special skills. Some professionals you’ll likely need if you want to build a successful web business:

• Knowledgeable Web developer
• Content writers
• Someone who understands pay per click advertising
• A savvy networker
• Sales team
• Branding expert
• Research and marketing analysts

And, yes, you’ll need someone who understands SEO too. If you can be all of these people by yourself then more power to you. Few of us can do it all. There may even be a few specialties and skills that I missed. At any rate, you can’t rely on SEO alone. You need a team of professionals who can work toward one goal.

(Source) Recently there has been some dialog and commentary on certain SEM channels about upcoming harder economic times calling for SEO to be taken back to the basics: “Textbook SEO” as Mike Grehan would put it. I disagree with the premise that companies should stop experimenting with new tactics and stick with the fundamentals. Effective SEO in any economic environment means getting more creative, not mundane.

It’s difficult to argue with Lee on this one. I don’t think SEO is about being safe. It isn’t about protecting what we did yesterday. It’s about innovation. It’s driving the bus to the future, even if it means coming dangerously close to the cliff.

Search engine marketers, by nature, must be creative. Every time Google (or one of the other search engines) changes its algorithms, so too must SEOs and other SEMs change their practices. Maybe the changes aren’t drastic. Maybe we don’t have to change at all on certain search engine tweaks. But there is change involved - sometimes more, sometimes less. Knowing when to change and how much adjustment is necessary is a vital part of the profession.

To some extent, search engine marketing has always relied on certain principles - “the basics,” if you will - and it likely always will. But what search engine optimizers and other Internet marketing professionals need to keep in mind is that innovation drives best practices. “The basics” are the starting point, not the end. Even in hard times, search marketers who put the pedal to the metal will be the ones who pull ahead of the pack.

So you’ve decided that you want a part of your site to be secure. Good for you. But how do you ensure that it stays secure?

Just in case you aren’t aware of it. Any time you see http:// in an URL, it means you are looking at a non-secure web page. By contrast, https:// denotes that the web page is secure. Typically, you’ll see the https:// in the URL on pay pages, whenever you are purchasing something and you need to give out credit card information or other personal data. If you don’t see the https:// on a page that asks for your personal or private information then run away. Don’t give up your information because it isn’t secure.

But there are other reasons for want to ensure certain web pages are secure. Maybe you have a membership site and you want to restrict access to the membership benefits of your site to your visitors who are not members. You may not necessarily need the https:// distinction in those pages, but you definitely should have a password system to give access to those site visitors who are members. But there are some other things you should do as well.

First, the danger of web security. You might make the mistake, if you are new to this area of webmastering, of leaving an unsecure link leading from the non-secure part of your site to the secure part of your site. If that happens then there is a hole in your security and anyone will be able to get in. To prevent that from happening you can add “nofollow” and “noindex” tags to your robots.txt file or meta tag. By keeping the search engine spiders from crawling your links and indexing your secure pages, you ensure that security holes are not leaked and that future searchers do not find your secure web pages in the SERPs. It’s a small measure you can take to ensure that the secure parts of your website remain secure.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz wrote an excellent post this morning reviewing 12 browser toolbars. He details the benefits and features of each toolbar and measures their useful to the actual user as well as the SEO or Internet marketing professional. The 12 toolbars he reviewed his post include:

• Google Toolbar
• Yahoo Toolbar
• MSN Live Toolbar
• Ask.com Toolbar
• AOL Toolbar
• Alexa Toolbar
• Compete.com Toolbar
• Netcraft Toolbar
• StumbleUpon Toolbar
• Firefox Toolbar
• Microsoft Developer Toolbar

I agree with Rand’s analysis for most of these tools, but I disagree heartily with one of them. In fact, I only had two really strong reactions to two of his reviews. One was positive and the other was negative.

The Toolbar That Makes Stumbling Fun
The positive reaction was to StumbleUpon. This is one of the few toolbars that is useful to the average user as well as the Internet marketer. It is very user-friendly and has a lot of cool features. I particularly like the vertical stumble features, which allow you to search and find (by “stumbling”) videos, photos, and other topical information. You can also vote up or down your favorite and least favorite websites when you find them. It’s not only fun to Stumble, but as an Internet marketer, you can Stumble your own blog posts and information and see how much traffic you get as a result of it by taking a look at your analytics (you are using analytics, right?). The only thing I’d disagree with Rand on about SU is that the traffic you get from it not always valuable. If you target your information correctly then you can get good traffic, but StumbleUpon traffic can sometimes be hit or miss.

The Toolbar That Is Crazy Like A Firefox
I also had a positive reaction to the Firefox Toolbar review, though not as strong as the reaction I had to the SU review. I agree with Rand that the Firefox Toolbar isn’t particularly useful to the average user, but it is extremely useful to Internet marketing professionals. With this toolbar, you can see Google PageRank, Alexa ranking data, and Compete.com information together side by side. That alone makes the information moderately useful. But the real gem with the Firefox Toolbar is that it will show you which links are “nofollow” links. How many times have you submitted a link request, offered to pay someone to link to you, or trackbacked to their blog only to find that the links you get are “nofollow” and therefore useless to you? That feature alone is worth downloading the Firefox Toolbar.

Alexa: The Most Worthless Toolbar In The World
OK, I may be overreacting. The Alexa Toolbar isn’t really that bad. But I was surprised to see the way Rand recommended it. This is straight from his review:

There are enough uninformed decision makers at businesses, ratings services, investment funds and competitive firms who still trust Alexa data to make it worthwhile to game the system.

Did I read that right? Rand Fishkin is encouraging people to game the system? Has he flipped? That’s probably the worst advice I’ve seen since Gene Marks told small business owners not to worry about anti-virus software. Let’s see, you want your market to trust you so you game them into believing a lie? Yeah, that’s a great business practice.

Sorry for the strong reaction, but Alexa started out a good concept. Unfortunately, it’s turned into a totally useless tool. The whole idea is to give Web publishers an idea of their standing relative to their competition. But the concept relies upon data received from other Alexa Toolbar users. If hardly anyone in your market is using the toolbar then you don’t have a realistic picture of where you stand. As Rand states in his review:

The Alexa toolbar is designed to be a competitive information tool, and as such, offers virtually no functionality, other than the ability to get (highly inaccurate) website popularity data and contact information (which is also spurious) for the sites a user visits. It’s too bad, because the value of Alexa’s data lies in the number of people they can get to adopt their toolbar. The more ordinary and “average” those users are, the better Alexa’s data will be, yet they really fail to serve this market effectively.

He rates the toolbar’s value to the average user as low, and I agree. It is low. Which diminishes the value of the toolbar for Internet marketers. If you are looking for competitive information and your target customer isn’t providing you the information you need in order to analyze your competitiveness then all your efforts are useless. You might as well just stand on a street corner with a clipboard and a survey because the information you gather will be just as useful. I’m sorry, but I think Rand was just way off on this one.

Why Not Create Your Own Toolbar?
You can, of course, create your own toolbar. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend this for everyone. You really have to market your toolbar and it has to be useful to your target market. If you do take this suggestion, don’t try to create a general toolbar that is targeted toward everyone. The search engine toolbars and the SU Toolbar have done that to relative success, and chances are you’ll create a toolbar that isn’t nearly as useful. Instead, create a toolbar that is very useful to your target market. One place you can go to create your own toolbar is Conduit. But don’t tell anyone I told you that.

I’ve often touted the benefits of trackbacking. It’s a useful strategy, particularly for new blogs, for a number of reasons:

• You can usually garner some link juice from older, more established websites and gain valuable inbound links from relevant, high PR sites
• Trackbacks can be a good source of new traffic and new, loyal readers
• It engages conversation between professionals within the same industry
• Can save your butt when you borrow snippets from other blogs because a trackback is a form of attribution

While trackbacks can be good, there are some dangers to receiving the trackbacks of others and bloggers who get a lot of trackbacks should be very careful about which ones they approve. I recently had to go back and delete several trackbacks and comments that I’ve received over the months due to those comments and trackbacks hurting my search engine rankings.

Yes, it’s true. The wrong kind of trackbacks can ruin your SEO. Here are some reasons you might want to not approve specific comments are trackbacks on your blog:

• The trackback goes to a site that is a link farm
• When you click on the URL of the commenter you get a 404 page
• The comment or trackback is very generic and doesn’t add anything to the conversation
• You visit the site leaving a trackback and all they have there is your content and nothing else
• You try to visit the site leaving the comment and you are redirected to another URL
• The site linking to you is in another language

Many people leave comments that are legitimate, but many others do not. Some of the comments I deleted this morning from this blog were from scrapers who lifted my content and linked back to me without providing any other value to readers on their blog. This provides no value to you or your readers. They are just trying to steal your traffic. I also deleted comments from sites that redirected me to another URL. I think I am going to an Internet marketing blog and I end up on a camera sales page. Not good. These redirects could hurt your rankings. Broken links will also affect your rankings so get rid of those.

The most interesting comments I got were from bloggers who blogged in another language. These blogs are probably legitimate and likely won’t hurt my rankings at all, but they are written in another language. The blogger leaves a comment in English and links to a Russian or German site. I do not speak Russian or German, and I’m assuming that most of my readers don’t either. If the site provides no value to your readers then you should think twice about approving the comment.

When it comes to comments and trackbacks you have to be diligent not to approve every one. Bad inbound links can kill your site faster than good ones can benefit it.

One of my favorite blogs, Marketing Pilgrim, wrote up a nice piece today about Internet marketers using Twitter. I’m assuming you know about Twitter by now. The interesting thing about the article is that it lists 75+ Internet marketers who use Twitter. Now, I know there are more than 75 Internet marketers in the world. But I also know that the best Internet marketers don’t jump on a bandwagon unless there is some value in it. I was surprised to see some of the biggest names in SEO and Internet marketing on the list. Here are just a few:

• Andy Beal
• Brian Chappell
• Andy Beard
• Bill Slawski
• Duncan Riley
• Graywolf
• Greg Boser
• Jason Calacanis
• Jennifer Laycock
• Jill Whalen
• Jeremiah Owyang
• Lee Odden
• Lisa Barone
• Problogger
• Rand Fishkin
• Rene Lemerle
• Rusty Brick
• Robert Scoble
• SERoundtable
• Sugarrae
• TheNanny612
• Vanessa Fox

And that’s not even the whole list. There are many more!

Twitter has a PageRank of 8. That’s at least as high as many social bookmarking sites that have been around a lot longer. Del.icio.us is at a PR 8. Digg has a PR 8. StumbleUpon has a PR 8.

With a PR comparable to the most trafficked social bookmarking sites online, you know there has to be some serious link juice in using Twitter. I know that’s not why these savvy Internet marketers are using it. The social benefits are just as powerful as the SEO benefits, but that does give you something to think about, doesn’t it?