It never dawned me until I read this, but Microsoft’s interest in Yahoo! could be local. As far as local yellow page providers go, Yellowpages.com doesn’t provide any more advantage to Microsoft than Superpages does. Greg Sterling is right about that. But take a look at his update:

Update: Now that Ingenio is part of YellowPages.com, which I wasn’t thinking about in writing the above, there may be another angle here.

Ingenio actually could benefit MSN, but based on Sterling’s second update, it may be that MSN isn’t the one pulling the strings in this deal. Nevertheless, an acquisition of Yahoo! would give MSN much greater leverage in the local advertising market. There is no one doing local business advertising better than Yahoo! Not even Google, who seems to be beating Yahoo! at everything else. Yahoo! is top dog in local Search Engine Optimization directories and has been for a very long time. I think MSN executives know that.

(Source) Here’s what I mean — let’s say that on your website’s homepage, you have two links to your blog. The first link is in the top level navigation, and the anchor text is “blog.” The second link is in the body of the homepage and reads “celebrity news blog.” That second link’s anchor text is NOT going to help the blog page rank for “celebrity news” because Google doesn’t appear to count the anchor text from multiple links to a target from a single URL.

Rand Fishkin is at it again. His experiment on anchor text is very revealing and it tells something that I’ve believed for quite some time now. Anchor text on a page that points to another page is only useful once for Search Engine Optimization.

This is important because if you use an off site blog to promote your website then you’re not really doing yourself any Search Engine Optimization favors by linking to your website’s page multiple times in each blog post. The best way to do this is to pick one anchor text key phrase and link to a particular page from a single blog post one time. It used to be that you could do this twice, but Google has changed its algorithms for links since then. Now, once appears to be enough.

Another change in the algorithms I’ve noticed is that sidebar links from your off site blog to your website do not appear to help. Since those links appear with every blog post you create, you are essentially loading your website with the same anchor text day after day. Not helpful. You are better off not linking to the internal pages of your website from your blog in the sidebar and just using your blog posts to do that for Search Engine Optimization.

After four years of photo sharing success, Flickr has finally decided to announce the debut of video sharing. Supposedly, this is to take place some time in April. That could be in as few as 16 days or it could be in as much as 46. Unless something comes up that pushes the date back.

As pointed at by Paul Glazowski, Flickr has been talking about video sharing for a while now and we’ve just been waiting. Now it’s here, or soon to be, and videographers still don’t know whether Flickr will compete with YouTube or offer other opportunities. My bet is, there will be no contest between Flickr and YouTube, just as there is no contest between Flickr and Picasa, the photo sharing site owned by Google.

The question in my mind is this, since Yahoo! owns Flickr and Yahoo! has Yahoo! Video, what do they hope to gain with Flickr video?

On the positive side, if Vlickr video is to be anything like Flickr photo sharing then it could be a good opportunity to gain some video Search Engine Optimization. With Flickr photos, webmasters can upload photos and hot link them to their websites and blogs and since Flickr passes on link juice, those are good inbound links. Plus, you can place URLs in your profile and photo comments. Will those opportunities also be available with Flickr video? My guess is, Yes.

Back in the old days, when walking to school was uphill both ways, forums were a great source of inbound links for a website. You could visit several forums a day and leave several posts at each forum and be credited with an inbound link at every one. That seems to have gone by the wayside these days as most forums now nofollow all their links. But not all forums do, which is the point of my post for this morning.

Anyone who posts in forums solely for the link juice is doing it for the wrong reason. That’s not the real benefit of forum posting. It never has been. Even when every forum online gave link juice that wasn’t the primary benefit; it was ancillary.

The real benefit to forum posting has always been the relationship building aspect of being a member of the community. Forums are discussion groups. They are places where people go to get specialized knowledge and information from others with similar interests. It’s a friend-helping-a-friend platform and you always have people with different levels of skill chatting with each other about philosophy, technique, tools of the trade, etc.

As you interact with other members of the group, you are allowed to provide links to resources (even your own), and can even put in signature links with all of your posts to let people know what business you are in and allow them to visit your website. Again, though, not all forums allow signature links. Some forums make you pay for privilege.

What happened?

Well, in short, spam is what happened. As soon as word got out that forums were a good place to get link juice, every Search Engine Optimization expert and Internet marketer in the world flocked to the forums and flooded the message boards with their “Come to my website and see the fabulous new widget I’ve built for people who never visit this forum” type comments. Yes, without concern for the character of the board or the interests of the people in the forums, Internet marketers only left blatant marketing messages and didn’t bother to be useful or join relevant conversations. This unnerved a lot of regular forum participants who began to complain to the forum moderators.

To cut down on spam, forum moderators did two things. First, they instituted the “nofollow” links policy, which effectively cut down on the amount of spam they were getting almost overnight. Secondly, many forums started limiting the lines you could have in your signature link or not allowing signature links at all. In essence, what they were saying was, “If you aren’t here to join and be a part of our community and all you want to do is promote yourself then we aren’t interested in you being here.”

But not all forums went this route. Most did, but some forums still allow signature links and still give link juice. They’re hard to find, but they’re still there. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should run out and look for all the forums that give link juice and start posting marketing messages. It does mean that if you have relevant information that fits for a particular forum and you use decorum in presenting what you have to offer, not only can you realize the benefit of more traffic to your website, but you can also realize a small Search Engine Optimization benefit. My word of caution: Don’t abuse it.

When it comes to the Search Engine Optimization of photos, the content surrounding the photos is as important as the alt attribute in the img src tag. Yes, the alt tag is important, but it’s not the only thing the search engines look at. They also look at the content on the page.

There are really two ways to style a photo - three if you consider putting the photo in an enclosed table or iframe. If that is the case then the content outside of the iframe is less relevant than if the text simply wraps around the photo without an iframe. The same goes for a table.

The two ways, outside of iframes and tables, to style a photo with your web page content is above/below or aside. With above/below, you place the photo below a paragraph of text and above another so that the photo sits between paragraphs on the page with no text beside it. A more visually appealing way to position a photo is with content beside it. To get the wrap around effect with a photo you need to add align=”right” or align=”left” as an attribute within the img src tag. Then you resize the photo with height and width attributes to give the exact effect that you want.

Either way of positioning a photo is acceptable and it doesn’t really matter for optimization purposes. It does matter for visual appearance. But that’s page design, not optimization.

When it comes to optimizing a photo, you need to pay attention to the text above and below, or beside, the photo. What is your web page about? If you are writing about automobiles, for instance, and you include a photo of a Ferrari below a paragraph that uses the word Chevy more than any other and the paragraph below the photo also uses “Chevy” more than other words then search engines will consider the word “Chevy” important. If your web page is indeed optimized for the word Chevy then you probably don’t want a photo of a Ferrari on that page. You can give it an alt tag that uses the word “Chevy” but your human visitors might consider that deceptive, so it’s something to consider.

Be careful not to misunderstand the Search Engine Optimization photo process. Just because your web page is optimized around a particular keyword doesn’t mean that will be the most important word for a specific photo. The paragraphs and sentences nearest to that photo will be weighed much more importantly than the entire page. Your page might be optimized around the word “Chevy,” but if “Chevy” doesn’t appear anywhere near the photo that you are attempting to optimize then it won’t matter. If the word “car” appears three times in the aside paragraph then your photo will likely be optimized for car more than for Chevy even if you use “Chevy” in the alt tag and not “car.” To be sure, content on the page is actually more important than the alt tag. You are a lot better off with no alt tag and highly optimized page content than you are with an alt tag on a page that is not optimized.

The best way to optimize a photo for any page is to match your alt tag with the content that surrounds your photo so that they work together to inform the search engines of the content of the photo. In summary:

• Use a photo that is relevant to your page
• Place your photo near content that uses the keywords you want that photo optimized for
• The content nearest the photo is more important than the entire content on the page
• Alt tags should be used to re-enforce your photo optimization, not define it

Search Engine Optimization for photos isn’t difficult. There is still a long way to go before it is as scientific as onsite and off site content optimization, but there are ways to ensure that the search engines pay closer attention to a photo and it behooves you to pay attention to those.

If you’re wondering whether Google Analytics is a tool you can use for Search Engine Optimization, trust me, it is. And if you get half a chance then you should attend the Google Analytics training seminar.

Analytics is not just about tracking PPC conversions. That’s a part of it, to be sure. But analytics also allows you to track your visitors to see where they come from, where they go once they’re on your site, how long they stay, which links the click, and so on. All of this is valuable information.

Knowing and understanding the behavior of visitors on your website is one of the most important things you can do. For instance, if you get more traffic to a certain page from StumbleUpon than you do from organic searches, wouldn’t you like to know that? Sure you would. That’s valuable information.

If you can determine that a certain web page on your website has a higher than average percentage bounce rate then you can tweak the content on that page to keep visitors on your site longer. That’s what Google Analytics can do for you. It can help you make important, intelligent decisions about the content on your website.

If you are interested in learning more about Google Analytics, take a look at where the next training session is going to be and attend one.

Well, we all know there’s a woman behind every successful man. But even more importantly, there’s a woman behind, in front of, in the mind of, or somewhere around a fallen man. Just talk to Elliot Spitzer. He’ll tell you.

Ashley Alexandra Dupre may have charged too much for assisting a man to lose his prominent position, but look at the bright side - Monica didn’t charge a dime and all she got was some stinky cigar. Poor Willy.

But say what you will about the shenanigans of America’s politicians. It’s the ladies of the evening who have a leg up. And they have something to teach us all about search engine optimization. Just follow these tips brought to you courtesy of Spitzer’s main fox, or is that Fox’s main spitter? Uhm, nevermind.

These Search Engine Optimization tips are worth a fortune (or maybe just $5,000 a night):

1. Anonymous links are bound to be exposed for the fakes that they really are
2. Don’t bare all your assets to the powerful and well connected
3. Whoring yourself out might be the best way to the career of your dreams
4. Why pay for action when you can get it for free (or be paid for it)?
5. Even average-looking websites can earn top dollar
6. The age factor isn’t always your best advantage
7. MySpace isn’t just for teenagers
8. Paying too much for a good position isn’t what we mean by “quality content”
9. Sometimes, free advertising comes at the expense of OPR (Other People’s Reputations)
10. Why go to college when you can gamble your life, your body, your dignity, and your soul for a one-in-a-million chance at fame and fortune?

Well, it’s not all about Search Engine Optimization, but then, it wasn’t all about sex either, was it? Or was it?

SEO Book, just this morning, mused about the fall in PageRank of a respected directory, JoeAnt. The directory evidently fell in PageRank, to a 3. It’s not surprising, really. You have to pay to be listed in JoeAnt, which means your link is a paid link and we all know how Google feels about those for Search Engine Optimization.

DMOZ, on the other hand, still gets a nod of respect from Google. Even though Google no longer needs data from DMOZ in order to index websites, it still crawls the human edited directory and uses the information. If it were up to me, I’d degrade DMOZ and give paid directories like JoeAnt a boost. But, of course, it’s not up to me. Is it?

Yesterday, DMOZ announced that it has had visitors from over 200 countries. Surprised? I’m not. It’s an old website. They’ve been around a long time. And Google loves them. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have that many countries in their referrer bin.

I’ve said for a long time now that directories are losing relevance. It’s not entirely true. I do believe that general directories are a lot less important than they used to be for Search Engine Optimization. With the advent of other marketing tools like blogging, social bookmarking, social networking, and RSS, directory listings just seem so slow moving. That’s especially true of DMOZ. It usually takes up to a year to get a listing in DMOZ, and that’s after you submit your site. By that time you could have built up thousands of inbound links using other methods. It does make one wonder why we should waste our time with DMOZ? Answer: Because it’s still loved by Google. The evidence is its PR of 8.

Stay in a Search Engine Optimization chat room or forum long enough and the conversation is sure to turn to TLDs. Does it matter which TLD you have?

If you are a newbie and don’t know what a TLD is, it stands for top level domain. Those are the .com, .net, .org, etc. There are hundreds of them and many are specific to certain countries. For instance, co.uk is for websites that operate in the UK, .ca stands for Canada, .au is Australia.

Obviously, if you have a country-specific domain name, that won’t hurt. I’d much rather have a .ca if I lived in Canada than a .biz. But if I owned a television station in Canada then I might prefer .tv. Or if I owned a business that catered entirely to mobile phone users within Alberta then I might prefer .mobi. Those TLDs are for web businesses that exist within the TV and mobile phone industries, respectively.

Branding is one thing. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, however, there is not a lot of evidence to suggest that it is preferable to own a .com than it is to own a dot something else. Aside from the fact that there are more dot coms in circulation than dot bizzes or dot nets, there is no real distinct advantage to having a .com. It is more memorable perhaps than a .net or .biz, but branding and Search Engine Optimization are two separate things. They can - and should - work hand in hand, but from a technical Search Engine Optimization standpoint, the TLD doesn’t matter much.

There has been some speculation that having a .gov, .org, or .edu can be advantageous. Since only government entities can have a .gov TLD and only educational institutions can have a .edu TLD, that advantage is minuscule. The reality is that inbound links from those TLDs may be seen as more valuable to search engines because of the credibility associated with government and educational sites. But as far as owning the TLD is concerned, there is no real advantage for Search Engine Optimization. Keyphrase.edu and keyphrase.com will both be treated the same by the search engines and each ranking factor will still be given equal weight no matter what else the two websites have going for them. Whichever site is oldest will still have the age factor going in its favor, whichever one has more relevant, high value inbound links will still have that factor going in its favor, etc. TLD doesn’t matter.

When it comes to choosing a domain name, I’d put less emphasis on TLD than the actual phrase before the dot. That part of your URL is far more important for Search Engine Optimization, and for branding purposes. The only time the TLD could be a factor in branding, and I mean a major factor, is when you want your URL to spell a word that would end with the last two, or three letters, of your URL being your TLD. An example of this is with the widely popular social bookmarking site del.icio.us. Magnol.ia is another example. But in general, I’d put more thought into that part of your URL before the dot. Before the TLD. That’s what really matters.

Here is the second video of our weekly Search Engine Optimization video series. This is another starting video for those who are interested in indexing their website in the three major search engines. We will be covering various SEO techniques and tips in the upcoming weeks so subscribe to our YouTube channel today!

Most webmasters will inadvertently break one of the search engines’ guidelines at some point. What should you do if you receive a notice that you have violated one of Google’s webmaster guidelines?

First, you should know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure. Be familiar with the guidelines before you start building your website. You don’t have to memorize them. That’s why they’re posted online for all to see. But as you are building your website, make a point from time to time to go back and visit the guidelines. Read them about once or twice a year to stay current.

Google’s webmaster guidelines are broken down into three key areas:

• Design and content
• Technical
• Quality

If you get a notice that you’ve violated any of Google’s guidelines, it will likely be in one of these three key areas. Google will be very specific about what it is you’ve done to violate their guidelines so pay attention to what your notice says and address that issue.

Your best bet is to fix what Google has said is wrong with your website right away. Do this as soon as possible. You don’t want lingering issues and the longer you allow a violation to sit the harder it will be to gain any rankings you might lose. If you address them soon enough you might not see any loss in rankings, PageRank, or other loss of benefits. Wait too long and you could lose ground against your competition that you’ll have to fight hard to get back.

After fixing the problem, log into your Google webmaster account and click on Request Reconsideration under the Tools tab. Google will re-evaluate your website to see that it meets the guidelines and if you’ve managed to do that then they will re-include you in the search listings and you can continue with your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

It seems that one way to get links to your website or blog is to create a widget. This is the going thing now and a lot of people are doing it. But are we overdoing it? I mean, will we soon reach a point to where we are over-widgetized? That is, will the widget market be saturated? Will web surfers get tired of all these widgets and finally just decide not to use widgets at all?

There is no shortage of places online where you can go to create your own widgets. If you are a member of some social networks, you can get the network’s API and create a widget to share with others through that system. Some networks that offer widgets include:

• Facebook
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• MySpace
• Technorati
• BlogCatalog

Almost all of the major social networks now allow you to add a widget to your profile page and you can create one using that network’s API. But there are also standalone widget creation web sites that will allow you to create your own widgets and use on your website, blog, or social networking profile. Some of them are:

• Grazr
• KickApps
• Yourminis.com
• Yahoo! Widgets

It’s really not hard to create a widget, but it can be time consuming if you’ve never done any coding. There is a certain skill involved. But a cool widget can draw people to your website and help you build link popularity that will help your Search Engine Optimization.

So you’ve decided that you need to start a blog. Everyone else has one. The competition has two. You think they’re cool (now that you know what they are) and you’d like to start one. Is it good for Search Engine Optimization?

The real answer is, Yes, blogging is good for Search Engine Optimization - if you do it right. If you don’t do it right then it can water down your Search Engine Optimization. Here’s what I mean.

First, the two types of blogs for Search Engine Optimization: On Site and Off Site.

You can put a blog on the same domain name as your website and build your search engine saturation. That means the number of pages you have indexed at the search engines and potentially ranking for your keywords. Every blog post is a separate web page to the search engines so after you’ve written one year’s worth of blog posts (assuming you blog every day), you now have 365 additional web pages. But are they optimized?

With this type of blog, you have to use keywords, alt tags, anchor text, and other SEO elements in order to ensure that you gain the necessary mojo to rank for your keywords.

An off site blog is different. With an off site blog, you’ll still gain search engine saturation, but it will be for the blog itself, not your website. You can, however, build links to your website from your blog and that helps with link building.

Keep in mind, though, that most people in your industry will more than likely link to your blog posts before they’ll link to your company website. If your blog is on your company website, you may or may not get that link love. If your blog is on a separate URL then you’ll likely get link love - if your blog posts are well written and draw attention from other bloggers. That will tend to push your blog higher up in the PageRank scale. If you are linking profusely from your blog to your website then that PR will transfer to your website with each link.

That’s it in a nutshell. Blogging is good for Search Engine Optimization when done correctly. Most bloggers, however, are missing the beat here. To be the most effective blogger, you should learn the principles of Search Engine Optimization.

What is the most important thing for webmasters to focus on? It is Search Engine Optimization, social media marketing, blogging, article marketing, pay per clicking advertising, directory submissions?

In my view, the most important thing to be doing is none of those. Rather, the most important thing for all webmasters serious about making money online is tracking. You really need to track your visitors, clicks, conversions, and other key data. If you aren’t tracking what is going on at your website and what your visitors are up to then you don’t know what you need improvement on.

Google Analytics makes tracking very easy. You simply insert the Google Analytics code on your website and set some goals and let the software tell you what is happening. You can track visitors, conversions, and your goals all in one system. Unless you use some kind of analytics or tracking service, you can’t know how your PPC is converting sales or whether your content is closing the sale. When you set your tracking in place then you’ll know the areas where you need improvement.

Rupert Murdoch isn’t interested in Yahoo! To Screenwerk, that means Yahoo! is destined to become a part of Microsoft:

This probably means that they couldn’t make the numbers work. And it also means AOL is really all that’s left for Yahoo! — and that’s doubtful for several reasons. A Microsoft acquisition now has the feeling of inevitability.

While I would say that this certainly makes the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! more likely, I don’t think it’s inevitable. It really depends on how much Yahoo! execs decide to dig in their heels. If Yahoo! is in massive debt then that would make the Microsoft deal a lot more attractive to the shareholders. On the other hand, if the shareholders see profit potential that others are overlooking then they may decide to weather turbulent waters on their own. At any rate, it will be interesting to see how the Microsoft-Yahoo! saga ends.