The number of internet marketing tools launched over the past couple years has been staggering. Many of them are both free and highly valuable. SEO, which was once considered a bit of a seedy niche, has grown with search to become a mainstream marketing practice, with...

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I am tired of so many new and old SEOs talk about linking, the importance of it and how your efforts will be wasted if you don’t embrace it. I like linking and believe it provides a good way to build credibility on the search engines, especially for new sites, but I put it last on my list. That’s right I said last. I may be old school but I have found I can cut back my dependency (time) on the number/quality of incoming links if I follow some basic principles.

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Disabled? No Internet for You!

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I had the great pleasure and privilege of speaking at Search Engine Strategies 2008 in San Jose. The topic? Net neutrality. This is the point where your eyes glaze over and the inevitable question, “What is net neutrality?” comes forth. And that’s the point of this article.

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As technology advances and the demands of customers fragment, the task of empowering resellers and distributors with effective and relevant marketing tools becomes more daunting than ever before. To solve these challenges, a handful of forward-looking companies are experimenting with emerging technologies and particularly Search‹to empower their channel partners in an attempt to make them more flexible and responsive to the changing market.

The Channel Challenge

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 This week, Facebook announced that it is changing the timing of application measurement from daily to monthly.  This means that instead of daily activity reports, Facebook developers can now look at how their widgets perform over course of a month.

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Google went live with Knol, a platform to read and write articles on all kinds of subjects. Knol was being tested privately since some time and had been pre-announced back in 2007. The address is knol.google.com, but notably not knol.com or knol.org or even googleknol.com. This project is somewhat reminiscent of Wikipedia, though there are many differences as well.

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I've been speaking at a lot of events lately, and several focus on similar topics in social media or interactive marketing. One of the consistent problems with speaking at events like this is that there is a danger of using or hearing the same examples and stories over and over. As my volume of speaking increases, this is one of my big concerns ... that people will opt out of coming to hear me speak because they feel like they've heard my point of view before.

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You’ve probably picked up that this week is about SES San Jose from Dana and Ashley’s “15 Things Not to Miss at SES San Jose” followed by Jessica’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” post.  I am also headed out to sunny California next month.

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 This is an event I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while - WordCamp UK 2008, the first WordCamp in the UK, takes places in Birmingham during this weekend July 19-20.

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I am not sure where I have been for the past two years, but today is the first time I have heard about Windows Live Expo - today is also the day I heard about its scheduled demise.

Apparently this classified ad platform was considered to be a major threat for Craigslist, and this month, on July 31, Microsoft will pull the plug and the classified service launched back in February of 2006.

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A lot of my recent speaking engagements at both Search Engine Strategies and SMX have been geared towards running an SEO company, dealing with a changing economic landscape and similar issues. 

It is with this in mind that I got thinking about what separates one company from another.  There are many great SEO and SEM firms out there, I like to think that Beanstalk is among them but there are also a number of poor ones.  What separates the two and why will some succeed and others fail?

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One of the highlights of The Aloha Summit a few months ago in Hawaii was having Andy Sernovitz beam in electronically and join us for an hour of discussion and insight. Andy should be a familiar name, he's the author of Word of Mouth Marketing.

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If you’ve forgotten, just nine months ago, Microsoft purchased a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 million. Doing the math from that, the total value of Facebook last October was $15B.

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Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines. 

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