As long as the focus is getting links, you’ll fail miserably. It’s like Guy Kawasaki says: “If the focus of a startup is to make money, it will fail.”

The idea that getting links is the objective is the result of bad reverse-engineering. The common idea is: “All successful, high ranking, website have many backlinks,…. therefore if my website has many backlinks, It will be successful and rank high.”

That’s like thinking: “All rich people have lots of money,.. therefore if I have lots of money, I’ll be rich.” (if you don’t understand why this is not correct, you’ll never be rich.)

Money is the result of some form of success, it is never the cause of the success. The same applies to links. Links are the result of some form of success, they never are the cause of the success.

To most this feels like a chicken and the egg problem (what’s there first? The success or the links?) If you really want to know what was there first, the chicken or the egg, then you’ll study evolution and find that neither one was there first. They evolved!

The same applies to success and links. They evolve from something else, something more basic. Trying to take evolutionairy shorts cuts by link building just doesn’t work. It may help a bit, but it hardly ever works.

Links do come by them selves, first from your friends and family, then from colleagues, then from customers, then from some newspapers, then from communities, and eventually, if you´re really good, from already recognized authorities in your field.

Most sites however, hardly get passed the colleagues and customer links. There’s a reason for that,..  But it is also necessary to recognize that in many cases, that’s all people want. Success is a very relative concept.

Posted by Peter (IMC)
http://www.brane.com.br/

Want to know the link-building methods that still work to improve your popularity? Read the article here.

From what I can see, TWO of the sites Patrick referred to should be in the top 5.

Alex King, creator of the “Share This” social bookmarkting plugin, has higher technorati authority than the #1 “authority” site - but isn’t listed. 

PhotoMatt, aka Matthew Mullenweg, is the founding developer of Wordpress. I’m sure a lot of the top bloggers appreciate what his baby has done for them. How sad that he’s not allowed to appear in the top 5 despite his sufficiently high technorati authority.

So while the blogging community enjoys traffic and profit that comes from the wordpress platform that is Matt’s baby, and enjoys more exposure from the social network community through the “share this” plugin Alex created - Alex and Matt clearly are not welcome in the Technorati Top 100. And that sucks.

Patrick’s article did two things for me. I found a new blog that I’ll be reading regularly (his) and it opened my eyes to what’s happening at Technorati. I think I’ll head over and see how these two Wordpress heavyweights fare in the other social networks. Watch for an update.

If you think Alex and Matt should not be edited out of the Technorati Top 100, please link to this article and help pass the word among bloggers. Thanks!

If you’ve ever had stumbleupon, digg or technorati melt your hosting (raises hand) you know what I mean.

But here’s what your favorite marketing guru didn’t tell you about social network marketing and driving traffic through social networks.

Hobby oriented networks consistently get more users than social networks or business networks.

But then, a lot of marketers tend to forget that we’re flesh and blood people with personalities,  hobbies and interests… not just opt-in prospects to be captured by a squeeze page and measured by an analytics program.

Do you have hobbies?  Like, besides Internet Marketing? Maybe look for some hobby networks that you can actually have real conversations in.  You know… the kind that don’t include squeezing anyone.  You might just be surprised at the connections you make.

It’s amazing how interested people become once they actually know and like you.

Read the entire social network report at eMarketer.com

If you’re like most website owners, you don’t have untold hours to obsess on every little change at Google. You have a website to look after and work to do. Maybe a day job and family sprinkled into the mix.

Should lack of time for seo translate to lack of ranking? No. Because your ranking is ultimately about what you bring to the marketplace, not how much time you have to obsess on seo.

Thing is… there’s two different approaches to seo.

• One approach includes algorithms and page changes and obsessing on details.
• The other approach smaller increments of time – and has more longevity.

Want to learn the other approach?

I’m teaching this class free.  Once.

The class will be 6-8 sessions over 3-4 weeks…. to save a seat, just fill in the form, below…

Fact is, Google is the top search engine with over half the search market, and Google’s keyword selection tool doesn’t show the number of searches per month, per phrase. So, let’s look at what some of the keyword selection tools out there do.

Google’s Keyword Tool 
The upside of Google’s keyword selection tool is that it will show you tons of related searches. The downside? Some of them may have little to no demand. A “buy phrase” with little demand but high conversion is a great find. A long tail phrase with little demand and little conversion is pretty much useless.

Yahoo/Overture Inventory Tool 
It’s really a pity that this tool doesn’t work most of the time. It used to give solid and measurable demand figures. Used to tell how many times a keyword/phrase was searched at Yahoo in the past 30 days. You could take that figure, multiply by 2.5 and get a rough estimate of demand at Google. Except, it seldom loads. And results aren’t current anymore. And that’s sad to see because it used to rock. 

Wordtracker 
I haven’t jumped on the wordtracker rah-rah wagon. I find their results to be much lower in quality and accuracy than keyword discovery. Probably what I dislike most (aside of the totally skewed KEI figures) is that they pull results from dogpile and metacrawler – which both will list paid ads among organic. When I’m researching keywords for organic search, I don’t care what’s coming up in paid ads. Apples and oranges.

Keyword Discovery
Keyword Discovery offers both paid and free keyword selection tools. I find their results to be far superior to Wordtracker. The only downfall to Keyword Discovery is that you can suck up the better part of a day finding related search phrases and buy phrases. Gives phrase suggestions as well as the demand, which is very handy for finding both high search volume phrases and long tail phrases. You can get a free trial of the full paid version here.

Free Version of Keyword Discovery
Not as full featured as the paid version, but still a very handy tool that will turn up more keyword phrases than you can shake a stick at. Like the full version, you can eat up a chunk of time finding tons of keywords – and it also lists demand for the phrases, which is handy so you don’t waste time chasing phrases no one is searching for.

Nichebot
I’ve never used it, but the grapevine says the results are very similar to Keyword Discovery. I really haven’t a clue because the 32 page sales letter (pasted into Word) is a total turnoff for me. I’ve always relied on the theory that the longer the sales letter, the faster I run. Go look at Keyword Discovery – see the difference in presentation? Personal preference, but that’s my opinion.

SEOBook Tools
These were good back when Overture’s search actually worked and was kept current. The keyword selection tool, last I checked, was based on the Overture keyword selection tool and did the math of converting Overture/Yahoo demand numbers to Google numbers. Filed under ‘was good once upon a time…”

Keyword Enchanter
Totally free. As in, you don’t even have to give them your email address – although you can buy the guy a beer to say thank you. It’s a quick and simple way to generate a long list of related phrases. Doesn’t list the demand, though, so it’s not much more helpful than Google’s keyword tool.

Quintura
This might fall under saving the best for last. Quintura isn’t a search engine. It’s not a keyword tool, either. What it does is spit out a ton of words and phrases that are related to what you searched for. It’s a little gem for finding words and phrases that you should probably include in your content and keywords to increase LSI (latent semantic indexing) relevance. Go see. You’re welcome.

TechCrunch.com has 611,000 readers of their feed. That doesn’t count people that visit, but haven’t subscribed.  They get 6.5 million pageviews per month, are listed as the #1 source of tech news on Techmeme and the #2 site for inbound links at Technorati.

You can buy a 125 x 125 ad on Techcrunch for $12,000 per month. $8,000 for 50% exposure. There’s 10 of those 125 x 125 spots on their site.

Here’s the SEO lesson.

Know how you get over half a million readers and can bill those rates?

By creating compelling content that people want to read. Not by pumping out PLR content,  and regurgitated “keyword content” that you think will fool Google into giving you a page one ranking.

Because, really, would it matter if you’re on page one if you’re not converting eyeballs to profit?

Never forget your goal. Never. Your goal is to use SEO to increase your readers, or conversion, or profit. Your goal isn’t just to get on page one for the sake of ego. Is it?

Search engine optimization is very confusing to a lot of website owners, mostly because there’s more bad information floating around the Internet than good information.

When your ability to retain clients and put food on the table is directly tied to your ability to keep rankings up and traffic flowing, you get an entirely different perspective than, oh, say… a marketing guru that can just pump out a different product to stimulate profit. But I digress.

Back to the shoddy info out there. For example; no, you don’t need zillions of incoming links to land a page one spot in Google. And, no, you don’t need high PageRank or the right meta keywords, either.

Do you know why SEO (search engine optimization) is so messed up? Because a lot of people confuse visibility with popularity.

Remember grade school? If you wet your pants in class, you became very visible. Probably not very popular. Visiblity and popularity are not necessarily the same, although they can be when visibility is done right.

Same concept.

With SEO, if you confuse visibility with popularity, you will run into trouble eventually. Yes, you need to be visible. But popularity gets you the Brownie points.

Have you been confusing visibility with popularity?