In the old world of traditional media, if you wanted to get free advertising, there was only one choice.  You had to write a press release and be part of a story.  Then, and maybe only if you were lucky or really actually making headlines, a news source would pick you up and write, tell, or show your product or service.  In todays world we have spoken about sending our Press Releases as a great SEO tool, and they are still the best SEO tool for getting inbound links to your website.  But, you have many choices to get noticed.  They two top choices of getting noticed are getting Search traffic, and if it’s free we are talking about.  It’s usually comes in the form of SEO and through what natural search results.  If not you have to pay for it. 

The other major way to get traffic is through blogging.  Blogging is not only great for SEO and being found on the search engines, but also for direct 1 to many communications.  Research shows that blogs actually have the second highest conversion and click through rates, right behind search results.  People tend to respect blogs for their opinions on news and products.  So if you are blogging don’t forget to keep it up and provide resources to get yourself some free Internet Advertising and traffic.  And, look at the tips on why Search is still a great way for you to Advertise and get free traffic from natural search results.  This article below is from MediaPost so do go to the full source and get the whole story..CLICK HERE

Search queries prequalify the site visitor.  While search intentions may be split within a query or bucket of queries and funnels, good research helps advertisers target their ads or natural content strategies to a laser-sharp focus on the searcher, and offer the ability to target likeminded, laser-focused content with a higher degree and likelihood of conversion than other channels.  While not all queries convert on the first go, the opportunity to be selective about traffic from a linguistic perspective remains a distinctive characteristic of search.

Search traffic becomes an asset over time.  Once natural search traffic gets rolling, the returns often last for years.  Values can range from applying a relative cost-per-click to value the traffic, based on what the advertiser is willing to pay in paid search for similar category terms, to the actual revenue from the traffic.  Growing natural search traffic takes a different approach and amount of patience than in paid search media, but the payoff is a qualified traffic stream that delivers for years to come. Natural traffic still needs to be maintained closely, but the costs are nominal compared to overall returns.

Search is a fundamental touch point in the online experience.  The PEW Internet and American Life Project recently confirmed that search is a primary touch point with online users.  The bottom line is that search is a fundamental way to reach people online — such as more than 90% of all online users.  

Search is equally accessible by all advertisers and marketers, large and small.  Search marketing is open to both enterprise marketers with $20 million in spend, and to the guy or girl sitting in their bedroom with a twenty-dollar budget.  There is no other advertising arena I know of where a small business advertiser can park their asset in natural or paid search right next to the biggest corporations on the planet.  In search, everyone is invited to play, and the masses are still coming over to embrace it as a key strategy, if not the primary strategy.

Search is the ad platform for future online advertising asset delivery.   The next time you read an industry report that separates search spending from online video spending and contextual ad spend, keep in mind that those other placements may still be predominantly served on auction-based, search-based delivery platform in the future.  So is it possible that the 40% of online spend attributed to the search channel is grossly underestimated?  You bet it is.  

The targeted relevance of the search channel.  Giving credit where it is due, the search engines themselves help us find what we need, when we need it.  Marketers fundamentally have the opportunity to take advantage of the search channel with either a long-term natural campaign, or with media spend in paid search.

Do you know what your ranking is on more than one of Google’s servers at any given time? I recently took a trip to Colorado and I was comparing rankings from Boulder to the rankings in Seattle, Wa. Using a regular Google.com search for the Keywords Background Check, and Web Design St. louis. I was looking at two different sets of results. This presents a problem when you are doing SEO for companies that are not in your same location.

I found that looking at a data center update tool to be useful to know how you are ranking across multiple Google servers and anytime. Take a look at the SEOcritique data center tool. this tool also does insite: , site: , link: searches and more.

we love Vacations take a look at our VRBO – Vacation Rental friends at Rent Expert.

The Google Trifecta, aptly named, consist of Google’s, Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and Site Optimizer. If you haven’t been using these tools your missing out! why? well heres a brief run down before I give you the real goods of this post.

Webmaster tools – Why sign up? – Helps inform google about your site and helps you to know what google sees with your site.

Analytics – Why sign up? – knock knock…. Who’s there?…… web traffic! …….Web traffic Who? Should have looked at your analytics it would tell you. cute I know but very informative. you’ll want to know how traffic is coming to your site and how.

Site Optimizer – Why sign up? – Site optimizer is a great way to test changes to your web site with real users. want to test a new design vs the old design, or maybe you’ve decided to create larger sign up button and remove a picture. With site optimizer google will serve these changes for you to random users to see what variation produces results.

The Real Goods:
Ready to put all these tools together? watch the Google Webinar:
The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer
the webinar originally was available for viewing on July 9th 2008 @9am PST, this webinar will be available until October 7th 2008. watch it!

Brought to you by these fine sponsors Rent Expert for VRBO, People Finders for Background Check FYI I checked out my last date with their service it awesome and Artworks Design for Web Design St. Louis

Lately our blogs feel to be more sales and biased oriented towards our own products and SEO Services. We are cautious of trying not to be, and we are not journalists. We are a for profit company, and looking forward to the day we actually have profits:-). Things are much better than they were 9 months ago, it’s been the course of SEO services and selling some of our energy saving heaters and products that has elevated our revenues. We are pushing for a few more SEO Services clients, hence the focus on SEO related blogs the last couple of days. We do get a lot of comments on our blogs, so I do believe that we are providing good information.

Our SEO Tools at LinkMint.com are free, and we wanted to highlight some of the features, so below is a post from the SEO Tools overview. A lot of SEO services companies are getting in the SEO Tools business. We actually are coming from the SEO Tools in to the SEO Services business. Why? Because there are so many adequate Free SEO tools on the market, we felt that we didn’t want to charge for them.  Also, we didn’t want to do SEO services, being a services company is hard enough, not to mention being a SEO Services Company. Before we talk about SEO tools features, I want to mention that blogging often with the most appropriate keywords in your blogs is the #1 SEO Tools you can utilize. So as always blog often!

Here are a few features that every SEO Tool should have:

1. Keyword Searches, no one can beat Google Analytics and Google Adwords, so in this case most SEO tools will never live up to the standards, they just don’t have the information.

2. SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), to see progress, we have to see our rankings even if they are not in the top 50. So instead of sitting their and clicking on Google and hitting next an SEO tools should have ranking checkers.

3. Submission Tools, automated submission should be done at a minimum, but having a tool do it for you is a lot easier.

**To be honest with you I can’t think of any more features, that are really imperative in a SEO Tool, so maybe that is why most SEO services companies don’t use one, and I personally don’t feel good about charging for it. I think providing SEO Coaching maybe a better way for us to do SEO Services in a scalable way, and we may offer than in the near future. I actually called up Rand’s Fishkin’s SEOMoz last year at this time, I spoke with his mom, who is a very very nice lady. Little, did I know at the time, that rock star of SEO blogs, was starting his premium services. And, still we have not launched our SEO Coaching, but some day, until than check out the free SEO Tools features:

Linkmint.com currently features 22 tools for SEO, SEM and Internet Marketing when you login to the linkmint tools page you will see 4 tool sections. Web site promotion tools, web site analysis tools, link popularity tools, and miscellaneous tools.
Getting started using linkmint Seo Tools .
1) Create an account – sign up with your email address on the linkmint tools page. After submission of your email address you will receive a confirmation email. Confirm your account and log in to linkmint.com by clicking the link in your email or by going to the linkmint.com homepage and clicking on the linkmint tools tab
2) Manage your account – After login to the linkmint tools manage your linkmint.com account by clicking the Manage Account link:
a) Input at least one web site in to analyze by clicking on the new website link under the manage account link
b) Input keywords or key-phrases, corresponding to the website you entered by clicking on the new keywords link, selecting the correct URL and entering keywords or key-phrases separated by commas. If you need some guidance in creating keywords selection visit our Keywords Search page.
3) Manage your search engines – click the Manage SE link under the Manage Account link. A drop down list of Search engines in our system are there. Select the search engines you are targeting for your sites then click submit
4) Manage profile – The Manage Profile link under Manage Account link contains all your settings for changing parameters on your account. You can make changes to your search engine selection, keyword selection for a given URL, and you password for your account.
Now that you are set up on Linkmint.com go ahead and start analyzing your sites to learn about the individual tools please click the pages on the left. For a general description of the uses of the tools in each category continue to read below.

General use for each SEO tool section

Web site promotion tools – This Section contains promotional tools for a web site. A webmaster would use this section to search keyword and keyphrase rankings and compare them to the number of pages that use the searched keywords and phrases. Calculate keyword density for each keyword given, get a percentage of keywords to other words in your site, optimize density for your prefered search engines standards. Create meta tags from keywords, That are ready to cut and paste in to your sites code. generate Submit a website to all the major search engines at once with a few clicks. Check a web sites ranking on a certain keyword or phrase on google***, yahoo, MSN, or other major search engines, see where you place. robots text telling a search bot to follow all your site pages or not to search certain pages. Optimize keywords / phrases that you have picked out for a site.

Web site analysis tools – Webmasters can use these tools to analyze various sites for meta tags of any given site, check out your friends sites or competitors sites. Check out the internal and external links in a site with a page link analysis. Use the website analysis to keep track of how many hits your site gets with a custom code generated for your site. Get a sites source code by using the page snooper tool. Want to know how your site will look in a search engine query? The search engine simulator will give you a good idea. Do a Whois search to find out who owns a domain. Is your site’s html valid? test it with the html validator tool.

Link popularity tools - This is a useful set of tools to see how a sites links compare relative to one another. It is also possible to see how friends and compeitors websites compare with link popularity. these searches are done specific to each selected search engine*** .

Miscellaneous tools - This set of tools is a webmasters mixbag of goodies. Get your domain name typos, and keyword / Phrase typos generated automatically. check how a search engine spider sees text on your front page. You can also access google dance. google dance can help webmasters figure out when google may be recalculating your sites PR ranking. google does this “dance” monthly where the servers www, www2, and www3 for google.com go through the calculation. you can determine when google is “dancing” with your site when the results within the three servers are not the same. Want to do a page rank search? use the page rank search to compare the page rank of web page results for a specifed keyword on google, or use a page rank lookup for a single domain on google. Use the site link analyzer to get how many links are external and internal on a site. then use the future tool to estimate where your site may end up for its PR rank in google next month.
***must have a google API Key to Search google for keyword / phrase ranking, get a google API Key. Check out FAQ questions on google API keys

What is the Google Dance? It’s nothing more than the different clusters of servers that provide search results. It’s very important to your SEO, as your search rankings very day to day. And, if you have a powerful SEO tools, or use a free seo tools like ours you can check it easily. I am writing about this, as on this Saturday, I am not seeing the main Google server updates with big changes. Google’s 2nd cluster seems to be off, and lately on Friday’s I see Google’s 2nd server cluster go in to effect, while the main servers go do their database updates. On Saturdays, you see the big updates, or a glimpse of it. We see the major updates show up on Wednesday mornings too.

A little bit of surprising thing happened to me today, I found out that our SEO tools at LinkMint.com are ranked #37 for keywords “SEO Tools” and #52 for “Free SEO tools“. We have not been focused on them at all, as our developers who worked on them are not on our team any more, and there is broken feature. We left the links to the site, and I blame my self for not even using it. Our keyword searches are based on Yahoo’s search tool, which I don’t like either. If it used Google’s I would love it. But, I still find it to be one of the best SEO Tools on the market, the best thing about it is the fact that it’s a Free SEO Tool. I just used our Google Dance feature, to check all of our rankings on Google for all of our keywords. It was more accurate than the SEOBook – free SEO Tools, meaning it was more accurate. Sorry, Aaron Wall I was very disappointed this week, when I wanted to use your SEO tools and I could not find our sites in it. We were clearly in Google for search results.  Accuracy in ranking results is key for any SEO Tools, I don’t care if it’s Free SEO Tools, they need to be accurate. We still support Aaron Wall’s SEObook as probably the best SEO book on the market. We have not been SEOing the LinkMint.com site either, not for months any way. So natural links do work, but I am sure the links from this page won’t hurt:-).

Our SEO Tools do have issues, they are not 100% accurate, but closer than most, but most importantly, it’s an immediate results are from Google.  We will improve on them some day. But we are ranked #1 for WordPress SEO for this Blog Templates site, so we keep this going too. Our Free SEO Tools business model did not make much sense, we don’t think people pay for SEO Tools, maybe they do, but we see so many free SEO Tools, why bother to charge right? We do need to make money for our online businesses, but we never really wanted to be a SEO Tools vendor. We might rethink this strategy, but for now we are focused on our b2b marketplace, and online marketplace in concert with our Barter company ITEX. By the way, we have been SEOing their website for the keywords of Barter and Bartering and we got them in the top 10 in Google within 30 days. I guess we are good at SEO, even though we never really wanted to be a SEO tools provider or SEO consultants.

As far as my Online Marketplace blog of yesterday, Some of you know that I am not a fan of the Amazon Web Store tool, I do want to say that I do know a lot of people there, and I do support the company. I use to love the company, It’s just that last fall, I had some bad experiences, and too many disappointments with them. I don’t want to rip on a company, and I think if there are bad experiences I had, I do want to share with people about alternatives. I think it’s best to provide positive solutions. So I want to say to all of my friends who work at Amazon I do like you, but I think people should have their online businesses on Yahoo, eBay or our online marketplace when it’s fully launched at MyTypes.com/marketplace.

I do ask that some of you please check out our SEO tools, they are one of the best free seo tools on the market, and it’s an easy signup, with just your email. Would any of you pay for any SEO Tools? If yes, how much, only a monthly basis? If we get enough of a response, we might work on making them better and help provide you all 24 features. They really are worth while and good for SEO consultants too!

Are you worried about differentiating yourself from the millions of other blogs out there? After all, one could view the blogosphere as a massive haystack with a few valuable, glittering needles hidden inside it – the blogs with valuable content. The search engines help people discover the needles, but it’s up to the individual bloggers to get them to use the needles to sew and make something great (okay, I definitely stretched the limits of that metaphor).

One of the best ways to be sticky is to create a site that is a feast for the senses – an elegant design and bold images for the eyes, interesting videos and podcasts for the ears, and luscious language that paints a picture in your readers’ minds. Be creative with your word selection and try to choose the most precise, accurate terms to express your ideas.

First of all, a thesaurus is your friend, whether you rely on an printed and bound book or you use websites like Thesaurus.com. Thesauri are especially valuable when you notice that you’ve been using the same words too many times and as a result, your writing is flat, boring, and/or redundant. A quick trip to the thesaurus to find alternative options can liven things up in no time, and you might discover new terms that work even better than your go-to phrases.

You don’t have to neglect SEO and your keywords to writing appealing posts, either. First of all, it’s important to integrate a significant variety of keywords into your posts – using only two or three constantly is a dead giveaway that it’s SEO copy and many people will click away (and it doesn’t matter how much traffic SEO sends your way if they leave within a second or two). After all, don’t you want people to stick around, so you get multiple pageviews, interesting comments, and incoming links?

Another way to inspire your writing is to keep a folder or set of bookmarks filled with quality writing by people you admire. You can pull it out when you’re feeling unmotivated to get your creative juices flowing. Personally, I use del.icio.us for this – I have tags for “inspiration” and “writing” and “creativity” and more in my account. Social media is for more than just connecting people – you can use it to organize your ideas, sources, and inspirations.

Last but not least, it’s important to remember that the number one way to become a skilled writer is to practice, practice, practive, and then practice some more. If you’re serious about improving your work, it’s important to write something everyday, even if it’s just a short paragraph or two, and to read the work of other writers – you never know where you’ll pick up a new technique or interesting insight.  Remember no matter how much you SEO, search marketing is still about writing great content.