Greetings,

Just wanted to drop you a quick line and let you know that we've added a new statistic to all sites within our inventory.

Number of Outbound Links - This will show the actual number of link that point to other webpages.

As any Search engine Optimization expert will tell you, the amount of link juice that a link passes is directly proportional to the PR of the page, times the "dampening factor (.85), divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

If you are brand new to the internet, then you might not have even heard of SEM before. Or you might think that SEO and SEM are synonyms, or interchangeable acronyms.

Well, there's actually a huge difference.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, refers to making improvements in order to improve your position in the results pages of search engines. The type of improvements you can make are broken down into two different categories, on page optimization and off page optimization.

On page optimization has to do with changes you can make on your own site to improve your position in SERPs (search engine result pages). There are a lot of different improvements you can make, from title tags to alt attributes, there are numerous changes you can make that can and will effect your rankings.

Off page optimization pertains to improvements that you can make that are not on your website. Backlinks are the primary off page factor. Building quality backlinks to your site is a great way to improve your rankings on SERPS.

Search Engine Marketing, SEM, is different, in that it has to do with marketing directly through the search engines in the form of advertisements, or sponsored listings on the search engines. Google's Adwords, Yahoo's Publisher Network, and Search Advertising with Bing are the dominant SEM programs, but there are may others. SEM has proven to be generally more beneficial than other more traditional forms of internet advertising, such as banner ads or pop ups, because they send more targeted traffic your way.

Web marketers use SEM and SEO together to maximize their traffic through both organic search as well as through paid advertising. Any marketing campaign with hopes of being successful should include both, and now that you know the difference is between the two, I hope you will as well.

Ninty-nine point nine percent (99.9%) of all online business conducted on the internet begins with a simple search on a search engine. That's why it's absolutely crucial that you research and select the key phrases you optimize your website for. In fact, selecting key phrases can, and often will be, the determining factor that 'makes or breaks' your online business.

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Some of the key phrases we optimize for will be natural. Product names in an e-commerce store for example, are examples of natural key phrases. Each product description page in an online store should be optimized for that product name.

But there are many other key phrases that are not as natural, and we’ll want to choose our key phrases carefully.

There are essentially 3 different factors we want to consider when selecting key phrases.

• Number of times the keyphrase is searched for in Google (where 90% of all internet traffic comes from)
• Amount of competition a keyphrase has. A lot of people think this means the number of results you get from the Google search for a keyphrase, but really we want to know how many people have optimized a page for this keyword.
• How relevant a keyphrase is to you. Obviously, we want to select key phrases that closely match the content of our website.

There are four different tools that I normally use to do my keyphrase analysis and evaluate these key factors.

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/ – Provides key phrases you already rank well for. You can use these key phrases as a starting point, and then try to improve on them.
• http://www.semrush.com/ – Provides Extremal useful information, such as top performing key phrases and any given website. i like to use the to 'spy' on my competitors, to see what keywords they're using. Also provides AdWords key phrases that they are advertising with.
• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – I use this to determine how many searches each keyphrase gets each month, how much competition a keyphrase has, and to find new key phrases from their list of suggested key phrases.
• http://www.wordtracker.com/ – This tool comes with a free 7 day trial. It actually gives the number of times a keyphrase is searched for on Yahoo, and it’s usually a little further behind than Adwords, but it’s good to have a different perspective.

This has been a hotly contested debate over the past year as webmasters continue to try to find new ways to improve their rankings in SERPs.

The basic premise of a link wheel goes like this. You set up 5-10 hosted blogs on sites like Blogger, Wordpress, Sqidoo, etc. These are called the 'spokes'. Then you place a prominent link on each one of them to your main site that you are trying to promote, called your 'hub'. You also place a link on each 'spoke' to another 'spoke'.

When you are finished, your configuration should look a little like this...
http://www.adhocads.com/images/linkwheel.jpg

Unfortunately, that's where most webmasters stop. "I've built my wheel, now where's my traffic?"

But that's not how it works. This configuration in and of itself is practically useless. Links to your site on these 3rd party hosted blogs, having no inherent traffic, no backlinks, and no PageRank, are worthless.

Unless, of course, you actively promote each 'spoke' in your wheel. If you build links for each one of your 'spokes' through traditional link building techniques, such as blog commenting, forum posting, social bookmarking, etc, then you build up traffic and popularity of these sites, which in turn pass some traffic and popularity on to your main target site.

But wait a minute. Now instead of promoting one site, you've got SIX sites to promote. Sounds like alot of work, doesn't it? Well, it is. Not only do you need to promote each spoke, but you also have to provide unique content to each one.

And what benefit is it to link the 'spokes' to each other? This just makes it look like some complex reciprocal linking scheme that Google hates so much.

But there ARE some advantages. For one, you control the content on each one of these spokes. You can optimize each page for your important key phrases, in some cases you can get on the same page of a SERP as your main target site. I've seen one site that has FOUR different pages, one on their target and 3 on their spokes, all on the same first page of a SERP they were targeting. Can you imaging having 4 out of the top 10 results of a targeted SERP? Talk about blowing away the competition.

My recommendation is that if you can come up with enough unique content for each spoke, and you have the time to do the extra search engine optimization and link building for each spoke, it can be very advantageous to set up a similar configuration. But I wouldn't link the spokes together. I'd set up more of a 'star' than a wheel.

View our inventory of over 600 pre-screened, high quality sites ready to publish your text link ad today.

I was browsing around in Google's Webmaster Central yesterday, and I discovered that you can no longer view your 'live' PR distribution. You used to be able to find the live PR of your site in the 'Diagnostics' section under 'Crawl Stats', under the graphs of the crawl of your site.

This was often quite useful, as PR here is usually well ahead of the PR displayed in the Google toolbar, which is only updated every three months.

When asked about it, Google representatives said, "We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; ...We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

From an overall perspective, they're right. Obsessing over PR isn't a very good idea. Yes, PR is still the most significant off-page factor in determining your SERPs, but obsessing over PR leads to neglecting other factors that are just as imortant but harder to quantify.

Relevance, and Uniqueness are two factors that are on the rise in terms of importance in search engine optimization. These are two factors that Google has specifically targeted in their latest update to try to improve result pages.

That's why it is more important than ever to check many different factors when selecting text advertisements to purchase. Yes, you still want your backlinks to be on pages with good PR, but that's not all you should look at. Make sure sites you select from our inventory are relevant, or related to your site. also, check that the page that would have your links is unique. Copyscape is a great way to check for uniqueness.

Although PR is still the biggest factor in SEO, Google is obviously takes measures to prevent it from being the ONLY factor.

I've been asked quite a few times lately about the difference in the SEO benefit of a one way links, such as the links you find here on www.AdhocAds.com, and reciprocal links (2, 3 or more ways).

The reason everyone asks is that it is certainly easier to get a reciprocal link than it is to get a one way link.

The problem with two way links and three way reciprocal links is that Google's SERP ranking algorithm takes into account how many outbound links you have when they determine your PageRank, and when they determine where in the search results you will be.

That means that you want to try to build more inbound links than you have outbound links. And with 2-way and 3-way links, you have to provide an outbound link in order to gain an inbound link, so you're not really making any headway.

That's not to say they are completely worthless. I almost always exchange a link or two with any new site. But the links you get are very heavily discounted. Don't expect to move up very far in SERPs if you have nothing but reciprocal links.

What you want is one way backlinks on quality, relevant sites. Like the ones you find in our inventory at www.AdhocAds.com.