Friday Night Link-o-rama

Let my links open the door…

Can we start out with some SEO theory, instead of hands-on stuff? Yeah, let’s. Todd doesn’t post as often as he used to, but I’ll take quality like this any day over the quantity you get from other blogs: 7 Opportunities for “New School” SEO. That one’s for the SEOs in the readership here, and perhaps the more forward-thinking small business owners. 🙂

Great interview this week from Gord Hotchkiss who covered all things related to personalized search with Google’s Marissa Meyer. Two very notable bits from the interview:

1. No more than two “personalized” results will crack the Top 10, and the #1 result will never be displaced by a personal result.
2. Personalized PPC ads are quite likely a “coming soon” item.

Recognizing that small businesses have limited time, Pat Schaber explains how he keeps an eye on click fraud in just 10 minutes a week.

In response to some recent suggestions that ad rank doesn’t matter, Yahoo’s Kevin Wilk flips that coin over on iMediaConnection: Rank Does Matter. Says Kevin, “Internal studies by Yahoo! on observed clickthrough rates clearly show that moving down in rank could have a significant impact on the percentage of clicks an ad receives.”

David Temple dropped me a reminder this week that the early-bird registration discount ends March 5th for the China Search Marketing Tour.

StumbleUpon remains one of the biggest traffic sources I have here on SBS, but if it’s new to you, you’ll benefit from reading Tamar’s How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide on the 10e20 blog. I still have some StumbleUpon questions that deal with more micro-level stuff, but this covers the basics quite well.

Two good posts I bookmarked this week from Search Engine Roundtable: AJAX & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and How Does the Yahoo! Directory Rank Sites?

The idea of “bad neighborhoods” comes up a lot when working with small businesses who think any link is a good one. So Roger’s Link Hunting Tips: Bad Neighborhoods is a good read.

That’s all for this week!

Now playing: “My Twentieth Century,” Gavin Friday