Friday Night Link-o-rama

In the name of links … what more in the name of links

What’s the hottest trend in the SEO industry right now? Nope, not linkbait. Not Digg-bashing. Try mini-seminars. Seriously. In about two weeks, I’ll probably be the only search marketer not involved in a small group training seminar on SEO/SEM. The latest one is SEO Class, announced today, which features Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray, Rae Hoffman, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Greg Niland. Another new one is Seodays, which features Jennifer Slegg, Greg Boser, and Dave Naylor. And stay tuned, because by this time tomorrow, there’ll probably 3-4 more announcements of new seminars. 🙂

Gord Hotchkiss has done it again. Last week it was an informative interview with Google’s Marissa Meyer. This week it’s an informative interview with Google’s Matt Cutts, who says:

“…the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. At the same time, if you do choose to go to the other fork, towards the black hat side of things, you know you’re going to be working harder and the return is going to be a little less.”

You can read the full interview on Gord’s blog, or catch the highlights with commentary on Search Engine Land.

Over on the PPC side of life, the big news this week was Google’s transparency on click fraud. They say less than 10% of clicks are invalid, and all but 0.2% are identified proactively.

This really needs to be mentioned, at least for the archives. Over at ZDNet, Donna Bogatin recapped Intuit’s recent earnings statements, which included the news that the Google – Intuit partnership isn’t going very well so far:

“…we haven’t seen a huge lift on that yet.”

Don’t miss this great post from Peter Krasilovsky about video & local search: TurnHere: Local Video Network For Hire.

Tamar is on a roll lately, this week putting together an excellent overview of Six Free Stats Packages for the Startup or Small-Business Owner. That one already has a spot in the “March Best Posts” list.

More social media goodness from Garrett French, who put together The Why, How and Who of Marketing in StumbleUpon.

And for a different look at social media, don’t miss Social Bookmarking through the eyes of a novice from SEO Igloo. This one is what it’s like out in the trenches with small businesses, gang….

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!

Now playing: “Everybody Hurts,” R.E.M.