Wednesday night (Thursday morning?) link-o-rama

Okay, now let’s get caught up on all those links that have been piling up on my desktop over the past couple weeks….

I’ve added a link over in the “Random Good Stuff” box on the left to John Jantsch’s excellent Duct Tape Marketing blog. John’s focus is broader than just search engine marketing, and it’s obviously working — DTM just won Marketing Sherpa’s “Best Small Business Marketing Blog” for the 3rd straight year. It’s well worth a bookmark for marketing thoughts and ideas beyond search engines and the web.

Couple tools to bookmark:

See what a crawler sees via the WebConfs.com Search Engine Spider Simulator. It’ll show you the crawlable text and links on any page. Especially helpful if the boss decides that he wants an all-Flash web site or home page. “But, Mr. Jones, the search engines won’t be able to crawl our site if we do it that way….” Hopefully, he’ll listen. And understand.

(Update: Please read the comments for a link to a better spider simulator.)

When doing keyword research, be sure to use the newly-updated (Hi Matt) Keyword Difficulty Tool from my friends at SEOmoz.org. Before you start playing with it, do read Rand’s nifty guide to what it does and how.

Speaking of SEOmoz, their blog was the first place I’ve seen mention a new service Google is working on — Google AdSense Audio. The idea appears to be to target radio ads to the content of the radio programming — just like AdWords ads are targeted to the content on a web page running AdSense. And according to the Google presentation, this should benefit small businesses in particular:

They said Google AdSense Audio would enable people with a $200 budget to break into radio advertising, making targeted and area advertising via radio, IPTV and podcast more effective and viable for smaller businesses.

And lastly, another blog that might be one to keep an eye on is SEO for Everyone by Tom Schmitz. His recent post, How Will You Compete on the Internet?, has earned some well-deserved attention and is worth the read.

Okay … with that, I think I’m all caught up on clearing out accumulated links. Still have lots of updating to do to the Local Search Marketing Guide. Oh, and then there’s that little presentation I need to put together for SES….