Today the biggest challenge that Google faces is web spam. Google knows it and if you have been in the Internet marketing industry for any appreciable period of time, you know it. Heck, even frequent Google users no doubt noticed the lack of relevancy in the search results lately.

Recently, I have followed a number of threads online, in which many SEO practitioners have indicated the need to use spam comments in their link building efforts to achieve the results needed to retain clients. For certain types of clients or offers, this kind of high risk, quick results approach may work for a period of time. A sort of churn and burn approach, if you will. If the domain or domains are expendable, then spam comments as a risky SEO tactic may be suitable for your link building efforts, particularly if you understand that Google spam filters may catch and exclude the domain promoted by/links from spam comments. But, and this is a big but, (      |     ) if this domain happens to be your brand name, you’ve now put yourself in a position to win free tickets to the Google Reconsideration Request Festivus. Good luck with that.

Now, while I understand the difference between performance advertising, branding advertising, and the need to manage return on investment, it’s not clear to me that spam comments clogging the Internet with endless volumes of low value spam links pointing to your target site is a good use of anyone’s time, even from a purely selfish SEO perspective. This position is stated in full  recognition that spam comments as a link building/SEO tactic are working for may SEOs based on the spam comment dialogue on SEOMoz, the mass proliferation of the practice and the strong comments online from SEOs representing comment spamming strategies as both necessary and effective SEO techniques in today’s current Google environment. I am not sure I buy it.

The question is, how long will these comment spamming link building techniques work and what’s the effectiveness of 1000 comment spam links relative to three or four links from a high value, authoritative, established domain or better yet, a highly ranked page from within that domain? These kind of link opportunities demand legitimate, thoughtful, relevant comments. Regardless, many blogs worth commenting on use popular programs such as Akismet to automatically filter spam comments out before they ever get to the moderator. Even if your spam comment fools the programitic filters, good luck getting past the moderator, or better yet, community scrutiny.

The lack of long-term effectiveness of spam comments goes to the very foundation of link building and the fact that not all links are created equal. However, link building strategies that utilize spam comments seem to discount this all together going for more links instead of better links. High ranking blogs, if they allow comments, either nofollow the blog comment links or moderate out the links or post altogether. Therefore, comment spam in these instances is not effective.

So a strategy that can be evaluated as an alternative to content spam is one of targeting a few, very high-value links earned in the context of well-placed, thoughtful, relevant blog comments, which can have a tremendous positive SEO impact based on the passing of page rank and domain rank, not to mention the personal branding and traffic benefits as a result. Don’t just take my word for it, run some experiments yourself.

In the meantime, if comment spam is a core component of your SEO link building strategy, just make sure that you, and your client, are doing it with your eyes wide open, else risk suffering the painful wrath of the Google Web Spam Team who’s just doing their job. It’s not easy being the dominant US search market leader with over 2/3 of the US search market share which is why relevancy to Google and their users matters (ahhh can you smell the sarcasm . If you don’t think Google is investing big $ and constantly fighting comment spam, then think again!!

Creative Link Building Techniques Video by SEOMoz

This weeks SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday presented by Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, one of the most well-known and trusted names in the SEO industry provides some great online and offline techiques to acquire links from authorative webistes that may be hesitant at first to give a link wihtout some motivation. If I had to sum it up, Quid-Pro-Quo is the way to go in applying creative link building techniques.

The great thing about the creative link building techniques presented by Rand is the video below is that they have what I would refer to as great business sense, which is a lot like common sense, but in a business context. All of the techniques recognize the old addage that you have to give something to get something, the golden rule in my professional experience.

Rand’s creative link building techniques include:

• Testimonial - value of named testimonial from a real person, name, title, real photo = bonus points!
• Social Connection - Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can be powerful tools in support of this technique
• In-Person Connection - Taking potential link source/business partner out to dinner and picking up the check
• Missing Content - ID content of value from link source/business partner and offer to create it – make sure attribution applies

SEOmoz – SEO Software

One last great creative link building technique is to provide an embed widget for any engagement objects such as audio, video that you produce as this is sort of like mass production of the Missing Content that results in many links back to your site, the source of the content. Thanks for SEOMoz for producing Whiteboard Fridays which are publically available with content that is easy to embed and share!

Check out the following Interesting interview sourced from http://www.kenny.co/seo/majestic-seo where Kenny Goodman interviews Dixon Jones, an SEO verteran of 10+ years and current Marketing Director for Majestic SEO where they discuss the state of the Internet link industry and the alarming scarcity trend for  publically available, quality link information required to perform off-page SEO effectively.

In the interview, Dixon goes into detail on what’s driving the errosion of Yahoo! data, how useful the Googe data is, and exactly how Majestic SEO can help SEOs with their strategic link building campaigns. Dixon goes on to explain at a high level how Majestic SEO is acheiving its vision to be the most reliable link-data channel on the planet. Very interesting interview and definitely worth the listen.

As any SEO knows, strategic link building is the single most important factor in ranking for competive, high value search terms. For those interested in learning more about how Majestic SEO  and the free version of the Majestic SEO toos, check out the Webinar on Friday 28th January (3:00 GMT / 10:00 AM EST / 8:00 PST.)

It’s titled: “What you can get for free”, and is basically what it says on the tin: A webinar explaining how to use Majestic SEO (for free).

Click here to get more information on the webinar

Click here to sign up for the webinar

Note: eBiz ROI, Inc. currently have no affiliate relationship with Majestic SEO or Domainface besides using and benefiting from the free tools. eBiz ROI is already registered to particpate in the 28 Jan Majestic SEO webinar and hope to see other eBiz ROI readers there as well.

So now you have your business website. OK, that’s good. Now what? Wait for someone to fill in their contact info and then click submit on the contact us form? Wait until somebody calls the phone number listed on the website? Wait for someone to click the email link? Well, you could, but why not submit your website to Google to expedite the inclusion of your website in the great and mighty Google database, and by extension, in the Google search results.

The process of Submitting your website to Google is quite simple.

1. Navigate to the Add your URL to Google
2. Enter website address in the URL input field
3. Enter comments in the comments input field
4. Enter the optional characters in the image which is a mechanism used by Google to distinguish between sites submitted to Google and by individuals and those submitted to Google automatically through software. Note that this input field is optional
5. click the submit button

Only the top-level page of your website needs be submitted to Google and then the Google web crawler will discover linked pages that collectively comprise your website. According to Google, the comments entered in the add your URL to Google form do not affect how your page is indexed or used by Google once submitted.

If you are a procrastinator, fear not as new domains, once registered, generate what is called whois records that include the domain name and name servers which get communicated to Google who adds the new domain information to the queue of web address to crawl. That is not to say that submitting your URL won’t expedite the process getting your website listed on Google faster to bring more natural search traffic sooner.

Google does have the following disclaimer listed on the Add your URL to Google page: “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.” In my experience, it is rare that Google will exclude any unique and useful content from its database but like most things in life beyond death and taxes, nothing is guaranteed.

As the next step in managing your website positioning within Google, navigate to the Google Webmaster Central and login to learn more about tools and techniques to enhance your search positioning and Google search referral traffic.

While performing a search for “Interent Marketing Services” on Google, in addition to the top sites that have dominated that keyphrase sinse eBiz ROI began tracking last year, a funny thing happened. On the first page of the search results were labeled Latest Results for Internet Marketing Services which included Twitter Tweets containing the words Internet, Marketing and Service, broad matched, integrated into the first page of the Google search results.

Google search results with tweets integrated into first page results

I have heard about this coming and maybe this is old news, but this is the first time that I have noticed Twitter tweets integrated into page one search resutls for Google searches. This could certain alter the role that Twitter plays in search engine marketing and SEO. Since terms like interenet marketing services may not lend themselves well to video and image references being included in blended search results, maybe integration of tweets with those keywords in the tweet could provide another dimension of relevancy and timely information. This new approach provides savvy Internet marketers who use Twitter to promote their business, to get on the first page of Google, much like the opportunity that integration of the Google 7-pack does with the integration of local search results triggered on search of keywords likely to have location based intent.

Oddly enough, Google searches in the past would include Google 7-pack local search results, but in the instance of search results for Internet Mareking Services captured by the image above, it appears not to be the case as no local search results were included in the results. Does this meant that Google is mixxing things up in this regard, making sure to provide only one back door at a time (i.e. Twitter Tweet integration vs. Google 7-Pack) to the search results at time so as not to overly disrupt the delicate balance of the PPC-SEO-ecosystem too much at one time? Only time will tell.

Readers are invited to comment on whether this is old news or whether this is a new opportunity and incentive for search mrketers to step up their investment in Twitter to promote their businesses and their clients.

SEO is Hard Work

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is hard but rewarding work. SEO done right at least. Done right means employing only ethical SEO tactics, often referred to as whitehat SEO tactics. While it’s possible to achieve short-terms results using unethical SEO tactics, often referred to as blackhat SEO tactics to deceive search engines, it’s a risky approach.

How does one know if an SEO tactic is blackhat? All unethical SEO tactics are designed to deceive search engines into rating content relevancy to particular keywords higher than it really is. For instance, a blackhat seo tactic commonly used more than a decade ago when search engines were a relatvely new concept, was filling a page with repeating keywords in a font that was the same as the background color of the page, so not viewable by readers. While these blackhat SEO tactics, at the time, were effective in achieving short-term traffic results, once detected and labeled by the search engines as SPAM, the offending sites optimized with blackhat SEO tactics were in some cases temporarily blacklisted by the search engines, some banned from search results altogether.

The contemporary search engines have become more sophisticated in detecting blackhat SEO tactics, driven by maintaining relevant search results for users. To search engines, ensuring website content relevancy to search terms is their Holy Grail for maintaining and growing their search market share. Naturally, users will gravitate to search engines that deliver most relevant search results for the least amount of effort on their part. Wading through SPAM will drive search engine users to find alternative search engines with more relevant results. To search engines, loss of users means loss of search market share, resulting in lost advertising revenue. You can understand why search engines are motivated to find and punish websites that use blackhat SEO tactics.

Implementing whitehat SEO tactics is hard work which involves careful keyword research, website analysis, competitor analysis, comparison of website content to industry benchmarks, obtaining quality links from related websites. If it sounds like ethical SEO is a lot of work, it is. This is not to say that the amount of effort to implement whitehat SEO tactics is too high relative to the reward, but that caution should be used when considering short-cuts or SEO practitioners that employ them. Whitehat SEO tactics, when applied correctly, can deliver a steady stream of qualified traffic to a website for an ongoing period of time without incurring additional cost for each visitor.

In summary, when evaluating SEO practitioners, whether internal or outsourced, understand enough to ensure that Blackhat SEO tactics are not used as a shortcut to results. Evaluate tactics on the basis of whether they are designed in some way to deceive the search engines. When in doubt, great sources of additional information include the Google Webmaster Guidelines and the industry de facto SEO Code of Ethics offered to the industry and available in 19 languages.