Since the introduction of the normal algorithms into the local search game, there seems to be a lot of disagreement with regard to how important links can be to these local sites. In my opinion, local links are a strange introduction to the metric, considering that most of these positions (depending on the weight the metric is given), are going to be decided by just a few links.

At the moment, I’m running a couple of experiments worth noting. Since my company works primarily with State Farm insurance agents, my experiments are dealing with these agents to push their rankings up in their communities for simple searches like “insurance”.

Usually, when an agent comes to us, they are sitting on the second or third pages (if they are ranking at all) for keywords in their community. Usually, just by filling out their places profile, they shoot to the first page – sometimes to number one.

One of my most experimental clients is a State Farm agency in Plantation Florida. When she came to us, we couldn’t get the agency’s title to change. It took nearly 3 months for Google to recognize our newly submitted location data and get the title changed from what looked like SPAM to something that was readable. Her primary market is to Spanish speakers, and that’s how she represents her business in real life. She went from page 3 to page 1, and is now sitting at the bottom of that first page for basic local keyword searches.

The current experiment I’m running on this agency is adding linking into their actual page (not their places page) with keywords we are ranking them for, such as insurance 33322. Presumably, if this is a new addition to the metric, we will see a large uptick in positions.

What that means is links, like reviews, in addition to local directory submissions are important for both organic and local in a way that is unexpected. You see the picture today, at the moment, we are doing nothing else with that page. If the agency ranks higher, it’s a result of links.

Likewise, we are running another experiment on an agency in Jacksonville taking a look at geotagging photos. We have set up accounts on Flickr, Locr and Picassa, loaded up photos and then geotagged them to indicate they are from right within her State Farm Insurance agency.

Insurance Jacksonville

I found this post on the forum Talk Classical listing the top 100 Operas of all time. Now I know it has nothing to do with marketing, but for my own personal posterity, I decided to make a list here on my own website of these Operas next to the DVD versions of them that are, apparently, highest rated. This is going to be a work in progress. So if you happen to stumble on this post, and you don’t find what you’re looking for, come back and it’ll get evermore complete.

Der Ring des Nibelungen ( )	Der Ring des Nibelungen ( )
Tristan und Isolde (2007 London Philharmonic)	Tristan und Isolde (2009 Teatro alla Scala)
Le Nozze di Figaro (2006 The Royal Opera)
Giulio Cesare (2005 Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment)

Since Google put out its most recent updated, I’ve noticed a number of extra-HTML files rising in the rankings including, specifically, the file extensions .xls and .pdf. Anyone else run into this?

Check out http://lusat.jecool.net/. He’s got some really neat little pieces on how to work with PHP and MySQL for beginners.

That is all…

Hey ya’ll, just found out my favorite rank tracking program is being given away for free. If you’re an SEO, you will want to try this program if you haven’t already. It’s the best offline program ever to exist for the purpose of tracking your links (although their most recent updates have really made the tracking graph really stupidly hard to use).

Anyhow, go there, signup.

If you use PayJunction, then you’re familiar with it’s awesome interface. It comes with a lot of great analytical tools, recurring payment options, and more. What it doesn’t have is a simple way to email links to your customers…. So I made one.

Fill out the form fields below, click submit, and it will give you a link, and some buttons that you can cut and paste into the body of an email.

Get Your PayJunction Store Number

You can find your PayJunction store ID by clicking on “Gateway”.

What I love about The Link Juicer is that it uses Google’s algorithm to turn your shitty links into powerful links. I know the name calls to mind Barry Bonds sticking needles into his butt to try to hit more home runs. And I’m sorry to admit, that the analogy isn’t all that far off. Just like Bonds’ juices his muscles, the link juicer uses some general principles in Google’s Algorithm to turn your shitty links into powerful, homerun hitting links. I have seen websites that use nothing but the link juicer for link building begin ranking in the first few positions for some moderately competitive terms within six months (No I won’t give examples, sorry Cutts).

In a sense, it’s really not at all different than article syndication, save for the fact that the links are on blogs. The program builds link pyramids to your site. What that means is it uses blog posts that you write to link to your site. Then it links using social bookmarks, blog posts, and more to the articles on those blog posts. The links on the blog posts become more powerful as Google crawls and finds the links to those articles. Those articles pass on that link equity, and your sites begin to rank very quickly for the keywords that you target in the blog posts. To be honest, the Link Juicer is brilliant.

So if you’re looking for a great, efficient way to build some high-quality links, sign up for the Link Juicer, I know you won’t be disappointed.

If you sign up for the Link Juicer, come back here, let me know what you think of it.

Back in about 2007, all the major sites (Yahoo, Google, Facebook) were in a war for people’s homepage setting. Each wanted to be the first thing that users saw when they loaded up their browser. Who won the war? Well, in 2008, the winner was Yahoo. But since then, I think there was a sort of truce called as people have largely staked their claims.

To be honest, I think that the effort by companies like Yahoo to make you make them your homepage has been abandoned, because this idea of start pages has been essentially abandoned by the users. And as that happened, all of the internet giants sort of scaled back their efforts to get you to go to them first. That is until today.

I went to Google to search for Bloomin Gardens, one of my favorite flash games. And lo and behold. What do I find. As the google suggest bar drops, I see a little call to action. “Love Google Instant? Make Google Your Homepage. There you can click on a link to “Learn More”. I didn’t click it, but presumably, Google assumes that you’re too stupid to know how to make soemthing your homepage, so they will send you to a step by step tutorial on how to do it. I geuss it’s smart. Since the days of the war, Google has picked up significant market share. And since no one else is putting any effort into getting people to make them their homepage, this simple call to action may actually give google one or two percentage points more in terms of owning people’s start pages. No effort, some reward. Sounds amazing.

My only question is this: could this be the beginning of another war for your homepage? Or will Google’s call to action go ignored?

I know, I’ve had a lot of Like button posts. So I’m sorry, here’s another one.

I just wanted to point out that the call to action is not always appropriate. While I think the Like button has potential to really change the way that content is aggregated (as long as Facebook makes some fixes), I have some big problems with seeing it on every page.

Blue Fountain Media (a great SEO Agency in New York), reported a similar example after Gary Coleman’s death. TMZ’s site showed a like button. And those innocent content sharers, were trying to innocently show their friends the news they’d just found. It was, after all, shocking. As a result of everyone’s sharing the article, Gary Coleman’s death was “liked” by nearly 4,000 people.

Now, it may have been inadvertent. No one actually had to click the “like” button in order to get the article to count among the likes. In fact, if you share and article on facebook, the article will be counted as liked. On my blog for example, I have an article with a picture of a camel spider in it. Google the word, it ranks really well in image search. Even before I’d put the like or share buttons on the site, I had nearly 54 people who had put it on facebook. And now, no matter whether you click the “share” button or the “like” button, the counts on both will increase. Likes are a bit of a false positive. It’s a call to action that isn’t really signaling everyone’s intention. Sometimes, people are just wanting to “share” an article, and they get flagged as a person who “likes” the article… I don’t know what I ultimately think about that or if I even really care, but I do, at the very least, think it’s amusing.

The first time I noticed this was on an obituary posting I saw a long time ago on a local town newspaper’s site. Then more recently, I saw it on articles about the Craigslist killer’s article. I understand why people might like the outcome of that case, but seriously, inappropriate.

And then again today, I noticed the like button on BuzzFeed’s article on the girl who is taped throwing puppies into the water. Really? 3,000 people like this? I doubt it…