Where to invest, what to test and which deserve a rest

Allocating your small business marketing budget to maximize return on investment and minimize the risks of a low or negative return can become a lot more unpredictable when your investments involve trends and emerging technologies. Investing in trends requires smart timing and consumer analysis.

By Joe Whyte

One of the most interesting link development techniques unveiled itself to me today. Many link developers and SEOs might be a little upset at me that such a great technique is not being used privately for my own gain but in my mind I fell I should share this with the SEO community as I really doubt  anyone else knows about this.

If you didn’t know, .edu backlinks are pretty darn coveted due to the high trust rank they have within Google. Most edu sites have quality inbound links, have been online for years and years and are a credible source of information to the search engines and to the community. At SEOmoz rand has a page strength tool that measures .edu links as well and assigns a particular value to how many you have coming into your site. It is safe to say that a .edu is a power link and can do a lot for your site within the search engines.

By John Jantsch

If Howard Dean’s failed political campaign accomplished anything, I would say that it brought to the mainstream the use of something called a weblog or “blog” as it known in cyberspace.

A blog is really nothing more than a diary uploaded to the Internet and until about the last 12 months was the realm of the individual who saw it as a way to publish there random (and sometimes disturbed) thoughts. The great thing about weblogs, and the growing set of software that is being created to publish them, is that they are a tremendous business tool.

Weblogs allow you to create content and contact…and that is what your clients crave more than anything.

No SEO professional would deny that SEO tools makes life easy.  Right from keyword research to making reports after an SEO program, SEO tools are needed at every step of running a search engine optimization campaign. Here are some SEO tools that you must have in order to run an SEO campaign:

1. Ranking Tools: Google Rankings, Yahoo Search Rankings and Alexa Page ranking tools are ranking tools you can consider.
2. Page Rank Tools: you can use Page Rank Tool to check the Page Rank of websites. It will query and return Google Page Rank values for submitted URL from various Google datacenters.
3. Keyword Suggestion tools: Keyword research is the first step to every SEO campaign. A keyword research tool is a must have. Google Adwords Keyword tool, Google suggests and Search term researches are valuable ones.
4. Domain Dossier: investigates domains and IP addresses.
5. IP Address report: checks for a duplicate Class C block or Class C subnet IP address in a list of websites, these can be either hosted affiliate and internet marketing sites or potential reciprocal link exchange partners.
6. Link popularity checker: is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website’s online awareness and overall visibility. Simply put, link popularity refers to the total number of links or “votes” that a search engine has found for your website.
7. Backlink Check Tool: is a tool is to check your backlinks and the anchor text used in those backlinks.
8. Cache.it: besides searching and finding cache pages, it also gives a graphic view of the results over a period of time.
9. Copyscape: looks for copies for your page on the web.

Atom & RSS Feed Validator: is a validator for syndicated feeds. It works with RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. It also validates Atom feeds.