Have you ever submitted a story to a social site like Digg and then messaged a few of your friends through AIM and told them to vote for it? There is nothing wrong with this but they probably know what you are up to, here’s why.

Usually when users vote on stories, they go to the homepage of a site such as digg.com, roam around, and then vote on stories they like. But when you spam your AIM buddy list and get people to click on a direct link to a Digg story URL it shows up in Digg’s logs that they came directly to that URL.

The link baiting season promised to be one of the highlights of SES London. With linkbait being one of the hottest contemporary SEO themes, the crowds filled the room to hear what the industry experts were going to share.

The widget as link bait

First up, Nick Wilson gave a good high level introduction to ‘viral link building’. Giving a passionate speech, Nick discussed widgets as the ultimate linkbait, and his observations were well worth hearing.

Heellloou Jason Calacanis

If you were at SES London, you might have heard one or two little nuggets that seemed inconsequential at first, but were probably more important than you realise.

I was lurking toward the back of the room at the Linking Strategies Session when (I think) Tom Alby from Ask made a comment about hubs and authorities. He said that the difference between a link farm and a hub is that at least one or two authority sites would be linking back to the hub.

Bella posted an interesting comment today – here – on my post about the opportunity for analytics in which she commented on Tom Davenport’s POV in Competing on Analytics.

If you haven’t gotten the message yet that your website content needs to be as original and niche as possible for long-term search engine visibility, it’s time to get it and to hold on to it as you might the long tail as it pulls you along. But generating that extra searchable content isn’t a picnic, now is it?

The search landscape and how engines supplied results and paid links to other search engines has changed, as a once-chaotic environment of multiple sites has shaken out to one towering peak among them all.

After squabbling with YouTube and demanding that they pull over 100,000 copyrighted videos two weeks ago Viacom has struck a deal with Internet television service Joost. Under the agreement, Viacom’s divisions including MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount pictures will provide programming on the Joost platform.

Business Week looks at the battle to dominate the mobile search space and its estimated $11.4 billion ad spend by 2011.

While Google has the lead, Yahoo is making a strong challenge and there are a many white-label providers out there.

We should have suspected YouTube’s chances of signing a deal with Viacom were nil, when the cable company demanded more than 100,000 video clips be removed from the Google-owned video site.

Local search marketing tactics need to consider the needs of the desired customer base, and where they might go to satisfy those needs.

I feel bad for the guys at MyBlogLog. Ever since being acquired by Yahoo, they’ve not exactly had a comfy ride. Things escalated this weekend, with reports that spammers had found an exploit that allowed them to add themselves as "co-authors" on as many communities as they wished.

Excuse my giddiness, but it’s definitely addictive to look at your keyword quality scores. You could have guessed them before by the assigned minimum bids, but these are fun to look at anyway:

Fairly regularly in the blogosphere you hear people complaining about how few people reading their blog go the next step and leave a comment.

I recall that last year, Darren Rowse posted his "10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog", linking to a Jakob Nielsen study that found that

In the last few years the blogosphere has swelled, or evolved perhaps, from a loose and obscure collection of early adopters shooting from the hip into an all-encompassing theater of discourse. In this theater nowadays, your presence as a business professional is just short (very short) of required, but shooting from the hip, or half-arseing your online presence, is an enterprise best left to the MySpace drones.

WebProNews guest correspondent Debbie Harrison has provided us with more coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference in London. Today’s coverage will focus on local search marketing.

* Yes\n* No\n* I don’t care\n* I don’t even know what that means\n* CowboyNeal\n

In a time when the Internet can place individuals on level ground with multi-national corporations, the way to fix YouTube’s search may be by treating some content sources as being more important than others.

Where does a major Internet company with a $143 billion market cap and millions of dollars in cash in the bank turn to when it’s time to create an ad campaign for Gmail? To its cube dwellers, of course.

Link Building Blog expounds a good way of increasing ranking. It suggests that getting links from trusted sites like .edu and .gov sites will help in useful link building.

The first step is obviously to search for links
Although there an tons of educational and government sites, a lot don’t link out. The key to getting these links is to find sites that link to your competitors because they will probably be willing to link to you. You can do this by using Yahoo.

Today Jon Udell is showing you how to blog from Word 2007.

Yes, my Google Reader is working again (it was a munged up Firefox cache or something).

But, anyway, this is something I’ve noticed since leaving Microsoft. When you’re up at Microsoft all you think about is how to work with Microsoft stuff. Conversations like the one Jon is participating in seem normal and commonplace.

Sites like Stumbled Upon, Digg, Reddit, and others might drive traffic, but the issues remain the same, who is really clicking on those recommendations?

Citizen Journalism, Blogging, Web 2.0, Democracy Player and management systems, Podcasts, and the whole host of other systems that we use to communicate with each other also drive other social issues and concerns.

Often times we are asked how we optimize for one search engine (Google) and expect to rank well for the other two engines (Yahoo! and MSN). This question is usually followed up with “do you guys create different doorway pages for each keyword, that is optimized for each algorithm?”.

Tom Blue writes a blog called Marketing Revisited ("Lessons and Observations from the Marketing Trenches"). Last week he wrote a piece entitled "Harness the Market-making Power of Webinars." In his entry, he talked about how he had paid no attention to webinars until he was invited to be a presenter with Research In Motion (aka RIM… the company that makes the ubiquitous BlackBerry handheld communications device).

Dear Kalena…

John

Kalena’s Answer:

Dear John

Assuming you have already created a Feedburner account, your feedburner address should be: http://feeds.feedburner.com/[yourblogname]. If you haven’t created an account yet, simply go to http://www.feedburner.com and create one based on your blog info.